On April 10, the Motor Vehicle Retailers of Ontario (MVRO) kicked off its 2025 Women Driven series of networking events, with the first one of the year taking place in Toronto, at the Village Loft on Bayview Avenue in North York. 

A sold-out event, it was hosted by Edith Pencil, Director of Employment Services at Performance Auto Group and featured a keynote address from well-known consumer retail experience expert Katie Mares, and a panel discussion that featured women in various roles within automotive retail who had the opportunity to share their knowledge and experiences with the audience.

Personal experience

Katie Mares kicked things off, talking about how her own terrible experience in shopping for a new vehicle changed the course of her life. Today she is a leading customer service expert who helps create leading brand experiences and has worked with some of the world’s most storied brands including Celebrity Cruises, Honda and Volvo. 

Mares talked about the differences between men and women when it comes to outlook and perception, and how dealers need to understand what women seek out when it comes to vehicle purchases. She talked about confidence, and that often, men are willing to take more risks than women. Mares noted that true confidence is built over time and shared her own experiences in overcoming obstacles to become a public speaker and author. “Confidence is something you have to choose to do every single day,” stated Mares, and that it was important to choose your own positive attributes over the negative. She instructed the audience to write down this phrase “what I see is up to me,” noting that the way in which we see the world, is the way in which we experience it. In other words, we will find what we seek, and that negative thoughts tend to result in negative outcomes, while positive thoughts result in positive outcomes, both on a personal and professional level. 

Energy fields

Mares also talked about our own energy fields and how the energy we project impacts those around us. By channeling positive thoughts, she said, we can positively impact those around us, leading to superior results.  

Following the keynote, Prena Gulati, Senior Portfolio Manager, for Deloitte, presented findings from the firm’s recent 2025 Automotive Retail Employee Engagement Study. She was joined by a panel that featured Edith Pencil, as well as Patricia Graham, Service Manager at Don Valley Toyota; Carrie Leung, Financial Services Manager at Lexus Downtown (Toronto) and Christina Morris, Manager, Customer Operations and Communication at Subaru Canada.

Different approaches

The panelists talked about their own career journeys and how the automotive retail environment has changed over the years, with attitudes toward women having improved significantly. Gulati talked about some of the findings from the Deloitte study noting that while things have improved, it was important to understand that men and women think differently and as a result, tend to approach problems and solutions with a different mindset. 

This is why it is so important to have diverse perspectives within the workplace environment since it provides a distinct advantage from both an operational and strategic perspective. 

Edith Pencil noted that at Performance Auto Group, empowering leadership teams and managers to hire effectively is critical to the organization’s success.

More female technicians

Carrie Leung, who trained as an automotive technician before venturing into service management and later financial services roles, stressed the importance of dealerships hiring more female technicians, not only to address the ongoing shortage in the industry, but also in providing new perspectives and methodologies, which in turn can transform the way in which dealers conduct their business and elevate both the customer and employee experience.

In summarizing, Women Driven Toronto 2025 was an inspirational event and helped illustrate that while there is still a lot of work to be done, we’ve seen very significant progress in promoting women within automotive retail and recognizing their contributions to the industry. Women Driven will be hosting its next event of 2025 on May 21st at the Automotive Business School of Canada at Georgian College’s Barrie Campus. For more details, visit mvro.ca/womendriven