How ideas spread formally
Visits, phone calls, e-mail -- those were some of the ways Marian Cihacek's Baker for the Day idea spread from one Great Harvest shop to another. But like all the information and ideas percolating through the company, her idea traveled in other, more structured ways, too.
With Hanick and the other owners in Great Harvest's marketing group enthusiastic about the Baker for the Day program, the Dillon staff set to work producing materials -- flyers, clip art, templates for ads and banners, program how-tos, and so on -- to support it, distributing them through the Breadboard. That's what Great Harvest calls its internal Web site, which is accessible only to the company's employees.
The Breadboard site contains announcements ("Slicer for sale," "New baby in Dallas!"), discussion threads for ongoing electronic chats among owners on a wide variety of subjects (new recipes, notes on maintaining particular ovens, tips for Halloween promotions), articles (external press coverage, stories written by McMakin or other staffers, research reports by the Dillon crew or bakery owners about specific concerns or opportunities), and archives that enable owners to pull up ideas, advice, and information addressing any specific concern they're dealing with. Owners can use the archives, for instance, to find the resources to help them stage Baker for the Day, under the "Winning Hearts" heading (Great Harvest's label for marketing).
Dillon tracks the site's traffic to learn what bakery owners value most. "Right now the marketing area gets by far the most hits," says McMakin. "People love the clip art and other materials for making posters and flyers to support a product or campaign." But, he adds, it took some work to get owners to start using the Breadboard in the first place. "For a while we suspended the hard-copy newsletter version of the Breadboard so that people would break old habits and start going online," he says. The paper counterpart is soon to be reinstated.
An even more formal step is using the idea-spreading mechanism called Case Studies, a new initiative. Bakery owners or employees study a successful practice or a problem and then write up their findings using anecdotes and analyses, which are published in the Breadboard. Had Case Studies been around when Baker for the Day was evolving, the program might have become its own case study or part of a larger one covering programs for community giving.
This past summer a major study was done on store design and merchandising -- an attempt to bring together the best of what's been learned throughout the system and to get recommendations from professional designers about fresh ways to boost sales and profits through improved visual presentation. Upcoming studies will aim to learn not just from Great Harvest's own experiences but from looking at relevant goings-on outside the company, too. One study will take a bakery owner and a Dillon employee to Australia to learn from the well-developed fresh-bread retailing industry there; another will involve a trip to Denmark to research a new, more efficient type of oven.
So what happened to Baker for the Day? It traveled into the bloodstream of the entire Great Harvest system, pumped along by the Breadboard and all the company's other methods of capturing and communicating ideas -- printed newsletters, personal visit to bakeries by field reps from Dillon, and gatherings of owners at annual Great Harvest conferences and training sessions. Along the way it was steadily refined, as it continues to be. Successive bakery owners figured out nuances about how to select charity partners, what kinds of publicity draw the most attention, how best to involve the bakery's workforce, and more. A template is being developed, and a cadre of experienced guides can help newcomers understand it.
Of course, this being Great Harvest with all its libertarian zeal, franchisees are free to use the template or not -- or to use any part of it and deviate from there -- just as they choose. "The currency of innovation is use," says McMakin. "If a new idea's good, it gets adopted fast." If it's bad, it doesn't.
In this free marketplace of ideas, Marian Cihacek's little notion has passed the test. This year 40% of Great Harvest's 137 franchisees are planning Baker for the Day promotions of their own.
Michael Hopkins is executive editor of Inc.
To learn more about Great Harvest, read a Q&A with Pete Wakeman on managing to live well while managing an entrepreneurial company. You can also download a copy of Great Harvest's unusual franchise agreement and read inc.com's guide to franchising as a growth strategy.
The Company
Great Harvest Bread Co., headquartered in Dillon, Mont.
Business: Franchisor of retail bread bakeries that make soft-crust bread from Montana whole wheat that's freshly milled in each bakery
