Successful

businessman
Howard Schultz
RADULESCU CRISTINA-ELENA
GRUPA 1511

Summary

Howard Schultz is CEO and chairman of Starbucks, the

highly successful coffee company.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 19, 1953, Howard

Schultz graduated from Northern Michigan University
with a bachelor's degree in communications before
becoming director of retail operations and marketing
for the Starbucks Coffee Company in 1982.

After founding the coffee company Il Giornale in 1987,

he purchased Starbucks and became CEO and
chairman of the company. In 2000, Schultz publicly
announced that he was resigning as Starbucks's CEO.
Eight years later, however, he returned to head the
company. In 2014, Starbucks had more than 21,000
stores worldwide and a market cap of $60 billion.

Early Life and Career

Howard D. Schultz was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 19, 1953, and moved with
his family to the Bayview Housing projects in Canarsie, a neighborhood in southeastern
Brooklyn, when he was 3 years old. Schultz was a natural athlete, leading the
basketball courts around his home and the football field at school. He made his escape
from Canarsie with a football scholarship to Northern Michigan University in 1970.

After graduating from the university with a Bachelor of Science degree in

communication in 1975, Schultz found work as an appliance salesman for
Hammarplast, a company that sold European coffee makers in the United States.
Rising through the ranks to become director of sales, in the early 1980s, Schultz
noticed that he was selling more coffee makers to a small operation in Seattle,
Washington, known then as the Starbucks Coffee Tea and Spice Company, than to
Macy's. "Every month, every quarter, these numbers were going up, even though
Starbucks just had a few stores," Schultz later remembered. "And I said, 'I gotta go up
to Seattle.'"

Howard Schultz still distinctly remembers the first time he

walked into the original Starbucks in 1981. At that time,
Starbucks had only been around for 10 years and didn't
exist outside Seattle. The company's original owners, old
college buddies Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker and their
neighbor, Zev Siegl, had founded Starbucks in 1971. The
three friends also came up with the coffee company's
mermaid logo.

"When I walked in this store for the first timeI know this
sounds really hokeyI knew I was home," Schultz later
remembered. "I can't explain it. But I knew I was in a special
place, and the product kind of spoke to me." At that time,
he added, "I had never had a good cup of coffee. I met the
founders of the company, and really heard for the first time
the story of great coffee ... I just said, 'God, this is
something I've been looking for my whole professional life.'"
Little did Schultz know then how fortuitous his introduction
to the company would truly be, or that he would have an
integral part in creating the modern Starbucks.

Birth of the
Modern Starbucks
A year after meeting with Starbucks' founders, in 1982,
Howard Schultz was hired as director of retail operations and
marketing for the growing coffee company, which, at the time,
only sold coffee beans, not coffee drinks. "My impression of
Howard at that time was that he was a fabulous
communicator,"
co-founder Zev Siegl later remembered. "One to one, he still
is."
Early on, Schultz set about making his mark on the company
while making Starbucks' mission his own. In 1983, while
traveling in Milan, Italy, he was struck by the number of coffee
bars he encountered. An idea then occurred to him: Starbucks
should sell not just coffeebeansbut coffeedrinks. "I saw
something. Not only the romance of coffee, but ... a sense of
community. And the connection that people had to coffeethe
place and one another," Schultz recalled. "And after a week in
Italy, I was so convinced with such unbridled enthusiasm that I
couldn't wait to get back to Seattle to talk about the fact that I

Schultz's enthusiasm for opening coffee bars in

Starbucks stores, however, wasn't shared by the
company's creators. "We said, 'Oh no, that's not
for us,'" Siegl remembered. "Throughout the '70s,
we served coffee in our store. We even, at one
point, had a nice, big espresso machine behind
the counter. But we were in the bean business."
Nevertheless, Schultz was persistent until, finally,
the owners let him establish a coffee bar in a new
store that was opening in Seattle. It was an instant
success, bringing in hundreds of people per day
and introducing a whole new languagethe
language of the coffeehouseto Seattle in 1984.

But the success of the coffee bar demonstrated to

the original founders that they didn't want to go in
the direction Schultz wanted to take them. They
didn't want to get big. Disappointed, Schultz left
Starbucks in 1985 to open a coffee bar chain of
his own, Il Giornale, which quickly garnered
success.

Two years later, with the help of investors, Schultz

purchased Starbucks, merging Il Giornale with the
Seattle company. Subsequently, he became CEO and
chairman of Starbucks (known thereafter as the
Starbucks Coffee Company). Schultz had to convince
investors that Americans would actually shell out high
prices for a beverage that they were used to getting
for 50 cents. At the time, most Americans didn't know
a high-grade coffee bean from a teaspoon of Nescaf
instant coffee. In fact, coffee consumption in the
United States had been going down since 1962.

In 2000, Schultz publicly announced that he was

resigning as Starbucks' CEO. Eight years later,
however, he returned to head the company. In a 2009
interview with CBS, Schultz said of Starbucks' mission,
"We're not in the business of filling bellies; we're in the
business of filling souls."

Continued Success

In 2006, Howard Schultz was ranked No. 359 onForbesmagazine's

"Forbes 400" list, which presents the 400 richest individuals in the
United States. In 2013, he was ranked No. 311 on the same list, as
well as No. 931 onForbes's list of billionaires around the globe.In
2011 he was entitled Business person of the year in Fortune
magazine.

Today, no one company sells more coffee drinks to more people in

more places than Starbucks. By 2012, Starbucks had grown to
encompass more than 17,600 stores in 39 countries around the
world, and its market capitalization was valued at $35.6 billion.By
2014, Starbucks had more than 21,000 stores worldwide and a
market cap of $60 billion.The incredibly popular coffee company
reportedly opens two or three new stores every day and attracts
around 60 million customers per week. According tothe company's
website, Starbucks has been "committed to ethically sourcing and
roasting the highest-quality arabica coffee in the world" since
1971.

Bibliography

https://www.google.ro/images

http://www.biography.com

https://en.wikipedia.org

Thank you!