Meet your 2007 Mentor of the Year: Carolyn Pavlovsky, CCE.(member PROFILE)

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Thirty years of a career in credit gives a professional the chance to do just about anything if one is willing to accept the challenges. In addition, acquiring the experience and tools to control the flow of any day-to-day credit issue might not be considered a career fulfilled for some. Rather, it's a give and take, and give and give some more. The career of Carolyn Pavlovsky, CCE has given her a lot. It has given her the unexpected title of "pioneer" for being the first woman credit manager at each of the manufacturing companies she has worked for. It has given her mentors and challenges, which she accepted and turned into insight and knowledge and passed on to those she has mentored; so much so that Carolyn was chosen as the NACM National Mentor of the Year for 2007.

"It was interesting being the only female on a customer site visit in one of the Detroit automotive assembly plants in the '80s," Carolyn laughingly reflected. And no matter how difficult it was then, today, with more and more technological forms of communication whittling away at personal contact with the customers, Carolyn said it's important to remember to get out and visit them on-site. A face-to-face relationship is just one bit of the advice she has for credit professionals. Another is this: be a sales person. "Every day we have to sell ourselves (especially if we are females in a male-dominated industry), sell our profession and sell our policies," she said. "You have to educate your customers about your department's goals and your position in protecting your company's financial risk."

Since Carolyn's entrance into the credit field, she has always worked for manufacturing companies. She worked 21 years for Dresser, Inc. in the division that made pneumatic tools for the automotive and aircraft industries. "I built a lot of strong relationships with my distributors, which constituted about 40% of our commercial/industrial customer base," she said. Carolyn started as a collector, then was promoted up to assistant credit manager and finally, credit manager. As change came to the company, Carolyn changed too. When the pneumatic tools division was sold, she went to work for Igloo Corporation, whose customer base was mass merchandisers. Carolyn quipped, "I had never worked for a seasonal, sales-based company. Selling to retailers and dealing with seasonal projects, along with managing the A/R, was quite different from the industrial sector to which I had been accustomed." She worked for Igloo for three years, but, finding that seasonal A/R was not her glass of iced tea, she left to go back to an A/R base of commercial industrial customers.

Carolyn is currently the North American credit manager for Tyco Valves & Controls in Houston, TX. Tyco has a large sales and MR volume. "Here, my responsibility covers factory and branch sales for all of North America," she said. "My department is responsible for $115 million in receivables," she added. Tyco sells valves to the food and beverage and oil and gas industries, as well as specialty flow control valves for the nuclear industries, including the U.S. Navy, who requires inspections and special certifications. "As the country moves to build new power plants," she said, "Tyco Valves & Controls has been and will continue to be a huge part of these billion dollar projects, working with the engineering and construction companies." The large projects present set-up issues with contracts. Therefore, Tyco has added a contract administrator to the credit department. "This position has improved our collection time and reduced retention," she noted.

A Sampling of Technology

"The biggest change over the past 30 years from my standpoint is in technology," Carolyn said. "Not too long ago, in the scheme of things, it took a week to get a D&B report. You had to call in for a 'verbal' and then received the written version in the mail about seven days later." She also spoke of the routine of mailing credit references to suppliers and the old fax machines, where a document was attached to the machine's cylinder, which then "spun" for a few minutes to transmit the information. Because of the process, Carolyn's company only used the fax for important transmissions. "We did have pen and paper as opposed to stone tablets," she joked, "but processes have improved greatly. Now we fax and/or email everything in seconds. The downside is we tend to get caught in email strings instead of picking up the telephone or, better yet, having a face-to-face meeting."