Outside on the lot at Riverhead Mazda on Old Country Road on Wednesday morning, heavy construction equipment hammered away, raising up a new dealership showroom set to open in June.

Inside an on-site sales trailer, Sonya Lucki was engaged in a different kind of buildout: she’s actively assembling a team of women across sales, operations and mechanics.

“You sell to women all day long,” said the dealership’s Assistant General Manager and part owner. “But when they walk in, they don’t see themselves.”

Lucki is intent on changing that.

“I want to recruit and hire women,” she said. “Sure, it’s an intense job, and at the end of the month we’re all busy, we’re all running around. It’s so high energy. But you can make a living out here … you can sell cars and make six figures your first year.

“The challenge is, though, that most of the women — when you do the numbers and the data — they’re in administrative roles. They’re in the office, they do the billing, they do the paperwork, and that’s fine.

“But I want my women in the front of the house, talking to customers.”

‘No pipeline‘

At Riverhead Mazda, that shift is already underway. Women now make up a growing share of the front-of-house team, including top sales staff. At one point, she said, “we had a female tech, a female service advisor, and then it’s three of us in the front of the house [in sales]. Out of 20 employees, that was 25%.”

Lucki believes attracting women to the business requires rethinking the job itself.

“Car dealerships, historically, have not been a great experience for women.”

When her family acquired the Mazda dealership in Riverhead about two and a half years ago, she and her brother, General Manager Michael Lucki, moved quickly to break from industry norms, starting with compensation.

“Our people are all paid salaries,” she said. “So they’re not motivated to push a higher price. They’re motivated to help.”

Even with those changes, recruiting women into a traditionally male-dominated field remains a challenge.

“There’s no pipeline for women in the automotive industry.”

‘Finding a fit’

So Lucki looks elsewhere — to hospitality, retail and other customer-facing roles — for candidates who might never have considered selling cars. One of her top performers, Robyn Coval, previously owned a kitchen supply store in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market and more recently worked at 8 Hands Farm. When Lucki first pitched her friend on the idea, she was skeptical.

“You’re not selling cars,” Lucki told her. “You’re finding a fit for somebody.”

Coval began answering phones, moved swiftly to business development coordinator and then into sales.

She said she loves the vibe at Riverhead Mazda.

“It really is important to me that people feel embraced, welcomed, heard, loved, taken care of when they’re in my home — quote, unquote — and my home now is Riverhead Mazda.”

Every new hire is required to read the business leadership book “Unreasonable Hospitality,” a best-selling 2022 book by restaurateur Will Guidara that argues for turning customer service into an “art form.” The philosophy informs the culture Lucki and her brother are trying to build at Riverhead Mazda, part of a multigenerational family business with deep roots on Long Island.

‘The right attitude‘

That legacy began with her grandfather, an immigrant, who pioneered the family business. Her father joined at 30, leaving a career in corporate recruiting to sell cars “bell to bell,” six days a week, in a pre-internet world.

“He was a glorified salesperson his whole career,” Lucki said. “Because that’s what it was — relationships, servicing people. He’s still involved … [he] comes in three to four days a week to talk to his favorite people.”

Lucki’s own path into the business came later. With a master’s degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology in cosmetic and fragrance marketing and management, she spent five years in corporate talent recruitment and human resources at Estee Lauder in Manhattan.

After seven years learning the business inside the family’s Toyota dealership — rotating through sales, service and operations while raising three young children — Lucki moved to Mazda two and a half years ago.

She recently graduated from the National Automobile Dealers Association Academy, widely considered the industry’s equivalent of a master’s degree in running an auto dealership.

Her brother Michael used to teach there.

“We taught about 1,000 students a year that were all general managers or candidates to be general managers, who would eventually be the owners of their dealerships, from manufacturers all over the country, Canada, Mexico and Latin America,” he said. “The percentage of people that were in that program that were women was less than 10%.”

“So after leaving there and coming here to Mazda, I knew that Sonya would be perfect for this role,” he said. “My whole family works in this industry and she’s the most natural at it. Her skill set and her personality fits this industry better than any one of the children of the family, more than me, as much as I like this industry … She has the right attitude, the right personality.

“The way that she can attract people that would never think to join this industry before is just tremendous.”

Lucki feels similarly about her brother … on nearly every front.

New looks

When she first arrived at Mazda, Lucki was handed a standard-issue collared shirt.

“I love my brother, and he’s great,” she said. “But I went to him and said, ‘this is the uniform?’”

“I was like, absolutely not,” she said with a laugh. “Why would I want to work somewhere where I have to put on a different identity to do my job?”

She began consulting with fellow female general managers at dealerships around the state, rethinking how employees present themselves on the job.

Next, she began working with a designer to create a new kind of dealership uniform that was functional, expressive and designed for women.

“We want to get women in store,” she said. “We want more women sales people. We sell to women all day long, but when you show up, your women aren’t even looking and aren’t feeling confident in what they’re being asked to wear to work.”