Zach Zimmerly: The Story Behind ZIM FIT

I grew up in Pittsburgh and went to school in the Avonworth School District. I was always the small kid, and I don't mean a little undersized. I mean the kid people overlooked before they ever saw what he could do. When I weighed in my senior year, the scale said 135 pounds.

That number stuck with me for a long time, and looking back I'm glad it did. Being the small kid taught me early that nobody was going to hand me anything. If I wanted to be bigger, stronger, or taken seriously, I was going to have to go build it myself.

My parents and my grandparents were hard-working people, the kind who never had to talk about work ethic because they were too busy living it. My dad has a line he's said for as long as I can remember, and it's the closest thing my family has to a motto.

I took that personally, and I took it to the gym. I started lifting seriously around 18 and haven't stopped since. I didn't have genetics on my side and there was no shortcut, so I put in the time, a lot of it. The kid who weighed 135 pounds senior year weighs 215 today, and none of those 80 pounds came easy. Talent gets handed out unevenly, but effort is a choice anyone can make, and every rep was proof that my dad was right.

The gym is still where I go to think, to reset, and to remind myself what I'm capable of when I stop making excuses. That's where Zero FK'N Excuses really comes from. Long before it was printed on a tub, it was something I told myself.

After high school I went to Grove City College for engineering. On paper it made sense, but it wasn't me, and I figured that out pretty quickly. I dropped out.

People don't usually lead with the part where they dropped out. I'm telling it because it was the first time I picked the honest hard thing over the comfortable one. I enrolled at the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) to study fitness, the thing I actually cared about, and I did well there. Even so, something still felt off, like I was close to the right path without being on it yet.

For those years I was taking classes at CCAC and working two jobs at the same time, while living with my girlfriend at the time. Class, work, more work, gym, sleep, and then do it again. I didn't have a plan for where it was going. I just knew the Zimmerly rule still applied, so I kept outworking everyone around me and waited for a door to open.

The door turned out to be sales. Sprint offered me a job, but only part-time because of staffing, and I needed full-time hours to get by. I took it anyway, with zero sales experience, and did the one thing I knew how to do. I outworked the room. As a part-timer I finished with the top sales in the region, which is hard to do on full-time hours, and they gave me the full-time position.

The longer I stayed, the more I saw things that didn't sit right with me. We were pushed to put products in front of customers because they made the company money, not because they helped the person standing at the counter. I didn't have words for it back then, and I didn't even know I had core values. Looking back, that's exactly what it was. The job was asking me to be someone I wasn't.

I moved over to AT&T and did well there. I learned how to read people, how to listen, and how big companies actually run. I also learned that when an industry knows its customers don't have many places to go, it stops working very hard to earn them. People walked in needing real help, and the system rewarded selling over serving. I wanted to go out of my way for those customers, but the company only cared about what I sold them.

From there I went door to door, helping build a life insurance agency that wrote over $100K a year in business. I was in my early twenties and thought I was killing it, until I started seeing the same thing again: practices that put the sale ahead of the person, and a culture I couldn't stand behind. I went back to AT&T for another year, hoping it would feel different the second time. It didn't.

My whole sales career, I was selling things I didn't fully believe in. Every job had a different logo and the same problem. Promises got made to customers that the company couldn't keep, problems got passed around instead of owned, and titles got handed out instead of earned. I kept leaving for the same reason, and eventually it clicked that no employer was going to fix it for me. If I wanted to work for the company I kept looking for, I was going to have to build it.

By then I knew two things better than anything else: what it feels like to sell something you don't believe in, and pre-workout. Pre-workout has always been my favorite supplement. I'm a caffeine junkie, and I still remember my early days in the gym chugging whatever big-name tub was on the shelf. I loved it, and the longer I took it, the more the problems jumped out at me.

Powder clumped up in the tub, and the flavor changed from one tub to the next. Ingredients that should have been there were missing, and the ones that were there were often hidden behind proprietary blends so you couldn't see the dose. Flashy labels covered weak formulas, and too many brands cared more about marketing than what was actually in the scoop. I was honestly disappointed in the whole category, and I knew I could do it better. Pre-workout had the biggest gap and the clearest chance to stand out, so that's where I started.

