Building Your Own Moat With Heather Brilliant

Below is another excerpt from my book, "Lighthouse: Women Leading the Way in Finance," that comes out in April 2020. To me, a lighthouse guides boats in the sea. Its light provides warning of potential hazards along with the comfort of not feeling alone in the vast ocean. My new book is a compilation of female lighthouses in finance: their education, career paths, and struggles. The variety of experience and expertise provides each reader with one or more lighthouses to guide their journey and make them not feel so alone. I am grateful to them for sharing their stories. It highlights many women in finance professions. 

Lighthouses in Heather’s Words “For the first five to eight years of my career, I benefited from the mentorship of Bill Andersen, former portfolio manager at Driehaus [Capital Management], where I worked. He is now the founding principal of Ranger International, and we stay in touch to this day. Bill was so helpful thinking through my different career moves. I trust and value his opinions. Joe Mansueto, founder and chairman of Morningstar, where I worked for almost 14 years, was also a lighthouse. He is such an inspiring leader because he had a vision for how he wanted to transform investing and was extremely successful at implementing his vision. He thought about the competitive advantage of the company he created and made decisions based on the long term—more so than many entrepreneurs. He did not do everything perfectly. He would be the first to admit that, which is another great quality of his. He has always been an accessible leader.”

Heather’s focus on serving the long-term interests of individual investors goes back a long way. In particular, Heather’s female family role models had a lot to do with her path in investing and leadership. Her mother, Peg, paved the way to her leadership aspirations. 

“I was fortunate to have a mother who had an MBA, which was unusual at the time. Her achievements empowered me to think, as a woman, I could do anything, and that I could take on any kind of career opportunity,” Heather said. 

Heather’s mother was unique in many ways. She was an entrepreneur and started several businesses. 

“Her most successful business was a video production company where she would film weddings or parties and edit the videos. This might sound basic in this day and age where everybody can take a video with their smartphone, but it was unusual back then,” she said.

Her grandmother, Helen, was a role model as an investor. Heather’s grandfather passed away at a young age, which left her grandmother to take over the family finances and manage her family of seven children. He left her with a nest egg. She began investing and quickly learned what it meant to be a savvy investor during a time when women rarely touched their own finances. She invested mainly in large-capitalization equities and real estate in a style similar to Warren Buffett. Her grandmother always had a small number of long-term investments, around 20 holdings, in mostly blue-chip stocks. Helen’s investing success was due to her temperament and long-term focus, and her sage investment abilities introduced Heather to the world of investing. Not all investors have the qualities to become successful at investing, like her grandmother, and Heather realized early in her career that the investment industry could do more to help people reach their financial goals. 

In addition to teaching her how to invest, Heather’s grandmother taught her the importance of asserting herself. One of her favorite stories is about her grandmother’s stockbroker. Heather said, “I’ll never forget when she told me that she had a broker who executed her trades. She trusted this guy, and she worked with him for years. One day, he made a trade without clearing it with her, and she fired him immediately. She was so angry. She said, ‘He did not think I could make the decision, and it's my money. He didn’t have the authority to make that decision on my behalf.’” Heather’s grandmother was decisive and confident and recognized that individual investors could benefit from taking an active role in managing their portfolios. 

Heather grew up in the Chicago area and stayed there through college and business school. After spending a year abroad in Spain, her interest in international markets began to grow. Her first few jobs as an analyst were focused on covering several sectors in the pharmaceutical and retail industries in international markets. Heather did not have a science background and never enjoyed science in school, but she did enjoy the challenge of analyzing the healthcare sector. 

“I had to get up to speed on all of the different parts of pharmaceutical and biotech treatments, not just the financial aspects, but how to analyze and think about different clinical trial results and how [a company could] be successful in the healthcare space,” she said. The plethora of sectors Heather covered helped her as she rose to a leadership role at Morningstar in 2005. It is also a great example of the benefits of learning a new industry, even when it stems from a topic that might not have been a passion during school. 

Before becoming CEO of Australasia for Morningstar, Heather was the Global Head of Equity and Credit Research. She and her team screened for “wide-moat” companies (those with strong competitive advantages) by looking first for quantitative evidence of possible moats like high-profit margins and return on equity. The analysts then evaluated the qualitative aspects of a company’s competitive advantage. 

Want more inspiration? Read an excerpt from "Lighthouse" about Vicki Saunders.