Soon Hagerty was not quite five years old when she learned that survival is a matter of motion. For twelve days she sat pressed among roughly forty people on a boat leaving Vietnam, her mother several months pregnant, the family traveling on faked Chinese passports toward a refugee camp in Indonesia where they would wait six months for a future. When they finally reached America, they carried three hundred dollars and nine mouths to feed, an uncle having saved five hundred dollars a month for four years cleaning offices to fund the paperwork that got them out. Decades later, Hagerty has launched a luxury PR firm, co-founded a global communications agency, opened a Vietnamese restaurant in northern Michigan, and built a foundation that hands female entrepreneurs fifty thousand dollars at a time. Ask her for the thread running through all of it and she offers something almost contrarian: confidence, she insists, is overrated.
That conviction was forged long before any boardroom, in the backyard of a Fresno home where her mother, homesick for the tastes she left behind, began growing Asian fruits and vegetables the local grocers had never bothered to stock. To make ends meet, she sold them door to door, which meant a young Soon sold them too. She still remembers the Tiffany-blue van, the three-hour drive from Fresno to San Jose every Wednesday, her parents knocking on grocery doors with the day’s offering of bitter melon and eggplant. Those farmers’ market mornings eventually became Mai’s Produce, a distribution warehouse her parents ran for forty years. The lesson was never simply to outwork the competition. “Hard work is table stakes,” Hagerty says. Her mother did not win by grinding harder than everyone in Fresno; she noticed a gap nobody else had seen and filled it. The ones who break through, Hagerty believes, see around corners others cannot.
She spent seven years at a PR agency handling luxury and automotive accounts like Lamborghini, rising to vice president, and for months she and her boss had discussed her taking over. Then, in the very meeting where the handoff was meant to happen, he got cold feet. Hagerty, who had never quit a job in her life, quit on the spot. She went home and cried for a full day until her mentor phoned with an order rather than comfort: “Stop your crying. You’re gonna start your own business.” Forty-eight hours later, she had. The habit that built from that rupture has become her operating system. She has trained her brain to meet every obstacle with a single question: what can I leverage from this? If there is no value to extract, there is at least a lesson, and a lesson is its own kind of return.
The restaurant came later, and it came from longing. Missing the pho she could not find after moving from Los Angeles to Traverse City, Hagerty partnered with chef Tony Vu to open The Good Bowl in 2018, a premium Vietnamese spot on East Front Street built around a quiet act of generosity: one dollar from every signature bowl goes to a charity the customer chooses at the counter. The model has since channeled more than one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars to local, national, and global causes. She had zero restaurant experience and treated that as information rather than shame. “Get rid of the ego,” she advises anyone entering an unfamiliar business, recalling how foreign the thin margins and unforgiving profit-and-loss math felt until she brought in help and studied other owners. The founders who last, she says, stay curious and disciplined enough to act on what they learn. Her warning is sharper: if the rate of growth on the outside outpaces the rate of growth on the inside, you are in trouble.
Her most expansive venture may be the one that gives money away. In 2023 she and her husband McKeel Hagerty, chief executive of the publicly traded Hagerty, co-founded Boundless Futures Foundation to level the funding field for women building businesses with a social conscience. What distinguishes it is restraint: the grants, now reaching up to fifty thousand dollars, come with no strings and no equity taken, a rarity in a sector that usually wants a piece of what it funds. By early 2026 the foundation had surpassed 1.3 million dollars across more than fifty female founders and mission-aligned nonprofits, pairing capital with the mentorship Hagerty considers the real differentiator.
Through all of it, she keeps returning to the distinction between courage and its counterfeit. “There’s no such thing as being fearless,” she says. “It’s courage. You do it despite fear.” Confidence, in her telling, is not a prerequisite but a byproduct, something earned only through action, the way a tennis player earns a serve. The most important person a founder will ever manage, she adds, is herself, which is why every morning begins with ten minutes of meditation and journaling before she touches a single device. Her thinking is sharper for it, her words clearer. For a woman who crossed an ocean before she could read, the discipline of starting each day still is its own small act of leaving the shore.
