by Ari Weinzweig, Zingerman’s Co-Founding Partner

I’ve been asked this question many times: “What’s the secret to your success?” The answer is that there isn’t one. Success takes a lot of things, including hard work, good ideas with strong implementation, the ability to recover well from failure, a little luck, a few good breaks and then a lot more hard work. This list is probably pretty accurate, but it isn’t really all that helpful to anyone who wants to build a great business.

What I’ve found is helpful is the idea that there are organizational principles that consistently work and, in the big scheme of things, follow a natural order. My business partner Paul Saginaw calls these “Natural Laws of Business.” Our experience here at Zingerman’s (which includes working with hundreds of other organizations through our ZingTrain management training) is that the natural laws are applicable for any business regardless of size, scale, age or product offering.

Exceptions exist, but I’ll say up front I wouldn’t recommend expending much energy trying to prove these rules to be wrong. Pick and choose from this list as you like. I hope they help you as much as they have us.

1. You’re more likely to get to greatness if you have an inspiring and strategically sound vision.
Sure, there are people who never write an explicit vision of greatness, yet find ways to build successful organizations. But our experience is that it’s more likely that you’re going to build something special when you have one. And it’s certainly a lot more enjoyable to be doing the work en route.

What’s a vision? As we define it, it’s a picture of what success looks like at a particular time in the future. If you’re starting a business, I’d say it’s best to pick a time frame that’s at least three to five years out; longer might be even better. The vision details what the business does and why it’s special. It describes the way the people who work in the business feel about being part of it. It talks about how the organization relates to its customers, and about how the business fits into the community. It could detail what you and I as owners do, how much money we and/or the business actually make.

To be effective, the vision needs to be so inspiring that everyone involved in achieving it is motivated to contribute their energies. It also needs to be strategically sound—i.e. while challenging and not in the least easy to get to, you do have some shot at getting there—and it must have key measurables that give all involved some sense of the scope of the goals. (“As big as we can be as fast as we can get there” is not a vision.) To be effective, the vision needs to be in writing so everyone involved is, both literally and figuratively, on the same page. And, lest we forget, we need to communicate the vision regularly to the rest of the organization so that people know where we’re going.

2. If you don’t give customers compelling reasons to buy from you, they won’t.
From the day we opened at Zingerman’s we’ve taken the approach that we need our customers way more than they need us. We’ve always assumed that we have nothing to offer that anyone really needs and we’ve never once assumed that customers would just keep coming back. To the contrary, we’ve always worked with the belief that we have to give them a number of really good reasons—preferably, a bunch of them to be on the safe side—to buy from us.

What those compelling reasons are will vary for each business. But if you don’t think the reasons your organization is offering sound all that compelling, they probably aren’t. So start working on more.

3. If you don’t create a great, rewarding place for people to work, they won’t do great work.
While a rewarding, spiritually sound workplace won’t on its own guarantee success, if you combine one with all the other things on this list, your business will always outperform an organization that follows the other eleven natural laws, but ignores this one.

Here at Zingerman’s, we’ve always said that we were going to treat the people who choose to work with us as if they were volunteers. How rewarding should the workplace be? Well, pretty darned rewarding. Please note that we mean it in every sense of the word—emotionally, intellectually, physically, not just financially. We’re always working on how to make ours a more positive place to be by sharing our vision for the future (see Law No. 1), by involving people in running the business through our processes for organizational change, Open Book Finance, a whole lot of training and more.

Ultimately, we know that people want to feel their work makes a positive difference; that their extra efforts were noticed and contributed to a good cause; to feel like they can improve the quality of their own life and the lives of those around them through their work. When we do that we have a far more rewarding workplace to be a part of, which means that we’re having more fun, which in turn means that service improves and sales go up.

4. If you want the staff to give great service to customers, you have to give great service to the staff.
This rule is one of the key tenets of Servant Leadership, which is the core of our leadership philosophy here at Zingerman’s. (We learned it from Robert Greenleaf and his excellent book, Servant Leadership.) Let me restate the rule—the service that the staff is giving to customers is never going to be better than the service that we as leaders are giving to the staff. The tone that’s set from the top in this regard is pretty easy to pick out—I can tell with a high degree of accuracy how the leaders in an organization are treating the staff simply by watching the way the majority of the staff wait on their customers. It all starts with us.

5. If you want staff to give great performance, you have to give clear expectations and training tools.
The core of Zingerman’s Training Compact, which we developed with the leadership of Maggie Bayless, managing partner at ZingTrain back in the mid-1990s, is that to run a great organization we need to be clear with the folks who work in it about what we’re asking from them. And then we need to work hard and effectively to teach them how to do it. We’ve been working to live it—if ever imperfectly—since. The validity of this Compact was backed up by the book, First Break All the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, in which the Gallup Organization surveyed one million people and specifically 80,000 managers to determine which factors were most important to keeping the best (not just any, but the best) workers in their jobs for the longest period of time. The single most important element in making that happen? Clear expectations. The second most critical? The tools to do their work, of which effective training (on shift, classroom, online, written, etc.) is a huge piece.

