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Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes over some ways that you could *theoretically* sabotage the shop, and some of the ways to fix it. The conclusion that he comes to however, is one of the coldest lines in this entire series of podcasts - mainly that most shops are sabotaging themselves! From poor management to ineffective service advisors, when times get slow from either external or internal factors the personnel that stand to lose the most happen to be some of the most valuable in the shop, and the ones that have the highest demand for their skills! There are tons of ways to fix this, but the bottom line is, if you don’t have the work the people who suffer the most are the techs, and they often times have the best exit strategy!     Also Uncle Jimmy gets the palladium sombrero on repair order up-sells.  This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes down the AI Rabbit hole with some of the most pressing causes of the technician shortage. Weirdly, Gemini has apparently been an avid listener of grease the wheels, because the last few episodes were often referenced! However, where it completely excels is in the numbers, specifically looking at the aging population of auto mechanics with mid-60% being over the age of 45 years old. Apparently Millenials avoided the industry all together, but might be coming into the skilled trades as the aforementioned AI takes their office jobs! The real focus needs to be on Gen Z and more importantly how to keep them in the shop, to which Gemini actually has some very solid ideas. We also get into the idea of institutional knowledge drain.    Also Uncle Jimmy catches a wave listening to Dick Dale as a proud member of, “The Silver Tsunami” This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle jimmy concludes his symposium on the technician shortage with the simple fact that the job is dangerous, and it will hurt you at some point. There are a million and a half ways to get hurt at work, from the cars to the equipment, to not properly using either. There are also a millions ways that the job can kill you, such as trying to catch rolls royces, to chemicals. In this episode we go over the burns, cuts, sprains, and strains that can knock a good tech out of commission, and if bad enough get their coworkers to leave the game all together. Seriously, everyone listening to this has, at some point in time, gotten hurt on the job. And if employers think that this is not a cause of the technician shortage, they are delusional!     Also Uncle Jimmy goes over how the Germans do it right, and how The King ultimately ended up dying on the bog.  This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks episode of Grease The Wheels, Uncle Jimmy expands on the concept of “The Bullsh*t Factor” Quite simply put, this is anything that makes your job as a technician more difficult. This can from the environment, such as shops that are not properly climate controlled for the climate that they are in. It can also come from management and other support staff, being either too involved or not involved enough in keeping up standards, or adding steps to processes that should be incredibly simple. It can come from ownership that sees their technicians and support staff less as an investment, and more as a cost. It can also come from Parts Departments, usually because they are so underpaid for the job that they do. The bottom line is that if the effort is not there, and the view on the fixed ops department is that it is not a good investment but rather a human run impediment to selling more cars — then the situation is never going to improve and it is time to grease them wheels.     Also Uncle Jimmy resurrects an old intro format and gets an amber alert that almost completely derails an important bit.  This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy comes down hard on one of the major contributing factors of the technician shortage - the money. From warranty times that keep getting slashed to an abysmally low starting average pay, there is no wonder why the attrition rate is so high amongst young technicians. Throughout the industry, keeping talent is a problem - for some! For others who run a business well and understand that skilled labor isn’t cheap, there is no technician shortage. We also get into the weeds on a concept called “The B******t Factor” which will either compound or allow more leeway with what it is going to cost you to keep working there. There are many contributing factors to the technician shortage, but it is highly dependent on the attitudes and compensation of talent throughout the industry.     Also Uncle Jimmy blows up old Porsches.  This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease The Wheels, Uncle jimmy starts in on a series that is addressing the technician shortage. Throughout the history of media that has included cars, mechanics (and their modern iteration of technicians) have been unduly vilified as grifters, cheats, and scumbags. While there are some bad actors in the field, the same can be said for literally other occupation on earth (most notably, the ones that actually deal with the customers and complete the transactions in our industry!) We challenge this notion in it’s entirety, as many of the technicians that we know and love, especially the ones that listen to this podcast, are some of the best people that we have ever met. So how do we go about changing this societal view on an entire profession - media. While this media might not be a good example! But between the small screen in a customers pocket that is showing them a perfect video MPI on their vehicle, to larger scale scripted media, we are working to change customers perspective of the fixed operations department, one interaction at a time.  