Customer Reviews

Bread and Butter: What a Bunch of Bakers Taught Me About Business and Happiness

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Bread and Butter combines five perspectives, and you will get more from the book is you can keep them separate in your mind:

(1) An American business success story built around superb bakeries;

(2) How entrepreneurs can choose stability and steady progress instead of overwork and riding a high risk roller coaster;

(3) A new business model for franchising fairly simple operations;

(4) How the right work can center your life around your authentic self; and

(5) The author's search for his purpose in life.

The book has a twin tale to tell, the history of Great Harvest Bread Company and how Tom McMakin found himself through his connection to the company. Arriving at the company in 1993 on a fluke, Mr. McMakin and his wife began working on a variety of jobs. Rapidly being promoted, Mr. McMakin was soon the chief operating officer of the company. But he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life. Faced with that crossroads in 1999 by the founders, he chose to write this book.

Great Harvest is a somewhat loosely aligned network of over 140 independently owned and operated bakeries located in 34 states. The company's headquarters is based in the small town of Dillon, Montana near lots of good outdoor recreational sites. The business succeeds because of a unique approach to providing fresh bread (selecting the farms where the wheat is grown one-by-one and testing the wheat by baking bread with it, freshly stone grinding the wheat every morning in the bakery, using high quality ingredients, offering samples to all who enter, being friendly, and expressing the unique personality of each bakery's owners and the employees), the interchange of good ideas among those who operate and own the bakeries, and the quality of the people selected to be franchisees. It's a sort of small town, homey version of an Internet study group dedicated to advancing the art of creating and serving terrific, healthy baked goods in a friendly way.

The founders and the franchisees are just as likely to share ideas about meditation, exercise, and spirituality as they are about the latest bread recipe. "How do we create health and strength in our personal lives and in the communities in which we work?" The answer they have found is to "work first on yourself." A key element is to "create business or work that is truly in service of your life." As an example of this philosophy, those who work in the company punch a time clock . . . to help ensure that no one works more than forty hours a week. Extra work would just drain the joy from the work and the giving to customers and employees. Many new franchisees have been top employees in franchised stores.

Chances are you have never worked for or even heard about a business like this one. I think you will find it interesting. At times, it does come across a little like an infomercial for the chain or its franchising, but take that with just a little butter and honey on your hot slice of bread and you will be able to swallow it all right.

This book is very hard to grade. I think the company's franchising model is probably a step forward for those with reasonably simple businesses to operate. So that aspect is definitely a five-star effort. The description of the company's history is not well hung together, so although it is fascinating, the writing is about a three-star quality. The work on how to avoid excess risk in start-ups and unbalanced lives is outstanding, and is worth five-stars. The descriptions of how the right work can improve all of your life is told at about a three-star level. The author's personal history is very jumbled and disjointed, and comes across as a two-star exposition. The book's structure is certainly awkward, and the style is more than a little preachy. So Bread and Butter is somewhere between a three and a four star book as a work of business thinking, management practices, or spiritual living. The author and the people described have a lot of heart though, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and rounded up to four stars.

If you like your business books cut and dried like a professor would do them, you will not like this book. Go visit a Great Harvest store instead,and talk to the people you meet there.

After you finish this very interesting and unusual book, I suggest that you think about where your work is at odds with your values and natural preferences. Where is your work drawing you towards doing better than you would do otherwise? Where is the opposite taking place? How can you change how you do your work to make it integrate into your life better?

Open up to the potential of building on your uniqueness!

It's readily apparent to readers of Bread and Butter that Tom's words come from the heart, not just the head. The story of Great Harvest as well as Tom's business and spiritual awakening will melt your cynicism like a slathering of butter on hot whole wheat bread.

Great Harvest is a unique enterprise, as those of us who labor under other corporate regimes can attest. At its heart, Tom's book and Great Harvest itself is about goodness: be good to customers, the community, employees, the franchise system and your family, but most importantly, be good to yourself and you will reap the benefits, both in material and emotional reward.

Buy this book, you've never read anything quite like it.

I've spent my career thinking about how my life and work intersect. Bread and Butter is a book precisely about this question. In it Tom McMakin describes a philosophy of life and a philosophy of work that are one and the same and interviews many folks who have put this philosophy into practice. Regardless of whether or not you want to bake bread, if this question is important to you, this book is for you.

