Pour Your Heart Into It (12 page)

But as a parent, or as an entrepreneur, you begin imprinting your beliefs from Day One, whether you realize it or not. Once the children, or the people of the company, have absorbed those values, you can’t suddenly change their world view with a lecture on ethics.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to reinvent a company’s culture. If you have made the mistake of doing business one way for five years, you can’t suddenly impose a layer of different values upon it. By then, the water’s already in the well, and you have to drink it.

Whatever your culture, your values, your guiding principles, you have to take steps to inculcate them in the organization early in its life so that they can guide every decision, every hire, every strategic objective you set. Whether you are the CEO or a lower level employee, the single most important thing you do at work each day is communicate your values to others, especially new hires. Establishing the right tone at the inception of an enterprise, whatever its size, is vital to its long-term success.

S
HARING
THE
M
ISSION

I won’t mislead you. When I began planning for Il Giornale, I didn’t draft a mission statement or list the values I wanted the company to embody. I had some pretty good notions, though, based on what I had seen go right and wrong at Starbucks, about what kind of company I wanted to create.

What’s almost inconceivable to me today is how the ideal person came to me, just when I needed him most, to help articulate our common values and grow the company. Perhaps it was destiny.

One day, late in 1985, I was sitting at my desk, absorbed in planning the details of the Il Giornale launch. I had already left Starbucks but was still using my office there, and its floor was littered with drafts of menus, graphics, layouts, and designs.

I answered the phone and was greeted by a man I had met only a few times and knew mainly by reputation: Dave Olsen. People at Starbucks spoke of Dave with respect bordering on awe, so knowledgeable was he about coffee. A tall, broad-shouldered Montanan with longish wavy hair and intense eyes that sparkle from behind small oval glasses, he ran a small, funky establishment in the University District called Café Allegro. Students and professors would hang out there, studying philosophy or debating U.S. foreign policy or simply drinking cappuccinos. In a sense, Café Allegro was a prototype for what Starbucks later became, a neighborhood gathering place, although its style was more bohemian and it did not sell coffee beans and merchandise or cater to an early morning, urban, coffee-to-go clientele. It was more in the European café tradition than the Italian stand-up espresso bars I had seen in Milan.

“I hear you are putting a plan together to open some coffee bars downtown,” Dave said. “I’ve been thinking about looking for a location or two downtown myself. Maybe we could talk.”

“Great, come on down,” I told him, and we made an appointment to meet in a few days.

I hung up and turned to Dawn Pinaud, who had been helping me get Il Giornale started. “Dawn,” I said, “do you have any idea who that was?”

She stopped and looked at me expectantly.

“
Dave Olsen
! He might want to work with us!” It was such a remarkable stroke of good fortune. Although he jokes about it now, protesting that he was just a guy in jeans, running a little café and having fun, I knew that having Dave on my team would lend Il Giornale an authenticity and coffee expertise far beyond what I had been able to develop in three years. With his humble manner, precise speech, deep thoughts, and strong laugh, I also knew he’d be a lot of fun to work with.

On the day of our meeting, Dave and I sat on my office floor and I started spreading the plans and blueprints out and talking about my idea. Dave got it right away. He had spent ten years in an apron, behind a counter, serving espresso drinks. He had experienced firsthand the excitement people can develop about espresso, both in his café and in Italy. I didn’t have to convince him that this idea had big potential. He just knew it in his bones.

The synergy was too good to be true. My strength was looking outward: communicating the vision, inspiring investors, raising money, finding real estate, designing the stores, building the brand, and planning for future growth. Dave understood the inner workings: the nuts and bolts of operating a retail café, hiring and training baristas, ensuring the best quality coffee.

It never occurred to us to become competitors. Although Dave had been looking for ways to move forward and grow, when he saw what I was planning, he thought it would be more fun to join forces. He agreed to work with me to get Il Giornale off the ground.

