control your expenses

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 ranked number one 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.

Sam Walton

Sam Walton, Made in America by Sam Walton & John Huey. Bantam Books. 1992. p. 248, 249