Howard Behar
speaker
126 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Howard Behar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I've been retired for 13 years, but I still ask baristas. And store managers, what do you like about Starbucks? What don't you like about Starbucks? What would you change about Starbucks? You ask enough parties to that question. There'll be a place where it starts to tie together. where somebody will have this idea. I'm not pleading for anarchy here. You can't do everything that everybody says.
But I didn't always know. I mean, we tried a lot of things that didn't work. I don't like rules. I don't like anybody giving me rules. But I had four rules that everybody had to live by. Don't do anything illegal. Don't do anything immoral. Don't do anything unethical. And sure as hell, don't poison anybody. If you can live by those four rules, we can try it. So what happens if you make a mistake?
As long as you don't poison anybody, you don't bury the business, try stuff and listen to your people. Who knows more about what kind of broom to choose than the person who's doing the work? And too often as leaders, somebody comes and says, well, I'd like to get a new broom. And you roll your eyes and you can say, you know, purchasing chooses our brooms. Just use the broom that we gave you.
Let's call him Jim. Jim's excited. And he's been on the internet. And he saw this broom. And he thinks, God, if I could get this broom, I can increase floor sweeping productivity by 10%. And the floors would be even shinier. And yet the boss just rolls her eyes and says, you know, maybe they don't even say it. They just roll their eyes. Can't you see I'm busy?
I mean, it happens so often that you just don't listen to our people. The greatest story about listening was a woman named Dina Campion. She was a district manager in Southern California for Starbucks. And she invited me to come visit her stores. And she took me to our stores. And she took me to some competitor stores. And she brought me a drink in a competitor store.
And she said, Howard, we need a drink like this. And I said, really? She said, I think we could sell about 30 drinks a day per store if we had this. Well, I didn't have a college degree, but it was selling for about three bucks. 30 drinks a day is about 90 bucks a day times seven, about whatever, 600 bucks or whatever it is. And I said, really? Let me take that idea back to Seattle.
And I talked to a person that had a marketing person that had a product development. So I brought the idea back and there was total rejection. He says, we're not in that business. So I called Dina and I said, you know, there's no support for it. Let's give it six months. We'll come back after it. So about three weeks later, Dina pushes me again. She says, can you come down?
I want to show you something about this drink. And I said, Dina, you heard the answer. Leave it alone for a while. She says, really, Howard, please. I want to show you something. So I said, I'm not going to make a special trip, but I'll be there in about three weeks to look at some real estate. I'll stop by. So I did. And Dina served me three of these three little sample cups that Starbucks has.
And she says, take a sip of this. And I took a sip. I said, Dina, this tastes remarkably like that drink we had in a competitor store. Are you trying to get me fired? And she said, Howard, please let us try this. I'm telling you, people are walking out of our stores because we don't have anything like this.
It was one of those times in every leader's career where sometimes you've got to go against the rules. the grain, as long as you don't poison anybody, it's not illegal, unethical, immoral. And so I said, okay, let's try it. And she and a barista and a store manager figured out the drink. So they went out and I bought all the supplies and everything.
I said, you call me every night, tell me how many drinks you sold, because if it's not selling, we're going to get rid of it quick. So the first week, it wasn't 30 drinks a day per store, but it was 50 drinks a day per store. The second week, it was 70 drinks a day per store. I'm thinking to myself, Howard, you are a genius. So I took the idea back.
And this time I invited Howard Schultz and I had Dina come up with her team and She made some samples and passed them around. And the head of marketing and product development was there. And he got up out of his chair and he came over about six inches from my face. He said, Bihar, I told you we weren't doing this. You stop this now.
And he looked at Howard Schultz and he said, you tell Bihar to stop. And I had this document and I'm kind of an emotional guy. And I slammed it down on the table. I said, his name was George. I said, oh yeah, George, look at this. It was going to be a 30% lift in our sales. and even higher in our profits. I said, Howard, give me 90 days. So you know what the drink is, right? It's Frappuccino.
Nina camping in her broom. It was her idea. It wasn't my idea. Amazing. It was her idea. And eventually it became 20% of our sales in a $4 billion business, all because I listened and I took a chance. Now, not every broom is going to be worth $4 billion. Most of them are worth dollars, but And listen, it's amazing what can happen.
Oh, I drink triple tall Americanos every day, two of them. By the time I'm done with the second one, I'm invisible.
Well, you got to learn fast, but the best way to learn is to bring people that's smarter than you are. Bring great people into your organization. Look, a leader's responsibility is not to have the answers. It's to have the questions. And you ask the questions of the great people that you bring into the organization. So I didn't have to know the answers. I just had to listen.
We thought that drive-throughs would be good. for the business. We didn't know, but I'd never operated a fast food place that had drive-thrus. So we had people on our team that had been through it. And I said, let's go find a site that has a drive-thru. Howard Schultz didn't want them. We snuck the first one in, actually. But we had a team of people that figured it out.
They opened the drive-thru, it doubled the volume of an average store. But having said that, I'm not going to tell you that I slept one night. I didn't. I have a lot of anxiety. I've always had anxiety. And so I've dealt with that my whole life, but I just kept pushing myself and I kept going, but I do have a lot of energy and I believe in people. And I believe that we could get through it.
But I wasn't always sure. There were many times when I thought we weren't going to make it. Everybody thinks Starbucks was a straight shot up. It wasn't. It was like this. Sometimes we were successful. Sometimes we failed. We had lots of product failures. And we had to raise a lot of capital. And we made mistakes on people. And we did all the things. But you just kept having to push and push.
And the people gave me the energy. Whenever I was down, I would just go talk to the people. I'd go visit stores and they would lift me right up.
Showing 61–80 of 126 · page 4 of 7
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