We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP144: Billionaire Howard Schultz' book, Onward - A Story About Starbucks (Business Podcast)
Episode Date: June 24, 2017IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: The story behind Starbucks and how it got to where it is today. How Starbucks’ growth strategy failed and how it was fixed. Why successful leaders are obsessive a...bout their businesses. If McDonald's truly makes better coffee than Starbucks. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Howard Schulz’s book, Onward – Read reviews of this book. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota Fundrise 7-Eleven The Bitcoin Way Onramp Public Vanta ReMarkable Connect Invest SimpleMining Miro Shopify Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
Transcript
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You're listening to TIP.
So right now as you're listening to this, you might be driving down the road, and next to you,
you might have a cup of coffee.
And as you look at that cup of coffee, there's a good chance that it might be from Starbucks.
And that's what our episode today is all about.
And it's Howard Schultz, the CEO and founder of Starbucks, and the book that he wrote called Onward.
Howard Schultz started Starbucks with just one store in Seattle.
and today the company has exploded into a valuation of $88 billion.
Howard Schultz's personal net worth is $3 billion.
In this episode is all about how he pulled that off.
In this episode, we'll tell you the story behind Starbucks.
We'll investigate how Starbucks's growth strategy failed and how it was fixed.
We'll examine why successful leaders are obsessive with the businesses.
And finally, we'll raise the question whether or not McDonald's true
to make better coffee than Starbucks.
You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books
that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.
All right. So today, like we talked about in the intro, we're talking about Howard Schultz's book
Onward. And let's give you a little bit of a background on Howard Schultz here before we get into
the specifics of the book. Howard Schultz was a little bit of the book. Howard Schultz was a little bit of
born in 1953, and he did not start off as the original founder of Starbucks, even though when you
look up his bio, it'll say that he was the founder. But he worked for Starbucks when it was a small
shop just in Seattle, and he actually got frustrated with Starbucks, went off, started his own
little coffee company, and then had this opportunity a few years later to buy a controlling share
of the Starbucks brand, and he merged the two businesses together. And whenever that happened,
and he had full control of Starbucks at that point, that's whenever he took it into this whole new growth model and took it off in a completely different direction.
Something that's really interesting is the backstory on what gave him the idea on how to make Starbucks what it is today that everyone recognizes from a branding standpoint.
So like when you walk into the store, it has this feel.
You know, you got the free Wi-Fi. It's got that coffee smell and it's got this feel to it.
Well, he actually acquired this idea from whenever he was on a trip to Italy and he went into the various coffee shops that they had throughout the street.
What he noticed was that there was this culture and this community that was baked into the model of these coffee shops.
And what he took away from this was like, we don't have anything like this back in the United States.
He took this idea.
He brings it back.
He then applies it to the Starbucks store that he was running in Seattle.
and he basically incorporates this idea that the culture around selling coffee and the interaction with the barista and the interactions that happen in the store where people will go to as a place after work to sit down, communicate with other people.
That community type feel was what he was really trying to build with Starbucks.
And I think if you would talk to him, especially after reading this book, you can see that that is the brand that he's really going after.
is much more than a cup of coffee is the way that he's designed it. And that is a really profound
change that he brought to the whole coffee industry here in the United States. And that's what's
really set him apart as he was building the brand. So that's a little bit of a backstory before
we get into the content of the book because the book didn't really cover any of that. I think that
it's important to kind of highlight it so people understand the model because the book takes
place and the book is all about him coming back as CEO in 2008 because he stepped aside. I want to say
he stepped aside in the year 2000 around that time frame where he stopped being the CEO.
Yeah. Reading the book, you can really feel how much he loves Starbucks and how much it hurts him
personally that the culture was changing and how it wasn't about coffee and the community anymore,
but more growth for the sake of growth. And that's something we'll circle back to.
quite a few times in this episode.
All right.
So at this point, instead of going chapter by chapter like we normally do for books,
so what we're going to do instead is just kind of summarize the story of what takes place
throughout the book.
And we're going to get some of the high points.
And then at the end, what we're going to do is summarize the top learning points that we
had from reading this book.
So the story, like I mentioned, it starts off January 2008.
Howard Schultz decides he's going to come back to Starbucks.
