This is a must read for small business owners and independent professionals.

Here are a few tremendous blog posts posted by Linda Daichendt Marketing / Operations Consultant; specializing in start-ups, small & mid-sized businesses. This is a must read for all small business owners and independent professionals thriving for success....Cudos to Linda for taking the time to share such profound information...

Sam Walton: 10 Rules for Building a Successful Business
Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, grew up poor in a farm community in rural Missouri during the Great Depression. The poverty he experienced while growing up taught him the value of money and to persevere.
After attending the University of Missouri, he immediately worked for J.C. Penny where he got his first taste of retailing. He served in World War II, after which he became a successful franchiser of Ben Franklin five-and-dime stores. In 1962, he had the idea of opening bigger stores, sticking to rural areas, keeping costs low and discounting heavily. The management disagreed with his vision. Undaunted, Walton pursued his vision, founded Wal-Mart and started a retailing success story. When Walton died in 1992, the family’s net worth approached $25 billion.
Today, Wal-Mart is the world’s #1 retailer, with more than 4,150 stores, including discount stores, combination discount and grocery stores, and membership-only warehouse stores (Sam’s Club). Learn Walton’s winning formula for business.
Rule 1: Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else. I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don’t know if you’re born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it. If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you — like a fever.
Rule 2: Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations. Remain a corporation and retain control if you like, but behave as a servant leader in your partnership. Encourage your associates to hold a stake in the company. Offer discounted stock, and grant them stock for their retirement. It’s the single best thing we ever did.
Rule 3: Motivate your partners. Money and ownership alone aren’t enough. Constantly, day by day, think of new and more interesting ways to motivate and challenge your partners. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score. Make bets with outrageous payoffs. If things get stale, cross-pollinate; have managers switch jobs with one another to stay challenged. Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don’t become too predictable.
Rule 4: Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them. If you don’t trust your associates to know what’s going on, they’ll know you really don’t consider them partners. Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitors.
Rule 5: Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. A paycheck and a stock option will buy one kind of loyalty. But all of us like to be told how much somebody appreciates what we do for them. We like to hear it often, and especially when we have done something we’re really proud of. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free — and worth a fortune.
Rule 6: Celebrate your success. Find some humor in your failures. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun. Show enthusiasm — always. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. Then make everybody else sing with you. Don’t do a hula on Wall Street. It’s been done. Think up your own stunt. All of this is more important, and more fun, than you think, and it really fools competition. “Why should we take those cornballs at Wal-Mart seriously?”
Rule 7: Listen to everyone in your company and figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines — the ones who actually talk to the customer — are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there. You’d better find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. To push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you.
Rule 8: Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want — and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them. Make good on all your mistakes, and don’t make excuses — apologize. Stand behind everything you do. The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign: “Satisfaction Guaranteed.” They’re still up there, and they have made all the difference.
Rule 9: Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For twenty-five years running — long before Wal-Mart was known as the nation’s largest retailer — we’ve ranked No. 1 in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too inefficient.
Rule 10: Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you’re headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.
Since joining the LinkedIN community I have often made note of postings in many groups I belong to about the members’ frustration with the “self-serving” type of postings that don’t appear to meet the criteria of networking. As someone who has been a strong in-person networker throughout my career, I acknowledge that my opinion has been in agreement with this frustration. However, I found myself absent of an idea that could serve to change things – and then came along a posting by J. Michael Warner of Genesee Crest Ltd.
Michael has started a small business in which he provides online marketing services to help his clients build their brand on the Internet. Because his company is fairly new, Michael put his marketing skills to work and developed a promotional idea he posted on LinkedIN. His promotion involved offering his skills at auction for LinkedIN members – even if the bids were nominal; his thinking being that he could use the auction winner’s marketing campaign as a high-profile way to prove the value of his services, thereby serving as a marketing campaign for himself as well.

SOCIAL NETWORKING AT WORK
When I saw Michael’s posting I was immediately struck with the thought that this was an opportunity for the type of networking I’m used to seeing – networking that can benefit both parties involved in a very useful way. I responded to Michael’s posting with a proposal of my own – if he would select me as the winner of his auction and use his expertise to help me build my company’s brand, I would also use my tools (my website, my blog, my LinkedIN postings, my webinars, and my clients) to help promote his services.
I’m happy to report that Michael has accepted my proposal and we will begin immediately helping each other grow our respective firms – all this being done without any exchange of cash in an effort to help each other, and thereby, help our own businesses - the ultimate in effective networking, and the essence of small business in America, in my opinion.
THE CHALLENGE
In today’s economy it is critical for small business to take up the challenge of creating jobs to help, in the words of our new President, “pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin the work of re-building America”. Given that the largest percentage of small businesses are started on a shoestring, networking plays a vital role in that revitalization. Therefore, I’m issuing a challenge to the members of LinkedIN – and every other social network – I challenge you to come up with a way to utilize these social networks to develop a means by which you can help another small business that then results in helping your own business grow. If each of us does this just once, think of the tremendous impact this could have on our U.S. economy and that of our global community! Will you meet this challenge?
If you decide to take up the challenge, please send me your stories so I can share them with others in the online community. I look forward to seeing the impact of small business and social networks on re-building our nation’s economy and hope that the members of LinkedIN will play a pivotal role in this endeavor! Let’s see the REAL power of small business and social networks!
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The author, Linda Daichendt, is Founder and Managing Consultant at Strategic Growth Concepts with over twenty years’ experience in working with small businesses. Linda can be contacted by email at strategicgrowthconcepts@earthlink.net. The company website can be viewed at www.strategicgrowthconcepts.com