February 2020

I t’s a new decade, with new challenges. Gone are the days where you could rely on just your abilities as a mechanic to guarantee your income. With new cars sales precarious at best due to a whole host of factors including an uncertain economy thanks to Brexit anxiety, dealers are going to be looking to keep hold of those customers past the three-year mark. On top of this is an increasingly tech-savvy consumer population. Today’s motorist want to be properly looked after when they are spending hundreds of pounds on a service. Many motorists don’t actually want to spend a lot of money on their cars. Making the process as pleasant as possible is going to help you There are a whole host of business activities that you need to be good at to stay successful. Customer care, marketing, all ‘soft’ skills. We don’t want to stereotype, but these are areas where having female members of the team can really help. Despite this, the number of females in our industry is still not huge. Considering the ongoing skills shortage we are experiencing, that would seem to be a major oversight. Are we missing something? After all, in the workshop, it is not quite the dirty job of yore. Meanwhile, as we just covered, there are a whole host of areas where the female perspective will really help take a business to the next level. This leaves out of course the other small matter of female mechanics, or the lack thereof, but we will leave that until later. What are we doing wrong? Let’s ask some women in the sector how they see things today. Proud Carmaster is an independent garage based in Harrogate. One of the main figures at the business is its MD Rebecca Pullan. She said: “I am extremely proud to be a partner and the Managing Director of a MOT test station with ten ramps and the whole shebang that goes with that. I know that there are plenty of bigger or better garages and plenty of smaller and not so good ones too but I am very proud of what my partner and myself have created together from nothing over two decades of hard work.” Despite her many years in the sector, and in a period where gender barriers in the workplace overall appear to have become less of an obstacle, she still feels that as a woman she is not seen as equal to men in the industry, and sometimes not seen at all. She cited as an example some experiences she had at Automechanika Birmingham: “With a desire to continue to strive ahead, learn and keen to keep moving the workshop forward into the future I attacked the show on day one, with more of the team to follow on day two and three. Ready for the onslaught of sales pitches, I maneuverered myself around. However, I noticed that when I stopped to look, I was left to stop and look. In fact, it turned out the ambush of over keen enthusiast sales teams did not exist for me. I started to get a feeling of being ignored. “Not to be perturbed and because I was on a mission, I kept going. I had already made a couple of appointments and they went well, I enjoyed a knowledgeable talk and continued my perusal. Once I was back walking around though, I definitely felt like I was being ignored. In fact, unless I started the conversation there is no conversation, even when the sales team had no one ese to talk to – they preferred to 8 AFTERMARKET FEBRUARY 2020 BIG ISSUE Below: Rebecca Pullen, Carmaster Garage www.aftermarketonline.net WOMEN IN THE MOTOR INDUSTRY It’s a new year at the start of a new decade. Is the motor industry still a man’s world?