Sales manager provides customer comfort
Monica O’Malley is one of those rare New Mexico champions. As a high school basketball player, she played for the Clayton Yellowjackets that were in the midst of an eight-season run of Class 2A winning state championships.
She was a bench player as an eighth grader, then a varsity starter the remainder of her career and can claim the honor of never having lost when walking down the Pit ramp.
That led her to first a scholarship at New Mexico Junior College, then McNeese State in Lake Charles, La.
But her high school coach, Miles Watters, had moved on from Clayton to Lubbock Christian and convinced his old point guard to finish her final season in Lubbock, where she earned a degree in social work and criminology.
“At one time I thought I wanted to be a police officer or a firefighter,” O’Malley said.
It was hard to take New Mexico out of the woman, however, and she wanted to move back to her home state.
“I ended up visiting a friend and she had to go to a dealership to drop off some paperwork because she had just bought a car there,” O’Malley. “I needed a job so I just happened to be looking in the newspaper and I saw a finance job available at Garcia Honda. I thought I’m here already so I might as well talk to somebody.”
Although she was not offered the finance position, she was asked to be a salesperson, a position she eventually accepted.
Things went so well that eventually she became sales manager and last year moved over to Perfection Honda as the general sales manager.
“It’s a male-dominant industry so at first I was scared,” O’Malley said. But I learned so much. I learned that when people come into the dealership, they want to buy cars from someone like them and ladies come in and buy cars. I identify with women and they are happy and thankful when they see me in the dealership.”
It turns out that the Perfection motto mirrors her own way of thinking: “To create a lifelong relationship with our customers by providing them the best products, service and value in the automotive industry.”