When you walk into Gary Zimmerman Jr.’s Creative Business Interiors Inc. office building, you’re taken on a journey.
The reception area features a ceiling with about a one foot sub-ceiling, or “cloud.” The contemporary reception desk has diagonal shapes of wood and stone. It’s here that the journey truly begins.
“We’re a working showroom,” says Zimmerman. “Each of our rooms has been customized to our personnel to best suit their work environment and serves as a model of what we can do.”
The company’s boardroom is glass-enclosed to create an “open” feeling for communication. Desk shelves stop a few inches sort of connecting to either side of the wall.
“Traditional shelving can be boring,” he says. The handles on drawers are even customized to give a feng shui ebb-and-flow to each room.
Framed in the boardroom are trophy designs that Creative Business Interiors completed for U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl’s office and the Wisconsin Energy Conversation Corp.
Creative Business Interiors, a 16-year-old, West Allis-based interior design company, has recently re-branded itself. Its new tag is “Experts at Work,” and appropriately so. The 100-employee company is deft at its design and enthusiastic about its other offerings. Creative Business Interiors is a proprietor distributor of Pennsylvania-based Knoll Inc., which creates office furnishings. Creative Business Interiors draws from more than 300 other distributors to create its masterpieces. Last year, Zimmerman’s company grew 16 percent and is on pace to do so again this year.
Ergonomics is something Creative Business Interiors takes seriously, Zimmerman said.
“Ergonomics isn’t even a buzzword anymore,” he said. “It’s the standard.”
The standard comes in to play because of the number of businesses that have gone or are going “green.” Many of the products Creative Interiors deals with are recycled. Energy efficiency is kept in mind with each design effort.
In addition to the work that Zimmerman does for his clients, such as American Family Insurance, he’s an outspoken small business advocate. For his work for the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC), Council of Small Business Executives (COSBE) and CEOs of Growing Businesses, Zimmerman has been named this year’s recipient of the Small Business Times Regional Spirit Award.
Zimmerman sits on the board of directors for the MMAC. He served as the chairman of COSBE and sits on the steering committee of the CEOs of Growing Businesses.
“It’s important work because of the networking and contacts,” Zimmerman said. “Through that, I realized they have a mission. Promoting business and a healthy business environment is profitable for all of us.”
Zimmerman and the MMAC seek to expand business owners’ thinking from their own backyards to the entire region.
“I feel it’s important for business in southeastern Wisconsin to take care of themselves locally,” he said.
Zimmerman said small-business owners, individually, don’t have enough clout with policy makers. But united through the MMAC, they have a powerful voice, he said.
“Gary is one of the most awesome volunteers I’ve encountered at the MMAC in the last 14 years,” said Mary Steinbrecher of the MMAC.
Things ran really well at COSBE under Zimmerman’s leadership, said Arvid “Dick” Tillmar, a partner with Diversified Insurance Services Inc. and a board member with COSBE since 1993.
“There’s really only three resources anybody has, money, time and the ability to influence people for the cause,” Tillmar said. “Those are three resources I always look to. Personally, I would say that’s his biggest advantage as to why he wants to get involved. He can rally people around him.”
Address: 11217 W. Becher St., Milwaukee
Web site: www.CreativeBusinessInteriors.com
Industry: Commercial interiors
Revenue: $17 million
Employees: 70 in the Milwaukee office, 10 in Madison office
