The Grit Blueprint

Loyal Fans, Lasting Success: Zamzow's Inc | Sponsored by Do it Best

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Staying obsessed with the customer and what they care about is how you win long-term in business, as demonstrated by the 92-year-old Zamzows chain of stores in the Boise, Idaho area.

• Finding just 1,000 people who are absolutely obsessed with your company can create viral growth
• Jos Zamzow shares how his great-grandparents started with a small feed store during the Depression
• Passion for your product is more valuable than expensive marketing campaigns
• Regular employee training focuses on providing exceptional customer service beyond expectations
• The 33-year tradition of Frisbee Fest connects the stores with the community while supporting animal shelters
• Product effectiveness matters more than fancy packaging – customers return when products work
• AI phone assistant successfully handles customer inquiries during peak seasons
• AI implementation provides instant answers to complex questions that even experienced staff might struggle with

Ready to turn visibility into growth? Head to gritblueprint.com to learn more and book a call to talk about your growth strategy.


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Stefanie Couch:

Staying obsessed with the customer and what they care about. That's how you win long-term in business.

Jos Zamzow:

Once somebody shows you that blueprint, you realize, even if you only own five bags, if you're standing there with passion, that's worth more than borrowing a million dollars and having an ad agency in Chicago build you a campaign.

Stefanie Couch:

I agree. You don't need a million people to love you If you can find a thousand people that are absolutely obsessed with your company. That is all you need for that to spread like wildfire, and I think it starts with one fan.

Jos Zamzow:

You mentioned, just as a side note, that AI could answer phones. I went up to you after and just said did you say? I can tell you that in the process of testing it, we repeatedly were just tickled and we would like laugh out loud. We were so happy. Even my dad, who's 78, he would call me and say Josh, this is unbelievable.

Stefanie Couch:

Welcome to the Grit Blueprint podcast, the playbook for building unmistakable brands that grow, lead and last in the built world. I'm Stefanie Couch, the founder of Grit Blueprint, and I'm a lifelong building industry insider. I was raised here, built my career here, and now my team and I help others win here. The truth is, you can be the best option in your space and still lose to someone else who simply shows up better and more consistently. Each week. On the Grit Blueprint, I'm going to show you how to stand out, earn trust and turn your brand into a competitive advantage that lasts. If you're ready to be seen, known, chosen and become unmistakable, you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Stefanie Couch:

Thank you for joining me on the Grit Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Stefanie Couch, and I'm coming to you live from the Indianapolis Convention Center. I'm here today at the Do it Best Group Market and I have a very special guest, one of my friends that I met actually last year at the Spring Market and we actually have been working on a project together. You also have a 92 year old store chain in the Boise, idaho area with 12 stores Jos Zamzow. Welcome to the show.

Jos Zamzow:

Thank you so much for having me.

Stefanie Couch:

We've been working on a pretty cool project together, so I want to talk about your stores first and the amazing history you have, and then I want to get into this AI stuff, because we're innovating and testing some things out. But tell me a little bit about your 12 stores. What do you sell, what do you do and how do they get started?

Jos Zamzow:

Our business started with our great-grandparents, august and Carmelita Zamzow, and they sold their farm in the worst year of the Depression in 1933 and bought a little feed store and they were literally mixing feed formulas on the floor with a shovel and and then making hundred pound bags and carrying them out and adapting those formulas for the local population According to what, what kind of things that the animals needed.

Stefanie Couch:

Where was the first store?

Jos Zamzow:

The first store was on Fairview Avenue in Boise, idaho, and literally you know one patch of concrete. The rest of it was all wood floor. That was their mixing station. Fast forward 20 years. My grandfather then purchased another feed mill and created, you know, we got a little bit heavier into the feed business. But all along that time, you know you can't sell feed without selling a shovel or some twine or whatever. And so the business has kind of grown alongside. And then my dad, when my dad took over with his brother in the 70s, they kind of expanded the lawn and garden portion of our business. And then in the 80s we really embraced pet and so while we had always sold, you know, even from the 50s we were selling dog food and other things Pet wasn't really a division until until about the 80s, and now we kind of do a little bit of all of it.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, and you've got crazy millennials like me that are obsessed with their golden retriever that are like I'll buy whatever it is.