And the reason that he is deciding to come back to Starbucks.
is deciding to come back based on what he describes in the book. He felt that the core principles
of how the business was founded were starting to erode. And he felt that he needed to come back
and fix those things. And when you look at what took place between 2000 and 2008, whenever he
wasn't the CEO, and this is when Jim Donald was the CEO of the company, it was all about growth.
It was all about expanding more businesses.
It was standing up more stores worldwide.
And Donaldson did a great job at that.
I mean, the growth in store count from the time he was CEO
until the time he left in 2008 was explosive.
But where Howard Schultz, his opinion on what he wrote in the book is that
during that period of time when they went through all this massive growth,
there was also enormous erosion that happened with this brand and the way that the
stores look, the way that the stores were being presented, the food that was in the store,
the way that the store smelled was something that was repeatedly brought up. In fact, Stig
and I were emailing each other about the book. And that was the one thing we were kind of poking
fun at whenever we were reading it was like, how many times is he going to bring up how bad the
cheese smells, the burnt, the burnt cheese, how bad it smells in the stores. But anyway,
that's the reason. That's the starting point of where the story starts off is 2008 whenever
he comes back as the CEO. And in terms of growth, I mean, this.
This was massive.
Back then, prior to 2008, they were opening six stores per day all over the world.
And like Preston also said before, there was too much focus on sales growth.
They were not really thinking about the bottom line, and perhaps even more importantly, weren't
thinking about the right culture and creating the right community within the Starbucks cafes.
One of the things that's happening with companies that grow really fast is that you would
often promote people before they are ready.
though there's a lot to be said about people will be ready whenever you promote them,
and they will grow into the shoes of being a store manager in this situation, that is not exactly
what happened. Sometimes people have been there very, very short amount of time, and then they
would have the responsibility for an entire store, simply because focus was on growth, growth, growth.
Just to relate back to this discussion about smell, which was actually a very interesting
story. He talked about smell out of throughout the book. It was so important to him. As Preston said
before he went to Italy, he fell in love with the amazing coffee, and he fell in love with
the lifestyle aroused a great coffee or great espresso. So if you go into a Starbucks store,
that is what Howard Schills is saying, he would get the smell of burnt cheese. And that was
not the smell that he remembered from going to Italy. Well, first of all, he wasn't too happy
about selling sandwiches in the first place. He wanted this truly to be a coffee store
where you can sit down and enjoy your coffee. Now, because the company really has,
have to grow, they needed to sell different products. Also, because they realized that people
actually left the Starbucks store whenever they were hungry. So either they would bring food
to the store or they would simply just leave. So they kind of have to bring sandwiches in,
which was something that he really didn't like because if you're selling sandwiches,
you need to have cheese. People want that hot. And one way or the other is going to smell like
cheese. He really shows you how passionate how it shows is about coffee whenever he was selling
that, you know, how poor their room was.
All right.
So continuing on the story that was told in the book, so he comes into the business at this
point.
And one of his very first actions that he makes is that he's going to shut down all Starbucks
stores across the world because he's going to implement a training video to teach people
how to pour the perfect espresso.
And so this was a drastic change.
A lot of people, whenever he took this action or put this out there,
I think a lot of people were kind of blown away like, what in the world are you doing?
You're going to shut down every single store for an entire day to teach people how to pour an espresso that they kind of already know how to pour.
And his argument was that if you poured it too fast or you poured it too slow, he says that it's bitter or I don't drink coffee.
So I just need to throw that out there to start with this.
So I'm a terrible person to really be talking about Starbucks.
but I can talk about the business side of it.
He was very passionate about people knowing exactly how to do this to perfection.
And so he shut down the stores for an entire day.
And I think what it was more than anything else was a message,
a psychological message to the workforce that quality is going to trump everything else.
And that if the baristas that are pouring these drinks are not 100% satisfied with the
way it came out. They literally had his permission, Howard Schultz's permission, to pour out the
drink and start over again because he wanted them to focus that much on the quality, which I think
is very admirable. I think it's very customer focused and centric. And anytime you see
an executive put the customer first over the potential loss or the lower net income that the
company is going to produce, I think you're setting the business up.
for a long-term win and maybe a short-term, you know, negative opinion by different shareholders
or whatnot. But in the long term, that's always going to come out as a win when you take care
of the customers first. So I think that that was a really interesting way to approach his first
couple weeks was implementing something like this and really kind of the shot across the bow,
like, hey, things are going to be different now. Instead of focusing on growth, we're focusing
on quality. And that was a drastic change.
