Howard Behar is a renowned business leader, author, speaker, and mentor who has influenced the lives of numerous men and women. Shaped by his experiences working in his parents’ Seattle market, schooled in operations and management in consumer-oriented retail business, and part of the leadership triumvirate that built the Starbucks brand, Behar is the ultimate “servant leader” who is known for such memorable lessons as “The Person Who Sweeps the Floor Should Choose the Broom” and “Only the Truth Sounds Like the Truth.”
For 21 years Behar led Starbuck’s domestic business as President of North America, and he became the founding President of Starbucks International. During his tenure, he participated in the growth of the company from only 28 stores to over 15,000 stores spanning five continents. He served on the Starbucks Board of Directors for 12 years before retiring. He is a proud member of the Sephardic Brotherhood and currently lives in Washington state.
Magazine Staff: Can you tell us a little about your background?
Howard: My father was a Bulgarian Jew who came to the United States in the early 1900s and left his family behind. He had a brother at the time who was living in Vancouver, British Columbia, so he initially moved to Canada before eventually making his way to Seattle. By then it already had a large Sephardic Community. But I’m a half breed, half Sephardic and half Ashkenazi on my mother’s side, whose family came from Latvia. I sort of attached myself to my Sephardic identity primarily, probably because I became very close friends with a lot of the members of Sephardic Bikur Holim and Ezra Bessaroth, the two Sephardic synagogues in the city.
I spent the last 21 years of my working life working at Starbucks Coffee. I started when there were just 28 stores, as the Head of Operations for the business, which was very small at the time. By the time I retired, I was president of Starbucks North America, with over 15,000 stores. And in between that I was the founding President of Starbucks International, and opened thousands of stores around the world including in places like Turkey and Bulgaria, which let me go back to my roots.
Magazine Staff: Did you ever get a chance to go and visit Bulgaria yourself? What was the experience like returning to your father’s country of birth and connecting with your roots?
Howard: The first time I went was a personal trip. My father’s family all emigrated to Israel after the war, so one of my Israeli Bulgarian cousins took me to Bulgaria for 10 days and we traveled the country. We went to the small town where my father was born called Stanamaka (now called Asenovgrad), which was close to the Greek border. From there we went to Plovdiv and Sofia, where he was raised most of his life before immigrating to America. In Sofia, we were able to go to the Central Synagogue, which was being remodeled at the time by another Sephardic guy from Seattle named Jack Benaroya. We went into the community’s birth and death records and were able to find where my grandfather was buried in Bulgaria. We found the spot and it was all overgrown, so we got on our hands and knees and ripped away the overgrowth to find a headstone flat on the ground in Bulgarian with my grandfather's name. I had a new headstone made in Hebrew and English. Of course the Bulgarian food is fantastic and had all the classic Sephardic flavors.
The second time I went back was actually to open our first Starbucks location in the country, and while I was there I had the chance to meet another Behar who lived there. He was a significant player in the PR business in Bulgaria and who knows, maybe we’re cousins!
Magazine Staff: You mentioned you were of a “mixed marriage” between a Sephardic father and an Ashkenazi mother. Any thoughts on why you really pulled towards your Sephardic identity more than your Ashekanzi heritage?
Howard: I think it was honestly the girlfriends! And my buddies too were all Sephardic. I remember being active in my local BBYO - B'nai Brith Youth and the chapter was half Sephardic so I had all my friends right there. Plus I love the food…my first marriage I married a Sephardic woman, so we had all the Sephardic foods and culture mixed in our household.
There’s also a certain soulfulness about it. I remember going to the Sephardic Synagogues in Israel and it's just different. It's not better, it's just different. So I became very attached to the Sephardic identity. It’s funny because I was raised going to an Ashkenazi Synagogue. My father said it didn’t really matter to me, but all my friends went to Sephardic synagogues so I would go to both. I would say it boils down to people, culture, and food.
Magazine Staff: What’s your favorite Sephardic food?
Howard: Bulemas, Borekas, and I love having Agristadtha kon Peshkado (Salmon with Lemon Sauce) during Passover. I also spent a lot of time with Turkey. When I visited one of the synagogues there, I gave a speech to about 2,000 people there, all engineers. After the speech a guy comes up to me and says, “do you know such and such a person from Seattle?” And I say sure, he’s my friend! Here I am thousands of miles across the world and a Sephardic Jew from Istanbul is friends still with a Sephardic Jew from Seattle.
We had a Turkish guide who I became friends with over the years. One day I get a call from this guide asking if I know a guy named Solly from Seattle. I say sure, he’s a fishmonger at Pike’s Place Market in downtown Seattle. The tour guide said “he’s a relative of mine!” I was amazed; how could they be relatives when the tour guide wasn’t even Jewish? Turns out the Tour Guide’s aunt married a guy that was Jewish, and this guy Solly was a distant cousin through that marriage.
Magazine Staff: That’s such a Sephardic story. Our communities are interconnected even when they’re separated by thousands of miles.
Howard: That’s very true.
Magazine Staff: Can you talk about your professional experience before Starbucks? What got you into coffee to begin with?
