A struggle for many small to medium-sized businesses is that the opportunities within the company are limited. Often the owner and top management may be family. Or, simply because of the size, there’s no room at the top for more people.
One thing that Zingerman’s realized is that if they wanted to keep their top people and also give people more opportunities to expand themselves, they needed more business. The deli was only going to support so many people, realistically. They started to see that their people had passions for other areas in their industry of food service. They also were seeing some limitations in the products they were able to find that met their high standard.
To solve both problems, they started a process to allow internal team members to propose ideas for businesses they were passionate about and that could be financially successful.
The cool thing is that they were able to continue the Zingerman’s way of treating employees and customers into all the businesses that have grown from this process.
Check out this webinar replay of the ZingTrain training called, “Creating a Community of Businesses” to learn the basics. This should get you to thinking how you may adapt for your organization.
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Here’s the link to the ZingTrain page. This page includes slides and samples of the items discussed like the huddles.
Click here to go to the main Deep Dive page on this site to see a listing of all the shows and their respective links to ZingTrain.
Thank you to the team at ZingTrain for giving me permission to replay their webinars. You can sign up for their email list to be notified when they are planning a new webinar.
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