And in continuation of this, what might surprise you is that since Starbucks is focusing so much on great coffee, that whenever they had like a nationwide taste competition, they actually lost to McDonald's, which was a very interesting discussion. It's something he definitely didn't like. He had like a long discussion about why Starbucks coffee was a lot better and how it was roasted differently than McDonald's. And this is actually not from the book, but this is from another talk I listened to by.
Malcolm Gladwell about coffee. And I really want to put it into the mix because I think it's very
interesting to understand from business perspective. What he said was, if you ask people which
kind of coffee that you like, then most people would say they would like a dark, rich,
hearty roast. That's the type of coffee that they want. Now, the problem is if you actually
ask them to blindest a lot of different coffees, that's not the coffee that they want. Only
25 to 27% would like a dark, rich, hearty roast, which is probably what Schultz found in Italy.
Most people want a weak, milky coffee.
That's actually what they're like.
And Schultz also realized that.
He realized that, even though he was kind of not heavy about it, that most people, in this
situation in America, was growing up with a weak, milky coffee.
And that is also why they preferred McDonald's coffee more than his.
So what does he do?
Well, first of all, he would need to make what is called horizontal segmentation.
So he would need to come up with different kinds of drinks that would cater to different segments.
So that's also why you have the Frappuccino.
Right now you have a nitro brew.
You have an espresso.
So you have a lot of different types of drinks whenever you go to a Starbucks.
But the signature coffee, the most important drink, that had to be changed.
And that was something that he really didn't like.
He used words like, oh, we came up with a more approachable and more consistent coffee than what they had before.
But I think he really wanted the dark, rich, hot roast.
So back then, whenever he came in as a CEO, they actually changed the signature coffee.
He probably would never say that it's a weak coffee, but it's definitely, it's called it more approachable what you drink now than what you used to at Starbucks.
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Back to the show.
Even in the book,
he was describing it as this mix of blends
from these different countries and everything.
But at the end of the day, when I'm reading it,
I'm, you know, as a non-coffee drinker,
I was like, oh, so you just kind of made it a little bit weaker.
So it was more applicable to more of the people coming into the store.
And I took it the exact same way as used to.
The key takeaway from that, though, was I was impressed with his adaptability to change,
even though you know he's this hardcore, you know, rich blend kind of coffee guy and probably
a coffee snob when it comes to what he's willing to drink.
He was very adaptable to, hey, here's McDonald's.
They just beat us in a taste test.
And what are we going to do about it?
Well, we're going to roll something out that's similar that people are going to like the taste
of.
and they did and it had enormous success.
And then so at this point, the story kind of evolves into all the financial woes that the company
faced in 2008.
So the book kind of presents the information as if because their growth was so bad and they,
you know, got away from their original objective of having a high quality product and this
and that, that the company kind of peaked on their growth and they started to decline in
they're in-store. Coms from the previous year were down. But as I was reading this as a person
who studies a lot of financial history, the timing of when he came into the job in 2008, you were
seeing credit start to contract. And then by the end of the year, only nine months after he had
gone into the position, the world seed one of the biggest credit contractions since 1929. And so his
discussion of how the store was declining and all these other things and he was fighting this
massive, you know, dire financial situation, I think was kind of, I don't want to say misrepresentative
because he does talk about it being a financial crisis. But at the same time, it was flowered
over with all these other qualitative things that he thought that the company was doing wrong.
