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The way Marshall Heller describes it, God played a major role in the success of her last business, the Mission City Coffee Roasting Company.
“The way the Lord led us is so amazing,” said Heller, who will discuss her experiences at Friday’s Peninsula Community Prayer Breakfast in Palo Alto.
A chance meeting with a coffee roaster at Draeger’s Market led to a productive association that helped Heller and her husband John open their business in 1992. The couple found the perfect location – a 100-year-old building along the Alameda in Santa Clara, abandoned after the 1989 earthquake. Its proximity to Santa Clara University provided a ready-made market.
“From the day we opened our doors, it seemed like the whole city of Santa Clara came in,” Heller said.
Its success led the Hellers to open two more locations, one on Great America Parkway in Santa Clara and the other in Cupertino, before selling the business last year.
Heller credited God for steering the couple in the direction of opening the coffee shop.
“We were looking to God to help us,” Heller said. “For us, it was looking to find something we could do – to use the skills and talents He had helped us develop.”
For 10 years, The Hellers had run a catering company that had left them “exhausted. We were looking for something else to do that wasn’t so strenuous.”
The Hellers hit on their coffee store at the time the “coffee craze” hit in the early 1990s.
Heller teaches a Tuesday evening bible study fellowship for about 250 women at Union Presbyterian Church in Los Altos.
Former San Francisco 49er Brent Jones, now a CBS sportscaster, is the headline speaker for Friday’s Peninsula Community Prayer Breakfast.
Straight Talk and the Los Altos Prayer Breakfast have scheduled the community prayer breakfast for 7 a.m., Friday, at Rickey’s Hyatt Hotel, 4219 El Camino Real, Palo Alto.
Reservations are required. Admission is $20. For reservations or more information, phone 323-8616.
