The Gumption Guru

From hawking lemonade to managing personal fortunes, Heather Moir-Dangler has learned a lifetime of lessons about small business success

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BOOKENDS: Heather Moir-Dangler started on the entrepreneurial road at 5, selling lemonade. Above, Moir-Dangler helps her present-day clients at her financial and insurance services company.

At the age of 5, Heather Moir-Dangler decided to sell fresh-squeezed lemonade on a street in her neighborhood. She set up a card table, hung a sign noting the 2-cent price, and hoped for a passing car of parched patrons. This sounds typical, but the blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl was in the Philippines, living with her parents and two older brothers in the 1960s. She’d have to stay within view of their home, allowing her mom to peek through the window, since kidnappings near her private community weren’t an anomaly.

 

The kid just wanted to work.
 

The traits already evident in that 5-year-old street hawker — an entrepreneur’s soul, an incomprehension of the word “no,” and a love for money — have brought her many places since.
 

Today, the 46-year-old, Oahu-born dynamo is a financial advisor and owner of Moir Financial and Insurance Services, located in downtown Honolulu. Strictly talking money, her goal is to end the year at more than $1 million total gross revenue — and that’s just for 2008. Besides her natural knack for finance, her personal and business-related experiences from a youngster to an adult have given her the ability to not only relate to clients, but to share what she’s learned about succeeding in small business today.

Starting Low

Her father, Jim, was in the heavy machinery business. (Think Peterbilt trucks and John Deere tractors.) When Heather was 1 year old, he sold his business to Honolulu Ironworks, and snatched an opportunity to work for a division of the company in Manila. A few years later, as a way to make some dough of her own, the young Moir-Dangler starting selling lemonade in the hot afternoons. “I think I got mad at one time because there weren’t any customers and my mom said, ‘Well, you’re the one who wanted to do this,’ so it taught me to stay the course and have persistence,” says Moir-Dangler, who admits that she can be impatient.

 

When she was 8, her parents decided they would rather she grew up in the United States and the family moved to Eugene, Ore. Jim eventually started another heavy-equipment business. “At a very young age, I was always going to my dad and not necessarily asking how to make money, but telling him that I wanted a job,” she says. “But no one was going to hire an 11-year-old.” Dad offered her a summer position working five days a week mowing and weeding the lawn of his business complex. Favoritism — or allowance — wasn’t her father’s style, and she was paid minimum wage. “I hated it. The gloves, pulling weeds, going over this huge area. I ran over two sprinklers and I ended up breaking the lawn-mower,” she says, laughing.
 

When finished with her outside duties, she’d mop the floors, answer phones and by the next summer, she had earned the right to become an indoor office assistant. “There are things in life that you have an opportunity to do, maybe you might not totally like it at the time, or maybe it seems degrading or beneath you, yet today, I’m not embarrassed to do those things. I think that’s why I can get along with such a wide range of business people,” she says.
 

At 15 years old, when other teenagers were hanging out in malls, she collected enough savings — stored in a brass western wagon-shaped piggy bank — to buy a car from her father for $500. “He was ready to sell it, and said that if I wanted to buy it, he wasn’t going to discount it to me,” says Moir-Dangler. She painted it blue, threw some mag wheels on it, named it Junior, and sold it for $1,500. At 16, she used the profit as a down payment for her first new car: an orange-brown, almost lightning-colored Datsun B210. “I was thrilled. It was so rewarding because, yes, my parents helped me, but they didn’t do it for me,” she says.
 

She continued to work for her father’s company in the summers and, at 18, her attention to detail uncovered an embezzler within the company. “I was an assistant to the internal comptroller, so I would organize invoices, type out checks and answer phones,” she says. “But it was when I was doing filing that I found something odd. I was looking at one of the invoices and thought, ‘How come we are writing them another check? It’s showing that we paid them.’” It turned out that the internal comptroller was writing out checks and making them payable to cash. The further she looked, the more checks she found.
 

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