Eve Rogus, vice president of the Lighthouse Group, discusses her life story on today’s “Money, I’m Home!” Starting over after divorce, Eve fought and won against challenge after challenge on a personal quest to prove to the world that she would provide for her family and succeed at life. Listen today!

 

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00:07 Lynne Jarman-Johnson: Money, I’m Home! From Finance to Fitness. Welcome in, I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson, with Consumers Credit Union. And we love telling stories of success. And you know what? Sometimes, stories of success take a little while to get there, and we can learn so much from them. And our guest, I’m so honored to talk with Eve Rogus. She is vice president of Lighthouse Group. You’re in this beautiful power suit today, Eve.

00:31 Eve Rogus: [chuckle] Thank you, I’ve had meetings all day already, so…

00:34 LJJ: And got lots more.

00:35 ER: I’ve got lots more, lots more to do.

00:38 LJJ: So, we had the opportunity to share stories about ourselves at a recent event that really focused on leadership, women in leadership roles, and I was literally blown away by your story. And I asked if it would be okay if you would tell us, really, how you got to what you’re doing right now.

01:02 ER: Sure. I’m a little shy about it. It was a very… It was a wonderful time and a really difficult time in my life. I went through a divorce with three young children, and…

01:15 LJJ: How old were they at the time?

01:16 ER: They were three, six and eight, two boys and a girl. And that was in 1992, when a lot of women weren’t going through those types of things, and I lived in a very conservative community, and it was very difficult for me to do that, to go through it. I didn’t have a job then. Luckily, I had a college degree from Central Michigan University, which my parents…

01:36 LJJ: Chippewas!

01:37 ER: Chippewa, fire up, Chips. But at least I had that. And I started working.

01:44 LJJ: So, you had not been working.

01:45 ER: I had not been working, no. No job.

01:47 LJJ: And you’ve got three kids, and you wake up one morning and say, “Ah.”

01:52 ER: I went, “Ah.” I went to see an attorney, and it was a female attorney, and the female attorney essentially told me that I would live in poverty the rest of my life.

02:02 LJJ: What?

02:02 ER: Yeah. Yup, she told me I would live in poverty the rest of my life, that I had no chance to make it, and I should just go on assistance. Yeah, that happened, that actually happened. So, I decided to see a man instead, [chuckle] because…

02:16 LJJ: Oh, my goodness!

02:17 ER: She wasn’t helping me. And so, I changed attorneys and he said, “Well, the first thing you need to do is get a job. And network, and get out there, and get a job.” And so, I spent two weeks looking for the first thing that came along, honestly.

02:36 LJJ: At that juncture, how in the world do you even get up in the morning to think… You just had somebody tell you you’re not worth that.

02:45 ER: Exactly.

02:47 LJJ: Wow.

02:48 ER: Yeah, it was very, very hard. And my parents, they were still alive, my parents were working full-time, but did not live in this state, they lived in North Carolina. And they were the old-school kind of parents. “You made the decision to go through a divorce, you’re going to have to live with it,” type of thing, “so you’re going to need to work things out yourself. Call us if you have an emergency.”

03:14 LJJ: So, you wake up… In my mind, I can’t even imagine, after someone tells you, “Look, you’re not worth… ”

03:23 ER: Anything.

03:23 LJJ: Anything.

03:24 ER: “You’re going to have to go on assistance and you’re going to live in poverty the rest of your life, and you’re going to lose your home.” And so, I started looking for a job. That’s when I decided, “Okay, I’ve got to pull myself together.” And I had some really difficult times. There was a time I was driving down the highway and I thought I could just drive my car into the cement pillar and just be done. No, that was really hard, it was really hard. And I said… But I thought to myself, “I’ve got three children, three wonderful children, and they need me. Their father was not the right choice, and I take total responsibility for that,” and we just started going through our days. And luckily, I put the house up for sale, because my ex-husband left me there with the house, the mortgage, no job, three children.

04:16 LJJ: Nothing in the savings?

04:17 ER: Nothing in the savings at all. I had to sell the house.

04:19 LJJ: How did you even do one month?

