IN COMMERCIAL lore, it is the office boy who winds up as CEO running the company. In the auto world it is the apprentice who can and does wind up running their own companies in the oft-repeated story of early school leavers making good.

For Geoff Gwilym it was a hybrid career where leaving school at aged 15 to become a body builder led him to acquiring a score of metal working skills and jobs in the UK before moving across the world to teaching and training jobs in Australia and then skills management roles.

Geoff Gwilym

The apprentice became the teacher of apprentices.

All this was a prelude to running, as CEO of Victorian Automotive Chamber of Commerce, an organization with 5000 members in Victoria and Tasmania and $280 million in assets.

Mr Gwilym is retiring after 10 years running the VACC which has seen the boy from the local garage at Titchfield in Hampshire in the UK move from rubbing down motor bodies to rubbing shoulders in Australia with federal and state political leaders; including cabinet ministers and prime ministers.

As CEO he saw the chamber expand its leading role of protecting the business interests of its members by educating bureaucrats and politicians at all levels of government on how the motor trade works and he was constantly called upon to remind them of the vital contribution his members play in the mobility of our community.

A key role at the VACC is to protect and grow the treasure chest that flowed from the fortuitous sale of the VACC Insurance company all those decades ago and during Mr Gwilym’s tenure he saw that kitty grow by more than $100 million.

A particular achievement, he streamlined the committee structure of the chamber from 34 members to nine. He launched or expanded the business services within the chamber for the benefit of members and sold-well the long-standing VACC headquarters in St Kilda Road and the move to new offices in North Melbourne.

It is a career in which he has seen the mechanical overtaken by electronics with engines being replaced by motors. He leaves at a time the industry and its participants face the greatest transformation in its history.

Frequently called on as a commentator on the industry Mr Gwilym is well known for his expertise and explanations of a complex business.

In that spirit, GoAutoNews Premium asked him for his advice about key trends that those in the motor trade are facing and how they should address those trends:

The value of advisors

The majority of VACC members are small businesses, followed by medium and large. And for the small business person today, their first consideration is: Where am I going to get skilled labour from? How can I retain that skilled labour? 

They have to ask: How do I apply the labour in a way that means that I can run a successful business without going broke all the while dealing with a huge complexity of red tape and regulatory obligations that have been foisted on industry over the past decade.

If you’re not a member of an association, and you’re in a small to medium or even a large business, I don’t think you’ve got any hope whatsoever of getting across the complexities of legislation, industrial relations, human resourcing and those sorts of things. So I think you just need as much help as you can get to be able to navigate that complexity and work out how to work within it. 

Sourcing of labour

So that’s the first thing: where do I get my labour from? How do I retain my labour? We know that the industry, over the past 20 years has reached out more and more for international labour  and mechanics in particular, but also body trades and other roles in the industry. 

But lots of places in the world are after that same labour now. So we’re competing with Canada, we’re competing with America and we’re competing with Europe. In Australia, our members, in our workplaces are looking to India, and we are looking more and more to other parts of Asia to get the labour that we need. 

And I can’t see that changing, because even though apprentice numbers coming into the automotive industry are actually quite positive at the moment, and we have seen an upswing, it’s not going to be enough to fill the jobs that are required. And we’ll continue to reach out to that intentional labour market.

Choosing to stick with ICE

From a technology point of view, we are seeing a flood of EVs, predominantly coming from China and that is proving to be a bit of a divide in the repair side of the industry. Some members are saying they are just going to work on internal combustion engine technology. They have another six or seven years to go and then they will get out.

But there is another part of the industry that’s saying they will adopt a more progressive view around concentrating on repairing EVs and hybrids. It’s very distinct. In the industry, some people are making a decision just to not go there (new technology). 

Even in dealerships, we have got a whole lot of dealers who don’t want to trade in EVs because of the technology required to repair them. There are also concerns about whether they can move those vehicles based on the condition of the battery and the overall condition of the vehicle. 

So the industry is in a huge state of flux around decision making, around what businesses would look like moving forward. 

Of course, we will start to see specialist EV repair shops pop up. You know, if you look around the world, Norway and Sweden and other places, that’s what happened once they got over 50 per cent take up of EVs. More and more specialists arrived. But that’s going to take a while to get there in Australia even though the market is shifting and changing considerably.

Danger of OEMs retiring brands

Dealership land will continue a level of consolidation and I think we’ll see that with the Chinese brands as well. We will see more multi-branded sites because there’s no indication that Australia is going to have fewer brands of vehicles, because we like variety. 