Jos Zamzow:

It doesn't matter, the price or the thing.

Stefanie Couch:

So you've got the pet stuff, which piqued my interest a lot because you do some really cool events and some some things in the community. This summer you had a was it a Frisbee contest? Yeah, so tell me about that.

Jos Zamzow:

Well, the Frisbee Fest. This this is our I think our 33rd year of doing the Frisbee Fest, but it's all designed to be a donation for the local shelters People. You know, they sign up in store and get a little Frisbee with our name on it and then we set up a course where we've marked off the distances and we have a couple of radio personalities do the announcing and, you know, literally throw the frisbee, the dog runs down and catches it and there's a style, uh, portion and a distance and also, uh, you know, the little tiny dogs have their own division.

Jos Zamzow:

But it's, it's really fun and we get as many people come to watch as do to participate yeah and uh and, and all for a good cause, so it's a cool event I feel like I need to be there next year it's it sounds so, but you really have a lot of cool stuff for pets.

Stefanie Couch:

You have your own line of dog food, right?

Jos Zamzow:

right.

Stefanie Couch:

How did that come to be?

Jos Zamzow:

My dad in the early 80s. He really wanted to introduce people to premium food, and at the time Science Diet was the big brand of premium food, but it was veterinarian only, and so he started looking around trying to find one. He found a mink food called Iams. They were just feeding minks and as he started looking at it he's thinking I think this would also be good for dogs. And we actually became the exclusive Iams dealer for all the Northwest when we were transitioning it from mink food to dog food.

Jos Zamzow:

And then, as that became a big corporation and things changed there, we realized we had to create our own, and so we've been making our own dog food for a long, long time and, just like every phase, that that whole environment is changing really drastically right now and it's hard to stay on top Takes a lot of effort and innovation to be involved in that yeah, that's one of the things that struck me about you and your sister, callie, who's in the business as well, but you're now fourth generation right, callie and I are and it sounds like your family's been pretty darn innovative and and really willing to take a risk, take a change and actually go out there and try something for the whole time that your family, so it must run in your veins.

Jos Zamzow:

It does. But I think also we. I think when somebody shows you like we have in our family, how you can? I mean we're bootstrappers. So I'd like to tell you that we developed a dog food and then one built million dollar plant. That's not how we do it. You know, a lot of times you're building a one ton batch of dog food and you're putting it out there, You're literally sharing it with customers and say, hey, feed this and tell me what you think. And if you hit it and it works, then it starts to grow from there. And I think once somebody shows you that blueprint, you realize. You realize, man, I don't have to. I don't have to have 10 million dollars to start something. I can really start small and grow.

Stefanie Couch:

And we've just done it over and over and over again yeah, I want to double click on that a little bit because taking, like the, the hardware, the lawn and garden, all that out of it just in general for people that are listening to this that maybe think they want to start something or think they want to expand in their business they already have I believe that's such a great point because it is easy to think I'll do this when I get this capital or I'll do this when I have this skill, and what I've found my whole life is you'll probably never have enough time, you'll probably never have enough money Right, and you most likely won't know how to do anything until you try it and probably screw up several hundred times.

Jos Zamzow:

Right.

Stefanie Couch:

And I think that spirit of being able to say I'm going to do this anyway, even though I'm not really prepared, I don't have the money and I'm not sure if it's going to work out.

Jos Zamzow:

Right.

Stefanie Couch:

What's a time that you've seen that happen, and then you're like I don't know what's going to happen, and then it works out.

Jos Zamzow:

When the whole thing with Iams happened, I mean, literally a huge portion of our business was selling and distributing Iams pet food and then when they became a big corporation and took that away from us, that was like, what are we going to do? This is such a huge portion of what we're doing and I think it's a generational confidence of you. Know even great-grandma who she lived to be 104. Wow, she was still alive at that time. And people are having conversations around the dinner table saying you know, we did that with this particular feed.

