Auto industry expert shares story of success by reinvention

Auto industry expert shares her path to success

Jan Griffiths has blazed a trail in the auto industry - and explains how she's done it.

FOX 2 - It’s never too late to reinvent yourself - it’s something we hear all the time but is it actually true? For one woman in the auto industry, it is.

The backstory:

Jan Griffiths has appeared on FOX 2 many times as an industry expert. It is a field she spent the bulk of her career in.

However, she says her path to success was anything but a straight line and she’s not done blazing trails just yet.

Griffiths’ story starts a long way from the motor city. She was born into a family business across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom.

"A long line of farmers, my parents were farmers, my grandparents," she said. "I was supposed to grow up and marry the farmer next door but I didn’t want to do that."

From a young age she was fearless. When BorgWarner, an American auto supplier located in her hometown of Wales, posted a job opening - and she went for it.

"I walked on to the shop room floor and I fell in love with manufacturing," she said. "I could smell the oil, coolant, the equipment, the machinery, it was a transmission plant. I was hooked on the auto industry from that day forward."

She spent a year learning everything she could about the auto industry.

"And then one day they sent me on 10-day business trip to Muncie, Indiana, and the rest is history," she said.

It is a history that includes moving to the Detroit area and becoming chief procurement officer for a $3 billion company.

"I would love to say I had intention around my career and it was a plan - I did not," she said. "When the opportunity presented itself, I snatched it and went for it."

At the height of her career in 2008, the economy took a turn and she found herself laid off.

"All of the sudden, I was a single mom living in an apartment with no job," she said.

She pivoted to private equity, manifesting her goals of buying a home, taking care of her child and leading a Tier-1 auto company.

"I'm going to start my own business and I'm going to focus on changing the culture in an entire industry," she said.  "People looked at me like I was insane and I did it. I started Gravitas Detroit and learned how to be an entrepreneur."

For the next year she took no salary, and then came yet another way to reinvent herself.

‘Someone came along and said 'You should start a podcast," Griffiths said. "I said 'Oh, what’s that?'"

She went to work again, proving that if you are driven you can write your own rule book.

"Now I'm in the media, I'm podcasting, I do webinars, speaking engagements," she said. "These are the things I need to do because they all come back to the message of changing the culture in the auto industry."

Griffiths says the biggest thing that got her off the family farm in Wales is the support of her mother, who told her to go for it - advice that she still follows to this day.