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Back in the early 1980s, Frank Crail had a dream that many of us harbor in some small corner of our souls. A successful - if harried - tech entrepreneur in sunbaked Southern California, Crail yearned for a small town in the cool mountains where he and his wife could raise a big family and savor the simple life. So he moved to Durango, Colo. (pop. 15,000), and started looking around town for a way to make a living.

“I realized I had two options: a car wash or a chocolate store,” Crail recalls. “I’m not a car-wash kind of guy, so I opened the chocolate factory.”

Crail wasn’t exactly a candy man, either. He mixed his first batch of chocolate on a Ping-Pong table and got it all wrong. The nut clusters were as big as hockey pucks. The peanut-butter cups were a size D. But it turned out that folks were hankering for supersized sweets. Crowds gathered, and not just for the chocolate. Part of the fun was watching the new shopkeeper fumble around in his open kitchen.

Today Crail’s Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory is the largest U.S. chocolate retailer in terms of locations, surpassing Godiva and See’s. Rocky Mountain has 325 stores in 44 states and this year plans to open 40 more. Revenues rose 13 percent, to a record $31.6 million, in fiscal 2007. (Same-store revenues, however, were flat.) Profits climbed 17 percent, to an all-time high of $4.7 million, propelling the company to No. 80 on the FSB 100.

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