Pour Your Heart Into It - Starbucks

The book I read to research this post was Pour Your Heart Into It by Charles Schultz which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. A while back I reviewed Onward also by Charles Schultz about how he came back into the CEO job at Starbucks and helped make the company much more successful. This book is the prequel to that book and is about how he started the company and follows his first stint as CEO. Charles had a holiday in Italy and came up with the idea of trying out having restaurants that specialized in gourmet coffee. In Italy they had these places where they had newspapers for you to read and had gourmet coffees like espresso which served a discerning clientele. He thought the same could be done in Seattle, Washington. Seattle was facing a bad recession with one of there major employers slimming down its workforce from over 100,000 to just 38,000. Initially when he was working in a restaurant he talked the boss into turning part of it into a gourmet coffee section but had only been given a small area which was so tiny customers had to stand and there was no tables. They did however get some coffee machines. He left this company and started his own gourmet coffee restaurant. He had difficulty getting financing. They ran at a loss for the 1st 3 years due to the amount of financing needed. After that they made a profit and later he was able to buy the company he used to work for and he took their name Starbucks as the name of his company mainly because it was better known but also because he liked the name. Later on they started a mail order business for discerning coffee drinkers. Eventually they even invested in their own research and development centre where scientists would try and develop new products centred around coffee. I really enjoyed this book and it's a reasonable length at around 340 pages but is also a wealth of information. I think this book is even better than Onward.