Sarah Pesek on Women in Automotive Marketing: Built From the Inside Out

Sarah Pesek was 16 when she first walked into a Jim Taylor dealership — not as a customer, but as a part-time receptionist. Her mom made the introduction. The job was supposed to be a little extra cash. What it turned into was a career, an identity, and a front-row seat to one of the most underestimated roles in automotive retail: the marketing director who actually understands the business she's marketing.

Today, Sarah leads marketing for Jim Taylor Auto Group — a three-rooftop dealer group in Northeast Louisiana covering Chevrolet and Buick in Rayville, Buick GMC in Monroe, and Ford Lincoln in Ruston. She holds an MBA from Louisiana Tech, where she was named one of 16 Outstanding Senior Scholars for the College of Business. Before stepping into marketing full-time in 2020, she spent time as a title clerk — processing deals, managing lien payoffs, tracking funding timelines, understanding from the inside how a sale actually moves from desk to DVM.

That background shapes everything. It's the reason this profile is worth your time.

Meet Sarah Pesek

It Started at the Front Desk

Most people in dealership marketing come in from the outside — agencies, OEM-side roles, digital platforms. They learn the business from a distance, managing accounts for clients they visit a few times a year. Sarah learned it from the inside, before she even knew she was learning it.

"Growing up I never planned on being involved," she says, "but when I was 16 my mom asked me if I was interested in being a part-time receptionist for some extra cash. I realized very quickly that I loved this organization and how much more there was to the automotive industry than just selling cars."

That realization sent her to Louisiana Tech, where she focused specifically on the disciplines she knew she'd need: accounting, marketing, and business management. She graduated with an MBA and returned to Jim Taylor full-time in 2020. But she didn't walk straight into marketing. She spent time as a title clerk first — hands in the deal paperwork, tracking how funding moved, understanding the financial mechanics that most marketing directors never see up close.

That foundation matters more than it might seem. When you know what a backend product does, you market it differently. When you understand how a stale deal ages, you think about lead follow-up differently. When you've watched a deal fall apart at the lender, you understand why urgency messaging needs to be honest, not manufactured. Sarah carries all of that into every campaign she builds.

What keeps her here isn't the work itself — it's what's wrapped around it. "I stay in the industry because I love the organization," she says. "The history, the family legacy, working with my family, working with my coworkers and their families, and all the ways our company contributes to our communities." Jim Taylor Auto Group has donated more than $246,000 to Northeast Louisiana nonprofits over the past 12 years through its annual Memorial Sales Event — a program started by Sarah's mother, Tanya Pesek, to honor the memory of Sarah's grandfather Jim Taylor after his death in 2014. That's the organization Sarah markets. And it shows.

Taking Marketing In-House — and Making It Personal

When Sarah stepped into the marketing role, the first thing she found was a gap. Everything had been outsourced. And it showed.

"It was evident it was outsourced and did not make things personable for our customers, which does not align with our values," she says. "There was no one internally that was seeing if our money was being spent well."

This is a problem that is far more common than most dealer groups want to admit. The vendor dashboard looks fine. The monthly report is full of impressions and clicks. But no one inside the store is actually cross-referencing that data against floor traffic, against closed deals, against anything real. The agency is optimizing for the metrics it controls. The dealership is hoping those metrics connect to the ones that matter.

Sarah's first project was fixing that. She brought strategy internal and, in doing so, changed how the organization thought about itself. Three stores with three separate identities became one auto group with a shared brand. That shift — from individual rooftops to a unified group presence — isn't just a marketing decision. It's a positioning decision that affects every touchpoint a customer has with the business.

She's clear-eyed about where the biggest opportunity sits right now. "AI is the biggest opportunity," she says — and then she adds the sentence that most people skip: "You need to truly monitor that the money you are investing is giving you a return and that we are not just hoping AI will solve all of our problems blindly."

That's the part the industry keeps getting wrong. AI can scale effort. It can generate content, personalize touchpoints, automate follow-up sequences, and surface insights from data that would take a human weeks to process. But it cannot replace judgment. It cannot tell you whether your messaging is right for your market. It cannot evaluate whether a campaign feels like your brand or like every other dealer running the same vendor playbook. That's still a human's job. Sarah's job. And she knows it.

