Tag: STARBUCKS CORPORATION

Venti, Vidi, Vici

Howard Schultz, Founder and CEO of Starbucks Corporation, shares how he nearly lost the USD10 billion company he created.

Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks, has candidly admitted making some shocking mistakes and taking drastic measures three years ago to save the global company, which suddenly started losing its way, and has rebuilt Starbucks’ reputation by going back to the company’s main proposition when it was founded 40 years ago – sourcing the world’s fi nest coffee.

What brought you back to the front line as CEO in January 2008, eight years after OPPOSITE Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks Corporation, back in the hot seat. you had stepped away from day-to-day operations to become chairman?

I felt I had to take responsibility for what had suddenly started going wrong after a 15- year magic carpet ride, when everything we touched seemed to turn to gold. The sales were improving quarter after quarter, until, in 2007, they suddenly didn’t. I realised we were engaging with the wrong things while competitors in the coffee business were sweeping into the marketplace to take the food off our table. I held myself responsible for all the problems we had created and felt I had to return to take daily control to have any hope of saving Starbucks.

You left the company in 1986, four years after you joined as head of marketing, because, as coffee-roasters and retailers of whole beans first and foremost, the founders did not share your dream of creating an empire of Italian-style coffee houses. So, having started your own small chain, Il Giornale, why did you bother buying them out and rebranding?

It seemed like destiny to buy the company I had had so much respect for when the owners, Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker, decided to sell their Seattle stores and roasting plant 16 months after I left. I was attached to the Il Giornale name but I knew I had to let it go. Starbucks had established a reputation for high-quality coffee and I felt the name – which comes from the first mate in the classic novel Moby Dick – was a great one in itself.