What’s his story? Howard D. Shultz was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 19, 1953. His family was poor and they had to move to a housing project when he was 3.
Schultz was a natural athlete and was a great basketball and football player. He got a football scholarship to Northen Michigan University in 1970.
He graduated with a degree in communication in 1975 and started working as salesman for a company that sold European coffee makers in the U.S. He was rising through the rank and eventually promoted to director of sales in 1980.
He noticed that he was selling more coffee makers to a small operation in Seattle, Washington, known then as the Starbucks Coffee Tea and Spice Company, than to Macy's. "Every month, every quarter, these numbers were going up, even though Starbucks just had a few stores," Schultz later remembered.
Howard Schultz still distinctly remembers the first time he walked into the original Starbucks in 1981. "I had never had a good cup of coffee. I met the founders of the company, and really heard for the first time the story of great coffee”.
A year after meeting with Starbucks' founders, in 1982, Howard Schultz was hired as director of retail operations and marketing for the growing coffee company, which, at the time, only sold coffee beans, not coffee drinks.
In 1983, while traveling in Milan, Italy, he was struck by the number of coffee bars he encountered. An idea then occurred to him: Starbucks should sell not just coffee beans, but coffee drinks. Eventually, he became CEO and chairman of the Starbucks.
In 2000, Schultz publicly announced that he was resigning as Starbucks' CEO. Eight years later, however, he returned to head the company.
What about today? Howard D. Schultz is best known as the chairman and CEO of Starbucks, and is worth $2 billion.