Jos Zamzow:

Grandpa got sideways with Purina in the 50s. And so we've had these experiences where we say, all right, here's major changes in what we do and we're going to have to try something different. And I think my thought would be for people that want to try something different. It's about the people who have the passion for the product. And if you're standing in front of a display, even if you only own five bags, that's all you got is five bags. But if you're standing there with passion, you know that's worth more than than borrowing a million dollars and having an ad agency in Chicago build you a campaign.

Stefanie Couch:

I agree. And especially because grassroots, like on the ground people that love your stuff, you can sell those five bags of dog food to five people that love it, until five more people each, and then that's how you get a following. And I read a book recently about something called raving. It's called Superfans, but it talks about raving fans and I'm going to actually talk about this today in my learning session.

Stefanie Couch:

I think we all get really caught up a lot of times I know I do especially because you see people going viral. They're getting a million views, they have a million followers, but you don't really need that, especially in a small business where you're in a local market. You don't need a million people to love you. If you can find a thousand people that are absolutely obsessed with your company, your locations, your products, that is all you need for that to spread like wildfire, and I think it starts with one fan. And if you can't have a product, amazon Jeff Bezos started in his garage, obsessed over the customer, and he's built this giant thing that's become this whole other deal. And whether you love or hate him, it shows you that staying obsessed with the customer and what they care about that's how you win long term in business.

Jos Zamzow:

Absolutely, and I think the other piece of it is if you start off with a product that's genuinely good, not just looks good and I think I can't speak for this show, it's not set up yet but at a lot of the other shows this is the year of packaging. It seems like maybe it's tariffs or whatever. Nobody's innovated any products, they've just changed packaging, and I think that's fine and good to a point. What what? What our experience is is that if people have a product and it works, it doesn't matter whether it's something that cleans your deck or something that gives your dog some relief from joint pain. If it doesn't work, then people don't care if the packaging looks good or if the colors are modern.

Stefanie Couch:

The packaging is going to go in the trash anyway, once you start using the product.

Jos Zamzow:

The packaging maybe helps it get them in the dog's mouth, but it doesn't get them to come back. The dog can jump up in the truck now. That's when people say whoa. And honestly, in our locations our packaging is never national standard. We do a lot of craft and a lot of simple things with stick-on labels, because that's what we can do, but the products work and people respond to that.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, and also I do think people like that anti-modernism a little bit. My husband and I talk about that a lot. I think people want things that feel nostalgic. You know, there's stuff that I grew up with that I would literally. I'll give you a super Southern example, Okay, so you're probably not going to know what this is when I say it, there is this bold peanut stand. So I'm going to spell it for you, because I don't know if you can hear me. B O I.

Jos Zamzow:

L E D, that's my.

Stefanie Couch:

Georgia twang. So they're just water, salt and peanuts, so it is pretty simple and if you don't love them, you hate them, like there's's no in between. But this guy has a little trailer with one of those little uh noodley arm men and a burn barrel that just has smoke coming out of it, and every weekend, if he's there, I stop and get those peanuts right, right, right and it's because I grew up eating them and there's something about it.

Stefanie Couch:

But the product's good and it's just in a styrofoam cup and I don't care yeah, right so that's.

Stefanie Couch:

you said it's what do you love and how, who? And here I am on a podcast telling you about Robert's peanuts, so it's cool to see that. What kind of other customer experiences Cause? I know you guys have a lot of experts in your store, especially around lawn and garden, where, if you don't know what you're doing, you might tell someone something that could kill your grass. Tell me a little bit about how you breed that in your culture.

