04/10/2025
His boss rejected his idea. So he quit, proved them wrong, then bought the company and fired them.
Howard Schultz was 29 years old.
Working at Starbucks as marketing director. Making good money. Safe job.
But Starbucks wasn’t what you think. Just a coffee bean store. Eleven locations. No espresso. No lattes. No places to sit.
Then Schultz went to Italy and saw espresso bars everywhere. People gathering. Connecting over coffee.
He came back with a vision.
Turn Starbucks into an Italian-style coffeehouse. A place for community. Not just beans in a bag.
The owners said no.
“We sell coffee beans. That’s what we do.”
“Coffeehouses are too risky.”
“Stick to what works.”
Schultz pushed harder. Showed them the numbers. Explained the opportunity.
They said no again.
So in 1985, he quit.
Left his stable job. Left his steady paycheck. Left his position at the only coffee company he believed in.
Everyone thought he was crazy.
Here’s what Schultz knew that everyone else missed:
Poverty teaches you that safe isn’t always safe. He’d grown up in Brooklyn housing projects. Watched his father get injured on the job with no health insurance. No safety net. No backup plan.
That experience taught him something.
Playing it safe still leaves you vulnerable. Taking calculated risks is how you build real security.
So he started his own company. Il Giornale. Italian coffeehouse concept. Everything the Starbucks owners rejected.
Raised money. Built stores. Proved the model worked.
Within two years, he had six locations. Growing fast. Making it work.
Then in 1987, the Starbucks owners decided to sell.
Schultz saw his chance. Raised $3.8 million. Bought Starbucks. Merged it with Il Giornale.
Now he had seventeen stores total. And the freedom to build his vision.
People said it wouldn’t scale. Coffee shops are local businesses. Regional at best.
They were wrong.
Schultz grew Starbucks from seventeen stores in 1987 to over 33,000 locations worldwide today.
Built it into a $100 billion company.
But here’s the part most people miss.
In 2000, Schultz stepped down as CEO. Let someone else run the company he built.
By 2008, Starbucks was dying. Stock down 75%. Stores closing. Losing money.
The board asked Schultz to come back.
At 54 years old, he could have stayed retired. Wealthy. Successful. Legacy intact.
Instead, he came back to save the company.
Closed 7,100 stores for a day to retrain every employee. Lost millions in revenue. Did it anyway.
Shut down 600 underperforming locations. Laid off 12,000 employees. Made the hard calls nobody else wanted to make.
Within four years, Starbucks was thriving again. Stock price recovered. Company stronger than ever.
Today, Starbucks serves 100 million customers per week. In 80 countries. Creates jobs for hundreds of thousands of people.
All because a kid from the projects refused to accept other people’s limits.
He turned a rejection into a reason to build his own company.
He proved that safe jobs aren’t actually safe. That calculated risks beat comfortable complacency.
What rejection are you treating like the end instead of the beginning?
What vision are you letting other people kill because they lack imagination?
Schultz was making good money at Starbucks. He quit anyway. Started from scratch. At 29.
Then came back at 54 to save what he built. Made brutal decisions. Closed stores. Let people go.
Because he understood something most people don’t.
Building something real means being willing to risk everything. Multiple times.
Your comfortable job might be holding you back from building something bigger.
Your employer’s rejection of your ideas might be the push you need to build them yourself.
Stop waiting for permission to pursue what you see clearly.
Start thinking like Howard Schultz.
Find your vision. Build your proof of concept. Take the risk.
And if it breaks later, be willing to come back and fix it.
Sometimes the greatest companies come from the courage to quit a good job.
Because when you stop playing it safe, you start building something real.
Think Big.
