Made from scratch: from brokering flour to peddling bread and pizza, this restaurant chain's founder has been rolling in the dough.

• Position: BOOK EXCERPT - Company overview

Now based in Greensboro, with 54 restaurants in North Carolina and Virginia, Biscuitville Inc. grew out of two bread stores that Maurice Jennings opened in Burlington 43 years ago this month. High Point lawyer and serial entrepreneur Phil Johnston chronicles the company's "recipe for success" in his new book. In the abridged chapter that follows, Biscuitville's founder tells how it came about.

My dad bought an interest in a bakery in Burlington in 1941, so we moved there from Greensboro. The bakery had a retail store and about a half-dozen wholesale routes. The first Christmas there I worked setting up carryout boxes. I could pretty much eat all of the bakery products I wanted. So while nobody paid much attention, I ate about three dozen doughnuts in one day. I did not eat another doughnut for two years.

I worked in the bakery a lot because help was so hard to get during the Second World War. I also did the usual adolescent things--played football and baseball, etc. I was never very good at either one. I'm lucky they kept me on the teams. When Charlie "Choo Choo" Justice was playing football for Carolina, I used to thumb to Chapel Hill for every game. I'd wait until they played The Star Spangled Banner and for the police to salute at attention, and then I would climb the fence and watch the game standing up inside. Most people stood up when Carolina was on offense anyway.

A bunch of us formed a boxing club called The Blue Streak Boxing Club. The name came from the fact that when we tried to print tickets for a boxing match in my basement there was a blue streak from the printer on the tickets. We staged matches in my basement. Lace Hall, who is in the Carolinas Boxing Hall of Fame, was our star. We didn't make much money. A local businessman had gotten the franchise for Tucker Torpedo automobiles and built a building. The Tucker Torpedo did not work out, so I rented his car-wash area and organized a group of us to wash cars on the weekends. I did make a little money out of that.

I remember always having a paper route from the time I was about 12. In fact, most of the time I had two routes. I delivered the Greensboro paper in the morning and the Burlington paper in the afternoon, both along a similar route. I had to get up at 5:30 a.m. for the morning route because the papers had to be delivered by 7 a.m. I would deliver every day and collect once a week. I caused quite a furor when I told my customers we were changing procedures and collecting once a month instead of once a week. A lot of my customers didn't want to pay once a month. My brother would help me on the route, especially when I was out of town.

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Dad's bakery did pretty well. However, he had a disagreement with his partner and sold his interest in 1948. He went into the brokerage business, selling bakery ingredients on commission. At that time, it took about two years to get started in the brokerage business; he suffered a stroke in 1950, two years after he started. He was 42 and never able to work after that. I was 15, my sister, Janice, was 11, and my brother, R.B. Jr., was 9. All of the money from the sale of the bakery had been spent. I worked in restaurants during that time because they were some of the few places that would hire young people. It was fairly easy to get a job. I also worked in a movie theater, clothing store and radio station and on a farm.

After my senior year in high school, I figured if I was going to college I'd better get on with it, I went to Elon College and talked with Dean Hook. He told me to come on up and we'd see how it worked out. So I did. About that time, Johnny Loy and I opened a short-order restaurant in a building owned by his dad. I don't remember what we named it. We had about 15 counter seats with counter service only. The health department closed us down because we did not keep the place clean. I never forgot that lesson.

I attended one quarter at Elon and joined the Air Force for various reasons. (In 1972 I enrolled in Elon College again for two years and took about every business course they offered. Later, I served on the board of trustees for 20 years. 1 retired in 1999. My son, Burney, graduated from Elon in 1985 and serves on the board now.) I was sent to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. From there I went into pilot training. I failed flight school from lack of interest and went to Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo. In Cheyenne we did troop shows, which was a lot of fun. From there I went to Far East Air Force Headquarters in Tokyo. I worked in the Office of Information Services, which handled media--radio, television and newspapers--for the bases. I wrote, produced and handled radio and television programs and wrote for the newspapers.

In 1955, after six months in Japan, I got a hardship discharge and came back home to try to save the family business. After his stroke, my dad could not talk, so my mother...