If you look at most franchises, they began when some smart person figured out a way to make some money in a business and then wrote that recipe down and began to invite others to copy what she or he had done. The great thing about these sorts of franchises is that they aren't very risky for the person joining the franchise. The business is, after all, proven. Most franchises of this variety require their owners to do things the headquarters way. That's because HQ knows it works and also because the franchisor is trying to build a national brand, the foundation of which is consistency.

The problem with this sort of franchise, if you're an entrepreneur-type, is that they aren't very much fun. All the good stuff about opening your own business - figuring out what you want to offer and what color the walls will be - aren't your decisions to make. They've already been made.

At the other end of things is starting up and running your own Mom and Pop shop. There you have all the freedom in the world to create this thing just the way you want, but you're flying solo, with no one else to lean on. That's why so many start-ups fail.

National Public Radio's All Things Considered recently produced a segment on us and our Freedom Franchise. Listen here*

Our initial fee for a first time bakery is currently $35,000 instead of $30,000 as expressed in this story. The NPR story also talks about a franchisee who generates over $600,000 in annual sales. As reported in our January 28, 2011, Franchise Disclosure Document, our franchisees' average system-wide sales for the period December 2009through November 2010 were $524,570 (bread companies open and operating for the 12-month period as of November 30, 2010). Of the 167 bread companies meeting this criterion, 61, or 36.5%, exceeded this average. A new franchisee's individual financial results may differ from these results.

We're trying to find that middle ground between the advantages of a traditional franchise and the fun of a let's-do-it-all-ourselves start-up. Our philosophy is simple. Let's create Mom and Pop whole-wheat bakeries where Mom and Pop know what the heck they're doing! We call it a Freedom Franchise.

Open a Great Harvest bakery and there aren't any rules on how to run your store. You do it your way but within the context of a community of like-minded and like-talented and like-spirited owners. When you open a Great Harvest bakery, you stand on the shoulders of 200 plus franchise owners and over thirty years of experience. We call this the Learning Community. With a Freedom Franchise, we're trying to combine the fun of doing it yourself with the quick learning that comes with being part of a community.

Read profiles of our current franchise owners, as well as posts about the practical application of the Freedom Franchise and the Learning Community concepts on The Bread Business Blog.

We just can't see doing franchising any other way. In franchising, you always worry about how you are renewing yourself. The greatness of that original business idea can be a trap that can lead you toward thinking the first way something was done is the best way. By connecting owners together into a Learning Community, we can profit from 200-odd minds and not overly rely on two or three headquarters types who are charged with research and development.

That's why we spend a huge part of our operating budget on things that cause us to connect one bakery owner with another and thereby cross-pollinate the best thinking in the system. A great recipe for trail bread invented in Minnesota flies across the franchise system because it is so tasty. A promo tip pioneered by Washington, D.C. area bakeries is quickly picked up in the Ohio River valley and the Northwest because it produces results. All this keeps us fresh and is, to our way of thinking, a key source of our competitive advantage.

You might be asking yourself, does this Freedom Franchise idea really work? If it's so great, why don't all franchises adopt this approach? The main reason is that it's more difficult to grow at a high rate of speed with this type of system. And that's OK with us.

We live in an age when fast growth is king. Everyone wants to become the world's next gazillionaire. That's not our goal. Don't get us wrong, we love to grow. When bakeries grow, it means more people are eating great bread. But we don't love growth so much that we let it blind us to what we want from life or endanger the thing we've already built. To us, there is a balance lying somewhere between stagnation and chaos called sustainable growth and that's what we're after.