City of Industry, Calif. -- While the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) is best known for its annual trade show that draws more than 2,000 exhibitors and 110,000 attendees to Las Vegas every year, the association has dozens of programs it is working on every day for the good of the specialty auto parts industry, said Mitch Williams, who ended his two-year term as SEMA Chairman in August.
Williams, chief operating officer of Pilot Automotive Inc., an automotive accessories company, said that keeping an eye on new legislation that could be damaging to the industry is one of SEMA's key roles.
"The government is like a freight train," Williams said. "It's hard to get going, but it's even harder to stop once it's rolling. With member companies representing more than $38 billion in business, we have a lot of clout."
Williams said that during the last two years, the association has been ramping up its communication and advocacy at the local and state level in addition to its longtime federal efforts. It is very important to make sure the best possible information is available to our elected and appointed officials if we expect them to make the best possible decisions, he said.
One thing SEMA is lobbying against is "smart" highway systems that take over the responsibility of avoiding accidents from the driver, Williams said. "The driver is still the worst performing component in a modern vehicle, but also the one that receives the least attention." "We don't want to create an automobile that is a rolling computer so that in 10 years it is still mechanically viable but all of the computers mean it is no longer viable to maintain or repair."
Williams said SEMA is also in the pilot stage of a program that will make it easier for member companies to sell their products. The program, called Pro Pledge, intervenes if an aftermarket product is used and causes a vehicle warranty issue, he said.
Williams said that by joining Pro Pledge, manufacturers can protect their customers if their product is installed and then there is a problem that voids the vehicle's warranty. He said that SEMA will first try to mediate and determine if the warranty is being improperly denied. If the warranty issue is determined to be the fault of the aftermarket product, he said Pro Pledge will then cover the cost of the repair.
"A warranty denial is a lose-lose-lose-lose situation," Williams said. "The vehicle owner loses, the dealer loses, the vehicle manufacturer loses, and the aftermarket loses." The new program will allow installers and customers to be confident that even if they use aftermarket products, they will still be able to maintain their new-vehicle warranty.
The aftermarket product company pays a small fee to participate in the program, Williams said. "It establishes a very high standard," he said.
Williams said his involvement in the industry began as a young man growing up in the shadow of the Atlanta Motor Speedway. He said he attended his first NASCAR race in 1968.
"Back in those days, a lot of the cars arrived on open transporters, and you could walk over and touch them, and more often then not you'd bump into the drivers around town," he said. "Literally, you might bump into Curtis Turner having lunch and Junior Johnson working on this car all in the same day," he said.
In 1969, construction began on Road Atlanta, Williams said, and he began to learn about SCCA-sponsored road racing at the sports car track. "NASCAR seemed unattainable, but here I saw people racing street cars that were lightly modified for racing," he said of Road Atlanta. "Here was something that I could get involved in."
Williams said he took a job in a full-service gas station so that he could learn about cars even as he began college to become a clinical psychologist. He said he soon went to work for a friend who opened a BMW and Audi repair shop. The friend was an SCCA racer and sold Williams a BMW 2002 that he said he began to campaign in SCCA autocross and regional events.
His work at the shop introduced him to a local performance products company, Williams said, and the company's salesman brought him to the attention of Cibie and Marchal, two French automotive lighting companies that were looking for someone with an interest in racing to represent their products on weekends at automotive events across the country.
"This became my first job along this career path," he said. "The company bought a motor home that I could live in and travel with between races, car shows, and distributor events.
"I lived in the motorhome for a year and traveled about 50,000 miles," he said. "It was my dream job. Every weekend was about cars."
In fact, Williams said he drove the motorhome to his first SEMA Show in 1978. "I was just blown away by the show," he said. "It was like this giant toy store."
While he was enjoying himself, Williams said the job began to force him to make a decision about either giving up his efforts to become a psychologist or "try to turn my passion for cars into a career." ."
He said his epiphany came one day when he was discussing careers with one of his instructors. "I was talking with a professor with a Ph.D. and discovered that I was already making more than he was," he said.
Even so, Williams said his decision to bet his future on the automotive aftermarket didn't seem like a sure thing. "We were entering the '80s with the advent of emission controls," he said. "Performance was generally declining and fuel prices were fluctuating. Here I was getting heavily involved in performance when people who ought to know were predicting that it just might be over."
At the same time, he said he was meeting people in the aftermarket that absolutely refused to quit. "They recognized that there were challenges, but they believed could be overcome," he said.
In 1985, Williams said he went to work for Hella. "These turned out to be very good years," he said. "There were still plenty of muscle cars our there, and pickup trucks were becoming more popular. I think I was one of the early people to realize that the future of auxiliary lighting was about pickup trucks. I was at the right place at the right time.
"It was a time period when you had to learn something new every few years," Williams said. "Really, it has been that way ever since."
Some of today's challenges include the level of transparency that has been created by the Internet and easy access to information from all over the world, Williams said. "Someone sitting in Germany can now see what the same part would sell for in Australia," he said.
In many ways, Williams said his career has followed many of the major trends in the industry, beginning with working with European companies in the 1980s, following the growing trend of trucks and SUVs in the late '80s and then becoming involved with Pilot Automotive in the '90s. Pilot was founded by Calvin Wang, who began the business out of his garage while working on his master's degrees in both chemical and petroleum engineering at USC and UCLA, he said.
"His friends convinced him that automotive accessories were a good area to be in," he said. "Because of his engineering background, he was able to produce a high-quality part at a very good price."
The company is primarily known for its accessory lighting products, Williams said, but it also markets the APC brand of headlamps and high-tech tail lamps, , seats and interior accessories, and performance air filters; Bully Truck accessories; and collision-replacement lighting products.
"A multiple-brand strategy is important for the future so we are able to offer the products that customers are asking for," he said. The company supplies all of the major automotive retailers, as well as performance warehouse distributors, and numerous OE manufacturers, he said.
Williams said that in today's market, it is important to consider an item's price point during the design process in order to build a good-quality product at a good price and deliver a good value.
"We try to offer the right quality," he said. "Everybody can appreciate a Rolls Royce but not everybody can afford that quality. We try to look at the end user and determine what the right quality level is recognizing that the quality always has to be high these days. At the end of the day, it does matter what the consumer is willing to pay."
While much of the company's design work is done in the United States, Williams said, most production is done in the Far East. In some cases, Pilot owns the plant, in others they are purchasing from other producers, and in other cases they are private-branding their products for others, Williams said.
"We don't have a single way that we do business," he said. "We look for what will work best for the customer ."
As SEMA expanded in the intervening years, Williams said the group came to include collectible cars, restyling, performance, trucks and SUVs, tuner-type cars, motorcycles, hot rods, and marine, among others. "What we discovered was that we have great deal of diversity, and SEMA became the one tent where all of these segments came together," he said. "The secret of SEMA is that we used that diversity to work for us and to bind us all together."
While the market for products to modify vehicles will continue to change at an increasing pace, Williams said he believes it has an indefinite future. "Whatever we're driving in 20 years, there will still be a subsection of drivers that will want it to perform better, drive better, and look different, so the industry will remain strong and continue to grow."
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