ZingTrain Sells the Thing That Can't Be Shipped
The ninth stop in our Zingerman's Universe series. At 3728 Plaza Drive, a small team teaches other companies how to run like Zingerman's.
Eight entries into this series and I keep arriving at the same conclusion: Zingerman's works because the people running each business are trained to a standard that doesn't exist at most companies. The bread is consistent. The service is consistent. The coffee is roasted the same way whether Allen Leibowitz is watching or not. That consistency is not an accident, and it is not a personality trait. It is a system, and the system has a name.
ZingTrain is at 3728 Plaza Drive, Suite 5, in the same commercial complex as the Bakehouse, the Creamery, the Candy Manufactory, and the Coffee Company. It is the ninth Zingerman's business in this series and the hardest to explain, because it makes nothing you can eat, drink, or put in a box. What ZingTrain makes is the knowledge that holds everything else together.
The Origin
Maggie Bayless founded ZingTrain in 1994 with, as the story goes, a thousand dollars and a desk in an attic. She had read Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw's long-term vision document for Zingerman's and saw something that the food businesses couldn't sell on their own: the management philosophy behind them.
The question was simple. People kept asking Zingerman's how they did it. How do you train staff to care? How do you run open-book finances in a sandwich shop? How do you get, according to the company, over 800 employees across ten businesses to deliver the same level of service? Bayless built a business around answering those questions.
Today ZingTrain is run by managing partners Katie Frank and Joanie Hales. The operation has grown from that attic desk into a purpose-built training facility on Plaza Drive, but the team is still small. They teach in-person seminars, virtual workshops, keynote sessions, and self-paced online courses. They also do custom consulting, traveling to client sites to work with organizations on their own terms.
What They Teach
The curriculum covers the management practices that Zingerman's actually uses. This is not theoretical. Every seminar is built from the systems running across the ZCoB at the time of teaching.
The core topics: visioning (how to write a long-term vision and use it to drive decisions), open-book management (sharing financial data with every employee so they understand the business they work in), servant leadership (the organizational chart is upside down, with frontline staff at the top), and Bottom-Line Training, ZingTrain's trademarked approach to making training measurable and accountable.
The two-day in-person seminars are the flagship. They run at the Plaza Drive facility, which means attendees spend part of their time inside a working Zingerman's operation. They eat Bakehouse bread at lunch. They drink Coffee Company beans. The teaching is not separate from the business. It happens inside the business, and that proximity is the argument.
Who Shows Up
I expected the client list to be small food businesses. It is not. ZingTrain teaches owners, managers, and leaders from every industry: hospitals, school districts, tech companies, nonprofits, manufacturing firms. The common thread is not what they make but how they want to run. People come to ZingTrain because they want their organizations to work the way Zingerman's works, and ZingTrain's pitch is that the systems are transferable.
Inc. Magazine has called Zingerman's "the coolest small company in America," though the specific issue is hard to pin down. That reputation drives the consulting business. But what keeps clients coming back is that the advice is grounded in a real operation. When ZingTrain teaches open-book finance, the instructors can walk the class next door to the Bakehouse and show them the P&L on the wall. When they teach service standards, they can point to the Deli staff on Detroit Street and say: this is what it looks like in practice.
The Odd One Out
ZingTrain is the strangest business in the Zingerman's Universe. It produces no food. It has no retail counter. You cannot walk in off the street, buy something, and leave. Every other ZCoB business I have profiled in this series is tangible: bread, cheese, candy, coffee, sandwiches, mail-order boxes, a farm with a barn. ZingTrain sells knowledge, and knowledge is the one product in the Zingerman's catalog that you cannot taste.
But it may be the most important business in the Community. Without ZingTrain, the Zingerman's model stays in Ann Arbor. With it, the principles travel. A hospital administrator in Ohio reads Weinzweig's book, attends a two-day seminar, and goes home to restructure her department around servant leadership. A bakery owner in Portland flies to Plaza Drive, sits in the training room, and learns how to run open-book management. ZingTrain is the business that turns Zingerman's from a local success story into an exportable idea.
Plaza Drive, Part Nine
Nine businesses in, and I have spent more time on Plaza Drive than on any other street in Ann Arbor. The Bakehouse, the Creamery, the Candy Manufactory, the Coffee Company, and now ZingTrain all share this commercial strip near the airport. It is not a destination. It is an industrial park with loading docks and parking lots. But the concentration of focused, specific, well-run businesses on one stretch of asphalt is the physical proof of everything ZingTrain teaches.
The training facility is the last stop on my Plaza Drive tour. Through the window, I could see a seminar in session: twelve people at tables, a whiteboard covered in notes, someone from ZingTrain at the front of the room. Next door, the Bakehouse was pulling bread from the oven. Across the lot, the Coffee Company was roasting beans. The lesson and the evidence were ten feet apart.
ZingTrain is at 3728 Plaza Dr, Suite 5, Ann Arbor, MI 48108. Seminars, virtual workshops, and custom consulting at zingtrain.com.