Latin America. Milagros Méndez, CEO of Ramco Automotive, will talk about women's leadership in the aftermarket industry on the first day of the AutoAmericas Congress, to be held March 24-25 in Miami.
More than 25 years ago, Milagros Méndez arrived from Venezuela to the United States, in her case to practice her law career. He was there when he was called from his native country by a friend, a mechanical engineer, who asked for a hand with some poorly prepared orders from his supplier there.
"But I know absolutely nothing about this; talk to me about law, but not about spare parts," Milagros replied. "Don't worry; I teach you step by step," he told her on the other end of the line.
Thus, Milagros was instructed where to get sensors, which was the best factory, how to test them. With each guideline received, he entered more and more into the world of the aftermarket, passionate to the point of not sleeping, and finding boxes of suppliers that flooded his house, and that he took through two or three containers per week to his native Venezuela.
At one point, his house became too small, and he had to buy a 1000 ft² warehouse in El Doral and hire a lady who helped him pack when large orders arrived, already from an even larger distributor in Venezuela. Over time, this distribution would be extended not only to sensors, which is its forte, but also to water pumps, gasoline pumps, modules and coils.
During an AAPEX fair, a major customer in Mexico asked him to distribute his product, for which he asked for his brand. Ramco Automotive (located at booth A3867 of this edition), registered since the beginning of the last decade, was born in his mind at the beginning of this century a few months after the death of his father: Ramiro Méndez; The beginning of his name became the basis of it, to which was added the 'co' suggested by a friend, "because that's going to be something big."
However, ten years ago, when her old friend Clarisa Gianelli also traveled from Venezuela to Miami in search of better opportunities, she found Milagros with only the client from Mexico and distribution in Venezuela, where she had just lost a major burden at the expense of a partner who disappeared.
Immediately, Clarisa, who knew the logistics part from her experience in a typography in Venezuela, began to make a wide list of distributors not only in Latin America and the Caribbean, but even Europe. Thus, the company took a second wind of expansion, to the point of opening up to the United States market by the hand of The National Performance Warehouse Companies (NPW), which highlighted the quality of its product.
In this country they have 25 employees, most of them women, whose presence they want to reaffirm in "a closed world of men", as Clarissa affirms, who maintains that within the United States it is the only company with its own brand, certified by Miami Dade, SBE & LDB, led by Latina women. For this they have had the valuable support of Tammy Tecklenburg and her company dott which, in the words of Milagros, has been "a reliable voice in the navigation of the industry and fundamental to our recent success".
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