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At Home on the Ranch
From Silicon Valley to the Northern Californian mountains, entrepreneur, rancher, and mom of four Mary Heffernan has built a life on hard work and endless ideas
For Mary Heffernan, being an entrepreneur is a lifestyle, one that demands complete attention and commitment—and, sometimes, a willingness to sleep on the floor.
At age 44, she and her husband, Brian, run Five Marys Farms, a ranch in Siskiyou County, California, with free-range, pasture-raised Black Angus cattle, Berkshire hogs, and Navajo-Churro sheep. They also run an online and brick-and-mortar shop, a restaurant and bar, and a butchery; and they offer two online courses, teaching small business essentials to budding entrepreneurs and ranch skills to kids. Juggling all of this, while raising four daughters (all named Mary), may seem ambitious, but Heffernan has been on this journey all her life. She has had, in total, 19 to 20 businesses along the way.
“I always had this spark,” Heffernan said. “I was the oldest of four, and I was motivated by wanting my own money in the bank, and making my own decisions.” At age 9, she started a T-shirt stenciling business and had booths at craft fairs. At 13, she opened a backyard summer camp for 15 to 20 kids called Mary’s Fun Summer Camp, which she ran annually until she was 18. As a child, teen, and later college student looking for income to help pay her way through school, “I was just always looking for chances to start businesses,” she said. “I knew that with a lot of hard work, I could make an idea happen.”
Heffernan’s biggest inspiration was her grandfather. “He was a serial entrepreneur,” she recalled. “He always had a new idea on the horizon. He would drive me around picking up checks from his rental properties and looking at empty buildings. He would say, ‘What could we put in there? We could make it an ice cream shop, or a taco bar.’ He inspired me to realize, ‘Wow, you can just think up an idea and make it a business.’”