# Zingerman's – A Favorite Case Study

- **Episode:** [229](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/229.md) (2025-09-04)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** zingermans, case-study, business
- **Time:** 20:08–25:21 (start 1208s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/229?t=1208](https://truthliesandwork.com/229?t=1208)

---

[20:08] Meghan French Dunbar: Oh my gosh. They're like one of my favorite case studies in the United States. And when I told you I get really excited, this is like the Steve Irwin thing where I'm like, ah, let me tell you all about Zimmerman's. Anyway, I got to interview Paul Saginaw and They treat people very, very well. It was like the crux of their company. But the thing that they did that flipped the entire thing on its head was instead of franchising, which they very clearly could have done, they were this incredibly successful deli, they looked at how could we create a family of businesses all in the Ann Arbor, Michigan area where they were based so that we can boost the local economy and not just businesses that are, you know, a family of businesses, but businesses that support and feed each other. So they made a bakery that does the delis and like coffee shops and like everything that they do. And then everyone who works at these owns a percentage of all of the companies together. So it's this diversified portfolio of small businesses that create immense economic opportunity for Ann Arbor, but then also help break generational cycles of poverty because there's this gigantic employee profit distribution that's going because they have ownership in all of the different companies. They're just, they're thinking about business as a way to create opportunity for people. And then they also have this gigantic Zing Train, which is their corporate training, where they're teaching people the skills that we should have been having in kindergarten, like listening. And communication and also open book management. They are fully transparent with every single person on their team about finances. Every— they're all making decisions together, fully transparent, which is one of the things that we love to do in organizations is hoard information and not share it with people and immediately make people feel like you don't trust them and that you don't respect them enough to share company financials, even though it's the place that you ask them to work every single day. So yeah, Zingerman's is one of my favorites. They're an extraordinary company
[22:19] Al Elliott: I suppose the pushback would be, well, it's okay for them. They've been going decades. They can do all this stuff. I'm struggling to take home $50,000 a year as my business owner. I can't start doing this stuff now
[22:34] Meghan French Dunbar: Like with everything, there's varying degrees of ways that you can turn up the volume on things. I mean, at most we had 10 employees. We were a very small company. It was stressful. I was going through all of the small business owner stuff of like, oh my God, are we going to make payroll next cycle? Like, I have been there. The last thing that I wanted to do was pop my head up to work on the business, on the things that I espouse that most companies that, you know, mid and large enterprises should be doing. Employee ownership, profit distribution, all of those things. I think that those come in layers as organizations get larger. That doesn't mean though that as a small business, you can't treat your people extraordinarily well. I mean, Vanessa very sweetly nominated me as this best boss. And I mean, we worked together 6 years ago when we were at Conscious Company and We had a third-party consultant come in and was, 'cause my company got acquired in 2017 and I stayed on as CEO. And so, I was a wholly owned subsidiary brand under, and there were 4 other brands in this portfolio under our parent company. And there was a third-party consultant that came in and audited the company culture of all 4 of the organizations and the parent company. We were trying to do some culture work and they shared with me later that like, I had the highest culture scores that they'd ever seen. And I was a small business, I was struggling. This isn't to toot my own horn, but it was very much from that place of leading like a human. I was completely flexible. I now, there's a term, results-only workplace environments, ROW workplaces, that are very autonomous, like work whatever hours you want, Work wherever you want. You know, here, just make sure you're getting your stuff done. Treating people like humans, unlimited time off. And we did this stuff as a very, very small business. And I had one person leave in the 5 years I was there. One employee quit. And we punched above our weight and we're, you know, a fantastic little company. So. There's degrees to which you can do it. And it's about the next best step, not you have to model yourself after the Eileen Fishers and the Toranis of the world that have these humongous— they're doing very big things that small companies can't afford to do. But as you get larger, there are things to consider