April Ancira says she didn’t expect to end up in the car business.
Like many children of auto dealers, she had other ideas about her future. But when she was 16, she wanted spending money and asked her dad, Ernesto, for a summer job at his San Antonio dealership. After spending the next few summers moving from answering phones to working on the floorplan, Ancira went to college, got a business and finance degree, and planned to head to Wall Street. Then the world was shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.
Ancira shifted to Plan B. Instead of heading to then-devastated Wall Street, she started studying for an MBA. She continued working at the dealership and told her dad that she also wanted to try her hand at selling cars, “to see what it’s all about.”
“I sold my first car and I was in love,” she says. She never looked back.
Today Ancira is vice president of Ancira Auto Group, which soon will open its 12th Texas store, a Nissan dealership in south San Antonio. After those early days selling vehicles, she built her knowledge by working in all areas of the business – from service to parts and dispatch. “Now I’ve really assumed my dad’s role without the title, and when we open new stores, we pitch me as the operator,” she says.
She also is on her “second go-round” as chair of the San Antonio Auto Dealers group and is immediate past chair of the Texas Automobile Dealers Association.
Ancira believes attitudes in her family and her hometown shielded her from the sexism many women experience. “My dad had the first female GM in San Antonio. He raised five girls and never showed any favoritism; there was nothing I was told I couldn’t do,” she says. “It wasn’t until I went up north that I found that women were looked down upon, and mostly confined to accounting jobs at dealerships — not sales, or service. I said, that’s just bananas.”
She also says a history of strong female business leaders and elected officials in San Antonio has embedded the idea that women are equal players. “Some of those women, leading businesspeople and several mayors, had to deal with the hard blows, and break the glass ceiling. They’re the ones who carved the path for folks like me,” she says.
Ancira’s husband, who grew up in his own dealership family, now is vice president of operations for Ancira Auto Group. She says it’s been interesting to watch their parallel careers, and how his approach differs from hers. “Women don’t ask for enough stuff,” she says. “My husband would ask for raises and opportunities far more than I did. We need to recognize our talents and ask for the opportunities.”
Ancira Auto Group boasts women in several leadership positions, including CFO and another corporate vice president post. April Ancira looks to add women staffers whenever she can, and she says she especially loves when a woman joins the service team: “They kill it,” she says. But Ancira frets that dealership hours remain challenging for a lot of female job-seekers. “Most people shop after work or on the weekend, and if you have to pick up kids from school or get exorbitantly expensive day care, it’s hard to make a dealership job work,” she says. “We’ve seen success for women in our BDC and Internet sales because those jobs can be done more flexibly, at home or during daytime hours.”
She says, “Women in this industry are just like anyone else who feels they’re a minority. If you never see an existing example that looks like you, you think it’s not for you. But if you see someone like you succeeding, you start to think, ‘Maybe I can do it too.’ Bringing women into the industry will inherently bring in others.”