Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in business and development but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Janis Showers, Founder, and CEO of The Car Girls, located in Aurora, ON, Canada.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

In 2013 I turned my vision into reality. The goal was to create a group of talented, no-nonsense, tenacious Car Girls and bring a unique perspective to Automotive dealers. We pride ourselves on providing dealers with real solutions to drive more sales.

Our mission is simple, work hard, over deliver and build revenue for our dealers. We turn data into traffic in the automotive industry.

Tell us about yourself

My name is Janis Williams-Showers, and I am the founder, president, and 100% shareholder of The Car Girls. After working in the automotive industry for over 20 years as an award-winning salesperson, sales manager, and sales trainer, I started this business to help car dealers communicate better with their customers and develop more profit. The automotive industry has notoriously struggled with hiring and keeping women as employees. While working as a trainer in a dealership where yet another woman had left her job, I saw an opportunity to offer outsourced services to the industry. I started to build a team of automotive phone specialists and deliver quality results for new car sales and service departments. Our reputation for helping dealerships grow spread, and automotive manufacturers added us to their approved vendor lists for marketing co-op dollars. We started to offer along with hand dialed, phone calls, mail, sale hosting, email, and text marketing. We have worked with many car dealers across Canada on different events, projects, and sales and have filled in a wide variety of staffing gaps.

I was asked to speak at a conference hosted by Kijiji Canada, and because we understood the many challenges car dealers face, Kijiji ended up offering us a contract to help support their Autos Marketplace. We now serve as their level one tier support to car dealerships across Canada. This has been a successful partnership for the last four years. As a result, this contract has been renewed to 2023, and Kijiji has recently asked us to expand our services to them. As we honed our skills in supporting this marketplace, we were approached by a new AI tech start-up called, Carbeeza. We are supporting them by reaching out to general managers of dealerships and booking demos for them to learn about this new application. We are working with them as they continue to launch and hope to form their outsourced support team completely.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

This might sound crazy as it is of no profit to me and actually hurts my business on a few different levels, but my former employees, team members, or as I like to call them, friends have been hired by my clients, and they are making big money and able to help their families. Crazy, I say, as I even had these people sign a non-compete. However, I am not at a level in my business where I can offer them what a corporate-level employer offer, but I personally feel accomplished when I see others that I have helped succeed.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

I have experienced so many challenges in my 30 years in the male-dominated field of automotive and ten years in business for myself that I am not even sure where to start. Throughout my career in automotive, I have been underestimated many times. A humorous instance came to mind when my husband and I attended the Chrysler Canada Senate Gala in Windsor, Ontario, where I was honoured as one of the top fifty salespeople in the country. I was eight months pregnant with my son, and I could tell by looks from other attendees that they assumed my husband was the one being honured. Being close to giving birth, I didn't even have the energy to explain myself, but the looks on their faces when I was called up on stage to receive my award were comical.

Throughout my career, I have been challenged on many levels by my managers and coworkers. I have experienced bullying and inappropriate behaviors in automotive that would never be tolerated in today's environment, and that is a good thing. Many times, I have had to meet conflict head-on; it was the inspiration for the name of my business, The Car Girls. It means I am not apologizing for being a female salesman. When I started my own business and got to this point in my career, I was well respected in my industry. What was brand new to me was a commercial property lease. Renting a space for my business came with many hurdles. I found out the hard way we were fully responsible for our heat when an aging furnace that certainly our landlord was aware of stopped working in the middle of a minus twenty winter's day. I have a picture of my staff wearing coats and hats inside. Not only did the landlord not help us financially, but he also put up roadblocks. I hired a local reputable heating contractor who my landlord began to call and threaten about damaging his solar panels on the roof. We had already entered into an agreement with the heating contractor, but they backed out and charged us for the fitting they had already fabricated. I was out over nine hundred dollars and still had no heat. The landlord then wrote us a letter telling us we had to get an engineer to verify the size of the unit needed.

We spent another fifteen hundred on an engineer's letter with still no heat, which was starting to affect our business. We ended up getting a lawyer involved, with whose help we secured another contractor and installed our furnace. Over fifteen thousand dollars later, we had heat. I personally learned a lot from this experience and found a great small business lawyer in the process.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Don't count your hours, just work and give some shit up like tv.
  2. If you get any commercial space - get an inspection!
  3. Go for it; take action now!!

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://thecargirls.ca/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecargirls/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thecargirls
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janisshowerscallcenter/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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