A deli that sells its training

The business

A deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It opened its doors on March 15, 1982.

This one isn’t mine. It’s Zingerman’s, and everything here comes from what they’ve published about their own history.

What it already has

Ask what a deli owns and you’ll get a short list. A kitchen, a counter, a sign over the door.

By 1994 this one also owned twelve years of working out its own way to run the place.

And it had an old friend. She’d been around since the doors opened, and once drove its bread truck on Saturday mornings. Her trade was training: she’d managed the development of courses for clients like IBM and Ford.

The business hiding in it

That year the founders wrote their first long-term plan for the company. She read it.

Where the plan needed training, she saw a company. She stayed up all night and wrote it down.

Not a second deli. A training company, built on how the deli already did things.

The three of them started it that June with $1,000, a desk in her attic, a second phone line and a fax modem.

The unfair start

Look at what it had.

The founders’ plan described a group of separate businesses, each run by partners with a stake. Strong training was key to building it. So the training company had people to train at home: Zingerman’s own managers.

It sells the same know-how to outside clients. And a client who learns a method in the classroom can visit the businesses and see it in use.

More than thirty years later it is still running, with clients in banking, health care and manufacturing.

The honest filter

Here’s what would make it a bad idea.

You can only sell what you do better than the shop down the road. If you train the way most shops do, a shadow shift and a handshake, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s also nothing to sell yet. Prove it on your own people first.

And notice who started it. Not a manager with a side project. The person who knew training, as a partner.