6. Successful businesses do the things that others know they should do but generally don’t.
I could tell a thousand stories to illustrate this point, but the one that always sticks in my head is about how we got our bread back when we first opened the Deli in the early 1980s. We knew that if we wanted to have a great corned beef sandwich (it was a key part of our vision), we had to have great bread. After testing loaves from 20 different sources, we settled on one—the rye bread from a bakery about 45 minutes away in the Detroit suburbs. The problem was that the winning bakery wasn’t willing to deliver, although the other competitors were. But it was the best bread. So someone had to get up at the crack of dawn to get the bread back to the Deli by 7 a.m. We did that every day for about ten years because we knew it was worth the effort—and it helped drive our success.

You’ll find this attitude—and anecdotes like this—in successful businesses in any industry. While their competitors all too often cut corners, the people and the companies that get to greatness just keep doing all those unglamorous little things that the others know they should do but just don’t. It could be anything, but generally it’s along the lines of staying late, opening early, thanking a few more staff and customers, paying a bit more to get better raw material, forgiving a former employee who erred, giving a bit more to the community and so on.

7. If you aren’t consistently getting better, you’re not going to get long-term greatness.
The reality of business life is that if we’re not learning, growing and improving then the marketplace is going to pass us by. The best organizations and individuals have always understood this.

8. Success means you get better problems—but there will always be problems.
Would you rather have too few customers and be struggling to pay payroll? Or have sales booming and be struggling to keep up? Obviously, I like hitting sales levels right on plan best of all, but there will always be problems. The key is to appreciate the chance to work on the better ones.

9. Whatever you’re good at is likely to also lead into areas of weakness.
Said another way, pretty much anything we’re good at is going to, at some point, be carried a bit too far and become a problem. For example, I’m very focused and I don’t let go of something I believe in easily. Certainly that quality has contributed positively to what I’ve been able to achieve over the years. But it’s sort of inevitable then—following this Natural Law—that sometimes I’m going to stick with something longer than I should. The same holds true organizationally. One of our strengths at Zingerman’s is that we are a participative workplace. The inevitable weakness then? Sometimes we have so many chances for people to participate that things take longer than they might have. The beauty of this Law is that, if one embraces it rather than fighting it, it actually makes life far less stressful.

10. It takes a lot longer to make something great happen than people think.
Early on in our work together Paul taught me that, to his view, “Professionalism means sticking with something long after the glamour has worn off.” Everything I’ve seen, heard and learned since has supported that belief.

While there are the overnight successes of the world, those are few and far between. Nearly all great organizations, almost all long-term, sustainable successes, take a long time to build. Some of those businesses may seem like “instant winners” but I can’t say I can think of many of them. And I deal with a lot of organizations.

For instance, we’re big proponents of Open Book Finance—we use it now religiously and we even teach a ZingTrain seminar on the subject. But I’ll tell you flat out that for the first five years or so of doing it we were probably, at best, mediocre in our implementation. And that it took another three or four years to really get good at it.

My experience here (this part is my experience, not necessarily a Natural Law) is that it takes two years—not two months—for us to get to some level of equilibrium for any meaningful change or new project we undertake. It then takes another year or two to get to be good. And it’s only then that we’ve got ourselves in position to go after greatness. To quote the essayist Logan Pearsall Smith, “The test of a vocation, is the love of the drudgery it involves.” I couldn’t agree more!

11. Profit is good.
This one is so widely accepted that I almost didn’t include it. But in brief, you do have to be profitable in order for the business to survive; you do have to have cash on hand in order to pay the bills; and if you don’t pay your taxes properly and on time you get in a lot of trouble.

12. Great organizations are appreciative and the people in them have more fun.
At Zingerman’s we’ve worked hard to create a culture and systems that are positive and appreciative. We’re far from perfect and we’re certainly not the only ones doing this. But without question, it’s contributed enormously to us being the organization that we are.

Not long ago, Amy Emberling, one of the managing partners at the Bakehouse shared an article with me from the Harvard Business Review entitled “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time,” written by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy. It’s about how leaders—or any of us really—could focus attention on building energy instead of the usual approach of managing time more effectively. The authors weren’t down on the latter, but they acknowledged that there was never going to be more time to go around. The article lists a couple of characteristics that contribute to these increased energy levels, but one of their key conclusions is that energized, high-achieving individuals live—and live in—appreciative, positive settings.

I believe great organizations are great because the people in them are actively appreciative and have learned to have fun doing whatever it is they need to do. This is especially true when times are tough. (We’ve been there, believe me.) People in these organizations still seem able to find ways to be kind to each other, and to enjoy the fact that although they’d rather not be struggling, they’re glad to at least be struggling with people they really like.

Natural Conclusion
With this last rule in mind, let me close here by appreciating all the amazing people that I get to work with every day. I feel fortunate to be in this organization, to be partners with Paul (and Maggie and Frank Carollo and now 11 others as well) and to work with more than 500 great staff members. I feel the same way about the hundreds of quality-oriented suppliers we buy from, and the thousands of caring supportive customers we have here in what I think is a great town. And we get to do it all in an industry full of interesting colleagues. Sure, all of this work sets the bar high to keep surpassing ourselves, but I think it’s a good problem to have. I look forward to the challenge of helping to raise the bar even higher in the years to come.

I hope that getting these Natural Laws out of my head and onto paper is of help to you or those around you in your work. And that it leads to greater success and more rewarding lives for all around you.

- Ari Weinzweig