A mission to get women working in service lane

One of the first jobs Roger Conant had in the auto business was sitting at a dealership lot on Sundays collecting contact information from the tire-kickers for the sales staff to follow up on Monday.

It was the late 1980s, and Conant noticed that most of those car-shopping were women. He finally got up the nerve to ask one why she was there outside the store's normal business hours. "Because they're not here," the woman told Conant, referring to the mostly male dealership staff.

The notion that women were intimidated and turned off by the prospect of dealing with men when buying or servicing a vehicle stayed with Conant. "That got me," the 75-year-old Houston resident says. "That was it for me."

Conant, who had earlier careers selling real estate and working in auto lending at a credit union before joining Group 1 Automotive's Service Development Center in 2013, formed an initiative in the late 1990s called Her Auto to help dealers better engage with female customers. Conant also was a customer experience manager at Beck & Masten Buick-GMC North in Houston from 2015 to 2018 before rejoining Group 1.

In April, he announced a new undertaking, called Women in the Service Lane. Its purpose is to recognize dealerships that have at least 40 percent female service advisers, share the successful recruiting and hiring practices of these stores, and encourage others to hire more women in all fixed ops positions that touch customer service.

A Facebook page and website are being developed to support the project. Conant also is enlisting his friends in the fixed ops business — of which there are many — to amplify his efforts.

Conant says he knows dealership leadership will want to see how more women working in the service department will positively impact profits.

"We'll have to quantify how a diverse work force contributes to the bottom line," he says.

And don't try to tell Conant that fixed ops departments can't find interested women.

"They say, 'We can't get women here,' " he says. "That's such baloney."

Conant shrugs when asked how he came to lead this effort. He says he has been "surrounded my whole life by women" — his wife and two grown daughters.

"This interests me," he says. "I don't like to play in the middle. I look for areas where I can improve things."