Also Uncle Jimmy quotes last week’s episode write up!  This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy takes a common problem and solves it in the most insane way that he possibly can! We have all seen manuals, repair instructions, and bulletins that seem to be written by someone who has never turned a wrench in anger, but sometimes they are egregious enough to actually be a problem. Such as the one that attempted to have Uncle Jimmy start messing around with battery connections on a live battery - pro tip; don’t do this! So we decided to reimagine these forms of literature in the forms of common children’s stories - some for technicians, some for other techs, and even some for customers to get the point across in a simple and digestible way. The practical application of this comes from the definitely-non-children author, H.P. Lovecraft who famously said, “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” The more that we help both professionals in the field and the customers that use the products that we keep running every single day understand what is going on, the less fear there well be overall.  Also Uncle Jimmy drops a positively millennial/gen-z hot take, “don’t die at work, that means work wins!” This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy outlines the service advisor boot camp that will break your service advisors of all of their bad habits, and build them back up with all of the right ones. All it will take is sheer psychological torture for a few days, weeks, or months! The real idea here though is to make Service Advisors do the job the way that everyone wants them to do it. From actually walking around the customers car and possibly pre-selling the repairs right in the drive on, to watching the video to gather the evidence they need for their followup conversations, to utilizing the proper communication method for where that customer is at in the building — the service advisor boot camp will make monsters out of even the most slovenly examples that the industry puts forward. We also get deeper into the idea that going with a blank slate, and even service advisors that don’t know anything about cars can be a good tactical choice when it comes to choosing them, because you get to indoctrinate them the way that your shop wants them to get the job done.  Also Uncle Jimmy keeps it under a dozen quotes from the eternal R. Lee Ermey.  This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we delve into the world of statistics, and come up with some genuinely novel applications of baseball numbers and terminology to help your shop run better. RBI for service advisors, Errors also mostly for service advisors, and techs having to bat 1.000. There area already hundreds of datapoint for shops to utilize to make better decisions, but more often than not we find that the data is being underutilized, and no one really knows what it is. There are many reasons for this, but it leads to one of the most pressing concepts in the automotive industry today, a takeoff of the stat line WAR from baseball that we named Repairs Against Replacement. Are the new guys able to actually turn the hours with the accuracy of the people that they are replacing - more often than not. Will your shop have the payroll to effectively replace high performing techs who decide to grease the wheels - also probably not.  Also Uncle Jimmy is still salty about the Bills and has used the time between football and baseball season to binge some Ken Burns.  This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we go over some of the highlights and lowlights of automotive management. One of the main things that we have noticed is that in the rise of the corporate owned, multi-location dealership group era, there are a lot less nepo-hires in management. It still happens, especially at smaller family owned dealerships, but on a whole the quality of management in the automotive space has actually gotten significantly better in the last 20+ years! There are still ineffective, and poorly trained management in this space, but many of them are a lot easier to get rid of when they aren’t going to show up at family parties. We go over some of the hallmarks of what makes managers successful in this space full of good examples, ideas, tips, and tricks. Bottom line, good management can make a good shop great, and bad management can make a bad shop infinitely worse.     Also Uncle Jimmy knows that he cannot govern the ungovernable!  This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, we answer a question that absolutely no one asked: what if the safety systems in your car could be funny? To do this, we use the framework of our personal favorite retired New York State Trooper, Jimmy’s brother Bob! This is a natural fit because Bob did the nitty gritty work of crash scene reconstructions and even taught it at the Trooper Academy for years. Needless to say he knows pretty much all of the ways that things can go wrong on the road and their direct consequences first hand. However, our OBDII program B.O.B would use those inputs to give you feedback — some gentile and caring, and some hilariously unhinged. There would be other inputs as well, from Bluetooth jamming people lollygagging in the left lane, to some other, much grosser applications. Either way, Bob/B.O.B. is there to keep you alive and quite possibly make you wet yourself laughing!  