What can a bunch of bakers teach us about business and happiness? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Tom McMakin, like many of us, is seeking to integrate his drive for achievement with his sense of social conscience. Unlike most of us, he tells his story in a manner that is more than interesting -- it's compelling. Like the bread made by Great Harvest, the ingredients of this book are simple, but the product is substantial. Read this business book when you are away from your business.

This author tells us the story of his journey through the franchising/business of bread making world. Through his journey at the Great Harvest business, what Tom has learned, I have learned as well. Freedom Franchising can be one of the most successful entreprenuerial career options ever; offering financial success and personal happiness in one. I definitely recommend this book.

A must read! "Bread and Butter" is nothing short of inspirational! One can't help but feel the desire to open a Great Harvest Bread store after reading it. Tom McMakin sets a tone of disciplined, hard work that is rewarded through customer satisfaction and the sense of self-accomplishment. The seemingly lost relationship of business and community is renewed in his writings. The simple yet committed lifestyle of the Great Harvest family is infectious. Catch the bug!

The Great Harvest Bread Company is an unusual organization with an intriguing operating philosophy. Many groundbreaking innovations have been employed to create a model that works. If you've ever been a customer of a Great Harvest franchisee, you can understand my interest in learning more about the company and what makes it tick.

The author was employed as Chief Operating Officer for Great Harvest, so I anticipated that this book would be a great business book, full of insights into what makes this company so good. Well, that information is there, but it's polluted by pages of personal thoughts of the author's search for meaning. Two totally different themes-and books-have been combined into one. At times, I felt like I was in a jam session where the musicians were each doing their own thing without much concern about what others were doing. That kind of clashing of messages made this book a disappointment for me.

If you'd like to learn about Great Harvest's "freedom franchises" and how the company grew from one bakery to a network producing over $60 million a year with 140 stores in 35 states, you'll gain a lot from this book. The company was built on principles that attract a unique kind of franchisee. Little things like limiting work to just 40 hours a week and aggressively giving back to your community are explained to outsiders can begin to understand what drives these unusual businesspeople. It's a lifestyle thing.

If you'd like to share one man's experience as he struggles to find himself, that's here, too. Former Peace Corps volunteer Tom McMakin reveals, in my opinion, too much about himself. "I wonder about myself," he shares on page 83. "Too often I get wrapped up in my own little universe and pass on the negative stuff like some hot potato. Even worse, I catch myself on bad coffee days actually amplifying negativity that comes my way."

The personal stuff is woven throughout the book. It's irritating, but then it also explains something about the people who have chosen to be associated with Great Harvest. They don't think or act like you might expect mainstream retailers to act. These folks are different, and that's part of the message McMakin conveys in the words and the structure of his book.

Rocking back and forth between a great business story and one man's quest for meaning in life, I decided to back to the cover in an attempt to re-center myself on what this book is supposed to be. Ah! It's McMakin's personal story about what he gained from working for Great Harvest. That focus begins to forgive the approach and the continual insertion of personal feelings, questions, and musings.

The Great Harvest Bread Company, itself worthy of a fine story, is used by McMakin as a platform for congealing and sharing his life's message. Enlightening. Worth the read, but be sure to concentrate on what's fact and what's personal feeling. In fact, you may even want to read it twice-one time from each perspective.

In his down to earth way, Tom has shown us that kindness and gentleness is, in fact, a more powerful paradigm for doing business than what most for-profit companies in the world are doing. Thank you, Tom for your honesty, vulnerability and courage to bring this important book to American business culture.

The personal saga of the former COO of Great Harvest Bread Company. . .how he found truly meaningul-soul-satisfying work AND work/life balance. Written with an inspiring flair for story-telling and lots of morsels of wisdom to chew on. Very challenging, but in a realistic, down-to-earth, sort of way. (Most How-To\Self-Help books leave me feeling like I'm four marathons behind the eight ball! Not so, with Bread & Butter.) Add this one to your summer reading list.

This is one of the warmest, most relaxed approaches to business that I've ever read. I hope to see more books by Tom McMakin soon!