Heather Mayo was a sophomore in college when she saw a television show about abused children in child care, prompting her to change her major and career path to embark on making a difference in family lives.
“I wanted to create a high-quality, very educated, early childhood school, and that’s kind of what started it all,” Mayo said.
While working as a nanny during college, she fondly remembers a mother calling her children “sweet peas,” which struck a chord.
So, when it came time to open her child care center in East Greenwich in 1996, she named it Sweet Peas Village. The business, a privately owned corporation, serves children from 6 weeks to 5 years old in 22 classrooms.
Sweet Peas sits on a 7-acre property resembling a Christmas village, and employs 45 teachers who care for 230 children, from infants through kindergartners, including preschool and pre-kindergarten. An additional two classrooms for infants are being built.
The school had humble beginnings, operating inside a traditional-style farmhouse converted into a six-classroom schoolhouse. Mayo would later convert a barn on the property into more classrooms for expansion of the operation.
There were challenges as she built the business, but her family played a pivotal role by providing support.
“I couldn’t have done this without my parents,” she said, noting that she had to gut the farmhouse to accommodate her plans. “It was a little daunting because I kept running into small roadblocks that kept costing me more money.”
Things were tight back then, so Mayo rented space in the schoolhouse to tenants to help pay the mortgage. She also enlisted her mother and her grandmother, and her best friend volunteered, to pitch in to help.
But the early pangs of anxiety, worrying if anyone would show up to enroll their children, gave way to an onslaught of enrollments.
“I remember sitting in the kitchen area watching the cars go by,” she said.
Her first customer, Kathy-Jo Payette, head of human resources at CVS Health Corp. at the time, enrolled her two boys.
“She told her friends that I had opened, and it became a word-of-mouth business,” Mayo said. “So, the six children I had turned into 12, and then 12 turned into 24 pretty quickly, and so on. I think I exceeded my five-year goal within six months of opening my doors.”
The school had a three-year waiting list after the second year of being open, and the need for expansion. After five years in operation, Mayo went back to the bank and got another loan to build the annex addition.
Things didn’t go smoothly, as construction delays caused her to adapt and rent a trailer to serve as a makeshift kindergarten classroom.
“Every year brings different challenges,” she said. “You always learn from your biggest mistakes.”
Mayo also operated a private elementary school for seven years before realizing that it couldn’t succeed because of competition from the public school system.
So she turned her attention back to her original dream, creating a foundation for children to succeed in a fun, inviting, educational setting.
“When you’re having a bad day, you walk into Sweet Peas and the children hug you and love you. It’s unconditional,” she said. “They make everything better.”
OWNER: Heather Mayo
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Child care center
LOCATION: 836 Middle Road, East Greenwich
EMPLOYEES: 55
YEAR FOUNDED: 1996
ANNUAL REVENUE: WND
