Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Given this moment that Starbucks is in right now here in summer of 2024, this felt like the right way to address that. Back to the interview. Well, Howard, we’re at the end here, and I think listeners may be wondering, okay, but what about Starbucks today? The last few years have seen you come back as interim CEO for a year, transition to a new CEO; it’s been about a year after that. It’s been a rough couple of years. Part of it’s coming out of the pandemic, but I think anybody who tuned into the last earnings call is wondering what’s up with the future of this company. Can you give us a little bit of narration on what brought you back the things you did and where the company is today? Let me try and go back to when I returned as an interim CEO in April of 2022. I was asked by the board to come back to the company and I said, no. My life has changed. I have no desire to come back. I have no intent to come back. But it was clear to me as the weeks were going on that the company was heading into an existential crisis. If your listeners take anything away from what we’ve talked about is my love of the company is so significant that I changed my life and I came back to the company. I want to be fair. I don’t want to criticize anyone. But when I came back, I saw things that really surprised me about the lack of investment over a 4–5 year period. Also I didn’t like the way the stock buybacks were being used to basically increase CPS. It’s no way to run a company. The first day I came back, and I knew what the market would do, is I announced that we were suspending the stock buybacks and stock went down. I expected it. I announced that we were going to take basically the money we were using to stock buybacks for the year—I think it was north of $2 billion—and invest back into the people of Starbucks, the partners, which I did. The most important thing I did, though, because I’m not a messiah, but I have an instinct about the company, and I know the inner workings of the company better than anyone else. I know the people. In a year’s time, despite the underinvestment and the challenges, we brought the company back to a much healthier place operationally. Certainly, the stock price was significantly higher when I left. When I started, it was in the 70s when I left, it was……

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