So I think that a continuing concern for the future is if we get pop up car brands coming in that are only here for a few years and then disappear. That will lead to a huge consumer detriment that also blows back on industry and unfairly blows back on dealerships. 

They sold the car to the punter. That’s why we (industry associations) continue to seek better protections in the franchise code, so that a franchise dealer that’s put millions and millions into a facility, doesn’t get left high and dry by an offshore manufacturer when they pull out leaving the dealer with the stock and making sure those vehicles are maintained. So that’s a bit of a worry moving forward.

Has ACL improved the reputation of the auto sector

The ACL has assisted consumers but it is a double edged sword. The industry has had to step up and to operate in a different way to meet the requirements of the ACL but lots of consumers think that the ACL is a get-out-of-jail card for everything and they think can bring a car back to a dealer or repairer and demand change when the ACL doesn’t say that. 

So I think when the ACL is used properly, it helps consumers and it lifts the standards in industry. The downside of the ACL is when consumers, and sometimes consumer advocacy bodies, think that the vehicle seller or the repairer is liable for everything, irrespective of whether it’s part of the ACL or not.

This has meant there are fewer major repairs being made on engines, for example, because of the potential for an ACL claim, for something that actually may not have anything to do with the rebuild, but the cost of the liability of taking on an ACL claim around something like an engine rebuild for a lot of smaller repairers just isn’t worth looking at, and that’s why they’re not doing that work.  

So the vehicle goes to the vehicle recycler. That’s one of those downsides of the ACL. If repairers are less likely to take on complicated work because of the potential effect of the ACL, then you end up scrapping more vehicles that in another time would have just been repaired.

Membership has its benefits

Our business is to advocate on behalf of our members and to protect the industry more broadly. 

But we do run a whole lot of commercial programs. Some members pay for their membership every single year just to get access to some of the alliance arrangements we have with banks and energy companies etc. And it’s possible with the savings from some of our alliance deals that your membership might not cost you very much at all or you can get more back that you give us.

We also take significant funds out of our savings every year to top up what the members give us to make sure that we provide services that are way, way more (costly) than what members give us every year. 

The Capital Fund is to be able to give members more than they pay for but to also ensure the sustainability of the VACC for at least the next 100 years. 

Engaging with governments 

Advocating on behalf of our members is our number one priority, and that probably takes up 40 per cent of all of our resources and energy. And you have to ask if the VACC is not advocating for the automotive industry in Victoria and Tasmania, who is? The answer is nobody. 

The strength of the VACC is in its 5000 members. They are the voice of automotive. All we do is we shape that voice. We are they’re megaphone. We don’t win everything, but we never come out without having a good fight for what’s good for the industry. 

And we’ll never stop doing that. That’s our job. Our job is to go in and fight for what’s good and to keep going back in. It’s not complicated, but it takes huge energy to keep engaging with government at a state level, and through our advocacy through MTAA,

It involves high energy. Some pieces of legislation might take 10 years to change, but if we give up, nothing will change. If we don’t go on that long journey, as painful as it is, it’s easier for  government to not change legislation than change it.

Are bureaucrats increasingly more receptive? 

No, I think it’s harder. Actually I found it easier to get legislation changed nationally than at a state level in Victoria. I think that the levels of bureaucracy and red tape that we have to go through just makes it hard to engage and to get change. It’s about where the priorities of a particular government sit. If a government in power at a state level doesn’t have a high priority on industry, it is very, very hard to get anything changed.

Is merging a good path to growth?

Asked if small repairers should merge with three or four other smaller guys as a solution to secure your future, Mr Gwilym said: “No. You think it would make sense to have four panel shops or three mechanics in a row or in an industrial core; the natural thing is, why don’t they work together and have a bigger shop? 

But a lot of people in the automotive industry run a small business because they’re comfortable in a small business and often they don’t want to grow any bigger than they are. They have three people in the workshop. 

They might have an apprentice, their partner might be helping out administratively, and a lot of members have made a lifestyle choice about the size of business, the size of liability, and they are quite happy to run a smaller to medium sized shop. They just want to be left alone to get on with what they’re doing.

There is a reasonable living in it, you can pull those shutters down at five o’clock. They make a choice whether they work on Saturdays or not. They can control the workflow. 

Normally, the repair book has 200 families they’ve been dealing with for 30 or 40 years. They did mum’s car. They do the kids’ cars. They do grandad’s car. They’re running good small businesses that provide really good services to local communities. They make a reasonable living out of it and they’re their own boss. They don’t have to put up with somebody else telling them what to do.