Flour power: Maurice Jennings built Biscuitville by knowing his limits, which kept him rolling in the dough.

• Author: Kunkel, Karl
• Position: Restaurant chain operator

Before she died, Erma Jennings gave her grandson Maurice a choice: inherit the family farm or her biscuit recipe. He took the recipe, using it to launch Biscuitville Inc., a chain of restaurants. It says so in needlepoint at company headquarters in Graham and in each of the 43 restaurants.

Touching story. If only it were true.

Jennings cribbed the recipe from a flour sack. Or maybe it was a cookbook. He's not really sure. Wherever it came from, he tinkered with it until he found a taste and texture he liked. He has run his business much the same way, starting with a day-old-bread shop, then moving into pizza before settling into a breakfast-biscuit niche.

Since he opened the first Biscuitville in 1975, Jennings has nurtured it into a $30 million business with stores as far away as Lynchburg, Va. All but five, however, are within an hour's drive from headquarters. Biscuitville has managed to survive and grow, despite the addition of biscuit-based breakfast fare to the menus of fast-food Goliaths, most notably Hardee's and Bojangles' Hardee's, with 2,813 stores nationwide, has 58 on Biscuitville's turf. Bojangles' has 263 stores - 40 in Biscuitville.

Now the Jennings family biscuit recipe, and business, are passing to a new generation. Jennings' son, Burney, 35, took over as president and CEO in 1996. Jennings, 65, still controls 45% of the voting shares and can block any changes he doesn't like, but he spends as much time walking the fairways as running the company. He drops by his office a few times a week to check mail and offer advice. You could call him the mayor of Biscuitville.

His heir has ambitious expansion plans. In five years, Burney Jennings wants to build 27 more Biscuitvilles, a growth rate of more than 60%. Driving time to the farthest will extend to an hour and a half. Much of the growth will come in Winston-Salem, which already has eight Bojangles', and Raleigh, home to 12 Hardee's.

The growth carries risks. Attracting and keeping good help - always a struggle in the fast-food industry - is even tougher in a tight labor market. Expand too fast and you end up with new managers training newer ones, and quality plummets. Biscuitville plans to finance its growth internally, without help from franchising, which would spread the investment risk and responsibility for finding good help to franchisees.

And by accelerating its growth, Biscuitville becomes a bigger target. "Right now they're sort of a small, regional concept, and if...