Once the deli connected, the founders were besieged with offers to replicate it — from Disney, from Las Vegas casinos and from would-be franchisees. Mr. Saginaw and Mr. Weinzweig turned down all of them.

Still, they weren’t satisfied with the deli, which had hit a plateau, and they wanted the business to grow. But they weren’t interested in cookie-cutter growth. They wanted to retain the things that they believed made Zingerman’s special. “When I see a model like Steak ’n Shake, I think it’s great,” Mr. Weinzweig said, referring to the hamburger chain, “but I don’t want to do the same thing again and again in places where I don’t even live.”

If anything, he and Mr. Saginaw were more focused on how they would run their business than what the business would be. “From the beginning,” Mr. Saginaw said, “we wanted to build an extraordinary organization — not the biggest, not the most profitable — but an organization where decisions would not be based on who had the most authority but on whoever had the most relevant information.” He added: “We wanted to invite everyone to help run the business and convey that each one of us was personally responsible for its success.”

In 1994, the two founders wrote a vision statement for what would become the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, or ZCoB (pronounced ZEE-cob). Instead of building delis wherever they could, they envisioned a dozen or so distinct, local businesses that would all be operating by 2009. Each would be founded and run by a passionate managing partner who would know the Zingerman’s culture and values, having gone through extensive in-house training, what they now call “the path to partnership.”

These partners would invest their own money, generally 10 to 15 percent of the initial investment, so they would have a stake in the success of the business. Mr. Saginaw and Mr. Weinzweig, who would contribute capital as well, hoped that by offering staff members an opportunity to move up within the company, they would recapture the start-up spirit they had initially enjoyed with the deli.

Not everyone liked the new vision. Within three years of its introduction, 80 percent of their managers had resigned. With increased opportunity comes increased responsibility, and many of the employees were accustomed to the deli’s relaxed environment and didn’t want to recapture the spirit (or workload) of a start-up. Disappointed with the departures, the founders went looking for people who shared the vision.

And they started rolling out new businesses: A bakery that had been started to make bread for the deli became Zingerman’s Bakehouse. A training and consulting business, ZingTrain, would share Zingerman’s strategies and philosophies, especially its emphasis on customer service and staff training.