The bathroom at her first auto parts store had a hole in the floor. And not a small one—a gap that looked straight down into the basement below. It's the humorous memory Courtney Pedler reaches for when she discusses how her career in the automotive aftermarket began out of college, and it tells you something about the industry she's enamored with: it's unglamorous, a little bit broken in places, and completely unpretentious. "But I loved working there," she says of the store.

Pedler was 12 years old in 1983, pedaling her bike down the street to her dad's auto parts store in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her mother, a hair stylist, ran a hair salon across the street—a cleaner, gentler business by all accounts—but Pedler, though she did work at the salon occasionally, found a kinship in the parts store. "I liked the sort of grittier nature of it," she recalls. She handwrote statements and stocked shelves. By 16, she was making parts deliveries.

Pedler worked for independent auto parts stores after college, then settled in at Checker Auto Parts—later acquired by O'Reilly Auto Parts—moving from the commercial desk into a district commercial sales manager role. On paper, it was a good job. In practice, she found herself crying behind the wheel on an ordinary Monday commute, unable to fully explain why.

"I was driving to work. It was on a Monday morning. And I started to cry. It was a really good job, and I just didn't like it all that much, you know? I'm like, 'This is an amazing job for someone, but I don't think it's the right job for me,'" Pedler recalls.

She picked up a newspaper, scanned the classified ads, and a listing caught her attention: data entry work, automotive experience preferred. She got the job. It was 2000. Her attention to detail was immediately noticed, and entry-level data entry work gave way to data mapping. Her days were now spent manually keying paper parts catalogs into digital form, line by line, before optical character recognition made any of that automatic. "We would take those digital catalogs that had been keyed, and we would turn them into the industry standard format for the delivery of that data, which at the time there were several different formats," she says. Pedler describes discovering that newfound love for data in almost spiritual terms—"I was born to do this work, and I love it," she says.

It's easy to understand why. Pedler describes herself as a perfectionist, and finds it deeply gratifying to roll up her sleeves and dive into data that's dirty, inconsistent, or fragmented to make it clean, trustworthy, and "as close to perfect as I can make it," she says. In an industry that for years ran on incompatible formats before anything like the ACES standard existed, Pedler's obsessive precision wasn't a personality quirk—it was exactly the skill ripe for an automotive aftermarket on the cusp of full-speed modernization.

Founding Autology, Fear and All

In 2004, she co-founded Autology Data Management (pronounced aw-TAH-luh-jee) with her now-husband, Joe. It wasn't a confident leap, but one she felt she needed to take. Pedler had watched her own father run a small business under constant stress while enduring long workdays that left him absent from home. She recalls having limited access to him, seeing him tired and cranky. In hindsight, she appreciates the sacrifices he made to provide for his family, but it wasn't a life she wanted as a business owner.

"Oh my God, that man worked so hard," she says of her father. "He was just on a mission to support his family. He was not going to fail at that. So, I saw how hard he worked and didn't want that life for myself."

The first five years of Autology were marked by real anxiety, sleepless nights, and a level of financial uncertainty most founders don't admit to publicly. Client acquisition in those early years meant cold-calling names pulled from a trade-show phone book. Valvoline, one of those first cold calls, is still a client today.

"We had that paper-bound book that was given out at AAPEX, you know, it lists everyone's contact information in there. I just opened it up. Well, not just me, but, you know, me and Joe and the other people that worked with us. We would go through that book and start cold calling people," she says.

Pedler describes being "thoughtful about and intentional" in deliberately choosing to keep Autology, and its clientele, intimately sized. She didn't want to manage a large staff, and she wanted to keep her hands in the data, staying connected to the reason she'd fallen in love with it in the first place. She calls her work at Autology "very relationship dependent."

Building a Home in the Industry

Outside her own company, Pedler has spent two decades participating in and building the Aftermarket Content Professionals Network into a respected professional community. She was eventually recruited onto its committee, and later talked into chairing it—twice, by her own account, after initially calling the idea "a terrible idea." As chair, her explicit goal was to create a sense of belonging for its members and those curious about ACPN.

"I just wanted the members of the community to feel like this is a place for you. You belong here, and we've got your back. That was one of the things that I really wanted to accomplish: to make people feel really at home there and comfortable," Pedler says.

She instituted the organization's Trailblazer Award, a lifetime-achievement honor for content professionals, as part of that legacy during her tenure.

"I so love the people that have won that award and the people that have contributed so much to the content side of this industry; I felt they really needed to be recognized," she says.

The industry felt similarly about her. In 2025, Pedler learned she would receive the Women in Auto Care Lifetime Achievement Award at AAPEX. She didn't celebrate upon hearing the news—she walked into her husband Joe's office and cried, calling it a "magical day."

"I will take that experience with me to my grave," Pedler says. "I think about it all the time and how meaningful that is. This can be a thankless industry, especially as a woman sometimes unfortunately."

The award forced a kind of reckoning: Pedler has talked about needing to become more intentional about the example she sets for other women in the industry, thinking back on her own early career, when female mentors were essentially nonexistent, and she once checked out library books on rebuilding carburetors just to prove she belonged in the room. It's a wound that's still a tad tender.

"I always felt like I had to work, especially on a parts counter, twice as hard to be seen as half as good."

She adds that Women in Auto Care has been her tour de force and her chosen vehicle to strengthen other industry women. "Had I been 20 years old today, I would not have that issue. There are so many amazing women, and they have so much good advice to give," she says.

Outside of work, Pedler rock climbs, gardens, does yoga, and travels. She'll tell you these aren't simply hobbies, but ongoing leadership and life lessons outside of business hours. She draws a direct line between problem-solving on a climbing wall, where technique matters more than brute strength, and the way she approaches a client relationship. Yoga is a reminder to always stay centered. Gardening, she says, taps the same nurturing instinct that shows up in how she manages people; however, in Courtney Pedler fashion, there's a humorous twist.

"I became a master gardener because I was tired of killing things," she said, laughing.

Pedler loves her life and career, and describes herself with a line borrowed from an old joke: not a thoroughbred, but a fast donkey—built for endurance, not speed. It's a fitting way to describe a 35-plus-year career defined less by any single leap forward than by decades of steady, obsessive, unglamorous work, done well, one line of parts data at a time.