Great Harvest is a unique business opportunity. People who achieve success with this bakery franchise often do not resemble a typical franchise owner. In fact, most franchise systems aren't interested in attracting the type of creative, entrepreneurial, progressive, generous people we'd like to find to own a Great Harvest bakery. These free-thinking personality types just cause too many problems in a typical command and control style franchise. At Great Harvest, we love to see an idea, or a person, grow and thrive in an atmosphere of true freedom. To top it off, this a fun group to hang out with!

In the application review process, we want to learn about you and your reasons for wanting to own a bakery. The right reasons for wanting a bakery are things like wanting to be your own boss, being tired of traveling, wanting your family to work together, or just loving the bread and caring about quality. It can be as simple as seeing a Great Harvest bakery, talking with the owners, and just plain wanting the same thing for yourself.

Based on thirty years of experience, we have established some minimum financial requirements. We truly want you to succeed and we take these minimums seriously given that we've seen good businesses close their doors because the owners were under-capitalized. The requirements are:

• We like to see a minimum of 30% ($70,000-$75,000) of the average total cost of opening a bakery, which is currently $250,466, as liquid unencumbered cash. We do not view retirement accounts as liquid.


• In addition to this amount, you will need to have the resources and/or ability to finance the balance needed to open the bakery. Please keep in mind that banks typically regard 75% or 80% of the equity you have in your home as collateral.


• You will also want to consider personal living expenses from the time you quit your job to move or complete the bakery start-up work. On opening day, you should still have at least $10,000 in cash reserves as a cushion for the first few months. This is a very conservative amount for most people.


• People are often unrealistic about where the start-up money, plus personal expenses, will come from. A substantial portion should be your own cash. After signing a Franchise Agreement, we will help you develop a business plan for a bank, but we don’t like starting bakeries where the bank is carrying the majority of the initial investment.


• Start-up costs are outlined in Step 2

People often ask, "How can we expect to succeed when we don't know anything about baking? I was trained to be an engineer!" This always strikes us as funny because the Great Harvest system is so different from a regular bakery, as most people think of it. To teach somebody who had experience would be much more difficult than starting with a clean slate.

Over the years, we've learned ways to systematize every aspect of the business so it can be easily taught to new employees, or new owners. And our training program now is much more complete than it was for the earlier bakeries. With each go-round, we learn more ourselves. The first franchise was taught just the recipe. Now the recipe is less than a tenth of what we teach.

Sometimes we receive applications from people looking for a passive investment or a part-time project. We're always thankful that these people are impressed enough with Great Harvest to apply, but we have to let them know this isn't the franchise for them. We're looking for owner/operators, not investors. Running a bakery is a physically and mentally-demanding prospect. Some of the strongest bakeries are run by couples who can divide the work and match tasks to individual strengths. However, we also have some very impressive owners in this system who can run a bakery single-handedly.

The best locations are often chosen by local people. We contribute the knowledge of bakeries to their knowledge of the town, and we do well. We do have strong bakeries where the owners were not local. But truly local people have a feel for the town that no amount of careful study by outsiders can substitute.

Another big factor: Local people very often hang onto their jobs while location and equipment hunting and, as a result, don't feel the time pressure to be open by a certain deadline. They may actually save some money, instead of watching it gradually dwindle to living expenses while unemployed and trying to get settled in.

Patience is often a big factor in getting the right location. It's important to recognize the high cost of self-imposed deadlines during start-up, and to put yourself in a position where patience can come naturally. If you're not local to the area where you are applying, that's OK. We'll just want to understand in the application review process your plans to overcome this challenge.

Great Harvest is probably not a good fit for you if you are looking to "be in on the ground floor" of a hot concept, wanting to open a bunch of stores run by managers, wanting a return-on-investment that will amaze your friends, etc. You will potentially be surprised if you go into this thing counting on doing as well as the most successful bakeries. Our job is to remove as much of the risk for you as we possibly can, to teach you everything we've learned the hard way so you won't have to.

But it still takes an entrepreneur's spirit to start a Great Harvest bakery—yours will be a totally new business, in a totally new town, with different people running it, and you just can't know for sure how you're going to do. You can guess, but you can't know until you open your doors.

This brings up something else that we might as well cover here. Your biggest question—and we can't blame you—is usually "how much money will I make?" Profits are important for every business. We've never seen a "strong and exciting bakery" that wasn't profitable.

However, it's a question that, in the strict sense, we can't answer. The best we can do is to point you toward what other bakeries have done in the past. These are what the federal government calls "financial performance representations" and are strictly regulated. We include this franchise data as part of the Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD) which we will send you once we both decide we are more serious about opening a bakery. We have one of the most detailed financial performance representations in our FDD of any franchise system because it's important to us to give you the best answer we can to your biggest question.

Some of the best bakeries were started by people who originally called us years before they signed an agreement, kept the idea in mind, saved their money, and eventually did it. We're in this job for the long haul. Because of this, we take every call seriously, even if we're all signed up for the year or you don't have enough money yet. People's situations change. But we take an instant liking to anyone with the dream of working for themselves and ideals about quality. People who hang onto those ideas always get there. Whether you end up with Great Harvest or not, if we can get you fired up toward that dream, it's worth it to us. Any questions at all, just call.

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