How Automotive Changed Cathy Azzrad’s Relationship With Money and Opportunity

Cathy Azzrad, an Automotive and Financial Strategist, has watched her department disappear twice. She has spent 18 years learning how automotive dealerships work, from product sales to the finance office to management. Now she’s building something of her own and deciding what her next chapter should be.

When asked what gives her the confidence to make that kind of decision, Cathy doesn’t start with her résumé or her management experience. She starts with money.

“If I didn’t learn the financial and wealth literacy and wealth building skills first, I wouldn’t have the confidence to walk away from anything.”

Knowing how to do a job is one kind of confidence. Knowing you have the financial freedom to make a different choice is another.

Cathy didn’t always have it. In 2008, she walked into a dealership knowing almost nothing about credit, interest rates, or financing. What she learned there began with an opportunity she hadn’t gone looking for.

A Young Mother Finds Her Way Into Automotive

In 2008, Cathy was about 27 or 28 years old. She had just had her third child, and he was five months old. She had bought every vehicle she’d ever owned with cash, and she had no background in automotive or finance.

Her youngest son’s aunt worked at a dealership. Over dinner while Cathy was pregnant, the aunt explained what she did. A few months after the baby arrived, a position opened.

“And I was like, why not? I’ll try it.”

At first it was about three days a week, though the days were long. Then it grew quickly. “It just progressed quickly, very, very quickly,” Cathy says.

She didn’t enter automotive with a financial career plan. She entered willing to learn. And what the industry gave her turned out to be more than a paycheck.

“Thank God for the car business,” she says. “Because if not, I would have struggled as a single mother raising three kids if I didn’t have the knowledge, the information, the education and the income.”

Automotive became her source of stability and her financial education at the same time.

The Financial Education She Never Knew She Needed

Cathy remembers getting small credit cards at 18, with $300 limits, without understanding the importance of paying them on time. Financial literacy wasn't something she'd been taught in school, and she later recognized that her own children hadn't received that education either.

Working in automotive changed that. As Cathy learned about interest rates, credit, financing, and the long-term costs of purchasing decisions, her curiosity grew beyond the responsibilities of her own position.

“I don’t think that people realize just how much interest hurts you,” she says. “That’s what started the fire in me.”

Cathy only worked in one or two departments, but she made it a point to learn how every department was structured and how each one generated revenue. She wasn’t just learning her job. She was learning the financial system she had been navigating without a map.

That inside view gave her a balanced perspective. Cathy isn’t against dealerships. “Remember, they’re not nonprofits,” she says. Running a dealership comes with significant overhead, and businesses need to make a profit. The real question, in her view, is how much profit you allow them to make on you, and that depends in part on how much research and negotiating you’ve done.

The women she talks to often fear being taken advantage of. Cathy believes knowledge is what changes that. “Once you gain the knowledge, you have the confidence to go in there and negotiate anything with anyone.”

When the Industry Changed Her Plans

In 2018, Cathy’s department was eliminated for the first time.

She moved into automotive finance for a while, then returned to a similar role in product sales and customer education at another dealership. She eventually became a manager.

The disruptions didn’t stop there. During COVID, she was laid off from a dealership for four months, just as her daughter was preparing for college.

“I was like, whoa, like what am I going to do?” she remembers.

Even during that uncertainty, Cathy was putting what she’d learned into practice. When she recognized an opportunity to secure a favorable interest rate, she helped her college-bound daughter purchase a new Corolla, using her daughter’s stimulus money toward the down payment. It was one example of how understanding the market had changed the way Cathy approached financial decisions.

More recently, her department was eliminated a second time. She tried going back into finance again and found herself realizing it wasn’t the right fit anymore.

Cathy still speaks warmly about the industry. You can make a great income, build a life, and use it as a stepping stone to greater things. She has worked alongside people with more than 30 years in the business who still love it. But she’s honest about what it asks of you: long hours, weekends, and holidays you don’t get to enjoy the way you’d like.

The first time her department disappeared, Cathy learned another position. This time, she’s considering a different future. That possibility grew as other people started recognizing the value of what she knew.

Becoming the Resource Everyone Came To

As the years went on, Cathy kept digging deeper into how the business worked, and she kept excelling. Eventually, she began asking herself what else she might be capable of.

“What else can I excel in? What now can I do? How can I help?”

The answer was already showing up in her life. People in her circle started coming to her for financial and car-buying guidance. Then their friends started coming too.

“I was the resource,” she says. “So when I learned that I became that resource, I learned how powerful my information and knowledge can be.”

In the 60 days before our conversation, Cathy helped three of her best friend’s closest friends buy vehicles. She guided them from one dealership to another, walking alongside them through negotiations and helping them understand the decisions along the way.

When they finally reached an agreement, Cathy remembers how exhilarated they felt. They had started at square one, watched the process unfold, and participated in it. Now they could see the difference their growing understanding had made.

There’s a difference between giving someone an answer and helping someone understand enough to make her own decision. That difference is what Cathy wants to build on.

“It’s not about money,” she says. “Yes, we need to live, but it’s just like, I can empower so many women.”

Building Close Masters While Discovering What’s Next

That desire is the foundation of Close Masters LLC, the business Cathy is building around financial literacy, credit and capital building, and wealth-building strategies.

Her automotive career gave her the technical knowledge. Years of educating customers about their options taught her how to explain it. What she’s learning now is how different it is to build for yourself.

“The difference is that you have to build, you have to start building for yourself,” she says. She’s still figuring out the next path, how to grow, and where she wants to focus. She’s honest that it’s a work in progress.

While she’s still determining what the business will become, Cathy is clear about the people she wants to help.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Cathy the question I ask everyone: What do you wish I had asked you?

She didn’t hesitate. “I wish you would have asked me, how can I help women?”

After 25 minutes of talking about her own career, she wanted to talk about what she could give someone else. Her answer, when asked, was just as direct: “I can help women gain the confidence to walk away.”

The Confidence to Choose What Comes Next

Cathy knows the in-between place is frightening. A position disappears, a career shifts, or you simply know you’ve outgrown where you are. “It’s a scary feeling because we all feel stuck,” she says. The most challenging part, in her experience, is mindset, and knowing your true worth is essential to moving forward.

Once you have that confidence, she believes, you can walk into a room and ask for an opportunity, even if you’ve never done the work before.

“I could walk into a room and say, I swear to you, I could do this if you taught me,” she says. “And I’m confident enough that I can do that.”

But Cathy is clear that confidence alone isn’t the whole picture. What holds many people back, she believes, is living month to month. Without financial breathing room, there’s little space to walk away, support yourself for a few months, and figure out the next path.

In 2008, Cathy walked into a dealership without understanding credit or interest rates. Eighteen years later, she’s still learning, still adapting, and still deciding what comes next. The difference is that now she has the knowledge to make that decision on her own terms, and she wants every woman to have the same.

Your experience in this industry is worth more than you may realize. Join the Women In Automotive community at womeninautomotive.com and connect with women like Cathy who are ready to share what they know and help you take your next step with confidence.