As many workers leave their jobs and rethink life priorities during the pandemic, Mainebiz checked in with five Mainers who have reinvented themselves professionally to find out how the COVID economic upheaval is playing out in Maine.
Get Instant Access to This Article
Subscribe to Mainebiz and get immediate access to all of our subscriber-only content and much more.
- Critical Maine business news updated daily.
- Immediate access to all subscriber-only content on our website.
- Bi-weekly print or digital editions of our award-winning publication.
- Special bonus issues like the Mainebiz Book of Lists.
- Exclusive ticket prize draws for our in-person events.
Click here to purchase a paywall bypass link for this article.
As many workers leave their jobs and rethink life priorities during the pandemic, Mainebiz checked in with five Mainers who have reinvented themselves professionally to find out how the COVID economic upheaval is playing out in Maine. Stories range from a lawyer who took six months off to experience life as a national park ranger, to an engineer who “boomeranged” back to Maine from the Pacific Northwest. Their experiences are indicative of workforce dynamics and economic forces that may be forever changed by the pandemic.
Birthing a new business
Molly Brubaker birthed a baby — and a business focused on fitness for new parents — in 2021.
Though well-versed in “side hustles” from dog-walking to voiceovers, the 34-year-old’s unexpected path to business ownership came about after she was laid off from a job in marketing and business development last year at the start of the pandemic.
Pregnant at the time and uncertain of her professional future, Brubaker worked out regularly throughout her pregnancy to help prepare for childbirth and the physical demands of motherhood before giving birth to daughter Ella in January 2021.
Brubaker — a certified instructor in both group fitness and pregnancy and postpartum fitness — began offering virtual and in-person full-body workouts for pregnant moms and new parents in July 2021 via a new business she branded as Baby Booty.
While parents are encouraged to do the workouts toting their infants in wrap carriers worn on the back or front, that’s not a requirement.
“Throughout pregnancy, I was using Pilates, barre and spinning to keep up my mental health, but it’s not something I ever thought I would do as a business or profession,” she says. “I just kind of jumped into it.”
Brubaker is both the business owner and sole instructor, teaching courses live on Zoom from her home in Cumberland, offering on-demand recordings, as well as teaching live courses at a studio in downtown Portland. She estimates a regular clientele of around 40 to 50 parents, and finds that they enjoy the social connection as much as the physical aspect of group exercise.
Eventually, Brubaker may look into expanding class offerings to suit toddlers as the little ones get older and into teaching classes at other gyms, saying, “We don’t want to lose the community, so we’ll have to figure that out.”
Asked whether she ever sees herself returning to a salaried job, Brubaker says, “I’m so used to now being home and having the flexibility of building something of my own, so I’m not sure. It’s exciting.”
Fun fact: Americans filed a record 1.4 million applications to start new businesses during the first three quarters of 2021, according to an analysis by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Innovation Group using U.S. Census Bureau data.
Boomeranging back to Maine
Like millions of others who moved during the pandemic, electrical engineer Stephen Mead boomeranged back to western Maine this September to be closer to family.
He and his wife moved here from Portland, Ore., with their two children, ages four and eight, three chickens and a Basset hound, Daisy. They are now living at his family’s camp in Lovell.
Part of the attraction was the fact that Mead’s employer, an Idaho-based engineering and environmental-based consulting firm, has an office in Freeport, about a 90-minute drive from where Mead’s parents live. Mead, 33, left Maine in 2006 to study electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he met his wife, and they headed west in 2015.
Of his current situation, Mead says, “I already worked with people across the country as part of my job anyway, so now I’m just doing it from an eastern time zone,” estimating that he commutes to the office in Freeport about once a week. “COVID gave us the permission and the structure to be somewhere where you’re not expected to be in the office five days a week.”
Mead’s wife, who is a geotechnical engineer, was also able to bring her job with her to Maine though that was slightly harder with a small employer, and their youngest child is attending first grade in person after a year of remote learning in Oregon.
Making the most of outdoor recreational activities, Mead says the family is enjoying far less rain than Oregon and looks forward to skiing this winter, adding: “That was a bit of a motivator, too. We realized we missed the snow.”
Fun fact: A Zillow survey released in April found that 11% of Americans moved in the past year, and that 8 million more households could enter the real estate market because of the pandemic.
Business lawyer branches out
More than a decade into his law career, Bernstein Shur shareholder David Schneider branched out as a national park ranger for six months.
Schneider, 37, who advises clients on a host of corporate matters including mergers and acquisitions, joined the Portland-based firm in early 2015.
In 2021, the outdoor enthusiast applied for a seasonal ranger position with the National Park Service not knowing what to expect.
