How Starbucks Became a $100B Success Story | Howard Schultz | From Poor Boy To Billionaire

 

There's not a single person on this the 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 tough he even had to sell his blood a 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 projects 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 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 the coffee company called il journals but he had no money to fund this company in 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 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 am i dreamed big dreams I dreamed 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 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 you.