This spring, Zip’s parts guru Jim Lewis celebrated 20 years of service to the company at its main production facility in New Hampton, Iowa. This significant milestone not only earned him a distinguished service award from the leadership team here but also a spot in our ‘Meet an Expert’ employee profile series.
The majority of Jim’s time at Zip’s has been spent as a Parts Technician in the shop, taking care of customers and making sure the production team had what it needed to keep the assembly line moving along. He served in that role for more than 17 years, “ordering everything from tires and engines to replacement parts for used trucks,” he explained.
Looking back over his past two decades at Zip’s, Jim said one of the most rewarding parts of his job was “finding the right part for the job at the right price.” He said his position in the shop came naturally to him, as he spent most of his career before Zip’s wrenching on cars and trucks, including owning a few semis and operating an automotive and radiator repair shop.
A native of New Hampton, Lewis joined Zip’s in May of 2006 on the same day as current Executive Vice President David Rottinghaus returned home to follow his parents and Zip’s owners, Paul and Margo Rottinghaus, into the family business. Jim said the sense of family was apparent from the beginning.
“I’ve always felt like a member of the Rottinghaus family here,” he said. “Paul and Margo treat you like one of their own, and the growth of their business is a reflection of that. When I first started here, there were only about 20 or so of us working at Zip’s. Now we have more than 200 employees. It’s just been amazing.”
Two and a half years ago, Jim left the hustle and bustle of the shop behind and switched gears for a quieter role in the Product Management Department at Zip’s. He now spends most of his day in front of a computer, performing quality control over the 150,000 parts and products available for sale at Zips.com.
Moving to a part-time consulting role, Jim now works closely with a team of Product Managers to verify the accuracy of the parts described in the online listings. “I still get to use my mechanical background and experience around cars and trucks to help correct errors or issues on products and filters on our website,” he noted.
While his time at Zip’s has slowed down a bit, the 69-year-old still likes things that go fast when he’s not at work, especially local dirt track racing and attending NASCAR events. Most notably, he made every Daytona 500 race from 1974 to 2003, and even moved to North Carolina in the mid-1980s to work on Dave Marcis’ NASCAR team.
“At that time, Helen Rae Smith from Roland, Iowa, sponsored Dave’s car, and I was friends with people working for her,” Jim explained. “I ended up working at Dave’s race shop, was on his pit crew and drove their car hauler coast to coast for races. I met my future wife in 1986, and we decided to move back to Iowa in 1987 to get married and have lived happily ever after.”
Besides racing, Jim and his wife, Lisa, of 37 years like to spend time together “glamping” in their motorhome and doting over their three grandchildren from two grown children: son, Dustin, and daughter, Jennifer, both of whom are also raising their family in New Hampton.
