Lily Massey

I've been in the automotive industry since 1993, and my career has been anything but a straight line. I started with a mechanical engineering degree from Lehigh University, where I won a GM scholarship that had me working for them over the summers. That experience really drove me towards automotive. After college, I took a job with Ford, which eventually spun off Visteon. I spent almost 20 years there doing everything from product design engineering to manufacturing engineering to quality engineering. I developed products, worked in plants launching them, and even served as a production floor supervisor on the afternoon shift, managing over 50 hourly employees across several different areas. One of my proudest achievements from that time was developing a seamless airbag design that earned me a patent. We worked with a customer in France and launched the product at our Visteon plant in Brazil. While working full-time, I went back to school at night for my master's. I started with one semester of engineering management, but then switched to getting my MBA from the University of Michigan because I thought a business degree would be more flexible and give me more opportunities. After earning my MBA, I moved more into the finance and business direction, becoming a business planning manager where I developed quotes and did business case analysis. During the 2007-2008 economic downturn, Visteon sold off their entire interiors group. While almost everyone I had known and worked with for 15 years got let go, they kept me around to do analysis on what products to keep and what plants to close. In 2010, I made an unexpected move into IT as a Business Intelligence Manager at Visteon, managing developers both in the US and offshore in India. It wasn't a role I ever expected to have, but it turned out to be a really great experience where I learned about the complexity of ERPs, data movement, and the whole IT world. After about three years in IT, I left Visteon for Key Plastics as a Commercial Finance Director. That was my first experience with a privately-owned company and private equity, which is quite different. They were looking to grow and eventually got bought out by Novaris. With that acquisition, I moved back into IT since they already had a global commercial finance director. After several more years, I really missed the commercial finance direction, so I found a position with Horizon Global as a finance director. That was just before COVID, which hit them hard since they sold hitches and fifth wheels and got a lot of steel from China. They were financially struggling and got acquired by First Brands. Then I moved to the Shift Group as a commercial finance director, where we launched an electric vehicle walk-in delivery van and sold 150 of them to FedEx. But then the EV market kind of fell from beneath us and was put on pause. The company got acquired by Abe Schmidt last July, and after restructuring, I was let go about five weeks ago. Now I'm starting next week with Cameco LLC as a commercial finance director for an automotive supplier of seat structures. The first part of my career was very stable with Ford and Visteon, but the second half seems like I'm always on the wrong side of an acquisition. I've learned flexibility throughout all of this, going between finance and IT, being open to changing what I'm doing, and adapting when things don't go as planned. I think people think of their careers too much like a ladder they're trying to climb, but in reality, your career is probably more like a jungle gym where you can go up, or sideways, or down, or around.