Jos Zamzow:

We do a training every six weeks. We literally take half. We have about 250 employees, so we take about half of them, like Wednesday morning, for example, and and the other half of the staff mans the store, and then Thursday morning we do the other half and we regularly add a segment of just customer service. What does customer service beyond people's expectations look like? And we talk to people about what you know. These are the things that we've done in the past that have made a difference, and I think people want to provide good service. They don't always know how I'm saying and people mean our employees and a lot of our customers are so used to bad service they're not even sure how to take it. And especially, you know, we we train about how, how to approach somebody. You know we call it the chem wall, where people are trying to figure out what bug to kill or or what weed to kill. We're teaching them and if you walk up to the wall and say, can I help you, people always say no.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah.

Jos Zamzow:

You know they, but they're desperate for help Like they don't they really need help.

Stefanie Couch:

Right.

Jos Zamzow:

And so there's a, there's a technique to walking up and and and breaking the ice a little bit so that they will say, oh my gosh, I'm so glad to have you help me. Yeah, Cause they're used to just saying, no, get away, I don't want help or somebody can't really help.

Stefanie Couch:

They ask that out of obligation, but then they don't know what the answer is there's a lot of places you go that that is the case. So what do you tell them to say to people?

Jos Zamzow:

We always encourage them to ask open questions and I and you know everybody has their own style. My style was always to say you know, what are you trying to kill today? Or something silly, you know, but we'll walk this this, do it best show. And we're looking for products, but we're also looking for stories and we're looking for companies that will help us tell those stories. Because if our people, you know, if they find a new mop, that's really different. And they say no, I, the lady who built this, came to our training and showed it to us and here's how this thing works. People will buy a mop, even if they weren't thinking about buying a mop, because they love a story, they love the information.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, I think storytelling is probably the most undervalued thing in business because if you think about what you remember from a movie or from something that happened in your life, it almost always has a story around it and people love the brand stories that relate to them. So I love dogs. We've already established that If someone has a Golden Retriever in their commercial I'm going to pay attention, and then if it's a cool, I think about the Subaru commercial where the Golden Retriever family's driving. Basically every commercial has a dog in it now. But like the Aflac goat with Nick Saban and Deion Sanders, that story that they're telling around, that if you like animals, if you like football, all those things resonate. I think that's perfect for you to be looking for that. So what makes a good story, in your opinion? Like, what are you looking for when you walk around looking for a story?

Jos Zamzow:

So we bring a group of buyers and and we talk about before we start the show. I say don't walk past the guy that doesn't have a fancy booth, because those are those opportunities where you'll have somebody there and they just sneaked into the show at the last minute and they don't have all their stuff together, but they've got a great product that nobody's heard of and that's what we're looking for and we've got. You know, we've done business with most of the places that are here, but the ones that are brand new, those are the ones where where a lot of times we'll say hey, you know, if we were to place a pretty good sized order, will you come to Idaho and train our people? And they always look at each other and say yes, and then they come and share that same passion with our employees, which they pick up. You know, even if it's just a mop if we're going to use that example they can feel the passion from the mop inventor and they want to pass that on too.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, Well, and this fall show is really great for you guys with the lawn and garden because they've got everything here that's going to be hot in the spring, so I'm sure you'll find I love the flower section and all that. I know you guys have a ton of that. You have plants, you have garden stuff, that you know food garden things. I think it's really cool. I can't wait to come see one of your stores, absolutely.

Stefanie Couch:

So let's talk a little bit about our project we've been working on. So in the spring you came to one of my sessions. It was at the Do it Best Knowledge Hub and I was speaking on innovation in branding social media and AI was a part of it. That was in March, so AI voice agents had actually just come out. It's kind of crazy how fast AI is moving, because there's things that were here, you know, in March. Now they're totally different and exponentially better now in the fall. But tell me a little bit about that session, Like what struck you from that and what was the thing that piqued your interest?

Jos Zamzow:

Well, we were. You know, one of the things that's hard for us is in the peak of garden season. We're so busy that we cannot effectively answer the phone. And even if we would want to, you know I've told my people, if you have three people standing in front of you in store, don't you answer that phone. But at the same time those people calling are potential customers. And so you'd like to answer the phone, but you know we're for sure not going to interrupt the conversation we're having in store to do that. And so we were struggling with that and we've looked at different answering services and sending it off to India and whatever else.

