#6 Sam Walton

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to talk to you about the autobiography of Sam Walton. It's called Made In America. And this book was published about a year before he died. So he was suffering from a rare form of bone cancer, and he knew he was gonna die, so he decided to put all, like, his thoughts down on paper. So I want to jump right into the book. If you've heard previous episodes, then you know that we have this section that I affectionately call Critics Don't Know Shit, and I do that because in almost every, and actually in every biography, there's always people around the entrepreneurs telling them that their idea is no good, that it's not gonna work out, that you're not good enough, and I just think it's a good reminder to anybody that no one knows what they're talking about. So this is a, we're gonna start at the beginning of the book, and he's, Sam Walton, is working at JCPenney. And let's start.
And he says, anyway, he'd get all upset at the way I would screw up the sales slips and generally mishandle the cash register part of things. I couldn't stand to leave a new customer waiting while I fiddled with paperwork on a sale I'd already made. Walton, Blake would say to me, this is his manager, Walton, Blake would say to me when he came to Des Moines, I'd fire you if you weren't such a good salesman. Maybe you're just not cut out for retail. And I want to start there because this is one of his first jobs, this guy who's a training manager for JC Penney is telling what winds up being the world's greatest retailer that he's not cut out for retail.
The part continues and this is part of his inspiration. Fortunately, I found a champion in my store manager, Duncan Majors. He was a great motivator who was proudest of having trained more penny managers than anyone else in the country. He had his own techniques and it was a very successful manager. His secret was that he worked us from 630 in the morning until seven or eight o'clock at night. All of us wanted to become managers like him. On Sundays, when we weren't working, we'd go out to his house. There was about eight of us, all men, and we would talk about retailing, of course. But we also played ping pong or cards. It was a seven day job. I remember one Sunday, Duncan Majors had just gotten his annual bonus check from pennies and was waving it around all over the place. It was for $65,000, which impressed the heck out of us boys. Watching this guy is what got me excited about retail. He was really good. And at the time, he's making, Sam's making $75 a month at a JCPenney store in Des Moines, Iowa. And his manager is showing him a check for $65,000, which as Sam just said, inspired him and he said, okay, you know what? I want to get into this retail game too.
So let's skip ahead a little bit.
So he quits JCPenney. He gets into the army. This is right around World War II. So he wants to do his part. And this part is the importance of seeking wisdom. So a note about the book. This may be one of my favorite books that I've read about an entrepreneur, just because it's written in, it's autobiography, so it's written in, he's saying I instead of somebody else describing him, but it's also written like he speaks. And it's just this, you know, he's got a lot of like this Midwest Southern charm. And it's just, he's got some funny stories in here, but it's really, it's a really approachable book. And you'll see as we continue down this path. So let's go back to the book. Helen and I spent two years living the army life. And when I got out in 1945, I not only knew I wanted to go into retailing, I also knew I wanted to go into business for myself.
My only experience was the pennies job, but I had a lot of confidence that it could be successful on my own. Our last army posting was in Salt Lake City, and I went to the library there and checked out every book on retailing. So this is something we're going to see throughout the book. He was obsessed with studying, not only people that were doing what he wanted to do, in this case become a retailer, but also when he gets started in business, he was obsessed with studying his competition.
It says later on in the book that people who work for him think that he's, he visited more stores, more retail stores all over the world than anyone else in history. But he was obsessed with seeking information, which I find is a very common trait as I study entrepreneurs, whether they're reading, talking to people, studying their competition, in this case listening to podcasts about entrepreneurship, they're always looking for an edge, they're always looking for information that may help them. So I want to skip ahead a little bit. He figured out that he wants to go into retail, and he decides that he's going to buy his first store. So he gets, he has a little bit of money saved up at this time, and he gets a loan from his wife's father. And they're in a little town in Newport, Arkansas, of only 7,000 people. So the wonderful things about these stories is everybody knows who Sam Walton and how big Walmart got. You know, at the end of the book, I think they're doing $50 billion a year in sales. Yet just like Walt Disney or Elon Musk or any of these other guys, they don't start out that way. They just start out, everybody starts small. We talked last week about Steve Jobs. I mean, it was him and Wozniak in a garage. And now Apple is the most valuable company in the world. So this is Sam's first goal, and we're gonna get a little insight about his personality. But at that time, I was sure Newport and the Ben Franklin had great potential. Ben Franklin was a chain of retailers, and he becomes a franchisee of a Ben Franklin store.