And that's why their sales numbers were down whenever I think it was a much more macro economic
kind of thing that was happening than what he was describing as a degradation in the quality
of their service or their product. There might have been some of that going on and it might
have been some type of contributions. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that stick. Do you think it
was much more macro than it was the degradation of the quality of their product? I mean, that's how I
interpreted it. You know, I think it's a tricky question. If you ask him, I think he would say more
that not only quality in terms of the coffee beans, for instance, but also in terms of how much
do the employees care about what they do? How much are the store managers really leading the
culture in that store? I think that's perhaps what he meant with quality. Like, how long does
people have to stay in line? Are they just leaving for another store? Is that the problem? Is that
really yet? Because there was definitely a lot of things happening around this time in terms of
macro factors. And since this is a high-marketing product, at least compared to competitors,
I guess a lot of people just saved on the day of Starbucks and perhaps not drank coffee and went to
another place. Yeah, I think that that's probably more of a reason that they saw a drop is because
you had McDonald's and some of these other companies that were coming in at half the price.
And let's face it, at the end of the day, when a person's going to work in the morning,
and they don't have time to sit in a coffee shop, and they want to get their caffeine
high for the day because they're addicted to the caffeine. I don't see that as a flaw in Starbucks.
I see that as a flaw in maybe their pricing model of going through the drive-thru.
still charging $5 for a cup of coffee when another person can go to the gas station and get it
for a buck and a quarter or whatever. I think that that's more what was starting to eat away
at a little bit of their premium. Then I think you combine that with the fact that the economy was
becoming tighter and people had less money in their wallets, that those two things were more of a
contributing factor than the smell of cheese whenever they go into a Starbucks. But Howard Schultz,
the way he kind of describes it in the book, it's more of the latter than the former. But I kind of
disagreed on some of that, but I mean, this is the guy who's the CEO running the company,
so what in the world do I know? I'd say he's a little closer to the issues than my analysis,
but, you know, the listeners can decide what they think is more reasonable between the two different
approaches. Interesting discussion, though, interesting to see his vantage point and maybe a different
one there. So one of the things that I found kind of interesting near the end of the book was
this idea of Starbucks moving into the instant coffee realm, which looking at,
the whole brand behind Starbucks and everything.
If Howard Schultz would have come up to me and said,
hey,
I'm interested in doing instant coffee.
And I would have been really kind of looking at him with a strange look like.
I don't necessarily think that might be the best approach,
my friend.
I would have been,
you know,
I would have probably said,
I think maybe you need to focus somewhere else.
But what happened was is he got involved with an individual who was a chemist,
correct,
Stig?
Yeah.
And this individual,
I don't remember quite how the story went down.
But the two of them got linked up, Howard Schultz and this chemist.
And the gentleman said that I think that I could really replicate the in-store taste of a freshly crude cup of coffee with this approach that I've kind of invented for creating instant coffee.
It's completely different than any other kind of instant coffee that's on the market.
And so Schultz was like, yeah, right.
And so this gentleman, this chemist, what he did is he basically made him a cup of what he was working on and said, this is about a 60% solution of what I think I could get this to.
You give me some more time and some R&D dollars.
I think I could really get you to almost 100% solution.
So Howard Schultz drank it and he was blown away.
He's like, this is not instant coffee.
This stuff is pretty phenomenal.
So he decided to fund him and he brought him into the organization into Starbucks.
And this gentleman started working on this formula.
to create an instant cup of coffee that tasted like a cup of coffee was a freshly brewed store
cup of coffee. And so Don created this and he got it totally to the 100% mark where he felt
like he was able to replicate the taste. And once it went and Starbucks started selling it and
this was a big, huge ordeal whenever they launched this, I think it was around the 2009, 2010
time frame. Quite an amazing story about the process that they went through. And
But it was a really fascinating story.
He does a great job at explaining all the finer details on the decision making,
how controversial the decision was within Starbucks,
which I think is an obvious concern for a lot of the people with the brand and what they were doing.
But this ended up being a huge hit for the company and something that added a lot of revenue to their top line.
So in the end, Howard Schultz knew what he was doing, and he made a good decision on this one.
And I think that it has helped Starbucks tremendously.
in the long run to add some more revenue and didn't degrade the brand as much as a lot of people
said that it would whenever he was considering the idea and playing around with the idea.
Really branding was the core thing about this. And he actually talks about this again and again.
What is the people think of whenever they think of Starbucks? You know, for me, it's probably
because I've been traveling so much. Whenever I see a Starbucks store, I'm thinking clean
bathroom and Wi-Fi.
