CEO is recruiting women to join the world of car repair

Julie Holmes, Co-CEO of Virginia Tire & Auto, was recently featured in BizJournals’ Bizwomen section for her efforts to empower women in the automotive industry. BizWomen’s editor Anne Stych discusses Julie’s efforts to encourage young girls to explore careers as auto repair technicians, highlighting the industry’s lucrative potential and its demand for STEM skills.

Bizwomen – Julie Holmes has some advice for girls interested in pursuing STEM careers that could earn them six-figure salaries: Consider becoming an auto repair technician.

Holmes is the co-CEO of Virginia Tire & Auto, a $62 million auto repair business with 17 locations in Northern Virginia. Amidst a challenging hiring environment for small businesses, Holmes is hoping to tap into a new pipeline of future employees.

Her company has launched a campaign titled “Women in Automotive” to get the word out to girls in high school and younger that the automotive world offers great opportunities for them.

“It’s a career that does require you to use your brain,” Holmes said.

She said that advancements in tools and technology have diminished the physical requirements of being an automotive technician, breaking down past barriers to women joining the field.

“For instance, when changing a tire, the most physical thing you have to do now is roll a tire,” she said.

Automotive care has changed so much in just the past five years with the surge in technology that “current automobiles are basically computers on wheels,” she said.

When Holmes speaks about her industry at middle school and high school job fairs or to Girl Scouts troops, she’s quick to point out that auto repair requires good STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills.

“Figuring out what’s wrong with a car requires using the scientific method,” she said, referring to a process that includes questioning, doing research, forming a hypothesis and performing data analysis before reaching a conclusion.

She also lets her audience know that the industry offers lucrative salaries, with some technicians making as much as $200,000 a year.

“It’s time to offer this high-paying career to women,” Holmes said. “It’s a great career for women, and we want to be bold about saying we want to hire women.”

But she realizes getting girls in the pipeline for automotive technician careers is a marathon, not a sprint.

To help them along, Virginia Tire & Auto is offering up to three $2,500 scholarships for women to attend a National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence-certified auto technology program. The company also operates its own training program, partially to offer people who “may have had doors closed on them” in the past a path to developing a well-paid skillset, Holmes said.

Two of the three members of Virginia Tire & Auto’s executive team are women (the third is her husband, Mike, who is co-CEO), and five of the 12 people on Virginia Tire & Auto’s leadership team are women.

Those numbers are in stark contrast to the industry in general.

According to Zippia, just 4% of auto mechanic roles were held by women in 2022. Those women, however, earned 95% of the salaries men in the same roles earned, compared to a wage gap of 84% on average for women in the general workforce.

Holmes found her way to the industry by taking over the family business.

Her parents, Myron and Carole Boncarosky, had no experience in automotive repair when they bought a gas station in 1976. But Holmes said her parents were “entrepreneurs at heart” who differentiated their business by emphasizing customer relations, and soon that gas station grew into a full-service repair and tire shop.

She said her parents instilled in her a strong work ethic and encouraged her to work hard and be what she wanted to be — which led her to get a law degree and practice for a few years. But she always knew she would come back and run the business.

“I was an only child, and the business was the primary topic of conversation at home,” she said.

Holmes said her parents also instilled in her at an early age the importance of leading by example. She said she tries to be “10 steps higher than the standard” to prove she belongs as a woman in a male-dominated industry where she feels she’s constantly being judged.

Although she said she has witnessed some “bad behavior” toward women by men in the industry, she said she’s uncompromising in her moral beliefs and immediately shuts it down “in a polite manner.”

Getting more women into the industry is important to her not only as a business owner, but also on a personal level: Holmes is the mother of five kids, four of them girls. Whether any of her children, ages 5 to 14, follow in her footsteps in the industry is something that will play out in the years to come.

Holmes’ message to them?

“We just encourage them to work hard and create opportunities for yourself,” she said.

This article also appears on The BizJournals, Bizwomen.