Model SUCCESS - Sam Walton - #Entspresso

Good morning, Believe Nation! Today's message is Model Success. Over to you, Sam Walton.

Neither one of us knew the business.

True.

And we, and we, and we, we knew so little about the variety store business that we had to take the book that was written by Ben Franklin and, and apply the principles and apply the controls, the— and the merchandise, uh, merchandising programs that, that they outlined for us. But of course, knowing you and knowing I myself a little bit, we added on, didn't we? That's, uh, that's exactly right. But we were mavericks even then, and we started doing strange things like cranking up ice cream machines on the sidewalk on Saturday night, popcorn machine, popcorn on the other end of the sidewalk, hawking anything we could hawk on that looked like it might have a chance to sell wherever.

So obviously I'm a huge believer in modeling success. The name of my YouTube channel is Modeling the Masters. I found that it has saved my business over and over and over and over again. Whenever you are trying to learn something that you are not the expert in, the best way, the fastest path to shortcut your success is to learn from somebody who's already already done it, find out what made them successful, and put their strategies to work for you. Where most people do the opposite and try to figure everything out themselves, try to be the creative genius. Where if you realize that you can build upon what's already come before you, you can have much more success. I'm reminded of my Microsoft story, and I've told this a number of times on the channel, but I feel like I haven't told it in a while, so I'll share it again, and maybe it'll sink in for those of you who've heard it before. When I had my first software company, I was 19 years old, and I sucked and was failing and making $1,300 a month and barely able to survive. And up until that point, anything I tried had been successful at. And here I was putting an insane amount of effort and love into my business and not achieving results. And it wasn't until I realized that I didn't have to come up with every idea myself, that I could look up to somebody who's done more than me, that, that turned the tide for my company. In my industry, I was in biotech software. There wasn't any big biotech software company to model. It was such a new emerging field. So I looked a little bit beyond, I looked to software in general and I looked at Microsoft and I looked at Bill Gates and not how does Bill Gates make an extra million dollars now, but Zero to One, right? How did he do that? Because that's what I wanted to do in my business. And I found it was through partnerships. And he started forming partnerships with companies to help sell his software. So instead of him having to go consumer by consumer by consumer, he could sell it to one company and they would help push his product for them. The big deal with Microsoft came when they landed the deal with IBM. So every IBM shipped— IBM was the biggest computer maker at the time— every IBM that shipped had Microsoft software on it. But Microsoft was already a multi-million dollar company by the time they made that deal. And how did they get to multi-millionaire status? It was by making other partnerships, smaller partnerships. And so I took that strategy and applied it to my business too and started forming partnerships. The first partnership deal that I struck was with a company in Europe, and they agreed to pay us €13,500. $1,000 upfront. And that may not seem like a lot of money, but to me, for a guy making $300 a month, that, that was hitting the jackpot. And more important than that, I now had a system to follow where I can do that again and again and again for more partnerships, get paid more money, and they would help then sell our software for us. And so just that change in direction, that change in approach, instead of me trying to come up with every single idea, feeling like I need to be the creative genius, Changing that mindset and saying, who else has done this before in history, and how can I model their success? That saved my business. I'm forever grateful to Bill Gates, even though I've never met him, because he kept me on the path of entrepreneurship because I modeled his success. And so whatever challenge you're going up against now, whatever obstacle's in your way, it has already been solved. It has already been solved by somebody else in your industry or in a different industry. All you have to do is look at how did they solve it, and how can you apply it to your business today? Model success. So the question of the day today is, who do you model? I'm really curious to find out. Leave it in the comments below and I'm gonna join in the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. <LYRICS>I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.</LYRICS>