04:21 ER: I basically had a little bit of… I had $500 in the savings… A little bit, but we were eating breakfast food at that time. So, we were eating oatmeal and cereal, and I relied on neighbors. But this is where the interesting part comes into play. I put the house up for sale and this lady knocked on my door the next day, and she said, “Hey, we’re really interested in looking at your home.” And she said, “Why are you selling your house?” And I just basically broke down and told her what was going on. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. I have no money, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” And she and her husband had a home in Zeeland, where I lived, in town, and they were trying to sell it and they wanted to buy our house. We had a house in a subdivision. And so, she swooped in with her family and literally, we traded houses. So, they bought our house and I bought their house, and she gave me the price of the house that I could afford, so she dropped her price…

05:31 LJJ: So that you could live…

05:32 ER: I could live in her house, so I could afford… We figured out how to finance the deal between us, and we did it on a for sale by owner. I hadn’t hired a realtor yet, and we had an attorney that we worked with, and we worked out the deal, where I was able to move into her home and her and her family moved into my home. And then, they helped me move everything as well, and took care of the kids, and helped me babysit as we went through that whole process.

06:02 LJJ: What an angel.

06:04 ER: She was… They were wonderful, and we stayed very close friends for many, many years. We would do meals together, she cooked meals for us, she gave me hand-me-down clothes for the kids, and all of that, so I ended up moving into their home.

06:22 LJJ: And so, part of this is the humbling moment when you say, “I need help.”

06:27 ER: Yeah.

06:28 LJJ: “And I’m going to accept that help.”

06:30 ER: Exactly. Yeah, and there’s… You wrote down, “what was your rock bottom point?” In one of the questions when I was looking at your questions and I was trying to decide whether or not I really wanted to tell you all of this, but that was my rock bottom moment, is that I always prided myself on being very self-sufficient and never needing help from anybody. And that was the point that I realized that I will never make it without people in my life and people to support me. And she was definitely… Her and her husband were definitely one of those couples that helped me tremendously during that time.

07:04 LJJ: So, you’re on the job hunt.

07:06 ER: I’m on the job hunt and I land two job offers, both of them in sales. One of them gave me a car allowance, so I took that job, and that happened to be working for Trinity Health Systems selling HMO plans in 1994. And that’s when they were new, so this… At that point, our state mandated that all employers that were above a certain size, had to, by law, offer an HMO as an option. And so, I went in and worked for Care Choices, and sold HMO plans even though I had no idea what HMO plans were. I was actually in radio before that. Before I started having kids, I sold radio time, but I took hiatus to have children and wasn’t working when I went through the divorce. But at least I had a little bit of sales background.

07:54 LJJ: Right. So you jump in.

07:55 ER: I jump in, I start selling HMO plans all over Grand Rapids, to small restaurants and small gas stations and mechanics. Groups that had five and 10 employees. I would walk in and talk to them about HMO plans and sell them a benefit plan for smaller groups. We used to underwrite those plans in our office. I actually worked with a medical doctor, and I would bring in a census of people and he would go through the whole list and say, “Okay, that one is good, that one’s good, that one is really unhealthy. We are not going to be able to write this.” And I would go back to the group, I would get a… Collect all of their medical records.

08:34 LJJ: Oh, my goodness.

08:35 ER: And go back and kind of sell the group to our medical director to get them on the plan. And we were trying to grow the plan so we tried to write as many care choices HMO groups as we could. I don’t know if you remember that…

08:46 LJJ: Oh, absolutely, I do.

08:47 ER: But, yeah, I worked there for…

08:48 LJJ: I think I actually had one once.

08:50 ER: Probably, and they were a really good plan, but they were… It was run by the Dominican Sisters, which we loved. But we always said, “There’s no margin if there isn’t any mercy. So please give us some mercy so we can have a margin.”

[laughter]

09:05 ER: Yeah.

09:05 LJJ: So, then you’re… At this juncture, you’re in a home, are you feeling like there’s a light? Like, there’s that light. Are your kids… How… Once you hit that spot, how do you… Every day is a challenge for a certain point until…

09:20 ER: Every day was a challenge. My parents did drive in every couple of months and they would buy shoes for the kids. I worked a second job on the weekends. My ex-husband miraculously showed back up again, still didn’t pay me child support, but he would take the kids every other weekend. And then I took a second job and I worked for a funeral home, taking death calls, as a second job, so I could just buy those little extra things that you would need for school, like backpacks, and the kids were growing.

