The Greatest Personalities

HOWARD SCHULTZ

Thirty years ago, Howard Schultz got into the coffee business with one goal in mind: to enhance the personal relationship between people and their coffee.

He's now responsible for Starbucks, one of the world's most beloved brands, and worth at least $3 billion as chairman and CEO of the Fortune 500 company. But it wasn't an easy path to the top.

How did Schultz, who came from a "working poor" family in the Brooklyn projects, overcome adversity and grow a quaint Seattle coffeehouse into the largest coffee chain on Earth? 

Schultz was born on July 19, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York. In an interview with Bloomberg, he said growing up in the projects — "loosely described as the other He experienced poverty at an early age. When Schultz was 7 years old, his father broke 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.

side of the tracks" — exposed him to the world's wealth disparity.

In high school, Schultz played football and earned an athletic scholarship to Northern Michigan University. By the time Schultz started college, he decided he wasn't going to play football after all. To pay for school, the communications major 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 waiting for inspiration. He finally landed a job in the sales training program at Xerox, where he got experience cold-calling and pitching word processors in New York. The work didn't fulfill him, so after three years he left to take a job at Hammarplast, a housewares business owned by a Swedish company called Perstorp.

There, Schultz ascended the ranks to vice president and general manager, leading a team of salespeople out of the US office in New York. 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 In 1985, Schultz left Starbucks after his ideas to cultivate an Italian-like experience for coffee-lovers was rejected by the founders. He soon started his own coffee company: Il Giornale (Italian for "the daily").

that people could have to coffee.

Schultz spent two years away from Starbucks, wholly focused on opening Il Giornale stores that replicated the coffee culture he'd seen in Italy. In August 1987, Il Giornale bought Starbucks for $3.8 million, and Schultz became CEO of SAmerica swiftly took a liking to Starbucks. 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.

tarbucks Corporation. At the time, there were six stores.

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, severely damaging his popularity in Seattle. He later called owning the team "a nightmare."Culled from Biography