For every person whose life’s work is exactly what he or she had in mind, there are dozens of others who are more likely to say of their jobs that they “just sort of fell into it.” Then there is Gina Lovato, manager of the collision centre at Robert Slessor Pontiac Buick in Grimsby, ON. Once an aspiring commercial artist with no family connection of any kind to the automotive industry, she now finds herself 13 years into a full-fledged collision repair career.

Destiny

If you ask Gina how it happened, you won’t hear anything about dumb luck. As far as she’s concerned, if overseeing all of the hiring, purchasing, estimating, accounting and customer care for a dealer-owned collisionrepair shop wasn’t originally in her plans, then someone—or something—had to have done the planning for her.

“I honestly feel as though I was led somehow to this line of work,” says Gina. “It was predestined, I believe that.”

Beginning with a cashier’s job behind the service counter at a Hamilton Chrysler dealership in 1985, Gina’s resume reads something like a paperback detective novel: the pieces fit together almost too perfectly.

When Steel City Chrysler became insolvent in 1992, Gina redirected her career into the public sector, working for two years in what was then known as Unemployment Insurance. While there, as irony would have it, many of the cases she handled were those of automotive apprentices working for no pay while still in school.

“Here I was assigned to the claims of some of the guys I used to work with,” she says. “See what I mean about being led? That was my first clue.”

Gina got her first real break in collision repair when, on the very same day she was laid off from her government job in 1994, she allowed herself to be cajoled by an old co-worker to interview for an assistant manager’s position in the collision facility at another Chrysler dealer in Hamilton: Bay King Motors.

“I didn’t want any part of it,” she says with a laugh. “I tried to flat-out refuse to even go to the interview, but for some reason I went. And then I got hired on the spot.”

As things turned out, it was over the course of her four years at Bay King that Gina would come to learn both the hard
skills of estimating and accounting (what she calls “the real meat and potatoes”), as well as the less concrete, but no less important, softer skills of customer- and employee-relations.

She says her eagerness to learn is also responsible for the strong rapport she enjoys today with her customers.

“I drove my technicians crazy with my questions, especially questions starting with ‘why,’” Gina says. “In estimating, it’s important to know the ‘whats’ and ‘wheres,’ but you need the ‘whys’ in order to understand what you’re doing.”

Even now, having managed two dealerowned shops in the nine years since her apprenticeship at Bay King, Gina admits that her experience as a woman in such a maledominated industry has been frequently difficult, and that it still gets to her when she hears the familiar question, “can I speak with a man”. The biggest challenge of all, she says, is preserving a strong female identity.

“I think women who work in this industry run the risk of trying to act too much like men, and not enough like women,” she says. “When the way you dress is turned into an issue, it can be tempting to give in. But I’ve always tried to be true to myself as a woman, and I think I’ve done a good job.”

Shocking Stats

A truly shocking statistic emerges when Gina mentions that out of the hundreds of technicians’ resumes that have crossed her desk over the years, only one of them belonged to a woman. Gina says that an industry in need of talent does itself a disservice by not doing enough to court young women. She also urges girls to consider a potentially lucrative and
creatively satisfying career in the custom auto body or collision repair fields.

“It amazes me that a well-paying job such as painting, that really is such a fine art, doesn’t attract more artsy women,” Gina says. “A gifted woman could make a real splash in this business, and also make herself a great living.”

Hopefully, for the good of everyone in collision repair, just such a talented woman will find a way to “fall into it.”

Comments

Add New Search

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Website:
Title:
UBBCode:	-color-aquablackbluefuchsiagraygreenlimemaroonnavyolivepurpleredsilvertealwhiteyellow -size-tinysmallmediumlargehuge
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.23

3.23 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."