Because I still had very little cash, Dave agreed to work twenty hours a week for a paltry salary of $12,000 a year. In fact, he committed himself full time and then some from the start. He later was rewarded generously as his stock options gained in value. But Dave wasn’t in it for the money. He joined our team because he believed. He was intrigued by the Italian coffee bar approach, and he wanted to make sure we served the best coffee and espresso possible. He became the coffee conscience of the company.

Even today, as Starbucks’ senior vice president for coffee, Dave explains that he doesn’t view himself as either an employee or an executive or a founder, but rather as “a willing and eager and very fortunate participant.” “It’s like a mountain climbing expedition,” says Dave. “Yeah, I get a paycheck fortunately. I wouldn’t do everything I do if I didn’t. But I probably would do a lot of it anyway.”

If every business has a memory, then Dave Olsen is right at the heart of the memory of Starbucks, where the core purpose and values come together. Just seeing him in the office centers me.

If you’re building an organization, you realize quickly that you can’t do it alone. You’ll build a much stronger company if you can find a colleague you trust absolutely, someone who brings different strengths to the mix but who still shares your values. Dave gets exhilarated at the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. I get energized by the excitement at a basketball game. He can rhapsodize over a flavorful coffee from Sulawesi; I can fire up a roomful of people because of my heartfelt commitment to the future of the company.

Dave Olsen and I came from different worlds. He grew up in a quiet Montana town, and in his Levis, T-shirts, and Birkenstocks, was already running a little café while I was making sales calls in midtown Manhattan skyscrapers for Xerox. Dave’s love affair with coffee started in 1970, during a visit to a friend in Berkeley. While on a walk he came upon Peet’s, then an offbeat coffee store on Vine Street. He bought a little stovetop espresso maker and half a pound of dark Italian roast from the Dutchman himself and started fiddling. The espresso he brewed that day captivated him so much that he began regularly experimenting with the taste to get it just right.

The Army moved him to Seattle, where he worked as a carpenter. One day in 1974 he quit his job, loaded up his bicycle, and pedaled to San Francisco, nearly a thousand miles. There, he discovered the cafés of North Beach, Italian restaurants with atmospheres that were operatic, bohemian, noisy, eclectic, and stimulating. They treated espresso-making as one of many fine Italian arts. Dave began parking his bike against the windows of a number of restaurants and talking to their owners about food and wine and coffee.

Lots of people dream about opening a coffee house. Few actually do. But that’s precisely what Dave Olsen did when he got back to Seattle in the fall of 1974. He rented a space in Seattle’s University District, in the garage of a former mortuary, on an alley just opposite the busiest entrance to campus.

Café Allegro became a shrine to espresso, with a shiny espresso machine front and center. Few Americans knew the term
caffè latte
in those days. He made a similar drink and called it
café au lait.
Dave searched Seattle for the best coffee beans and quickly found Starbucks, then selling only coffee by the pound. He got to know the founders and the roasters, and tasted coffee with them. He worked with them to co-develop a custom espresso roast that suited his palate, just a shade darker than most of Starbucks’ other coffees, but a shade lighter than the darkest coffees they offered.

That espresso roast, developed for Café Allegro, is still sold in Starbucks stores today, and it’s used in every espresso drink we serve. That’s how closely integrated Dave Olsen is to the legacy of Starbucks.

As different as our backgrounds were, when Dave and I started Il Giornale in 1985, we had one undeniable connection: our passion for coffee and for what we wanted to accomplish in serving it. We took on different roles, but no matter whom we talked to or what situation we were involved in, we broadcast exactly the same message, each in a way that reflected our individual styles. There were two voices, but one point of view. The linkage, the alignment, and the common purpose that Dave and I have had is as rare in business as it is in life.

When I first met him, Dave owned only one sports coat, and that was because his wife worked for an airline that required a coat and tie for employees’ relatives flying on free airline passes. Today, he is as amazed as anyone that he is an executive in a $1 billion company, though he retains the spirit of an artist or inventor.

