Success Story of Howard Schultz-Chairman and CEO of Starbucks

He has born in Brooklyn, New york in 1953.He moved with his family into bayview Housing Society projects in Carnarsie. He attended Northern Michigan University on a football scholarship. In 1975 he graduated with Bachelor of Science degree in communication and started working as an appliance salesman for Hammarplast, a company selling European coffee makers in United States.

In early 1980s, Schultz had become the sales director and noticed that more coffee was being sold to small operation in Seattle, Washington-known then as the Starbucks Coffee Tea and Spice Company-than to Macy’s. In 1982, Howard Schultz was hired as director of Retail Operation and Marketing for Starbuck, which only sold coffee beans at the time. After a year, Shultz visited a number of coffee bars while travelling to Milan, Italy. The experienced inspired him to expand Starbucks’s products to include drinks instead of just coffee beans. After fierce lobbying by Schultz, the owner agreed to open a café bar in their new store in Seattle. The bar which introduced café latte to Seattle was an instant hit. However, in 1985 realizing that the owner were not interested in making it big, Shultz quit Starbucks to establish his own coffee chain that is II Giornale. With the help of investors, Shultz purchased Starbucks, merging II with Giornale with the Seattle company. Consequently, he became CEO and chairman of Starbucks.

Finally in 1992, Starbucks had made an initial public offering and after a year has passed Starbuck opened its first store in New York City. It quickly grew to 240 outlets nationwide, and aimed to expand to 1500 national stores by the year 2000. Starbucks opened stores in Japan and Singapore, the first outside North America in 1996. Starbucks has formed a partnership with Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau to create products that benefit local literacy programs across America.

In 2000, Howard Shultz publicly announced that he was resigning as Starbucks’ CEO but would remain Chairman. He suggested that his new role would be to create a global strategy for a company. In 2006, he entered into direct competition with fast food chains by offering breakfast sandwiches, after McDonald’s started to serve lattes. In the same year Howard Shultz was ranked number 359 in the “Forbes 400” list. After a year have been passed its stock fell by 42% due to its sugary drinks, which damages its reputation as a reliable coffee shop.

Shultz returned to Starbucks, starting in an interview that “We are not in business to filling bellies, we are in a business of filling souls “.In an effort to turn the struggling company around, he laid off1500store employee in the United Sates and 1700 global corporate employees. After this he has planned to shut down 300 stores and lay off around700 corporate employees, while revising his target for new stores down from 470 to 310. He has added a new service for public in his store that is free Wi-Fi through AT&T.

In 2012, Starbucks have grown up to more than 17,600 stores in 36 countries around the globe and after a year which is 2013 Howard Shultz made headlines and won wide praise after making a statement in support of legalization of gay marriages. After a shareholder expressed his disapproval, he stated that not every decision is an economic decision.