Our family bus, the wonderful long suffering Citroen Picasso, needed its MOT doing this week. The nearest FOXY Choice subscriber was female friendly SB Motors garage in Hove run by foxy lady Caroline Baxter so off I trotted for a chat whilst the job was being done.
Caroline told me that despite trading better during the recession than in 2008 (in which she is bucking the industry trend) the Bank says she is in a high risk area (garages presumably are discretional income?) so she can’t expect to borrow from them and must fund business growth herself. Whilst I am waiting for my car in the nice and warm reception area there is a steady flow of MOT, car servicing and repair business coming and going which certainly looks healthy to me.
My car then fails its MOT (I seem to recall a recent ‘grounding’ 
that may have caused this which my husband is unaware of until he reads this…) and needs a central exhaust part <not discretional income in any way Mr Bank Manager> so off I trotted again yesterday to get the job finished.
Whilst I was there I finalised a special offer for local members of FOXY Lady Drivers Club and talked Caroline into being FOXY’s first Female Business Ambassador; a new network to recognise female friendly garages who employ and/or are run by women, giving them the opportunity to describe a typical day for the benefit of other females who might want to know what is involved.
In my experience this means they are more likely to understand and appreciate what women want and many women see this as a sign of reassurance BUT it is by no means compulsory to employ women to be a female friendly business so this is not sexist thing and in fact most of the men I have spoken to quite like the idea too .
More about this later as the Female Business Ambassador network is under wraps and not quite ready to launch yet… hopefully by early February.
FOXY Steph
Of course it isn’t necessary to employ women for a business to be female friendly (in fact FOXY research last year suggested that women were equally happy to buy a car from a man as a woman in a showroom providing they knew what they were talking about) but in an industry with such a reputation for being male dominated, if you are seen to employ women this could be a source of reassurance for many local women drivers even if you don’t need to see them when you take your car in.