Howard D. Schultz is an American businessman, best known as the chairman and CEO of Starbucks, one of the world's biggest brands in coffee, and a former owner of the Seattle SuperSonics.
His story is one of rags-to-riches that teaches us that a person's background is no barrier to what he
can become in life.
Schultz was born on July 19, 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, to Fred Schultz and his wife Elaine, a Jewish family.
He experienced poverty at an early age. When Schultz was 7 years old, his father lost his job after breaking his ankle while working as a truck driver picking up and delivering diapers. At the time, his father had no health insurance or worker's compensation, and the family was left with no income. At the age of 12, Howard got his first job. First, he was selling newspapers, and then working in a local cafe. The boy faced rather hard experience when he turned 16. He was working at the fur store, where he had to deal with stretching the leather. This exhausting job only made Howard stronger and firmed his wish to succeed in future.
Being physically strong, Schultz excelled at football in high school and was awarded an athletic scholarship to Northern Michigan University where he received his Bachelor’s degree in Communications in 1975. By the time Schultz started college, he decided he wasn't going to play football after all. To pay for school, he took out student loans and took up various jobs, including working as a bartender and even occasionally selling his blood.
After graduation in 1975, Schultz spent a year working at a ski lodge in Michigan. He finally landed a job in the sales training program at Xerox. He did not find fulfilment in the work, so after three years he left to take a job at Hammarplast, a housewares business.
There, Schultz ascended the ranks to vice president and general manager. It was at Hammarplast that he first encountered Starbucks. The coffee shop had a few stores in Seattle and caught his attention when it ordered an unusually large number of drip coffeemakers.
Intrigued, Schultz traveled to Seattle to meet the company's then owners, Gerald Baldwin and Gordon Bowker. He was struck by the partners' passion and their courage in selling a product that would appeal only to a small niche of gourmet coffee enthusiasts.
A year later, the then 29-year-old finally persuaded Baldwin to hire him as the director of retail operations and marketing. At the time, Starbucks only had three stores, but they were selling pounds of coffee for home use, Schultz said.
Schultz's career — and Starbucks' fate — changed forever when the company sent him to an international housewares show in Milan. While walking around the city, he encountered several espresso bars where owners knew their customers by name and served them drinks like cappuccinos and cafe lattes. Schultz had an "epiphany" the moment he understood the personal relationship that people could have to coffee.
On his return from Italy, Schultz tried to implement his ideas to cultivate an Italian-like experience for coffee-lovers but this was roundly rejected by the owners of Starbucks and so in 1985, Schultz left to start his own coffee company: Il Giornale (Italian for "the daily").
In order to get Il Giornale off the ground, Schultz had to raise more than $1.6 million. "In the course of the year I spent trying to raise money, I spoke to 242 people, and 217 of them said no," he wrote. "Try to imagine how disheartening it can be to hear that many times why your idea is not worth investing in. ... It was a very humbling time." Despite the numerous rejections and dissappointments, Schultz was not deterred and he never gave up on his dream.
Schultz spent two years away from Starbucks, wholly focused on opening Il Giornale stores that replicated the coffee culture he had seen in Italy. He would go on to accomplish his dream and in August 1987, Il Giornale bought Starbucks for $3.8 million, and Schultz became CEO of Starbucks Corporation. At the time, there were six stores.
America swiftly took a liking to Starbucks and the coffee company quickly grew from 6 to 165 stores in under 5 years. In 1992, the company went public on the NASDAQ; its 165 stores pulled in $93 million in revenue that year. The world eventually caught on, and by 2000 Starbucks had grown into a global operation of more than 3,500 stores and $2.2 billion in annual revenue.
Starbucks' success made Schultz rich, and in 2001 he demonstrated his growing love for Seattle when he bought the Seattle Supersonics for $200 million. But the investment turned sour as the team struggled and Schultz feuded with players. In 2006, he sold the Sonics to a group of investors that moved the team to Oklahoma City. He later called owning the team "a nightmare."
In the last 28 years, Schultz has grown the coffeemaker to include more than 21,000 stores in 65 countries (ironically, there are none in Italy). "I've always been driven and hungry," Schultz said. "Long after others have stopped to rest and recover, I'm still running, chasing after something nobody else could ever see."
Schultz has compiled Starbucks' extraordinary success into two books: "Pour Your Heart Into it: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time" (1999) and New York Times bestseller "Onward: How Starbucks Fought For Its Life Without Losing its Soul" (2012).
As Starbucks has continued to grow — it now has annual sales of more than $16 billion — so has Schultz's fortune. His net worth is estimated to be $3 billion. He revealed in "Pour Your Heart Out" that his tremendous professional success is a tribute to his late father, who "never attained fulfillment and dignity from the work he found meaningful."
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