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Pour Your Heart Into It
How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time
Pour Your Heart Into It takes you on the enthralling journey of how Starbucks came to be a success story. It sheds light on its beginnings, reveals how the quick growth rate was possible and sets out to explain how businesses can learn from its strategies and principles.
- Anybody interested in coffee company chains
- Anybody interested in rapidly-growing companies
- Anybody interested in brand development
Howard Schultz is an American businessman and Starbucks Chairman and CEO. From a modest background and the first person in his family to go to college, he grew the small coffeehouse into a billion dollar company. In 2007 he won the FIRST award for Responsible Capitalism.
Dori Jones Yang is an American author. She studied in Princeton and John Hopkins University.
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Pour Your Heart Into It
How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time
- Read in 15 minutes
- Audio & text available
- Contains 9 key ideas
Synopsis
Pour Your Heart Into It takes you on the enthralling journey of how Starbucks came to be a success story. It sheds light on its beginnings, reveals how the quick growth rate was possible and sets out to explain how businesses can learn from its strategies and principles.
Key idea 1 of 9
Success in business comes from selling an authentic product.
If you bring up Starbucks in conversation, chances are pretty much everyone will know what you’re talking about. You know Starbucks as a successful business, but have you ever wondered how it came to be?
The secret to Starbucks’ success is, for founder Howard Schultz, no secret at all. Plain and simple, the success of Starbucks lies with the brand’s authenticity, achieved by selling only the highest quality coffee.
Back in 1981, Starbucks was just a small retail store. It sold exclusively dark-roasted Italian style coffee, which may be ubiquitous today, but was still a novelty back then. By roasting the coffee dark, the coffee grows in strength, gains a more powerful aroma and has the distinct taste of authentic Italian coffee.
Starbucks never compromised its beans, and became known for its premium-quality, dark-roasted flavor profile that its founders were so passionate about. Because of those early business decisions, Starbucks had an undeniable feeling of authenticity about it since the start.
The company has held true to its authentic coffee profile, in tough times to the present day. In 1994, coffee prices shot to an all-time high on the world market, from $0.80 to $2.74 in a matter of days, after a frost that destroyed much of Brazil’s coffee plants.
During this coffee crisis, a lot of shareholders promoted the purchase of cheaper beans, to keep the price of a cup of joe stable. But Starbucks was unwilling to compromise quality and continued to sell the highest quality coffee they could, instead reducing other costs to account for the higher price of beans. When the world coffee market recovered, Starbucks had an even stronger customer base because its quality remained consistently high.
Key ideas in this title
- Success in business comes from selling an authentic product.
- In business you have to be stubborn to succeed.
- It’s vital to build trust with your employees.
- Not only does a good business need strong values; it needs to stick to them no matter what.
- It pays to invest above the curve.
- Invest in people who are smarter than you and then let them do their job.
- Working with others can revitalize your brand, or even revolutionize your product.
- It’s important for a company to stick to its principles and ensure its employees are happy.
- Final summary