“I knew that I wanted to at least try,” he says via phone from his home in Blue Hill. “I wasn’t sure what would come of it — I tried to keep an open mind … My main goal was to try to challenge myself and do something different.”
He got his chance when he was hired for the job at Isle au Haut, an island in Penobscot Bay that’s home to portions of Acadia National Park and is accessible by mailboat from Stonington. Schneider, who grew up near Philadelphia and moved to Maine from New York City in 2012 for better access to nature, had requested the Isle au Haut posting in his application to the National Park Service. His only previous experience on the island, which has just 71 year-round residents, had been a visit four years earlier.
This time as a ranger, he was the one meeting tourists arriving on what he calls a “magical island” even when the weather wasn’t optimal.
“There were some rainy days, and some bug-filled days,” he recalls. “Not every day is a beautiful sunny day with amazing sunsets — I certainly had those days, but if it rained every day that week then the moss would be super-green and vibrant, and the mushrooms would be fruiting. Even on the bad days, there were good things happening.”
Besides greeting the daily mailboat, his responsibilities included developing and giving educational programs at the island’s primary school and treating injured visitors as an emergency medical technician, he says, adding, “I didn’t know if I’d be doing a search-and-rescue call or running a chainsaw or running an education program.”
Glad to be back practicing law, he also now has a greater appreciation for nature in his free time.
“Before I would just be hiking, it was just about being outside,” he says. “Now I’m looking at things through a different lens because I had that experience.”
Because of his experience, Bernstein Shur is, in fact, looking at creating a formal sabbatical program, says the firm’s CEO, Joan Fortin.
“It was a win-win,” she says. “He got a really great break and got to recharge in a unique way, and we got to retain an excellent lawyer with a bright future.”
Going back to school
When Belgrade resident Jessica Cates resigned from her job in education a little over a year ago to go back to college full-time, it wasn’t an easy decision.
“I loved working with the little kids, but I also knew that the outcome is far going to outweigh the position I was in before,” says Cates, whose responsibilities as a technology integration specialist at a primary school included teaching youngsters about the proper use of tablets.
While she had some college credits under her belt — the 37-year-old had attended Southern Maine Community College for two years after high school thinking she would go into pharmacy — she never completed her education as she raised her kids and put her then-husband’s military career first and enjoyed her work in education. Prior to her latest job, she worked as an educational technician in the school district’s special education department.
Encouraged by her current husband to put herself first and go back to school, Cates enrolled at the University of Maine at Augusta, initially taking early childhood education classes. Bucking the nationwide decline in college enrollment, she’s pursuing a Bachelor of Applied Science degree with a minor in computer information systems. Cates, one of 4,222 students at UMA this fall and 96 in the public institution’s Applied Science program, takes all her classes online.
Fast forward to this year, and she’s juggling three courses this semester that keep her busy four to five hours a day. She’s due to complete her degree next year and looks forward to the new career paths ahead.
“I went into it thinking I’m going to learn a whole lot about coding and that I could look into software development down the road or designing apps,” she says. “What I’ve learned is that I’m really enjoying web design, so we’ll see where that leads. There’s such a broad spectrum of jobs out there through this program.”
Cates has no regrets about going back to school and urges anyone thinking of doing the same to go for it no matter their age, saying, “If you have the opportunity and the ability to go after something you really want … you’ve just got to go for it.”
‘Rewiring yourself in retirement’
After close to four decades in public broadcasting, Mark Vogelzang, 66, retired as CEO of Maine Public in July to spend more time with family — and channel his inner entrepreneur.
The family part entails making up for lost time during COVID with visits to see grandchildren, friends and sights all over the country via an Airstream camper and as far afield as France, and a new lady friend in Las Vegas.
On the business front, he’s started a consultancy to advise nonprofit leaders on fundraising while offering himself as an interim station manager for public television and radio stations in management transitions and in need of experienced help.
Drawing on his own fundraising experience, his goal is to help nonprofit leaders “learn and develop the muscles to meet donors in person,” he explains. He finds those skills especially lacking at public broadcasters, where leaders have come up through the ranks from programming, sales and other departments but often without fundraising experience.
“Being able to talk to donors and explain the organization’s mission and goals, and the ambitions and dreams and hopes for institutions is sometimes hard to articulate,” he says.
Describing his new life chapter as “reinventing and rewiring yourself in retirement,” Vogelzang adds: “This whole notion of taking some risk in life and stepping out of our comfort zone, it’s one of the things that COVID has made us do.”
Fun fact: The percentage of retired adults age 55 and older rose from 48.1% in the third quarter of 2019 to 50.3% in the third quarter of 2021, according to the Pew Research Center.