09:54 LJJ: What you take for granted.

09:55 ER: Yeah. Yeah, but… And we were still eating breakfast three nights a week. And there was a time… Well, I still had to pay my mortgage, and there were a couple other things I did during that time period, as well. I used my credit card to charge groceries and then I would try to pay off as much of it as I could. And then I had before and after school daycare, and there’s another story behind that. I couldn’t afford daycare, so I tried to get them to school as close as I could and pick them up as quickly as I could after school, but Zeeland had a before and after school daycare program, and one of the directors was somebody that I taught Sunday school to five years prior to this.

10:40 ER: It’s totally coincidental. And so, I chatted with her and I said, “I can’t afford before and after school care. Can I negotiate with you? And can we come to an agreement on a price?” I said, “This is what the assistance is. And this is what your normal pay is for somebody not on assistance. But I should be qualifying for assistance. But I don’t want to take assistance because I was only making $25,000 a year, trying to raise three kids and pay mortgage. Can you give me this rate?” And so, she gave me that lower rate, and I was able to pay that lower rate through the whole time period that I was able to… While I was in this situation.

11:19 LJJ: So again, it’s the asking for help, which can be so difficult.

11:25 ER: It was difficult. It was demeaning. It was… But I felt like I had to survive, and I had a tremendous drive at that point. I just wanted to prove everybody wrong. I wanted to prove that attorney wrong, that I wasn’t going to fall into poverty and I wasn’t ever going to be poor again, and I was going to be able to give my kids a college education, I was going to be able to raise them appropriately and they were going to have the childhood that I imagined their childhood to be. At this point, we were living in a one-bathroom, three-bedroom house. I had a car with no heat, had no garage. I had to mow my own grass, make my meals, do all the things that single parents normally do all the time. It was just very difficult with three under the age of nine.

12:10 LJJ: And you’re so stressed. I mean, financial stress causes such damage to you as an individual, because it never goes away until you get out of it.

12:23 ER: Exactly. Exactly.

12:25 LJJ: So then, where does the change really start to happen? You obviously are very good at sales.

12:31 ER: Yeah, the change… My big break… My big break was that Priority Health noticed that I was selling these tiny little cases all over town, and somehow word got back to somebody at Priority Health, Denise Christy. You probably know Denise Christy.

12:45 LJJ: Oh, Sure. Yeah.

12:46 ER: She hired me at Priority Health. And it got back to her that there was this person, female, that was selling HMO plans, and it was just… Agents all over town were complaining because I was taking groups away from other agents, basically.

13:02 LJJ: Knocking it out of the park.

13:03 ER: Yeah. Yeah. So, and I was super excited about that and… So, Priority came knocking and they interviewed me, and Denise said, “So, this little… This plan, this Care Choices HMO plan, it’s a little… It’s a nuisance.” I said, “No, it’s not a nuisance. It’s the third largest Catholic owned health insurance plan in the country. It’s not a nuisance, and we’re coming after you, Priority Health.”

[chuckle]

13:28 ER: And she was like, “Are you kidding me?” I’m like, “I’m joking.”

[laughter]

13:34 ER: But we had a really good simpatico, and they ended up hiring me, but they doubled my salary, got another car allowance, thankfully, and had got my first cell phone and was introduced to email for the very first time. I had never used email. That was in 1996.

13:54 LJJ: Wow.

13:55 ER: And I had to relearn everything again because there were already women in the working world that were… Already had been working for 20 years, really, basically, and I hadn’t really been working that long.

14:06 LJJ: I don’t want you to have that just be a side story, because, I think, part of what happened in… And if I’m accurate based on what you had told me before, there was this point in time where you really wrote out a plan of what you wanted for a position. Like, you were bold.

14:23 ER: Yeah, absolutely.

14:24 LJJ: So, tell me a little bit about that.