But he said that they were venturing into all these different fields, not only just food.
They were also launching a new music artist.
So some artists had the big breakthrough because they were played a lot in Starbucks cafes.
And he even talked about that they would team up with World of Warcraft in like an
online game because the demographics of people playing World of Warcraft and going at
Starbucks cafes would be the same.
And eventually they actually decided not to sell video games and not team up with them.
I think that discussion about what do we want to be known for?
Is it just good coffee?
Like the dark rich roast we talked about earlier?
Or is it instant coffee want to be known for?
Great music, computer games?
What is Starbucks really?
I think that was a great discussion.
And I think that it was the very soul of the book.
What is it really that we are?
What is our identity?
And how do we involve and how can we allow ourselves to go into different directions?
in terms of branding.
All right, guys.
So this kind of, this is our roll up of what was in the book.
There's obviously a lot more.
It's an interesting read.
I think it's really good.
But what Stig and I are going to do at this point is we're going to talk about our top
takeaways from the book.
I have four takeaways that I'd like to highlight.
So my first one that I want to highlight is that an influential leader needs to care more
about the customer and the brand than just the profits or the growth.
The thing that I took away from Howard Schultz was,
you got the idea that for him it was much more about carrying the brand of Starbucks than it ever was about growing it to be bigger or to become worth more than $3 billion.
His net worth is $3 billion.
To add more to his personal net worth, it had nothing to do with that.
I think what he really cared about was just that quality of his baby that he created here.
And I think that that's really an important thing to think about.
So when you think about businesses, especially publicly traded businesses, that don't have that person at the helm who's thinking in those terms of how can we take care of the customer, how can we protect the brand, how can we protect our competitive advantage in the marketplace for sustainability in the long run?
How can we take care of our employees?
When you don't have that key person at the helm, or if they're not at the helm, they're a person on the board of directors that has a lot of shares and has.
has a lot of controlling interest in the business.
When that individual or group of people are not present,
I think that's when you really see companies take a turn for the worse.
Because what they try to end up doing is they just focus totally with the interest of the shareholders
and everything else is kind of somewhat secondary.
They'll say that it's the customers, but in the end it's not really the customers.
It's all about how can we just produce the biggest, fattest margin with the biggest bottom line.
and when you see executives and board of directors that take that approach and it's all about
the shareholders' interests, what you actually see is the goodwill of the business is slowly
being chipped the way at.
And this is something that I think happens very slowly until it's taken too much of a hold
and then it's almost too hard to reverse because the competition has stepped in and taken
over at that point.
That's something I really took away from this book.
and it made me think about any business that I'm ever going to own that I want to always try to have some type of controlling interest in that business or at least know that a person who's in charge has that controlling interest that has those values to properly balance the interest between customers, shareholders, and employees with customers and employees probably taking a much higher priority over the shareholders.
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advertisement. All right, back to the show. That was definitely one of my learning points.
too. And it's also very difficult to do in a corporation like Starbucks because it's so big. And the way that
he describes how he was training people in the very early stages when he had less than 100 employees and then
how it is today, I think it was very inspiring. He was even talking about how he went out to
random stores today to speak to the barista, even though he has more than 100,000 people. And obviously,
it's really difficult because you're not just talking about people seeing coffee as their calling.
You are talking about people, a lot of times students who are doing this to put themselves through
school. They might not even drink coffee. How do you tell people to care as much as you do?
And that was something he invested in Lutton was to invest in his partners. That was Starbucks term for
the store managers because that's where everything starts. He said, I can't necessarily reach
the person on the floor.
I can reach the store managers.
So I need to go through that round.
I need to set the example and have that trickle down within the organization.
And one of the things, if you look at the financial statements after he took over and he's not
shy to talk about it, by the way, is that the margins have dramatically improved.
It's not only a question about more and more sales.
You can see that the margins, I guess he would say because of the better service, they can
also charge higher prices compared to the cost of the products.
So for me, that was one of the key learning points.
How can you care enough on the top level so everyone in the organization would care as much as you do?
So my next two points, I'm just going to do them kind of together here.
The second one that I had was pay attention to the small things and understand the customer really, really well.
And that's something that I think Howard Schultz definitely embodied with, you know, walking into the store, how does it smell?
