The Starbucks CEO Advice for Turning Nothing Into Billions | Howard Schultz

He grew up poor and was the first in his family to go to college. He became Fortune magazine's 2011 Businessperson of the Year. He's one of the richest men in America with a net worth of $1.5 billion. He's Howard Schultz, and here are his top 10 rules for success.

I feel so strongly that the reason I'm here is I dreamed big dreams. I dreamed the kind of dreams that other people said would not be possible. I'm also living proof, this isn't a Hollywood movie, I come literally from the other side of the tracks. If you saw where I grew up and we took a picture of it, the neighborhood, the setting, you'd say it's not, it's impossible that someone could come from there and get here. But it is possible. And not to sound too trite, it's possible because we still live in a country where the entrepreneurial spirit is so alive and so well. And anyone in this country, if you dream big and surround yourself with great people and leave your ego at the door and share success with others, and have a little luck along the way, you can do anything. But there will be people along the way, and I remember this, who will say to you, "You know, you're dreaming too big. It's not possible. Those things just can't happen." Don't allow anyone, friend, family, acquaintance, teachers, whoever it is, Don't allow anyone to tell you that what you are dreaming for yourself and your family is not possible. It is possible. Don't be one of those people 20 years from now are going to be walking around in a 9-to-5 job miserable and angry and bitter because you let your dreams get away from you because you did not believe strong enough. Strongly enough in yourself and what was possible. Don't allow that to happen. This is an unbelievable time. And I, I can't encourage you enough to continue to think that things are possible and that your dreams can come true. How many people have you met in your life who have said things like, "I had that idea. I knew about that." Or, I, I was so close, but I gave up. I think sometimes the difference between success and failure, winning and losing, is a very fine line between those people who will continue to move forward. In August of '87, we had 11 stores and 100 employees and a dream to create a national retail company around the coffee experience, good coffee in America, But there was another dream I had, and that was to build a different type of company. A company that potentially could achieve the delicate balance between profitability and the fiscal responsibility of building shareholder value, but the balance of also having a heart, benevolence, and integrating a social conscience in everything the company would do. And hopefully one day, remember this was '87, The company would be known as much for its values, its culture, its guiding principles, as it would the quality of its coffee. Fast forward from '87 to '89 and '90, the company was beginning to get some traction. We had about 50 stores. We still were not making money. And I think we all realized at the time that we were not in the coffee business. Coffee serving people, but we were in the people business serving coffee. That if we wanted to exceed the expectations of the customer, we had to first exceed the expectations of our people. We made a very important strategic decision early on that franchising could not maintain the culture and values of the company, that all it would be would be an access to cheap capital. And so we continued on track of opening and building a company-owned system. I said for years that you have to celebrate your victories and really celebrate your mistakes. And what I mean by that is that you have to learn from the mistakes that you make. And you've got to create an environment where people are not afraid to take a risk and not afraid to do things that are beyond what the expectations are. At the same time, you've got to set up a framework for how those things are managed and judged and evaluated. But I believed very strongly that we could build a different kind of company. I never believed, never, I think it would have been arrogant to believe that we could have 1,000, 2,000, or 7,500 stores in the US and around the world. But something really magical started happening. And it started happening as a result of not advertising or conventional consumer classical marketing. The fact is that Starbucks spends very little on traditional advertising. It started happening because we demonstrated to ourselves, and now the world, that to build an enduring, sustainable, long-term business and consumer brand, It's not about fancy marketing. It's about establishing a very powerful and unusual emotional relationship with the customer. But I'm also here to tell you that I feel strongly that long-term value for your shareholders cannot be achieved in an enduring sustainable way unless the management of the company is completely and comprehensively committed to creating long-term value for the employees. And the two are directly linked together. And any company, any management team that turns its back on its people and doesn't share the success of the company with the people who do the work are not going to finish the race. I think something that has happened the last couple of years that I have noticed, which I think is powerful and it is a sea change, is that the consumer has begun in many ways to perform what I would call loosely a cultural audit of companies, of brands, and of products and services that they are asked to support, to buy. And the cultural audit goes something like, for the first time, businesses recognize that there is parity in the marketplace. Parity on price, parity on features and benefits. And the consumer, as a result of that, has significant choices as to what they're gonna buy and support. But for the first time, they're asking questions beyond the characteristics of the product or the service. They're asking about values. They're asking questions about how you take care of your people, whether or not you're giving back to the community in which they live and work. I think that success in business is a very difficult thing to achieve, and it's more difficult today probably than any other time despite the vast number of opportunities. And as it relates to finding your calling in terms of what the opportunity or the entrepreneurial adventure is going to be, it has to be linked to something that you are so passionate and crazed about that you're willing to knock down walls and climb mountains and do the things that are going to put yourself in a position of sacrificing so many other things for its success. And you can only do that when there's a compelling underlying feeling that you have that this is something I'm gonna fight to the death for. And without that, I think it's gonna be a commodity-based experience, not only for the customer but for you. And I think you can't really succeed at the levels that you want to unless you find that thing that you're so passionate, excited, and in love with. And I think because you've got it along the way, you're going to have to convince so many other people to believe in you and the idea and the opportunity and the struggle and the obstacles that are going to come can over— only be overcome by this passion that you have in which you're going to be able to get people to follow you over those hurdles. I know it sounds a little bit sophomoric, but it's so true. This is the key of unlocking the success of our business and hopefully the businesses that you either are thinking about, working for, or part of. And it's this, it's so basic. We all want to be The same thing. Break, break away the differences between what I just described— language, politics, the way people dress, their history. It doesn't matter. We all want the same thing. We want to be respected as employees. We want to be appreciated as customers. We want to feel dignified in the workplace, and who we are as people. And we want to go into a store and for that brief moment of whether we're buying a cup of coffee or whatever it might be, we want some value for our money. And the human condition of all of that between business and the consumer and everything, everything, everything else in between is the human condition of the human spirit. If you can exceed the expectations of your people, if they feel they're working in an enterprise or a company that values them as human beings and not as paychecks, values them as human beings and not a line item on the balance sheet, And they in turn can take that feeling of being respected and appreciated as an employee and share that with someone else, a paying customer. Whether it's in Kuwait or Dubai, or the opening of Starbucks France where people said it wouldn't be possible, it can work and it is sustainable. Because the human spirit has no language. And at a time in the world when there is such cynicism and a fracturing of trust, if you reach out and appreciate and respect another human being, it comes back to you. Because not every decision is an economic decision. Despite the fact that you recite statistics that are narrow in time, we did provide a 38% shareholder return over the last year. I don't know how many things you invest in, but I would suspect not many things— companies, products, investments— have returned 38% over the last 12 months. Having said that, it is not an economic decision. Decision. The lens in which we are making that decision is through the lens of our people. We employ over 200,000 people in this company, and we want to embrace diversity of all kinds. Respectfully, if you can get a higher return than the 38% you got last year, it's a free country. You can sell your shares in Starbucks and buy shares in Microsoft. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because Kitanjich95 asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. And I'd also love to know which of the top 10 lessons from Howard you loved the best.

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