14:25 ER: Yeah, absolutely. So, I… After working at Priority Health for a couple of years, I had another offer, job offer from a local insurance agency, Lighthouse Group, Lighthouse Insurance Group at the time. And they wanted me to develop their benefits program, their benefits department. Well, I had no management experience at all on my side. I’ve only been in the benefits world for barely four years. I’m still raising three kids, still have an absentee father, no family in state, no network really of friends because I was working full-time and trying to raise kids.

14:57 LJJ: You’re working and you’re… Raise the kids.

15:00 ER: And so, they came after me, but I was really happy at Priority Health. I loved Kim Horne, and she was somebody I worked with at Care Choices. She had moved over to Priority Health, and they’re very supportive of women working at that time. And I felt like I needed that… I needed that additional support. And so, I went to Lighthouse Group and I had a list of demands: Corner office, six weeks of vacation, this is my salary, I get another car… Just asked for the moon, basically, thinking that there’s no way they’re ever going to accept this because there’s just no way they’re ever going to accept it. So, they do…

[laughter]

15:43 LJJ: I just love that.

15:44 ER: Yeah. And well… And the other part of it was ownership, and that’s really where my life changed, is that I started asking for ownership in… At Lighthouse, at that time, during that negotiation and they agreed to do that even though they weren’t really happy about it. But they agreed to do that. So, I went back to Priority Health, told them, and they doubled my salary at Priority Health and offered me a lot of the same things. And again, my manager said, “You know it’s really harder than you think, Eve. It’s probably not for you. You probably should just stay here at Priority Health and just be happy with what you’re doing.”

16:22 LJJ: Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

16:23 ER: And never tell me no.

[chuckle]

16:26 ER: And never tell me, I can’t ever do something. So, I ended up leaving, and the rest is kind of history. Just have had a really great run at Lighthouse Insurance Group, and Lighthouse Group and our title company. And we grew from 15 people to 350 people and was part of that growth, and it was just an amazing, amazing career with a lot of great people at Lighthouse Insurance Group. I would be remiss in saying, I did not do it alone. I mean, there were so many great people there that are still there, that supported me and still support me to this day.

17:02 LJJ: When you look back, to me, as you grow in a career, part of what you wake up in the morning and are most proud of is your kids. I just… Your story resonates so much because of how focused you were on making sure your kids had the life that you knew that you wanted them to have. And yet, you truly were at a point where it could have gone a different way.

17:31 ER: It could have.

17:33 LJJ: Now, how are they?

17:34 ER: They’re amazing. They’re 28, 30 and 32. My oldest son is a teacher, he’s married, has his Master’s. My middle son is in insurance, chip off the old block there, that one. He works for MetLife and is doing really, really well there, and expecting his first child. And my youngest is 28, and my granddaughter started kindergarten today, and she works at Farmer’s Insurance and she’s doing a great job. She’s in subrogation there, which is a really, really tough job to be in. To go after money from other insurance carriers is not… You just don’t take that very lightly. But they’re all doing fantastic. And I have two step-daughters now too. I got married in-between all of that. And they’re wonderful, as well. So, we have a great family.

18:24 LJJ: I’ll tell you what, life has its ups and downs, but I think that your story is one that is so telling about… asking for help, being humble in a time when it is extremely hard to do that, and open and transparent.

18:44 ER: Yeah, humble is a big part of it. There’s… One of the things that our president and one of our owners has always taught me is that you try to always keep your ego in check, no matter what. And that’s kind of been our mantra at Lighthouse Insurance Group. We keep are egos in check, we do a good job, we work hard, we play hard, we support others. It’s the golden rule, “Do unto others what you want them to do to you.” That’s always been our underlying theme and that’s served me really well.

19:12 ER: That’s always been my value base too. I didn’t really realize that was my value base until I started working at Lighthouse Group. It became very clear to me that was very, very important to our company and in our owners, now, we have 30 owners in our company, and we share the wealth of our successes with our other employees and that’s something that’s been very special to all of us.

19:36 LJJ: Well, Eve, thank you for telling your story. I know that our listeners… It makes such a difference. And for all of you who are listening, if you’re in a bind financially, don’t be shy about it. Open up and let people help you, but truly open that door because the success stories that are out there are real. I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson, Money, I’m Home, with Consumers Credit Union. Aaron, thank you so much for your wonderful production skills. Eve, thank you again.

20:07 ER: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

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