Molly Kristick's Path to Automotive Leadership

Molly Kristick will tell you her automotive career started “against her will.”

Fresh out of college with a communications degree and years of coffee shop management under her belt, she couldn’t land a single marketing position. Every door closed with the same refrain: not enough experience, never worked in an office. So she took a paralegal job at her sister’s title company, spending two years in a windowless office reading legal documents and feeling her mind slowly melt.

“I was like, oh my God, I am not qualified to be reading these legal documents and giving advice,” Molly recalls. “I feel like I should not work here.”

Her mother kept nudging her toward sales. Molly resisted. Sales felt like failure — like giving up on the career she thought she was supposed to have. But desperation has a way of reshaping perspective. She walked into the local newspaper office in Nebraska and asked what they had available.

“We have only got one position open and it’s in the automotive department.”

It wasn’t glamorous. But it promised freedom: being on the road, visiting clients, escaping that suffocating desk. And sometimes the path you resist most becomes the one that reveals who you are.

Growth Through Discomfort

Those early days selling newspaper ads to Nebraska dealerships dismantled everything Molly thought she knew about sales, and about herself. The negative connotations faded as she discovered something unexpected — she was genuinely good at building relationships. The autonomy suited her. And the dealership visits opened her eyes to an industry she’d never considered.

Then came the moment that changed everything.

When Molly maxed out her print ad sales, the company mentioned their digital arm. She figured she’d pitch it to anyone willing to listen. That’s when a dealer casually mentioned Co-op advertising budgets.

“Mind blown at the amount,” she says. “You’ve got to be joking. This is going to be so easy to hit my goals.”

That one conversation revealed the scale and potential of franchise marketing. It became the true inflection point of her career, the moment she realized dealers were massively underserved in digital strategy.

A path she never wanted was quietly becoming a path she was meant to walk.

Learning by Doing

PureCars soon noticed Molly’s success and recruited her directly. Still determined to avoid traditional sales, she negotiated her way onto the support side, helping dealers understand their digital marketing performance after the sale. The job was 100% remote, prompting her to move from Nebraska, where she’d lived for twenty-six years, to Ohio.

What she didn’t mention in the interview? She had no idea what she was doing.

“I didn’t even know what Google Analytics and Google AdWords were,” she admits. “I asked our back-end support person, ‘Oh, is that in GA?’ He said, ‘Which one?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’”

She learned marketing by doing it, asking questions without ego, building trust with dealers, and growing competent not through textbooks but through real problems, real data, and real conversations.

“That’s where I learned everything,” she says of PureCars. “That launched me into leadership.”

When the Title Became the Misstep

Molly grew at PureCars. And grew. And grew. Eventually, she reached a point where she felt she deserved more. Looking back, she recognizes she had it really good.

Still, she left, chasing a title outside automotive.

“I knew immediately that it was a mistake,” she says. “It was not automotive. It was a huge learning curve.”

The company was under new leadership with constant change. Then came layoffs, and for the first time since she was eighteen, she didn’t have a job waiting.

She took an individual contributor role at an automotive vendor, a move that felt like a major step backward. But it was also humbling in a way she needed.

“I worked so hard to get so far just to make a wrong choice because I thought I was above the position I was in.”

Every Role Still Counts

That short-lived job doesn’t appear on her LinkedIn. But Molly is quick to point out its importance.

“Every single job I’ve ever taken, whether I’m embarrassed by it or not, it’s helped me. I’ve met people that have continued to help me on my path.”

TrueCar found her quickly. The relationships she built, even in roles she didn’t love, opened doors. That experience cemented a leadership principle she carries with her:

Stay humble. Because the people you meet today may shape the opportunities that come tomorrow.

Building TrueCar Marketing Solutions

At TrueCar, Molly’s curiosity found the perfect playground. With her blend of print advertising roots, Co-op knowledge, digital campaign experience, and exposure to CDPs through PureCars’ acquisition of AutoMiner, she understood the industry from multiple angles.

TrueCar was building products off first-party data. Molly immediately saw what was possible.

“Being really curious about what products we could make and what kind of progress we could make by using our own first-party data,” she explains.

Her team leveraged CDPs, Meta look-alike audiences, and data cleansing to solve real dealer problems, not just sell generic products. The results speak for themselves: virtually no churn. Dealers stay for years. The strategies even scaled to OEMs at tier one.

Collaboration Over Control

Molly’s team works closely with sales, often leading pitch decks and conversations while sales reps hold relationships. This shift required retraining teams away from inventory-only thinking and toward solutions-based selling.

Her collaborative approach extends into product development.

When one of TrueCar’s largest dealer groups presented a challenge, Molly’s team partnered with product, development, and sales to brainstorm solutions. It sparked the creation of a new product opportunity.

Here’s what made the process powerful:

Everyone brought a different strength, data insight, dealer relationships, technical architecture. No one owned the entire solution, but together they built something none of them could have created alone.

“You don’t have to push your agenda just because you’re in a leadership role,” she says. “One plus one equals three.”

Recognition Without Ego

Molly’s work has earned recognition, Auto Remarketing’s 40 Under 40 and Auto Tech Startup of the Year for her department, but awards haven’t redirected her ambition.

They’ve grounded it.

“I’m not looking to grow exponentially, salary and title-wise,” she says. “Winning awards reinforces that I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

Leading in the Trenches

When TrueCar Marketing Solutions temporarily lost a solutions consultant, Molly stepped in. She did pitches, demos, contracts, whatever was needed.

“There’s no role that I won’t do. If I weren’t going to be like that, that’s not a leader I would respect.”

Her leadership philosophy is simple: be the leader she herself would look up to.

The Voices That Shaped Her

Molly didn’t point to a high-profile executive when asked about influential mentors. She pointed to her mom.

“She has no context. No idea. She’s not impressed by titles or money. She’s impressed by whether I’m happy and have a regulated nervous system.”

Professionally, she credits Mark Catalinich at PureCars, who trusted her autonomy and supported her when needed, a balance she carries into her own leadership style today.

Boundaries Are Non-Negotiable

Both of Molly’s children were born during COVID, with her husband working from home and little travel required. That experience shaped what she now considers non-negotiable.

She would never again take a role requiring excessive travel, weekend work, or constant availability.

“I really respect the younger professionals protecting their time,” she says. “Burnout is no longer a badge of honor.”

You Don’t Have to Hurry

When people ask Molly “what’s next,” she feels almost apologetic saying she doesn’t know, because she’s genuinely content. She’s not rushing. She’s not chasing titles. She’s building depth where she is.

“I’m not done yet. I’m not done here yet.”

For those entering automotive and marketing, her advice cuts against hustle culture:

“You’re going to miss what’s right for you if you’re always jumping to the next thing. You cannot hurry your way into catching up to a title. Sit in the work. Figure out what you’re good at. Follow the work you identify with.”

Her own story proves it: the thing she resisted sales became the place she thrives.

Sometimes the real growth is staying. Sometimes the real success is alignment. And sometimes the career that starts “against your will” becomes exactly where you belong.

When you’re ready to connect with leaders like Molly, women rewriting what ambition looks like, join the Women In Automotive community. Find the people who remind you that your difference is your strength, and that your path doesn’t have to be linear to be powerful.