Walton Made Tons of Mistakes but Kept on Going
For anyone not familiar with Sam Waltons first retail store, any outsider would have said that it could be a case study to show how not to do start a retail business.
Keeping in mind that Waltons strategy was to focus on being a low cost leader, then the mistakes are ever compounded more.
The source of his mistake? The lease he signed to begin with. He tells it this way: 
"Only after we closed the deal, of course, did I learn that the store was a real dog ... it was the highest rent anybody'd ever heard of in the variety store business. No one paid 5 percent of sales for rent."
According to all his detractors he wasn't taken serious from the beginning because from the store he leased and the town and state he started in were considered a joke to his competitors, who even after years didn't take him seriously as a competitor until it was too late.
But as far as the leasing of the store in the beginning goes, it is a lot worse than it sounds when you consider that he was using a low-price model for the business. That meant that his overhead was already far higher than his competitors. This would make it even more difficult to follow through on the core purpose of the business.
He found out after years that he had selected the wrong store and had paid far too much for it. Eventually when the lease was up he was basically run out of town when it was taken over by someone else. Although he did sell the store, he had to start over from scratch.
Walton said concerning this beginning that "For all of my confidence I hadn't had a day's experience in running a variety store."
While he did pay a price for that inexperience, at the same time, with the strategy he was employing, I don't think there was anyone that he could look to for a model to copy. He was in uncharted territory.
What is important is that he believed in what he was doing without wavering. He refused to move off of his purpose and kept on going regardless of his huge mistakes. He has said that once he understood the mistakes he made and corrected them, he didn't dwell upon them and beat himself up over them. He simply dusted himself off and kept on going.
Other Walton Sources:
The Most Underrated CEO Ever The legendary Sam Walton
Sam Walton: The Power of Persistence
Sam Walton Business Quotes for Ya
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