Mother, wife, and energetic entrepreneur Sara Rogers stops for a moment in a meeting room in the Newcastle Realty offices in downtown Damariscotta. Rogers routinely juggles the demands two full-time careers and motherhood and makes it look easy. “I don’t idle well,” she said. (Sherwood Olin photo)
As someone who likes to work and who works a lot, Sara Rogers has developed a solution to the problem of time management. You don’t do one job and then do the other. You do them both at the same time.
On any given day, Rogers might be mowing a lawn for Jason Rogers LawnCare LLC, the landscaping business she owns with her husband, when she’ll get a message regarding a real estate issue that needs attention. Rogers, a licensed real estate broker working with Newcastle Realty, will stop what she’s doing, pull out her iPad, and keep working.
“The thing with being a Realtor is that I can do a lot of work from the truck,” Rogers said. “I can do a lot of stuff like I’m answering calls because I wear Air Pods all day long. Siri comes through, ‘So and So is calling you.’ I shut my weed whacker off. I’m answering calls. I’m doing real estate while I’m doing landscaping. It’s very multitasked. I have an iPad that I bring with me. I connect, I can write contracts; it’s all right there.”
Juggling family and multiple businesses can be a fearsome time commitment, but Rogers said its routine for her family of four. There is a never enough time in the day, but Rogers said she stays on top of her commitments by being on time and organized.
“This week is very, very packed,” she said on Monday, May 4. “I mean, weather plays a huge factor in our lives. Like this week, we have rain coming on Thursday, so we have to do four days of mowing. Fridays are for extra projects. So now we have to do three days of mowing, so those are three very long days. Then I juggle in my son’s baseball games. Real estate, I have that in between and then my daughter, I’m trying to catch her games because she’s volunteering as a coach for Little League softball, so I’m trying to make her games. It’s a lot of mixing, but I feel like my whole family, we just do it.”
Although the schedule can be hectic at times, Rogers said she prefers to be active. She takes time for herself when she can, but it helps that both of her primary jobs involve relationships with people and helping them solve problems.
“Because a lot of my jobs are helping other people, it’s fulfilling,” she said. “If I’m out on a showing and I’m with first time homebuyers, and they’re just starting out in their house journey; when we get to the closing table and they can settle their roots, it’s fulfilling in those ways. Same thing with (Rogers LawnCare). A lot of our customers are older, so we’re almost a sense of security for them that we show up every single week at the same day, the same time. We’re very regimented with our schedules, because I think people depend on that stability.”
In a way, Rogers married into the landscaping business. Her future husband, Jason Rogers, was already working for Stackhouse Landscaping when the couple met just before her 18th birthday. In few years, Jason would buy the mowing portion of the Stackhouse business and open Jason Rogers LawnCare in 2004.
When the children began arriving Kadence in 2007 and Logan in 2010 – Sara Rogers waited tables at night and stayed home during the day while Jason Rogers worked during the day and watched the kids at night. When Logan was old enough to begin kindergarten, Sara Rogers found a position in the health insurance division of Cheney Insurance in Damariscotta. A longstanding interest in real estate provided the motivation for her to obtain a real estate broker’s license, which she did in 2018.
The Cheney Insurance Agency is part of the Cheney Financial Group, a portfolio that includes Newcastle Realty.
“So I started as a sales agent, and then I worked up to an associate broker, and then I went and got my broker’s license,” Rogers said. “At the time, my daughter was in gymnastics up in Augusta. She was in competitive gymnastics, so four hours, four nights a week, I was in Augusta. I sat down at Panera Bread and did my course work there for three and a half hours. I sat there, drank coffee, ate dinner, and got my license.”
Although a license is not actually required to work in the industry, it does have benefits and Rogers said she felt motivated to make the most of the opportunity.
“My whole thought process was, if I did someday want to own my own brokerage,” she said. “I’ll have that underneath my belt, so it just made the most sense to me to get it all done and over with.”
Rogers said she loves working in real estate in part because of the connections she makes with her clients. As a lifelong Lincoln County resident, Rogers said it is also fulfilling to have be able to help her former classmates. People she went to Lincoln Academy with sometimes call, giving her a chance to catch up with old friends and help them achieve their goals, Rogers said.
A Nobleboro resident today, Rogers was raised in Jefferson, enjoying what she said was an ideal childhood. Years later she would be gratified to see her children engaging in the same activities the same way, she said.
“I had a great childhood,” she said. “I had the childhood where we would ride our bikes down the dirt road. I would play Wiffle ball with my neighbors. We played in the fields until dark. We walked to school. It was amazing.”
Having her children enjoy the same kind of activities in their childhood was important to her and extremely gratifying when it happened, Rogers said.
“They got to experience the same childhood, kind of, that I did,” she said. “They got to ride their bikes up and down my parents’ dirt road. They got to draw chalk on my parents’ driveway. All of the stuff that we got to do, they got to experience.”
In high school she had toyed with thoughts of moving away, exchanging the sounds of spring peepers for the bright city lights, but in 2000 when she was 16, her best friend died in a car crash in Massachusetts.
That tragedy combined with a series of similar crashes involving local students in the 2000-2001 school year fundamentally changed how Rogers thought about her hometown, she said. Instead of limiting, it felt reassuring.
“It just made the small town security feel better to me,” she said. “That was a time in my life where it was just a lot of things changed, and it works out for me now. I mean I love it here.”
On those rare occasions when she is not working, Rogers loves to be outside where at home, she tends to her flower gardens and her in laws have a camp on Damariscotta Lake, where she can usually be found when she has some downtime.
Rogers also loves spending time with her children. Becoming a parent helped her develop a profound sense of empathy for others and changed her taste in movies.
“When I became a mom, it made me more empathetic to other people and their situations,” she said. “Before I had kids, I could watch scary movies. I could watch dramatic movies. Well, now it’s like, I feel everything. It just opened up something in me that was maybe there all along, and it just made it bigger.”
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