There's not a single person on this planet who haven't heard of Starbucks, world's biggest coffee house company. But did you know that the former CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, was born and raised in poverty, barely making ends meet? And when things got really tough, he even had to sell his blood couple of times.
This is the success story of Howard Schultz. how he went from living in poverty and struggling for money to survive, to transforming Starbucks into a 100 billion dollar company. And he was just a young boy who never stopped dreaming, and here is why you shouldn't stop too.
He was born in a very poor family. He spent his childhood living in a small one-bedroom apartment from a public housing project. His father was an army vet and a truck driver and spent most of his life working low-paid jobs. When Howard was only 7 years old, while delivering diapers, his father fell on the ice and broke his leg.
And because of this, he was fired from his job. And with no medical insurance and no savings, his family was struggling for money. That image of his father laying on the couch, feeling hopeless, crushed and defeated, left a permanent mark in his memory.
It was one of the biggest defining moments in Howard's life. And to get away from all of these problems, he used to sit on the staircase in his building, dreaming of a better life. He played football in high school and earned an athletic scholarship to go to college, but he didn't want to play sports and decided to major in communications. So to pay for college, he had to take student loans and worked many odd jobs to make ends meet. Few times he even had to sell his blood for money to survive.
After graduating from college, Howard worked at a ski lodge and as a salesman, but he had a desire to work at Starbucks. At that time, Starbucks had three owners and only sold coffee beans. So, at the age of 29, after a full year of convincing the owners to hire him, he finally got a job at Starbucks. While on a business trip to Italy, he walked into an Italian coffee shop and he was fascinated by his experience while drinking coffee. He was amazed by the fact that the owners of the coffee shops actually knew their customers and they even called them by their names while serving them coffee.
Excited, he traveled back to the US trying to convince the Starbucks owners to accept these incredible new ideas, but the owners rejected him. So Howard quit Starbucks and went on to create his own coffee company called Il Giornale. But he had no money to fund this company. In the course of the year I spent trying to raise money, I spoke to 242 people and 217 of them said no. 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. But eventually, enough people believed in his vision and decided to invest in his business. He worked extremely hard to open his first coffee shop, where he could replicate the experience he had in Italy and finally implement his ideas. After a few years, Starbucks went bankrupt and Howard bought the company and became CEO of Starbucks.
He rebranded his company with the Starbucks name and expanded across the United States. Today, Starbucks has more than 30,000 stores around the world and market value over 100 billion dollars. And Howard has an advice for you.
In life, you can blame a lot of people and you can wallow in self-pity. Or you can pick yourself up and say, Listen, I have to be responsible for myself. I believe life is a series of near misses. A lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all.
It's seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It's seeing what other people don't see and pursuing that vision. I feel so strongly that the reason I'm here is I dreamed big dreams.
I dream the kind of dreams that other people said would not be possible. I cannot offer you any specific secret recipe for success, the perfect plan, how to reach the pinnacle of success in the business. But my own experience suggests that starting from scratch and achieving much more than what I dream about is quite possible. But if you wait for the perfect conditions, you'll never get anything done. But the good thing is… You can make a decision and take control now.
Remember something. A year from now, you may wish you had started today. So, what's your story?