Back in October 2020, Stephanie Williams was a finalist for the prestigious MTA Queensland Apprentice of the Year Award.

At the time, the then 21-year-old was a light vehicle apprentice at car and truck service provider CB Automotive in Yatala, near the Gold Coast, and was closing in on completing her training. As her appearance as an Apprentice of the Year finalist suggests, she was a standout student and employee, and someone who harboured a real passion for cars and the automotive industry.

Fast forward to March 2022, and you’ll find Stephanie is as passionate as ever, perhaps even more so as the now 23-year-old has joined the ranks of industry business owners as the proprietor of Marsden Mechanical in Logan City, just south of Brisbane.

That is quite a change in circumstances for the young mechanic, and it was around the time of that Apprentice of the Year award announcement that the opportunity arose for Stephanie to purchase the small mechanical workshop. For the determined and confident soon-to-be-tradesperson, the opportunity to buy a long-established business with a solid reputation was one that may have come early but was too good to ignore.

“The business had been here for 38 years and a family friend owned it, but he wanted to retire and he offered it to me first,” said Stephanie. “I thought, why not? I had to finish off my apprenticeship, obviously, and it was the 13th of December 2020 when I actually purchased it.”

It has been a steep learning curve for Stephanie since then. There has been the COVID pandemic to contend with, of course, and, in recent weeks, the rainfall that caused flooding across large swathes of southeast Queensland and northern NSW caused trouble in the Marsden area too. Thankfully, the workshop itself came through unscathed.

Worst of all, and very tragically, the previous owner passed away suddenly not long after Stephanie took over the business. That was a difficult time personally, but also meant Stephanie could not rely on his experience and knowledge, or his relationship with the local community, as she began her new role as a business owner.

Saying this first year has been a busy one would, then, be an understatement, and has been one that might have tested even the most grizzled industry veteran.

Running a workshop solo, working extremely long hours; combining the practical mechanical work while updating the shop and learning the art of running a business; repainting the shop; updating lighting and installing a new hoist and new equipment; learning the ropes of ordering parts and scheduling jobs; understanding bookkeeping and insurance matters; setting-up new computer hardware and software systems; kicking social media into gear – Stephanie has managed to do all this successfully and today her passion and ambition burns as brightly as ever. In fact, there’s a smile on her face as she talks about being her own boss, about doing things her way, and what the future holds.

“It was a pretty hard decision to make to buy the business,” said Stephanie. “I had to drop getting a stable wage every week, and CB automotive is awesome and a great place to work. But I had to just dive in.

“The mechanical side of things has been the easy part. The rest of it has been the fun part,” she added. “I just went with what I thought and hoped for the best.”

While she has done almost everything on her own, Stephanie has had support from her dad, an auto-electrician, who has, she said, been dropping by after his own workday has finished and who also chips in at the weekend.

And it was from working with her dad as a youngster that Stephanie first got bitten by the automotive bug.

As she told Motor Trader in 2020 prior to the Apprentice of the Year event, Stephanie’s childhood was one during which she spent many happy hours working with her dad on the cars and hot rods that were their shared passion.

“For many years, my dad owned his own business in Browns Plains and we were always tinkering on the cars he had at the house and on the hot rods that we built together,” she said at the time.

Those early days would lead to Stephanie’s first step into the automotive industry as a receptionist/service advisor at a large dealership operation before a move into the workshop as a light vehicle apprentice came at the beginning of 2018. A couple of years after that, Stephanie moved to CB Automotive to complete her apprenticeship.

As she noted in 2020, Stephanie had been determined to become a mechanic, even though there were those who suggested it would be a tough road to negotiate for a young woman.

“A few people told me I wasn’t going to be able to do it, but my attitude was that I would prove everybody wrong,” she said.
Today, she is doing everything right to prove those people wrong and is winning over those potential customers who still find it unusual for a woman to be hands-on in the workshop.

“People have been pretty good,” said Stephanie. “You still get old-school people who are set in their ways and let me know that I’m a young, female mechanic.

“And I do get people who walk in and ask me if they can ‘speak to the mechanic’. But I don’t take offence to any of it. I’ve dealt with that for a long time. I just ask people to give me a chance to prove myself to them. That’s all I can really ask for.

“And I now have a lot of repeat customers,” she added. “I don’t really advertise, so it’s all sort of come by
word of mouth.”

With things now ticking along nicely, Stephanie is already looking to develop the business and grow to include another, bigger workshop and move beyond the general servicing and mechanical work she currently offers. On the cards is the development of her own skills so that she can work in the performance upgrade side of the mechanical sector as well as auto electrical. There’s also the potential of a future in which she can work professionally with her dad.

“Dad and I work well together. We are really close and we mesh really well,” she said. “And I would like to expand in the future and get a couple more hoists and a bit more room. At some point, I’ll look at putting on an apprentice or bringing in an employee so I can step back a little bit and branch out into auto electrical and learn more about the performance side of things.

“Ideally, I’d like to keep this shop because it does mean a lot to me,” she added. “I could use it as a base and do mainly servicing out of here, and then bigger jobs could get sent over to the new shop.”

One thing Stephanie clearly does not lack is ambition, and there would be little doubt that, based on her achievements already, she’ll be a terrific ambassador for the industry in the years to come.

The chance to own, grow and develop her own business might have come early, but it has been
an opportunity she has grasped with both hands. As the old saying goes,

‘The harder I work, the more luck I have.’

“It was a case of the right place at the right time,” said Stephanie.“I guess it was just meant to be.”

Source: Motor Trader e-Magazine (April 2022) 

15 March 2022