The Mentors

Kent Sutherland talked his way into Sam Walton's office 18 years ago--and hasn't stopped relying on the legendary entrepreneur's advice ever since.

Plus: How--and where--to find a mentor of your own, and eight tales of life-altering mentor moments

Kent Sutherland won't forget the day 18 years ago that he first drove up to Bentonville, Ark., past the big American flag and the imposing sign welcoming him to Wal-Mart's corporate headquarters. "That sign'll scare you." Sutherland was only 23, working his first job out of college as a vendor for a supplier of health-care products, and was by his own description "really green." As he appraised the company's imposing building through the windshield of his car, he found he'd locked his grip on the steering wheel to keep his hands from shaking.

Wal-Mart buyers were tough, legendary for stirring as much dread as expectation in the hearts of hopeful vendors. What further quickened Sutherland's pulse was the prospect that the man himself might even amble out front--as was his occasional habit--to greet the anxious vendors clustered around the coffee machine and the bulletin board announcing Wal-Mart's stock price and store openings, each of those numbers in relentless ascent. On one level, Sam Walton was just folks, the guy with the red dented pickup with the bird dogs in back. On another, he was the flinty entrepreneur, there to peer as deep into the salesmen's souls as into their sample kits. Sutherland wanted to get into business for himself, as Walton had. He figured that if he could get the elder's ear, then perhaps he could glean some of his precious knowledge. "I wanted to pick his brain and see how he could help me," Sutherland recalls. "I wanted to ask him, 'How'd you do it? What's your secret?' "

Fate proved kind to Sutherland. He worked for Becton Dickinson, a multinational supplier of health-care products with plenty of clout to get Sutherland in the door at Wal-Mart. (Becton Dickinson happened to sell a certain syringe that Walton himself used for allergy shots.) Sutherland first met Walton on his third visit to Wal-Mart, and over the next seven years Walton would grant Sutherland brief, intermittent audiences, in which he would take the younger man aside and they'd talk business, like coach and quarterback crafting a game plan. Milas Hale, a Little Rock lawyer and a friend of Sutherland's, says, "Sam tutored him. It was almost impossible to get in to see Sam, but Kent did. Sam took a liking to Kent because I think he saw something of himself in him."

Today, Kent Sutherland is a company builder, and the late Sam Walton continues as the angel at his shoulder. "I feel that he has had a tremendous impact by motivating me to do things a different way than I might have," says Sutherland, who has started a range of Main Street businesses that are the sorts of unglamorous enterprises that demand a hands-on, small-town operator like Sam Walton to run them right. They are businesses that require as much common sense as a common touch, and it is those qualities that Sutherland courted when he befriended Walton.

While Walton's advice to Sutherland over the years was hardly the stuff of an M.B.A. tutorial, it represents the kind of grassroots counsel that many entrepreneurs readily acknowledge--but too seldom heed. (People have a knack for making business more complicated than it needs to be.) What Walton showed the world was that success was rooted in a mindfulness of a few basic principles, coupled with a relentless drive to put them into practice. Walton was as dogged as he was smart, and that would similarly describe his erstwhile disciple, Kent Sutherland.

"Sam said you should always diversify, spread your risk," says Sutherland, noting that while Walton may have had his fortune tied up in one business, he still sold everything under the sun. "I keep my eyes open for so many things so I can make the most out of the property I have," he says.

Kent Sutherland has been selling insurance since 1988 in Sherwood, a suburb of Little Rock, and has built his customer base in that business to 2,000. Four years ago he built a mini-storage facility across the street, shoehorning it onto a tongue of land between two churches. No one saw much use for such an oddly shaped lot--82 feet wide by 1,000 feet deep--except for Sutherland, who imagined a row of storage lockers there and was able to buy the land from the bank for a song. In 1995 he opened a car wash a mile down the street from his office. This year Sutherland plans to invest in a mortgage company which he says will be "a big deal." He has also looked into buying billboards and leasing his land to builders of cell-phone transmission towers.

Five years ago Sutherland's net worth reached $1 million, and it has since climbed by another $500,000. His goal was to reach $1 million by age 40, and he got there three years ahead of schedule. Sutherland's wealth will likely always be a small fraction of his mentor's, yet he has come to fashion himself as a small-business man and entrepreneur in the elder's image, using the advice he gleaned from Walton in those seven years of banging on the door at Bentonville. In Kent Sutherland's world, Sam Walton's wisdom proffers the guiding invisible hand. "I feel that he has had a tremendous impact by motivating me to do things a different way than I might have," says Sutherland.

Sutherland starts each weekday by trading stocks on-line from home. He's up by 6:30 to read the overnight business news before wandering into his home office. There is a lone book on the shelf above the computer, Burden of Truth, by Charles Colson, once of Watergate fame and since born again. The TV is on, with CNBC's talking heads jabbering away. Sutherland's Compaq computer, black and as sleek as a Ferrari, radiates a glittery array of stock quotes and market information. His goal is to make $500 in the first half hour of trading by taking a big position in one blue-chip stock that seems particularly active--and then quickly dumping it at a gain of a half point or so, before heading out the door to pan other streams of cash.