Pour Your Heart Into It

Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (1999), a business memoir by Howard Schultz, chronicles the journey of the Starbucks company from a single-store location in Seattle to its current worldwide presence. Born in 1953, Schultz is the CEO and chairman of Starbucks and has co-authored two other books about the company's success. The Starbucks company currently has more than 28,000 stores in seventy-six countries across the globe.

Pour Your Heart Into It opens with the story of Howard Schultz's childhood. He grows up in poverty in the Brooklyn projects with a father who never seems to catch a break. But Schultz dreams of great things, and a football scholarship to Northern Michigan University provides his escape from the cycle of poverty. Upon graduation, he works his way to being the general manager of Hammarplast, a Swedish kitchen supply company selling goods in the United States. From this, he learns much about what it takes to successfully operate a business across international lines.

Just as he is achieving success in sales, Schultz visits Starbucks, a little coffee shop in Seattle. Instantly, he falls in love with the product, and the allure of selling coffee sourced from across the world causes him to quit his job at Hammarplast to work at Starbucks. While the experience is good, Starbuck's owners are content with simply roasting coffee, which does not fall in line with Howard's grandiose ideas of a worldwide coffee chain. After only a short time, he leaves the company on good terms to open his own coffee shop.



Schultz opens Il Giornale, a coffeehouse modeled after those he grew to love while visiting Italy. Il Giornale finds some success, but then fate hands Schultz a curveball: the opportunity to purchase the Starbucks company in Seattle. He begins campaigning to investors with a goal of raising $1.25 million dollars. The investors are hesitant. After all, this is a lot of money for coffee. Nevertheless, Schultz is able to win them over with his passion and his belief that the business idea is a successful one. After raising the funds, he buys the company in 1986, becoming its President and CEO.

By now, the Starbucks shop has grown to five locations and earned a reputation for having the best tasting coffee in the city, something attributed to the fact that the coffee beans are roasted in-house where customers can see. The company's staff is also highly knowledgeable about coffee, educating the customers on flavor profiles. In this way, Starbucks stands out as the premier coffee company in Seattle. However, they only sell roasted beans, not coffee drinks.

Schultz has bigger plans. Drawing again from Italian coffee culture, he wishes to transform Starbucks, and in fact, all coffee consumption, into a cultural phenomenon. This will require transforming the stores into comfortable locations where people can linger while drinking their coffee. It also will require the employees to make coffee drinks, including drinks such as lattes and cappuccinos—drinks that are as-yet unknown in America.



The staff is resistant to Schultz's plans, and he must establish trust by showing them that Starbucks will treat employees as individuals with skills and passion rather than just automatons for creating products. He also collaborates with his employees to create a company culture of social responsibility and sustainability—concepts that still remain in the Starbucks Mission Statement today.

Over the next two years, Starbucks increases to twenty locations. Though the process is not without growing pains, the company finds success by marketing coffee as an affordable luxury and an occasion for social interaction. During this time, Schultz and his board of directors are also laying the foundation for the global business that is to come. They build a roasting house to supply the shops and create a computer network with which to track sales in a centralized location.

In 1992, Starbucks goes public, and with revenue reaching 80 percent, it is immediately successful. The number of locations now doubles each year. Schultz attributes Starbucks' success (and the failure of many of his competitors) to the fact that they took the time to invest in the people and the processes that are necessary for success, including the supply chain that ensures quality control for all products.



Schultz also attributes Starbucks' success to the fact that he chooses to hire people who are knowledgeable in areas that he is not. He cites the example of Howard Behar, whose idea it was to hold Open Forums for employees to voice opinions. During this time, Starbucks also begins sending in secret shoppers to rate customer service, and employees are taught to go above and beyond to please guests.

Throughout the 1990s, Starbucks continues to expand its locations and refine its processes for maximum efficiency. It is during this time that Starbucks' investment in its employees pays off when one of them invents the Frappuccino. Rather than quash the idea, which many businesses are prone to do when an idea does not come from the "correct" source, Starbucks tested the drink in certain markets. It was an instant success.

Always seeking to perfect the "coffee experience," the company begins expanding its sales into other areas, such as CDs, coffee-flavored ice cream, and bottled coffee drinks in stores. Starbucks also partners with United Airlines to serve the company's coffee exclusively during flights. When a bad frost hurts the coffee supply chain in 1997, Schultz continues to buy the best beans despite the price increase because he refuses to compromise on Starbucks' quality.



Schultz espouses the virtues of leading with your heart and growing big while staying small. Starbucks is committed to growing with integrity and social responsibility. The company pursues dreams rather than money, and success is best when it is shared.