‘Mom, I Am Not Taking the LSAT’

This week, in Episode 249, we bring you a conversation recorded at our recent 21 Hats Live event in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with Ari Weinzweig, co-founder of one of America’s most influential small businesses. Starting 43 years ago with a highly successful college town delicatessen that they could have replicated all over the country (including for Disney), Ari and co-founder Paul Saginaw have instead built Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, a collection of 12 Ann Arbor-based, collaboratively run businesses each with its own leadership and ownership structure. Together, these businesses produce $80 million a year in revenue. They include a bakery; a coffee company; two event spaces; a roadhouse; a Korean restaurant; a mail-order operation; an international food-tour business; a publishing house that publishes, among others, Ari Weinzweig; and a training center—ZingTrain—that has shared the Zingerman’s approach to business building with more than 10,000 businesses.

In 2003, Bo Burlingham pronounced Zingerman’s “The Coolest Small Company in America.” Bo’s article became the foundation of Small Giants, his book about companies that are more intent on being great than being big. The last thing we did at 21 Hats Live was to sit down with Ari to talk about that philosophy. In his passionate responses to our many questions—responses, I should note, that include a few F-bombs—Ari explains how the Zingerman’s team decides whether to start a new business, how he and Paul made (and re-made) an especially difficult decision about expanding, how he and Paul have managed to sustain their partnership for more than four decades, how they chose a succession plan, how they know if they’re charging enough, why for many years Ari’s mother continued to believe he was a failure, and a whole lot more.