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HALIIMAILE — Beverly Gannon never aspired to operate a restaurant, never even worked in one until opening Haliimaile General Store two decades ago — and that wasn’t supposed to be a restaurant.

Things, however, followed a logic of their own. This week, Gannon was named the Small Business Person of the Year for the state, thanks to the success of Haliimaile General Store, Joe’s Bar, Celebrations Catering and her position as corporate chef for Hawaiian Airlines.

She is the first business owner from Maui to win the state honor in at least a generation. As the Hawaii winner, Gannon will compete for the national Small Business Administration title of Small Business Person of the Year as part of a National Small Business Week April 21-25 in Washington.

Success, she says, came from giving the customers what they wanted. Looking back, she says, it may have been better that she didn’t approach the business from the conventional restaurateur’s perspective.

By being, as it were, forced to serve restaurant meals, she said, her perspective became, “What does my customer want?” rather than, “What’ll I give ’em?”

After she and her husband, Joe, moved to Maui, she established a reputation as a caterer (boboli crab dip was her signature dish), and she was casting about for a way to get her business “out of my kitchen.”

Maui Pineapple Co. also was feeling entrepreneurial, since its core business of canning pine was showing signs of weakness. At one time, Haliimaile had been a thriving village. Then, like so many plantation towns, it went to sleep.

Maui Pine offered the long-closed general store a way to kick-start some business activity in the town. Gannon envisaged a “take-out gourmet food shop,” not a restaurant.

Her idea was that customers would go out of their way to get good food to take home, but she didn’t hire servers and didn’t intend to operate a restaurant. There were a few tables, with about 30 chairs, so that if a customer wanted, he could unwrap his takeout meal and eat it on the spot.

On opening day, Gannon recalls, there were a hundred people at the door, and they expected sit-down meals.

That is how she became a restaurateur. For the first five years, she said, she had to plow back “every dime” into the business, and it was a decade before she saw significant profits.

Meanwhile, although her success never did lead to a wider commercial revival of Haliimaile, she became an increasingly significant employer in her own right. Today her enterprises employ 128 people.

That was something else she never planned.

“That weighs on your mind,” she said.

“You do think about” the workers she employs, Gannon said — all the people who are depending on the success of her decisions, all the children who are going to college because their parents are working.

She had come a long way from the young woman who just wanted to spend some time in London and figured that attending cooking school would induce her parents to help finance her adventure.

Besides her business success, Gannon has also established a reputation in the islands as one of the pioneers in the Hawaii regional cooking school.

In the early 1990s, Hawaiian Airlines asked a dozen well-known chefs, including Gannon, to create an in-flight menu for its first-class service.

Gannon says that was somewhat unwieldy, and the dozen was reduced to four and later to zero as the airline decided to partner with hotels to promote its meals.

Gannon then went back to Hawaiian and proposed that she repeat for coach passengers what had been done for the front of the planes: “Let me make coach food good,” she asked.

Hawaiian agreed. Gannon designs the meals — specifications even include the weight — although the cost is the key ingredient. Her restaurant does not prepare them.

Other winners in the annual SBA contest include:

• Pamela Tumpap, president of the Maui Chamber of Commerce, State Small Business Journalist of the Year. She also was named Small Business Journalist of the Year for Region IX (Hawaii, California, Nevada, Arizona). She was recognized for work in several media, including a weekly column on the Money Matters page of The Maui News.

• Neal Hasegawa of Hasegawa General Store, Family Owned Small Business of the Year in Maui County.

• Brennan Purtzer, founder of the Molokai Times newspaper, Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Maui County.

• Richard Kehoe, SCORE volunteer and consultant, Financial Services Champion of the Year in Maui County.

• Sky Barnhart Schual, Skywriting Journalism, Copywriting and Editing, Small Business Journalist of the Year in Maui County.

• Carole Kooy, owner of Kilakila Employment Services, Women in Business Champion of the Year in Maui County.

• WCIT Architecture Inc. won the Small Business of the Year award for Oahu. WCIT has many projects on Maui, such as Honua Kai.

The winners will be honored at a luncheon at Hilton Hawaiian Village on April 30.

For reservations, call (808) 526-1001 on Oahu or visit www.hwbc.org.

• Harry Eagar can be reached at heagar@mauinews.com.

 

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