Toasting the humble beginnings, grit and a burning desire to excel of small-town founders
The latest issue of Forbes India takes the small-town to startup saga forward, into the digital age, by shining a light on a clutch of new-age entrepreneurs with origins in Indian villages and towns
“Sam Walton’s first store was a second-rate store in a second-rate town in what no one would have classified as a first-rate state.â€
That line from Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires they Built by Harvard Business School Professor Richard S Tedlow sums up succinctly the Walmart founder’s strategy to build the retailing chain across small-town America. The ‘second-rate town’ was Rogers, in Arkansas, with a population of some 8,000 back in 1962.
As Walton himself wrote in his autobiography Made in America: “As an old-time small-town merchant, I can tell you that nobody has more love for the heyday of the smalltown retailing era than I do.†The Wal-Mart strategy was, as Walton put it, “simply to put good-sized discount stores into little one-horse towns which everybody else was ignoringâ€.
That Walton may have been born away from the urban outposts—Kingfisher, Oklahoma—and that his family of farmers moved from one small town to another in his early years may have something to do with his dime-store outlook. That think-small vision is responsible for Wal-Mart today being worth over $400 billion and racking up $573 billion in revenue in 2022 with operating cash flows of $24.2 billion.
Back in India, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Gurugram may be where India’s top industrialists are based; but many first-generation entrepreneurs have had village/small-town origins that played a key role in their relentless pursuit of growth.
(This story appears in the 15 December, 2023 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
