Most of my coworkers have absolutely no drive or motivation to be more. Don’t be that person. High performance green beans become high performance baristas who become high performance shifts.

After that (and obvious during as well) it’s all building connections. If another SM or your DM ever come to your store for any reason introduce yourself, be confident, and then show them the standard of your work. Every SM knows me in my district. They all know I’m reliable. If I wanted to transfer or see if I could become an ASM at the only store where the manager is a manager trainer, guess what, everyone knows me. Your reputation is huge in growing in this company.

I’m well aware of diversifying a portfolio and that’s something you could explore if you accumulate enough to sell to buy other stocks. It’s not like Starbucks gives you a choice of offering you various stocks instead of theirs. And we don’t receive huge numbers of shares or anything. It roughly averages out to ~1k a year after a couple years. But yea sure in general you never want to put your eggs in one basket.