At a recent meet-and-greet where SAMBRA’s (South African Motor Body Repairers Association) outgoing National Director, Jacques Viljoen, was bid farewell and his successor, Marcia Modiba, was welcomed, BodyShop News Africa had the opportunity gauge what the industry could expect from Modiba.

What are at the top three items on your agenda as you enter this new position?

I think stakeholder relation engagement is of utmost importance, specially building relations with our insurers; building and growing the association; and pushing the ‘toolbox’. (SAMBRA has been developing a one-stop ‘toolbox’ application for the industry that would cover and assist body repairers in every facet of their business). We are having a presentation by the developers of the ‘toolbox’ at our strat-session on 8 March and hopefully it will be officially launched within the next six months.

The biggest challenge you expect to have to deal with?

There are so many, but I think currently the biggest one is dealing with members’ complaints about their SLAs with insurance companies. They are not comfortable and happy because insurers are coming down hard on them, forcing them to offer low rates. This leads to them compromising on their overhead expenses and ultimately running at a loss. Currently, we are dealing with this on a case-by-case basis but many of our members are not coming forward with their complaints because they need the business. Ideally, we would like to find a broad-based solution.

Another big challenge is the lack of college facilities to train panel beaters and other mechanical apprentices. We need to promote training in our space and develop more training facilities.

As the outgoing Director rightly said, it is refreshing to have a female at the helm in a male-dominated industry, what are you going to do to develop women’s roles in the industry?

I was privileged to meet some amazing dynamic women in our industry and have already earmarked one of them to connect with our Transformation Director who runs a ladies network, to drive the upliftment and upskilling of females in the body repair space.

Modiba is a 13-year veteran of the RMI (Retail Motor Industry Organisation) who most recently served as National Operations Coordinator with MIWA (Motor Industry Workshop Organisation).