Starbucks would not be what it is today if Dave Olsen hadn’t been part of my team back at Il Giornale. He helped shape its values, bringing a strong, romantic love for coffee, unshakable integrity, disarming honesty, and an insistence on authenticity in every aspect of the business. He shared a vision with me of an organization where people left their egos at the door and worked together as an inspired team. He freed me up to build the business, for I knew I never had to worry about the quality of the coffee. Dave is a rock, part of the foundation of the company.

When you’re starting a new enterprise, you don’t recognize how critical those early decisions are not only in the formulation of the business itself but in laying the groundwork for its future. As you build, you never know which decisions will end up being the cornerstones. Each one adds so much value later on, and you’re not cognizant of it at the time.

Don’t underestimate the importance of the early signals you send out in the course of building your enterprise and imprinting your values upon it. When you take on a partner, and when you select employees, be sure to choose people who share your passion and commitment and goals. If you share your mission with like-minded souls, it will have a far greater impact.

E
VERYTHING
M
ATTERS

At the time, our plans seemed impossibly ambitious. Even then, when nobody had heard of Il Giornale, I had a dream of building the largest coffee company in North America, with stores in every major city. I hired someone who knew how to run a spreadsheet on a personal computer to do some projections, and originally asked him to build a model based on opening 75 stores over five years. But when I looked at the numbers, I told him to scale the plan back to 50 stores, as I figured nobody would believe 75 was achievable. In fact, five years later, we did reach that goal.

The tiny office I rented had space for only three desks, jammed close together, and there was a little conference room in an adjoining loft. When we started selling
panini
sandwiches, Dave used to slice the meats in the office, about ten yards away from my desk. I’d be on the phone, talking to potential investors, with the smell of those cured meats wafting up under my nose. Dave delivered the meat to the stores in his beat-up, old red truck.

The day the first Il Giornale store opened, April 8, 1986, I came in early, just as I had for the first Starbucks coffee bar. At 6:30
A.M
., the first customer was waiting outside the door. She came right in and paid for a cup of coffee.

Somebody actually bought something!
I thought with relief.

I stayed the entire day, and because I was too nervous to work behind the counter, I just paced and watched. A lot of Starbucks people came down that day to see what my store looked like. By closing time, we had nearly 300 customers, mostly in the morning. They asked a lot of questions about the menu, and we started educating them about Italian-style espresso. It was a gratifying start, and I was pleased.

In those first weeks, I checked on the quality, the speed of service, the cleanliness. I refused to let anything slip. This was my dream, and everything had to be executed perfectly. Everything mattered.

Dave worked behind the counter, from opening through the morning rush. Then he would come to the office. Dave and I would always go back to the store for lunch. We paid full price, doing everything we could to keep the sales up, drinking and eating lots of food and coffee to make sure potential investors saw strong sales numbers. It’s a custom we continue; we still pay full price at every Starbucks store we visit.

We made a lot of mistakes. In that first store, we were determined to re-create a true Italian-style coffee bar. Our primary mission was to be authentic. We didn’t want to do anything to dilute the integrity of the espresso and the Italian coffee bar experience in Seattle. For music, we played only Italian opera. The baristas wore white shirts and bow ties. All service was stand-up, with no seating. We hung national and international newspapers on rods on the wall. The menu was covered with Italian words. Even the decor was Italian.

Bit by bit, we realized many of those details weren’t appropriate for Seattle. People started complaining about the incessant opera. The bow ties proved impractical. Customers who weren’t in a hurry wanted chairs. Some of the Italian foods and drinks needed to be translated.

We gradually accepted the fact that we had to adapt the store to our customers’ needs. We quickly fixed a lot of the mistakes, adding chairs, varying the music. But we were careful, even early on, not to make so many compromises that we would sacrifice our style and elegance. We even debated whether we should have paper cups for the to-go business, which we knew would constitute a large part of our revenues. Although espresso tastes better in ceramic cups, we didn’t really have a choice: If we didn’t offer coffee to go, business would have been minimal.