Closer Look: Heather Rogers
Heather Rogers was working at a local country club when a member called and asked her if she had ever thought about a career in insurance.
“To be honest, I told him no and that I knew nothing about insurance. Fast forward almost 14 years, and I’m fully emerged in insurance as my career,” she told Insurance Journal.
That phone conversation was with the current vice president of Hanckel-Citizens Insurance, an independent agency in Charlottesville, Va., where Rogers is now a commercial insurance producer.
“I didn’t choose a career in insurance,” she said. “Insurance chose me!”
Now Rogers says that her long-term goals in the industry include “becoming the person that when my name is mentioned, someone in the community says, ‘Yes, she helped me with our insurance and still is our agent today.'”
While protecting clients’ assets is a job Rogers takes seriously, she indicated ensuring everyone’s needs are covered has its humorous moments as well. She said the funniest question a client has ever asked her is, “Would you cover bird poop that stained the paint on my car?”
“And yes, it was a covered claim,” Rogers added.
Rogers joked that if she weren’t an insurance agent, she has often thought about owning and managing a restaurant in a tropical location. “Some friends and family of ours have decided that when we win the lottery or ‘make it big,’ we are going to open a fun restaurant,” she said.
Even as an insurance agent, Rogers has that tropical location on her mind. If she could paint her office any color, it would be “a light blue, turquoise tropical color.”
On a serious note, one hope she has is for agency management systems to become more up-to-date so there isn’t so much manual entry. “If insurance companies can pull so much information from a person’s name and VIN (vehicle identification number), then why can’t the agency management system do the same?” Rogers said.
– E. Blosfield