BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT:

Laurie Leggio has two missions in life, and they can both be found on the back of the key chain she hands to unwitting strangers on the street.

The message at the top of the pewter plate, which sports an illustration of an angel on the other side, reads, “An Angel at your door. Whatever door shall be opened may your Angel always be with you.”

Leggio, a Costa Mesa Realtor, is in the angel business — or, at least, she’d like to be. Since 2002, she’s been producing prayer angel figurines, key chains and plaques and donating them for free.

Her dream now is to sell her designs and her pending patent to an outside buyer who can market her angels worldwide.

The asking price? Leggio would like an opening bid of $10 million. After seeing her following grow over the last five years, she’s confident there’s a market for her products.

“If a man pays $10 million, he can make $100 million,” said Leggio, a Newport Beach resident. “It’s easy money.”

Leggio, a Realtor for 14 years, crafted her first angel five years ago after an image came to her in a dream.

She and her daughter had prayed together before going to bed, Leggio said, and in her dream she saw her daughter as an angel standing in a doorway filled with light.

Upon waking, Leggio sketched the image on a sheet of paper and took it to a foundry in Buena Park to cast it in pewter.

With her Realtor’s salary footing the bill, Leggio has produced thousands of prayer angels since then. She hands them out sometimes on a whim, giving them to people at the grocery store, the bus station, even houses she’s in the process of selling.

Other times, she donates loads of them to the military or to Alcoholics Anonymous.

More often than not, she gets a warm response.

Nathan Wright, the chief executive of the California Sound Studio in Lake Forest, met Leggio through a mutual friend and keeps a coffee mug full of the prayer angels at the studio’s front desk.

“We’ve probably passed out a few hundred,” he said. “I have one on my key chain. Everyone in my family has one on their key chain.”

Dawn Gelzon, the owner of An Angel Store in Glendora, stocks Leggio’s angels and sells them for $4.50 apiece.

Some of her best customers, she said, are medical practitioners who pass them on to patients.

“Those angels do something to people to make them want to give,” Gelzon said. “I don’t know if it’s the story behind them or the power of God. It’s just genuine.”

MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected].