Howard Schultz

Last time we introduced you to Steve Jobs and today you’ll meet Howard Schultz! This man is worth around 1.1 billion dollar which ranks him the 354th richest person in the United States. He grew up in a housing project in Brooklyn New York and was the first one of his family to earn a bachelor’s degree. He definitely did it he made people pay $4 dollar for a cup of coffee. He is the one and only man who turned a local Seatle based coffee retailer into a $29 billion company. You know the company I’m talking about, it’s Starbucks!

Schultz had various jobs until he became the manager of US operations of Hammarplast Swedish drip coffeemakers in 1981. He noticed that a certain firm in Seatle was ordering quit a lot of products and decided to visit them! Back than this customer was just a small but good retail company selling coffee for home usage. Howard was impressed by the care the coffee makers put in their work so he offered to work for them and became the marketing manager of the one and only Starbucks company back in 1981.

“Once they learn to like the beverage, they would come back in the morning and become regulars.”

This is actually just the beginning of Starbucks which was just a retail boutiqe back than. Two years after Schultz joined Starbucks he was send on a business trip to Italy and he noticed people drinking espresso’s in coffee shops which served of being a meeting point on every street corner. He came back and told his bosses about it and talked them into selling espressos in their retail shops. The owners of Starbucks where not so found of it but aloud him to start selling it in one of their four shops. This soon accounted for more sales than their regular products. However, the owners of Starbucks did not agree with this new business strategy and therefore Schultz decided to leave the company and begin for himself. Just do it!

“Risk more than others think safe.”

“Expect more than others think possible.”

And he just did it, he soon had several coffee shops (not the dutch type of coffee shops) with the name Il Giornale. Than one year later he got hold of the news that Starbucks was being sold and he did not have to think that long about buying all six retail shops for just $3.8 million.

From that point Starbucks really took off, Schultz insisted on a relatively long staff training and a minimum of 20 working hours per week. He is also generous to his employees because his father worked his whole live doing all the fucked up work without insurance or any benefits and died without anything to leaf his family.

“I wanted to try and build the company that my father never got a chance to work for,”

Other than that Starbucks expanded rapidly by taking a strategy of covering every street corner to divide the workload among its restaurants. Soon it also went international and at this very moment you may find more than 15.000 Starbucks restaurants all around the world, they even sell bottled coffee in supermarkets. Yeah this dude definitely did it! He made people pay $4 for a cup of coffee creating a new international sub culture.

“China traditionally has been a tea-drinking country but we turned them into coffee drinkers.”

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