Also Uncle Jimmy casually calls out some of the bad driving and car borrowing habits of Erik the Producer, while thankfully leaving out that real Bob has gotten both of us out of enough tickets to fund the NYS Government for a whole 12 seconds. Thanks, Bob!  This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we close out our anthology on the Video MultiPoint Inspection, DVI, vMPI, etc -- with the most important part of the equation: the customers. Taking a step back, part of the reason why our customers are so unreasonable at times when it comes to our recommendations when it comes to facing or maintaining their cars is the immense amount of anxiety that they have about it. It is a known fact that the less you understand about a situation, the more the lizard parts of your brain are likely to overreact, over correct, and get defensive. When it comes to modern car owners, they really have never understood less! This is why they are so anxious, and why the Video MPI does so much heavy lifting when executed right. Even in short form, you can have a customer understand on even a rudimentary level what is going on with their car, why the recommendations that you made are accurate and factual, and why we do them in the first place. Quite simply put, the better that you can hold the customers hand and make them feel that they are making the right decision, the better your outcomes will be every single time! Also, this is something that folks with our skillsets rarely face, because we purposely go out and look for cars that are messed up when it is time for a new daily!  Also Uncle Jimmy writes a modern country classic, goes 2 for two without a single bit of help from the service advisor (on a Saturday) and gets an incredibly well-timed email from someone on the other side of the MPI Equation (hint, it’s Kalil’s Mom making her second appearance in consecutive weeks!) This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail  On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy loosely defines the roles of the management staff when it comes to doing Video MultiPoint Inspections. The main part of the management role in video MPI adoption is to properly incentivize their technicians on doing them, setting them up for success, and getting the right training into the shop to make it effective - insert shameless plug here- However, often times the management of a shop is a direct hindrance to getting quality video MPI’s out to their customers. By adding their own critiques while failing to incentivize techs for doing them well, they are setting the entire digital transformation of their fixed ops departments up for failure, every single time! There are tons of ways that shop management can properly incentives this, but they often miss the easy ones! There is a silver lining here, also we come up with the true end-goal terminology for video MPI - Peace of Mind Inspections!     Also Uncle Jimmy gives a shoutout to Kalil’s Mom!  This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy follows up part one about Video being a tool for mechanics with part 2 about Service Advisors. When a Service Advisor has technicians doing the video, or in some rare instances is doing the video themselves, they have an undeniable advantage over a fixed ops department where there are no video MPI’s performed. This is why it is infuriating when service advisors fail to leverage the high definition evidence of work or maintenances that need to be done. There is not much more else that a tech or ‘designated hitter’ can do to make that service advisors life easier, yet often times they are squandering opportunities left and right when they do not use the Video MPI as a sales tool. Smart Advisors use every tool in the kit to make sales and make the fixed ops department more money. However there is a glut of service advisors that do not fit this parameter. Any customer facing job is a difficult one, brought with all sorts of personalities, mood swings, and financial situations — however a failure to ask for the sale and a lack of attempting to overcome the customers objections are the hallmarks of useless personnel that are easily replaced by AI.  Also Uncle Jimmy hits us with some real tangible rage.  This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Send us Fan Mail On this episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes over some of the finer points of the Video Multi-Point Inspection; more specifically all of the very valid reasons that technicians do not want to do them! From being camera shy to not being the “loquacious type” and tons of background noise and poor lighting, there are a myriad of reasons for technicians to want to shirk this responsibility overall. We haven’t even mentioned that the vast majority of shops are not paying technicians for the time that they spend on these, but this is an incredibly important factor when having this discussion - the refrain of which is a simple, “you get what you pay for!” However, we also talk about some of the conversions that we have had that were 100% caused by the video and ask, “who got the commission on that one?” Bottom line, video isn’t going anywhere, and the better that you are at it, and the more your shop embraces this technology with some modern management techniques, the better off everyone will be. If you want this to go as smoothly as possible, and want top work with Uncle Jimmy and Erik the Producer personally, have your management team click the link at the bottom of the episode description!  Also Uncle Jimmy sharpens the executioners ax for the imminent follow up which is about the Service Advisors in this series!  This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!