In other words, Great Harvest says to its bakery owners, Do whatever you want. Except in one respect, which makes all the difference: Every owner in the chain is encouraged to be part of Great Harvest's "learning community." Those who join (and most have) must share information, financial results, observations, and ideas. If asked questions, they must give answers. They must keep no secrets. They must, as McMakin describes it, "let things go." The result is what academics would call an intentionally created "complex adaptive system." A learning organization.
An organization, that is to say, that responded to Marian Cihacek's idea in the way that it does to any new information: it picked it up and took it for a ride.
How ideas spread informally
Scott Creevy, at his shop in Boulder, got exactly what he wanted from Baker for the Day. He turned over more than $2,000 to the charity that his customers had chosen by ballot to help -- a rape crisis center -- at a cost to his business of about $600 in ingredients and payroll, and his bakery benefited immediately from the novel and highly positive publicity.
When he told all of that to Sally Weissman, a Great Harvest franchisee in Minneapolis he kept in touch with, she decided to try the program herself. Same happy result. Weissman in turn told the story of her good experience to Linda Hanick, owner of the Great Harvest franchise in Kansas City, prompting Hanick to try the program, too. When it worked for Hanick, she not only spread the word informally to other bakery owners, just as Creevy and Weissman had done, but also brought it to a one-step-more-routinized forum: the Great Harvest marketing group, a committee consisting of five bakery owners and Lisa Allen, who was then the company's corporate marketing director. "This is a great idea," the group told Allen. "You should do materials to support it."
Allen agreed, thereby launching another chapter in the program's journey, and we'll get to that. First, however, what can we say had happened so far? Perhaps it looked unremarkable: folks called other folks, maybe exchanged E-mail, shared the usual shoptalk about things that worked and things that didn't. But what was really going on was more rare and profound. Great Harvest had found a way -- several ways, in fact -- to provide every bakery owner with access to a collection of diverse and custom-matched mentors.
"We had an epiphany a long time ago," says McMakin. "Owners profit more from each other's experiences than from the 'wisdom' of a central world headquarters."
That epiphany happened when founders Pete and Laura Wakeman had their first informal dealings with early franchisees, in the late 1970s, and intuitively began to manage them the way Great Harvest still does -- by means of shoptalk and gossip. Today, though, the learning community they seeded has grown in both size and sophistication.
At its simplest, the Wakemans' idea is to let people "create their own enterprises but stand on the shoulders of 130 existing owners," as McMakin puts it. To that end, Great Harvest both facilitates the casual swapping of ideas and maintains formal mechanisms that steer owners to the best sources of help.
For instance, Dillon staffers provide franchisees with a top 10 list, a rundown of the 10 best-performing bakeries in 14 statistical and financial categories -- from total sales (the biggest Great Harvest shop tops $1.3 million), net profits, and payroll, to costs for ingredients, utilities, promotions, and "continuing education." Got a problem controlling labor expenses at your store? Call up the bakery owners who've got that figured out and get their advice.
The top 10 list itself is a by-product of the Dillon-compiled Best Measures report, a composite snapshot of an "average" Great Harvest income statement and statistical analysis. The report gives bakery owners a benchmark for identifying their own stores' strengths and weaknesses, as well as data from something called the Numbers Club. To join the Numbers Club, which 85% of Great Harvest owners have done, owners agree to open their books not only to the parent company in Dillon but to the other 136 bakeries in the system. Among the things they get in return is a summary of how their fellow-franchisees are doing. That update, which is ranked by the stores' total sales figures, also reveals the owners' performance in every category across the board. That means franchisees can spot other owners whose situations might be similar to theirs (same size bakery and market, say, or same level of "owner's labor") -- and who appear to have found better solutions to problems. They can identify the perfectly useful peer -- and call him or her up.
Or bakery owners can forget the phone and, with the help of Travel Match, go to see the stores they think they can learn from. Designed to encourage just such on-site, in-person mentoring, the Travel Match program pays half the expense incurred by any Great Harvest employee -- whether owner or cashier -- to go anywhere as long as half a day is spent in a Great Harvest bakery. Go to Anchorage, Alaska, where Dirk Sisson and his wife, Barbara Hood, do terrific marketing. Visit Tiffani Van Orman in Idaho Falls, Idaho, to observe how she and her husband, John, succeed despite the small size of their local economy. Wherever you go, Great Harvest pays half.