Howard: My father came to this country as a 15 year old in 1911, and he worked in the Pike Place Market and saved money until he could open up a small grocery store of his own. So when I was a kid, I would come to the store to help out after school, and I learned by osmosis and exposure. I watched how he paid his bills, how he hired his employees, worked with customers, etc. all the things that made his business successful. That got me interested in retail. When I was about 14, my brother opened up a future store, so I started working there through high school and college to learn more about retail.
When I left college, I went to work full time for my brother-in-law, then I worked at a furniture store in Salem, Oregon. From there I bounced around to a few other companies and I got good at retail. I ended up becoming the President of a small company, and that’s where I really learned to run a business. So by the time Starbucks came around I had a solid amount of business experience. A guy named Jeff Brotman, co-founder of Costco and an Ashkenazi Jew, reached out to me to connect me to this guy named Howard Schultz. He was looking for someone to run retail and over a year-long period we went back and forth until finally I ended up joining Starbucks by accident really, and the rest was history.
Magazine Staff: What do you credit Starbucks' incredible success?
Howard: The people. It’s really the people and how we treated each other. Once you hire one person, you’re not in the business you thought you were in - you’re now in the people business. I used to say to everyone at Starbucks - we’re not in the coffee business serving people, we're in the people business serving coffee. Everyone was treated with respect - we were the first ones in the industry to give people healthcare and equity in the company itself. Opportunity for us to pay for their college degrees. We provided the resources and held everyone accountable to the mission- we want to be one of the most well known organizations in the world, known for nurturing and inspiring the human spirit.
Magazine Staff: How do you keep your head in the game when your company scales so massively?
Howard: You have to stay focused on what matters. The people really run the business, and what you do is encourage the people around you. You have to give the same speech over and over again, and we just stayed focused on that. You have to pay attention to all the operations of the business obviously, but the primary thing is that the people have to grow, and that’ll grow the business.
When I started Starbucks International, we had about 500 stores, so it wasn’t a crazy idea to open up another store. I was looking for a greater purpose for myself and the people at the company, so I said we’re going to use Starbucks coffee to build bridges around the world between people. I don’t care where you went in the world, you’d get the same latte you’d get back in Seattle. And it was amazing to see people use the stores exactly the same way no matter where they were in the world. I remember opening our first Store in Kuwait, and there were three women in full burqas drinking lattes…and schmoozing together. They could’ve been in Seattle! It didn’t make any difference where you were in the world, Starbucks was Starbucks.
Magazine Staff: What kind of cultural shifts did Starbucks have to make when it went global?
Howard: We did not. We went in with the original products and remained Starbucks wherever we went. We were strong proponents of women in senior leadership roles no matter where we went. We ended up having two women presidents in Japan. You can’t change your values because you go to another country. At the end of the day, we all want to be treated with respect and dignity, the rest of it is just commentary.
Magazine Staff: Any meaningful stories you can share about Starbucks?
Howard: When I first started at Starbucks, I got a call from a store manager named Jim, saying he’d like to come visit me and Howard Shultz. So I asked him if there’s anything I can handle or do you really need the meeting? He said no I really need to see you both. So we met with him and Howard Shultz, and Jim arrived and said to us “Well I need to tell you both that I am dying of AIDS.” That was the first time in my life I had ever met someone with AIDS. Keep in mind this is just at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, so no one knew what it was and public information was not clear about it. Howard Shultz looked at Jim and said tell us more about it and how we can help you. Jim said I don’t know how long I have to live, but I would like to work as long as I can work.
Keep in mind this is at a time when there was really a huge stigma about AIDS. But Howard Shultz looked at Jim and said, “Jim, you can work as long as you want to work and as long as you can work. And when you can’t work anymore we’ll continue to pay you and cover your medical expenses. You’re on our healthcare system until you no longer need it.” We maybe had 40 stores at the time, and we were really losing money at this point, but Howard Shultz didn’t even hesitate to make this offer to Jim. It was just an incredible moment to me - it sent a message to everyone that no matter what, we put our people first. Jim eventually passed away, but the whole time he lived we paid him and paid for his healthcare.
A lot of people say they care, but when push comes to shove and costs a bit of money, they balk. We were willing to stand behind our guy even if it cost us a lot of money, because it was the right thing to do. And that was a great lesson for me right out of the gate.
Magazine Staff: Do you think there are any particular Sephardic values that you brought to your business?
Howard: I think it’s both the general Jewish and Sephardic value of sharing and giving back: my father would always help Jewish community members in Seattle when they were in need. I think the ties that bind Sephardic together are global, and I brought that sentiment, and the sentiment of family unity in the Sephardic community, to my work. It binds us together to something bigger than ourselves.
Magazine Staff: Any advice you can give to our Sephardic community members who are entrepreneurs?
Howard: Live your life with intention. There’s this old saying “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.” I believe in living your life with intention. You should write down your top 8-10 values, your personal mission statement, and have a plan. Have goals that you write down with clear dates in mind. Live your life the way you want to live it. You don’t want to wake up at my age, almost 80, and ask yourself, “Well what happened?” You want to be able to look back at your life and say “Did I accomplish everything I wanted? Probably not, but I lived my life according to the way I wanted to live it.” I really believe in living life with intention, and that has to include your business life. Also, always have a purpose greater than yourself. You want to make money in business? Sure, but that really can’t be the sole driver. I never got up one morning saying “Gee, I’m excited to make more money today.” I got up in the morning excited to say “Who can I serve today?”
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