I started ZIM FIT in 2018 under the name ZIM Fitness and began formulating our own pre-workout with a buddy of mine in 2019. This is where it all began:

ZIM FIT didn't start with investors or a partner writing checks. It started in a buddy's basement, where we ordered ingredients, bottles, and mixers wholesale and put every order together by hand. We call it the Basement Operation, and honestly, it was cleaner than a lot of full-scale facilities. Every scoop was measured on purpose. The standard existed before the brand name was even on a tub.

When we outgrew the basement we needed a real manufacturer, and that turned into the hardest lesson in our history. Our first manufacturer delivered a production run that didn't meet our standard. We fought it, but we didn't have the resources to take it further, so we ate the loss rather than ship something I wasn't proud of.

Eating that loss was awful. It hit me hard, and financially it almost put us out of business. I didn't think twice about the money, though, because it was never about the money. It was about the brand and doing the right thing for the people who trusted us. That moment locked in a rule I still run the company by: if it doesn't meet the standard, it doesn't ship, no matter what it costs us. We found a manufacturer who cares the way we do, and we've grown together ever since.

That's how our two pre-workouts came to be, both clinically dosed with fully transparent labels and no proprietary blends. With GET FKD high-stim pre-workout, I wanted a high-caffeine pre that delivers focus and drive without the downside, a fully loaded daily driver for people like me. GET PMPD low-stim pre-workout came from wanting a real low-stim option on the market, with full pump and performance dosing on 85mg of caffeine. Different days call for different tools, so we built both.

The tub has changed a lot since the basement, and the standard inside it never has. Here's how it evolved:

The people who backed us early made all of this possible. One of the first shops to take a chance on us was buying product straight out of my car. That story deserves its own post, so we gave it one.

Today I work in the trades as a plumber, 7 to 5, Monday through Friday. ZIM FIT gets the early mornings, the nights, and the weekends. It's still self-funded, with no outside investors and no venture money. Every dollar of growth comes from revenue we put back into the brand.

People sometimes assume the plumbing job and the supplement company are two separate lives, but they teach the same lesson. When I walk into someone's house, my job is to fix their problem, not to find something to sell them. If nothing needs fixing, I tell them that and I leave. That's how I always wanted to treat customers at the phone store and wasn't allowed to. Now I get to run a whole company that way.

The trades also keep me honest about who I'm building for. A lot of the people who buy ZIM FIT look like the guys I work with: up before the sun, working with their hands, and still finding time to train. They can spot a fake from a mile away. I'm not selling them a lifestyle, because I'm living the same one.

It still gets me when customers mention me by name. These are two of the reviews that remind me why the late nights are worth it.

Honestly, I'm pretty boring. I work out a lot. I play video games here and there, and I love food, so finding a good new spot to eat is one of my favorite things to do. Most of all, I love spending time with my fiancée. Between plumbing and ZIM FIT my weeks stay full, and my priorities are simple: business and family come first.

ZIM FIT started with just me. Today I have a team of people who live the same standard, and building that culture of hard-working people who push each other has been the best part of this whole thing. The vision hasn't changed since day one. I want a building and a warehouse with everyone under one roof, and I want ZIM FIT to be the first name people think of when they hear pre-workout. That's a goal we'll have to earn, and we're working on it every day.

I build ZIM FIT because I spent years inside companies that put money ahead of people, and I know exactly what that does to the customer on the other side of the counter. I wanted to build the opposite. In this company, helping people comes first, the label tells you the truth, problems get owned instead of passed around, and nothing gets handed out that wasn't earned.

I build it for the small kid who keeps getting told what he can't do, and for the guy working a 7-to-5 who still shows up to the gym at night. I build it for everyone who's been sold something that didn't deliver and is done putting up with it.

Mostly, I build it because my dad was right. I'm not the biggest guy, and I'm not the smartest guy in every room, but I won't be outworked on this. Every tub that leaves our hands has that behind it.

If that's the kind of company you want in your corner, I'd be proud to have you with us. Read what we stand for, try what we make, and if anything falls short of the standard, tell me directly. I read every message.