Linda Kamm sells the same tropical fruits she cultivates in her Florida garden: papaya, mango, orange, and lemon. She's also got star fruit, grapefruit, and lime. But there's another parallel between her garden and her company. This is hurricane country, where all of the hard work that goes into weeding, pruning, and fertilizing can be blown away in a matter of seconds. And that's exactly what happened to Kamm's business eight years ago. Only it wasn't a natural disaster that swept it all away. It was her then-partner who more or less stole her first $4 million fruit bar company out from under her.

Here's how she got started, the first time. "I was depressed," Kamm recalls. "I didn't like the people I was working with and I didn't see anything out there I believed in." A Texan raised in Georgia, Kamm majored in sports broadcasting at the University of Georgia, never taking a single business course ("I was afraid I'd get caught in a secretarial role"). She was in sales, peddling a TV guide and then frozen desserts, when she decided to put her hopes in writing. "That forces you to say, 'I'm making this a goal,' and that can cause things to happen," she says. "I wrote that I'd like to own a house, and to start my own business."

Writing it down was the catalyst Kamm needed to take action on an observation she'd made. She'd noticed that health-conscious women were being virtually ignored by the ice-cream business. "The biggest consumers of fruit bars are women in their 20s through their 50s who read wrappers," she explains. Yet the places they patronized in the mid-'80s — produce markets, health clubs, and health-food stores — weren't carrying healthy frozen dessert products.

"Two weeks later, I was sitting on a friend's balcony griping that I couldn't do the house or the business, that there was no money. And she suddenly said, 'Linda, I'll loan you the money.'" Thus, Kamm's first company was born in 1986.

In no time, she purchased and then mortgaged her new condo to raise start-up capital. She found a fruit bar manufacturer and set up a nationwide network of distributors. Business boomed. Thanks to her sales savvy, production outgrew a garage and moved into a plant. But a hurricane was brewing.

Kamm didn't own the formula or the trademark — the manufacturer did. "And then he got greedy," she says. "He started getting my bigger distributors to buy directly from the plant, even though my contract said he couldn't." By 1992, Kamm had been cut out of the business entirely and the matter ended up in court. Meanwhile, "overnight, I had no business," she says.

The result was some hard-won wisdom: "I realized the most important things needed to be successful long-term were, one, I needed control of the product, and, two, I needed to run a franchise, not a distributorship." She reasoned that with franchisees, the relationships would be far closer. Kamm, who was just 31 at the time, figured she could build deep loyalty across the franchise by providing good support, training, and ongoing assistance.

So she set out to do the fruit bar thing all over again, only the right way. "The hardest time in my life was starting over," she says. "I stood to lose everything. I told the former employees who were depending on me, 'Hang in there, I'll get going again.'"

Her genuine belief in the goodness of the product kept her going as she concocted a new formula, borrowed $100,000 from a distributor (and still more from friends and family), and mortgaged her home yet again.