Jos Zamzow:

And you mentioned, just as a side note, that AI could answer phones. And I just came, I went up to you after and just said, did you say? And you said, yeah, it's brand new, but we can do this. And the thing that blew me away and it was I said, well, this has got to be a really long process, like how long does this take? And you said, probably we could have one up that could do basic stuff next week. And it was like okay, I'll call you.

Stefanie Couch:

We were on a call next week talking about it, I think. Right, yeah, it's really cool because, like I said, that really had just come out. I think we had started testing it in January or February, and so you were kind of a beta, like first test, and so kudos to you for having a problem and being risky enough to say let's see what happens.

Stefanie Couch:

The good news is the phone calls weren't being answered anyway, so it's hopefully not going to hurt anything to try it. One of the things I think is crazy is small businesses. Over 70% of phone calls go amiss and a lot of those people don't call back. So it is a huge problem and you just can't throw enough bodies at that. Especially, like you said, if someone's in front of you, you got to take care of that customer in the flesh.

Jos Zamzow:

And I did the math, I did back of the napkin calculation. I just said, all right, if I hired someone and put them in the office and didn't let them go down to help customers and they just sat there with a headset and answered the phone. One, I still wouldn't be able to answer phones when they took a break or at lunch or after hours. And two, in order for them to be able to answer questions, I would have to have an employee who was seasoned, which means I would have to take someone really good off the floor and put them in the office, which didn't make any sense. And so this is a really fascinating concept and we're learning an awful lot about it every single day. It's not perfect. It's not perfect.

Stefanie Couch:

No, and I think that's the thing that I think about. A lot is, you know, I've trained a lot of people. You've trained a lot of people. I worked in a hardware store, in a lumberyard, and I've worked in technical products.

Jos Zamzow:

Yeah.

Stefanie Couch:

Kind of like the grass thing where, hey, you use the wrong pesticide or you know product grass, well, you mess up a door right with one wrong click somewhere.

Stefanie Couch:

But people screw up too. So I think that's the thing is like with ai you're never going to have something that'll answer every single question under the sun, no matter what the context is. But it gets them to a point to where you can answer the phone, answer basic questions, answer some pretty advanced questions and then get them to a human that can at least not lose the phone call because we didn't answer at all.

Jos Zamzow:

Well, and I can, I can tell you that in the process of testing it, we repeatedly were just tickled and we would like laugh out loud. We were so happy with some of the things that that are our chat bot was able to answer that that were beyond. I mean, if I hire a new uh, you know, like a high school graduate cashier, those employees cannot answer those questions, uh and and so in some ways, far better than an entry-level employee, and that's kind of hard to wrap your head around that.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, and we named her so tell. So tell us about what we named her.

Jos Zamzow:

We named her Faye, which is my mom's name, and so that nobody else knows that. That was kind of a fun piece of, you know, tying the whole family together. But we, I think, over the summer and through this process we have a record of each interaction. We know what people were asking and what the what she told them and we're able to make adjustments to how that and there was a lot at the very beginning and now it's just fine tuning.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah.

Jos Zamzow:

Just getting slightly better all the time.

Stefanie Couch:

And one of the things that's cool is you do get that full transcript, but you can also get it just a little summary, an email or a text saying hey, Stephanie called. She wants to know about pet food. Call her back. Here's her name and phone number and email. Or that person that just wants directions, or something simple like a store hours. Do you sell lawn and garden stuff at this store? It's just instant.

Jos Zamzow:

Instant and we were able to create it so that it doesn't answer questions randomly. It doesn't pull random information. It pulls from information that we wanted to, so it recommends the products that we wanted to recommend. That was one of the things that was really important to us. I didn't want the chat bot recommending products we didn't sell or things that we don't do in our area of the country. That would be improper, and we were able to get all that done.

Stefanie Couch:

So what would you say to someone who is on the fence? It's like I don't know if I want to put this into my business. I hear you know people say I don't know if people are going to like AI and not everyone does like AI. So what would you say to people that maybe are like I don't know if this was a good idea or not?

