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

by Tom McMakin (Author) "I'm at 35,000 feet and beginning to drop..." (more)
Key Phrases: freedom franchise, franchise office, free slice, Great Harvest, Salt Lake, Great Falls (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
With more warmheartedness and life improvement strategies than a month's worth of Oprah (TV, book or magazine), McMakin's guide to working well and living better is a potent and memorable read. A one-time Peace Corps volunteer and searching soul with a penchant for the outdoors (he once hiked 1,000 miles across Africa on a whim), McMakin started working for the Great Harvest Bread Company in 1993 and is now the company's chief operating officer. Great Harvest is a 25-year-old company running 140 franchised bakeries in 40 states. Making sure that each bakery buys its wheat from an approved quality vendor and freshly grinds it every morning are among the few rules the company cares about, and it shows. Barely two pages in and your mouth is already watering for a thick slice of the soft wheat bread slathered with butter and honey. McMakin mixes his own history in the company with a detailed examination of how its founders a pair of lovable but tough-minded hippies named Laura and Paul Wakeman developed the business their way. The maxims about the advantages of slow growth, always paying employees more than similar jobs in the area and not letting work overshadow your life are immediately applicable to just about anybody who picks up the book. McMakin's featherlight touch and buoyant enthusiasm make for such an infectiously inspiring read, in fact, that each copy should come with a label: "Warning: May cause an uncontrollable urge to start your own business."

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In the 1970s, Laura and Pete Wakeman sold bread to earn money to attend Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. They later opened their own bakery in Great Falls, Montana, and began selectively franchising the operation. Since 1978, Great Harvest Bread Co. has grown to 140 stores with sales of $60 million a year. McMakin joined the company as its newsletter editor eight years ago and is now its chief operations officer. He explains why Great Harvest is a different kind of company. Franchisees buy into a lifestyle not just a business. The company's mission is to "bake phenomenal bread," but it also encourages employees to "be loose and have fun." Freedom and community are essential elements of the company philosophy. There is a "40-hour rule" that limits the time employees should spend on the job. McMakin tells how working at Great Harvest has changed his outlook and his life, and he offers encouragement and inspiration to others who are looking for simpler, more fulfilling lives. David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (June 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312265913
• ISBN-13: 978-0312265915
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,048,657 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Work as Progress Towards Your Ideal Life, September 7, 2001

By	Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

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!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life -- Keep it Simple, May 31, 2001

By	Brian Westnedge (Boulder, CO United States) - See all my reviews

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Work and the Meaning of Life, June 12, 2001

By A Customer

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.