The Initiative She's Most Proud Of Isn't External

Ask a marketing director about their proudest campaign and you usually get something with a good ROI story — a digital push that moved units, a video that went regional, a co-op campaign that outperformed the benchmark. Sarah's answer is different.

"I am most proud of our employee appreciation initiative, D.R.I.V.E. Week," she says. "This past year, I reinvented the program with a renewed focus on our internal customers. I strongly believe that internal marketing is just as important as external efforts, because our employees are the hands and feet that represent and market our organization to our outward-facing customers every day."

Internal marketing is one of the most consistently underinvested areas in dealership operations. Recognition programs, culture events, internal communications — these aren't seen as marketing. They're seen as HR. But the distinction doesn't hold up when you look at the actual customer experience. Every call a service advisor takes, every walk-around a salesperson gives, every text a BDC rep sends — that's your brand in motion. If your team doesn't feel genuinely valued, that will surface in those interactions before any external campaign can compensate for it.

D.R.I.V.E. Week is Sarah putting that belief into practice. Rebuilding it with a renewed internal focus isn't a soft initiative. It's a strategic investment in the people who deliver the brand promise every day. The downstream effects — better reviews, stronger referrals, lower turnover, more consistent customer experiences — are real marketing outcomes. They just don't show up in the vendor dashboard.

On Being a Woman in This Industry

Sarah doesn't frame her experience as a woman in automotive as a story of obstacles overcome. She frames it as a story of doors opened — and a clear view of which doors are still closed.

"Thankfully, having a mom who is a woman dealer helped pave the way for my success in this field," she says. Tanya Pesek — Sarah's mother, owner of Jim Taylor Auto Group — is not a footnote in this story. She's the model. A woman running a multi-rooftop dealer group in Northeast Louisiana, building community partnerships that have outlasted her own father's passing, creating an organizational culture that her daughter chose to commit her career to. That's representation that actually matters.

"In just the time I've been in the automotive industry, I've seen more and more women step into these roles," Sarah says. And the data backs her up — somewhat. The CDK Global 2025 Dealership Workplace Study shows women's job satisfaction in automotive retail jumped from 66% to 83% in a single year, and 61% of respondents said their dealership has women in leadership positions. Progress is real.

But Sarah is also honest about where the industry hasn't caught up. "I would still love to see more women in sales and service, especially in technician positions. There's still a belief at times that men are better technicians than women, and that stigma can keep some people from even applying."

That's the gap worth naming. Marketing and management have opened up. The shop floor — the service bay, the sales floor, the technician bays — hasn't kept pace. Only 26% of women in the CDK study describe their dealership as a supportive environment. Just 12% say their employer actively invests in programs that attract and retain women. The headline satisfaction numbers are improving. The day-to-day experience underneath them is still a different story for a lot of people.

Sarah's case, though, is a direct argument for what's possible when the organizational culture actually matches its values. "I truly believe that women in automotive can help customers feel more comfortable in what is still a male-dominated space," she says, "while also showing the industry's growth in diversity and inclusion." That's not an ideological statement. It's a business observation — and the research supports it.

Two Words for Anyone Just Starting Out

When asked what she'd tell a woman early in her career who's considering automotive marketing as a path, Sarah doesn't give a list of tactics or a framework. She gives six words.

"Buckle up and be brave."

Then she fills it in: "It truly is so much fun, but it is fast-paced and multifaceted, which can be extremely challenging and scary at times. However, it can also be incredibly rewarding, exciting, and fun if you continue to believe in yourself and challenge yourself."

That advice lands differently when you know where it's coming from. This isn't someone who had a straight path. Sarah started at the front desk at 16, built her education around the business she was already in, papered deals as a title clerk, took over a marketing function that was outsourced and impersonal, rebuilt it from the inside out, and created internal programs designed to ensure the people around her felt as invested in the work as she does. She earned the right to say "buckle up."

The multifaceted nature she mentions is genuine. Dealership marketing isn't one discipline. On any given week you're managing OEM co-op compliance, producing social content, evaluating digital vendor performance, coordinating a community event, briefing the service team on a promotion, reviewing last month's lead data, and rebuilding an employee appreciation program from scratch. The variety is either the best or the hardest part of the job, depending on how you're wired. For the right person, it's both — and that's exactly the point.

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