Jos Zamzow:

The reality about AI at least for the next year or so, we'll see how it plays out is the people that call our stores. They're still looking up the phone number and calling the stores. That's a certain generation. We don't even have to label the generation, but it's a certain generation and those people are not instantly warm to AI. And what we're learning, our latest version of this is we're not going to say that it's AI, we're going to just have Faye say hi, I'm Faye, how can I help you? Instead of saying you know, I'm an AI chat bot because people freak out, you know.

Jos Zamzow:

But the reality is, even my dad, who's 78, when he got to talking to her, he would call me and say joss, this is unbelievable. I mean, she calculated this, the, the exact number of cubic feet of potting soil I needed for a planting bed. How many of your people could do that on the phone. And I said, well, not very many. I mean right, right, I mean they could do it if they, you know, called them back. But right, instantly, not very many. And and so so there's a lot of those things that I think once people have good experiences with it and they realize that, if my choice is getting somebody from bangladesh who doesn't speak super clean english, who's really just going to give me stock answers and take a message anyway, I'd rather talk to an AI agent that you've created a database of information from it to pull from. It's kind of like talking to you because we've kind of built it in our own image.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, absolutely, and one of the things we're going to be working on next that I'm really excited about and we've talked about a lot, is using it to internally train your teams, because you're already doing these trainings, but you have to take time off the floor. On Wednesday and Thursday You're doing just one training. It's not hey, I don't know this thing. Can I go do a training now, or can I learn about this? So we're going to weave that in and we're going to figure out how we can use it for other things, especially like a chat bot. We've got a website chat bot about to go live, which is going to pull from that same exact knowledge base.

Stefanie Couch:

I think one of the biggest things that is either a make or break is how good is your knowledge base, because if you just do it with a standard scrape of your website, if your website's really great, then that's going to be good. If your website has no information, it's going to be pretty basic. Still, probably better than not answering the phone, though I think.

Jos Zamzow:

If we say we're going to put this effort into training an employee that might leave, if we put the same effort into training our AI agent, we're going to have a sustainable thing that's going to get better and better over time. The latest thing that I'm super excited about is being able to email or text a customer. You know an answer to a question Like if they, if they said you know I need some help setting a lawn spreader, we're going to be able to say can we send you the spreader setting guide that has all the settings you know, in case they threw away the fertilizer bag or it got wet and they couldn't read it anymore, being able to just send it to them right there. They could pull it up on their phone and immediately set the spreader the way they want. Or our seed starting guide that tells when do I plant carrots and when do I plant onions, that kind of stuff. Those things are going to be. People are really going to embrace that.

Stefanie Couch:

Well, I'm excited to keep working on it. It's been a fun project and what I appreciate the most, like I said, is the spirit of innovation and also the spirit of hey, we're going to figure this out. It's not going to be perfect and we're going to have to keep iterating it and, you know, getting it to where you want, and you and Callie have been great to work with. So, it's been really fun.

Jos Zamzow:

Well, thank you.

Stefanie Couch:

And I'm excited I have to come to the Frisbee contest next year. That's a non-negotiable for me and I love Boise, so I've spent time there and I know it's going to be nice in the Frisbee time.

Jos Zamzow:

Absolutely.

Stefanie Couch:

Well, I hope that you have a wonderful market. We will, and I'm excited to see what stories you find. I'm going to call you next week and figure out what you found here that struck your fancy. But I hope you have a wonderful time in Indy.

Jos Zamzow:

You're going to a big basketball game tonight we're going to go see the fever play.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, so I hope that they win and you get to. Maybe get you a jersey or something, and I will see you soon. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for joining me on the Grip Blueprint Podcast. Thank you for listening to the Grip Blueprint Podcast. If this episode helped you think a little differently about how to show up, share it with someone in your building world who needs it. If you're ready to turn visibility into growth, then head to gritblueprintcom to learn more and book a call to talk to us about your growth strategy. Until next time, stay unmistakable.

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