All those jokes about women drivers get a new punch line with Laura LaBo, who makes her living talking horsepower and powertrain to the likes of Hollywood heartthrob Tom Cruise and TV’s high-profile morning man, Bryant Gumbel.
As the owner of Shows & Shoots, a Troy, Mich.-based fleet management company, LaBo rides the fast lane in an industry that has long been considered sacrosanct guy territory.
With Shows & Shoots contracted as the public relations fleet manager for the Warren, Mich.-based Chevrolet, LaBo and her staff of 20 shuttle 5 to 10 cars a week to television, radio, newspaper and magazine journalists throughout the country to be test driven and inspected.
In addition to shuttling the vehicles to reporters, Shows & Shoots inspects them to ensure they are in good working condition; washes and waxes them and makes sure the vehicles are fueled and the fluids filled.
“We might have to drive a new model out to Maryland for a public TV program, “Motorweek,” or a truck to Ohio to be written about in Future Farmers of America,” LaBo says.
Often, the vehicles are loaned to media celebs, as in the case of “Today” show host Gumbel, who got to sit behind the wheel of a new Chevrolet convertible for two weeks, as a courtesy, LaBo explains.
What makes her job most exciting are those occasional brushes with the rich and famous, such as former Indy winner Emerson Fitipaldi, whom she met at an auto show her firm helped coordinate, and Cruise, who drove cars prepped by Shows & Shoots in “Days of Thunder.”
Though women now account for almost 50 percent of all new car and truck sales in this country, careers in cars are still a novelty for women. LaBo says even she fell into her business almost by accident. From 1978 to 1987, she worked in public relations for General Motors Crop. in Milford, Mich., and in 1988, moved to Chevrolet PR.
She founded Shows & Shoots Ltd. in August 1989 to organize car preview shows.
“In the winter of 1991, which was typically my slow time, I received a panic call from Chevy PR asking if I could drive a vehicle to a journalist in Chicago that same day,” LaBo recalls.
Soon afterward, she was delivering vehicles around the Midwest three or four times a week. Last February, Shows & Shoots opened a branch office in Carrollton, Texas, to manage Chevrolet’s southwest fleet, LaBo says.
“There’s a lot of detail work involved in this, so it is a lot more than just moving cars,” she says. “But, who would have thought we’d meet so many interesting people and have so much fun doing this?”
