The son rises in the yeast.

• Author: Struod, Lisa M.
• Position: William C. Burkhardt's career and achievements

As William C. Burkhardt flipped through the pages of Fortune six years ago, a glossy ad for a Peugeot 505 shifted his imagination into overdrive. The next morning, the president and CEO of Bahlsen Inc. withdrew $18,000 from his personal savings and bought a black 505, loaded with options and a rich, taupe leather interior.

Twelve months later when his employees gathered at the Raleigh Marriott for a year-end celebration, the sleek car - all polished and detailed - was parked center stage on the ballroom floor, Burkhardt's gift for helping him clinch his corporate goals: $50 million in sales and $5 million in profits to expand the Cary-based cookie and cracker bakery.

In a banquet that sizzled with emotion, Jim Valvano, then head basketball coach at N.C. State University, spun a chicken-wire basket and pulled out a number. The winner was a 53-year-old woman who has worked in cookie packaging for 18 years. So confident was Omega Smith that she had her son posted by the phone: He'd have to fetch her because she didn't know how to drive a five-speed.

"I have always felt like if you take care of people that the profit will take care of itself," Burkhardt says. "You work closely with them, let them understand where the business is going, then they will pull together, and the other things will fall into place."

For the past 11 years, the hard-charging Burkhardt has driven home this philosophy. Since he joined German-owned Bahlsen as head of North American operations in 1980, sales have mushroomed from $25 million to $136 million. And since the flamboyant, 53-year-old executive hit town, his brand of management has been imprinted on organizations from the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce to the Triangle Transit Authority.

Not bad for a guy who was driving around inner-city streets in Washington, D.C., 31 years ago, peddling bread and cakes from the back of his Wonder Bread truck.

Perhaps it was genes from two generations of bakers that programmed Burkhardt for a career in the bakery business. His grandfather, a baker from a small town near Stuttgart, Germany, immigrated around 1890 and founded Laurel Biscuit Co., a regional cookie and cracker company in Dayton, Ohio. After his death in 1925, the company was sold.

Burkhardt's father continued the tradition when he moved his family to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 1952 and purchased a small retail bakery. He put his 14-year-old son to work after school, first delivering baked goods on his bicycle, then learning to bake. "I walked through the door, and he told me to call him Chris from now on in the bakery, not Father or Dad," Burkhardt recalls. From the minute I walked in there, I loved it. I just knew that was what I wanted to do.' ut the father-son team was short-lived. A year after buying the business, his dad shut the doors, traded his two company trucks for a 1948 Ford station wagon and took to the road six or eight weeks...