Like all these little tiny things that I think the typical person would just say, oh, that's not a
a big deal. They were big deals to him. And I think that you have to be obsessive about your
business if you really want to take it to the level like Howard Schultz did with his business.
The third point that I had was take the great things from other businesses or inspirations that you
have and co-op those ideas into your own product or service. This is what he did when he traveled to
Italy. He saw what somebody else was doing that was really great. And then he's like, how can I
co-op this and build some of this into my existing company and store. And man, you can't get a
better idea out of a book than that right there. You know, if you have your own business,
look at your competitors. What do you admire about your competitors? What do you admire about a
product that maybe competes with yours? And now how in the world can you bring some of that
back into your own business and kind of morph or admonish what you're doing with those ideas?
That's something that I saw him do extremely well.
I really liked how he wanted to decentralize decisions.
And because it was so important for him that people at a Starbucks felt like a community,
he wanted to adapt that to that country.
Because even though he went to Israel first and then took that back home to the States
and talked about how that would be impligable in the United States,
well, he was also expanding internationally.
And can we have the same store be as successful abroad?
and it turned out they couldn't.
So he's putting a lot of emphasis on decentralizing
to the respective store managers
and giving that person that local and community feel.
So let me give you an example of that.
I'm just going to use my own Starbucks here as an example.
My own Starbucks is located very close to a campus,
so there will be a lot of students.
So it's actually designed like a study cafe.
Clearly you can also, you know, you can find a comfortable couch,
but it is designed like a student cafe
where you would come typically by yourself and just sit and study throughout the day.
That is not the same Starbucks I would see if I would go three miles from here.
It's very different because they're catering to a different segment.
And I think that is what Starbucks has done really, really well.
Whenever you travel around the world,
you'll just see how every single store is just catering to that specific customer group,
a lot better than a lot of the other big change you see out there.
Fantastic point.
My last point is really short.
Do good.
That's what I kind of gathered from Howard Schultz.
You know, some of the book was self-aggrandizing and you just kind of smile when you're reading some of it.
And I mean, the guy has accomplished just enormous things.
So I guess you've got to take a little bit of that.
But the thing that I can say about Howard Schultz that I really valued was I think he deeply, deeply values and wants to do good for his employees of his business.
And not just the employees of his business, but also the vendors that they deal with in other countries.
One of the stories in the book that we didn't even talk about was he went to some developing
country where they were buying coffee beans.
And he asked one of the people there, you know, what's the one thing that you really would
like to have that you don't have access to?
And the lady said, I would like to have a cow.
And Howard Chols was like, why do you want to have a cow?
And she said, well, you know, if I have a cow, then I can harvest the milk from the
cow.
And then my children can drink the milk and they can be stronger and healthier.
and we can sell the excess milk to raise money and all these different reasons.
And like, that was her dream was to have a cow.
And Howard Schultz is like, well, we're going to get you a cow.
You know, like there's stories like that in the book.
And some people might read him and think, oh, he just included that to, I don't buy that.
I really think that he is a genuinely good person.
You know, a lot of their vendors that they're buying coffee from in developing countries,
they're paying a premium over what they could probably buy it at because of the currency
arbitrage and things like that. That's what I really took away. And I think that when you're a
good person like that, you're often rewarded in ways that you don't necessarily are able to tie
the strings back to, hey, I did a good deed here. So I got a good return from that immediately.
You don't see that immediately. Sometimes it's returned to you 10 years later from a completely
different source that you have no idea where it came from. That's my opinion. But I really liked
that part of the book and that kind of sense that I got.
that Howard Schultz is trying to do good in the world.
And I really like that.
So that was my final point.
All right, guys.
So that concludes our comments for the book Onward by Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks.
And if you guys would like to get our executive summary of this book, it is about five or six pages long that we typed up for each chapter.
And just kind of you can peruse through it and see what you think.
And if you like what's in the executive summary, you can go buy the whole book yourself.
But, you know, you just sign up on our email list.
And you'll have access to all of our executive summaries and anything else that we publish in the future
for all the books that we read.
All right, guys.
That was all the press that I had for this week's episode of The Investors Podcast.
We see each other again next week.
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