Tukker Zimmerman opens the break room door, and the smell of fresh coffee is the first to hit.
It's 6:45 in the morning. A chiropractor is working in one corner. A barber is set up next door, near a legitimate barber shop pole and chair.
And in the middle of it all, more than a dozen people are sitting around talking. Not on the clock. Not waiting for a meeting. Just here.
"A lot of people would wake up early and come in just to hang out with their friends before work," Zimmerman says. "An hour, hour and a half. People are just milling around, chatting, talking about sports."
At a plumbing, electrical, and HVAC company in rural Pennsylvania, before sunrise.
Summers & Zim's has been in business since 1930, when two companies — the Summers family on one side, the Zimmermans on the other — operated independently before merging in 1973. The company has 59 employees, 48 of them in the field.
Fourteen more people want jobs here. They've made it through the first round of interviews and are simply waiting for a slot, some for 18 months.
The last help wanted ad posted in 2017. The company doubled in size after that without posting another one.
‘Culture eats strategy for lunch’’
Zimmerman participated in a session at a ServiceTitan Toolbox Live event in northern Virginia, where Crystal Williams was talking about exactly this.
Williams spent years as chief marketing officer at McWilliams Heating, Cooling, and Plumbing in east Texas, the family business her grandfather started after retiring from the Navy in 1974. She now runs Lemonseed Marketing, working with contractors across the country.
"Culture eats strategy for lunch," Williams told the room. "When your culture is struggling, it doesn't really matter how good you are."
Her framework rests on three things:
Building the brand from the inside out.
Creating relationships.
Driving new customers.
In that order.
The first one is the hardest sell. Before spending a dollar on advertising, Williams says, make sure the experience inside the company matches what you're saying outside it.
At McWilliams, that meant rethinking hours. A rotation schedule gave late-shift workers Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off so technicians could coach a baseball team or make it to a school play.
"Give them a Friday," Williams says. "Game-changer for us."
Family first
At Summers & Zim's, the foundation goes deeper than schedules.
Zimmerman describes the company as operating from a family mindset: Not the team mindset business books recommend, but something closer.
"Some leadership coaches would say that's not the most efficient way to do things," he says. "But we're not about that."
The approach is explicitly rooted in faith. Zimmerman's father Joe, who runs the company day-to-day and sits in the coffee shop every morning before going to his desk, is the biggest shaper of the culture.
"The way Christ cares for us is the way we try to care for employees," Tukker Zimmerman says. "A lot of the folks making those key personnel decisions are designing the way they care for people from those biblical values."
That belief produces the coffee shop, the barber, and the chiropractor — all aimed at putting time and money back into people's lives.
The math on the coffee shop is simple: "Our cup of coffee costs us 50 cents and can put $4 in a tech's pocket," Zimmerman says.
The barber exists because scheduling a haircut around 10-hour shifts and young children at home is harder than it sounds.
The chiropractor covers the older technicians keeping up with the job’s physical demands.
Every year on June 21, either a Red Wing truck pulls up and everyone walks out with new boots, sunglasses, or headphones. A bulk meat purchase runs out of a back room year-round, sold to employees at roughly half the retail price.
The budget for all of it runs over every year.
"We spent too much money. We've blown the budget, so now what?" Zimmerman says. "And the answer was, 'We'll find the money. Just do it.'"
Show up when it matters
Williams made the same case in northern Virginia.
Every year, McWilliams held goal-setting meetings where each employee got a large Polaroid-style card on the wall. They'd put a sticker on it representing something they were passionate about — a house, a vacation, paying off debt — and the board stayed up all year so the whole company could follow along.
One of those employees had grown up in a mobile home. His goal, for all to see, was to buy a brick house in which his son would get his own room.
At the end-of-year meeting, Williams' brother, Trey, asked who had hit their goal. That employee walked to the front of the room.
"Bought a house," the employee told the McWilliams team. "Almost one year from the day I told y'all I was going to do it, I bought a house and my son got his first real room without holes in the floor.”
“Everybody in the room erupted into celebration," Williams says.
Williams also talked about a tech whose broken gear shift had his mother dropping him off at the shop at 5 a.m. on her way to work at the hospital. Williams found out at a crawfish boil — not because she asked, just because she was there and listening. Her brother paid to fix the truck.
The tech installed $2 million in equipment a year. The repair cost $2,000.
"I was like, 'We'll figure it out,'" Williams says.
Not about the statistics
Zimmerman has heard the seminar version of this story: Care for your employees because it will make you more money.
He doesn't buy it as a starting point.
"Happy employees make more money. Happy employees make customers happy. Happy employees make high margins. All that's true," he says. "But anybody who starts on the back end and works back toward 'so I should care for my employees' — I don't think you'll ever get there."
The harder part, he says, is ignoring the pushback.
"They say, 'That costs too much,' or, 'They're just an employee,' or, 'We already pay them well,'" Zimmerman says. "To ignore all of the chatter and say, 'How would I treat my own family? If I'm employing my son, how do I want to be treating him?'"
Summers & Zim's considers itself a high performer on profitability, and Zimmerman acknowledges that makes generosity easier. But the commitment came before the margin did. The company has 13 sets of siblings among its 59 employees.
"Everybody loves their job so much," Zimmerman says, "they try to get jobs for their siblings."
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It bleeds out
Williams closed her session with the third piece of the framework: How culture eventually pulls new customers in.
Culture doesn't stay inside the building. It bleeds out through the people who carry it home, talk about it at church, and show up to community events in uniform because they're proud of where they work.
"People are like, 'I want to be a part of that,'" she says.
Back in Pennsylvania, Zimmerman would tell you the same thing, just from the inside. The wait list, the siblings, the people who wake up early to sit in a coffee shop before they're even on the clock. None of it was engineered for retention.
It was built because someone decided that's how you treat people.
