People Business Serving Coffee
You're never in the coffee business; you're in the people business that happens to sell coffee.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 95%
Behar's central belief is that Starbucks succeeded not because of the coffee but because leadership recognized they were 'not in a coffee business serving people, but in the people business serving coffee.' This reframing put every decision through the lens of how the company treated its own people and the human beings it called customers. Coffee remained important as a craft and creative outlet, but it was never the thing that drove the business. Behar even rejects the word 'customer' because it reduces people to a dollar bill to be manipulated. The single most important recognition, long before the coffee, was that the business was about people.
Origin
Behar learned this watching his immigrant father run a mom-and-pop grocery store in Seattle, where customers were friends and neighbors, and later crystallized it after joining Starbucks when it was in the 'coffee business' and had grown arrogant with customers.
Core principles
- 01Every business is fundamentally about serving human beings, not moving product.
- 02The product is important but it is never the driving force of the business.
- 03Treat the people who work for you and the people you serve as the core of the enterprise.
- 04Reject the word 'customer' if it makes you see people as a dollar bill to extract.
How to run it
- 1
Rename the business you're in
Declare explicitly that you are in the people business serving your product, not the product business serving people. This single reframe changes what you optimize for.
Pro tip Say it as a mantra to your whole team until it becomes the default lens for decisions.
- 2
Drop the transactional language
Notice when you treat people as 'customers' to be extracted from versus human beings to be served. Language shapes behavior.
Watch out If your team only sees a dollar bill in the customer's pocket, they will manipulate rather than serve, and people feel it.
- 3
Serve internally first
Have people serve each other inside the company first; that internal care flows outward to the people you serve.
- 4
Make everything focus on the people
Route product decisions, store design, and policy through the question of how they affect the humans working there and the humans being served.
Pro tip Make each order the way the person wants it, not the way that is easiest for you.
In the wild
Consumer Reports mocked Starbucks' dark northern-European roast as 'charbucks' when Americans were used to Maxwell House and Folgers. Rather than change the coffee, Starbucks stayed true to who they were and doubled down on how they treated people.
→ The company kept its identity and its people-first culture became the engine that grew it from 28 to over 15,000 stores.
Where competitors served a standard latte, Starbucks made every drink the way the individual customer wanted it, extra hot, more foam, an extra shot, because the person mattered more than operational uniformity.
→ Customers felt personally served and returned an average of many times per month, building the repeat-business base.
Common mistakes
Treating customers as revenue units
Seeing the customer as a dollar bill to extract leads to manipulation, and people sense it and stop coming back.
Letting the product become the identity
When everything is about the product, the company grows arrogant and stops serving, which is exactly the trap Starbucks fell into early on.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and leaders of service, retail, or hospitality businesses trying to build a durable culture as they scale.
Not ideal for
Pure commodity or transactional operations where there is no ongoing human relationship to build.
From the transcript
“we were not in a coffee business serving people but we're in the people business serving coffee”
“when you say customer you say they got a dollar bill... they're human beings and we're here to serve them”
From the episode
Howard Behar: Former Starbucks President Reveals How Starbucks Grew to 15,000 Stores