Sam Walton: the store he built and lost

Sam Walton grew up in rural America during the Great Depression. After serving in the Army, he bought in 1945, with borrowed money, a small Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas.

The no

Walton made the Newport store grow enormously in five years, to the point of becoming one of the strongest in the region. But he had made a beginner's mistake when he signed the lease: he didn't include a clause giving him the right to renew.

In 1950, when the lease expired, the landlord knew there was no other spot in town where Walton could move the store. He refused to renew the lease, at any price. He bought the store, with its fixtures and inventory, and handed the business to his own son.

Walton told this story in his autobiography, Made in America (1992). He had made the store succeed and lost it because of a contract.

What they did

The family moved to Bentonville, a much smaller town in the same state. There, Walton opened Walton's 5&10 and started again from zero. Over time, he opened other stores, and in 1962 he opened the first Walmart store, in Rogers, also in Arkansas. Walmart became the largest retail chain in the world.

The Bentonville store where he started over now houses the Walmart Museum. The Newport lesson is one of the simplest and most expensive: a business can be right and still be lost over a contract detail or over who is on the other side of the table.

What this has to do with Bairo

This is one of the stories most like Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's, all proportions kept. He too built a business that worked and lost it because of others: his partners pushed him out of the business, and the idea stayed with them.

Some defeats hurt the wallet. This one hurt somewhere else, Bairo's story says. And the lesson he drew is the same one Walton drew from Newport: choose whom you build with. It's in the chapter No is the foundation of yes.

Walton went to a smaller town and started over. Bairo too started over more than once, from zero, as an immigrant who lost his footing and got back on his feet. Read The sun is for everyone and The seventh attempt.

Sources

• Sam Walton (biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton
• Oklahoma Historical Society, "Walton, Samuel Moore": https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=WA015
• Walmart World, "A Second Chance for Walmart in Newport, Arkansas": https://www.walmartworld.com/content/walmart-world/en_us/articles/2022/07/a-second-chance-for-walmart-in-newport.html
• Right Attitudes, "Lessons from Sam Walton: Learning from Failure": https://www.rightattitudes.com/2016/03/29/sam-walton-learning-from-failure/
• Walmart (company history): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart