Episode 346: The Technician Shortage Part II: Money

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 Bullshit 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!  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to Grease the Wheels. Thank you very much for tuning in. This is your Uncle Jimmy behind the microphone here at the Rock and Roll Garage. Hey man, thanks a bunch for listening. I appreciate it, man. I really do. And I also want to say I thank you very much for what you do. Thanks for doing what you do. Thanks for keeping things going, keeping things running, keeping this planet moving, keeping the economy uh up and running, keeping things uh cool and hot and mobile and building things and well, in some cases, tearing them right the fuck down. Uh thank you very much. Thank you if you're out there sweating and you have your collar is of a blue color. Thank you. Thank you for what you do. Now I wanted to uh uh jump into part two of why your Uncle Jimmy thinks that there is a technician shortage, but I wanted to kind of a round up and give you a little brief uh synopsis of what I was talking about last week. And I realize that a lot of you out there, technicians uh and other assorted people who work in this sort of field, uh probably don't think that number one is really the number one, okay? And I will agree with you, I would actually agree with you. Uh what's I I believe wholeheartedly that a lot of you out there, myself personally, don't really give a flying fuck what society thinks about us. However, the reason for the technician shortage is because society doesn't think much of us, and so people who are concerned with what society and other people think about them get sort of chased off of this occupation. They kind of get discouraged and maybe even conjoled into not becoming automotive technicians, and that of course helps to increase the shortage. Uh, a lot of people seem to think that the shortage can be uh corrected and even uh annihilated and and wiped out if new people would just go to tech school or go to automotive high school, uh automotive uh classes in high school and learn about cars and and want to be technicians, and then shops would have plenty of technicians and and they would and they wouldn't have a shortage and then I could get my car worked on and not have to wait a week for an appointment. Uh it's that's not how it's gonna work. It's I'm sorry, it's it's not how it's gonna work. A lot of you out there seem to think that the problem of a technician shortage can be solved by injecting new people into jobs as automotive technicians and automotive mechanics, and that's not going to fix the problem. It's not gonna fix the problem. There aren't enough of them out there. And then when you do churn them out, okay, when you churn out, let's say you're working at a tech school and you churn out a hundred technicians every three months, uh, within two years, half of them are gone. Roughly half of them are gone. And the other half, they're not gonna be there much longer anyway, either. It is not the kind of job that a lot of people really enjoy. It is not the kind of job where a lot of people can do it for a long time, and it's not the kind of job where people feel appreciated or respected at all. And really, that's all a lot of people are looking for. Now, those of us who do the job have gotten probably past that. Okay, you got five years in, you know that people think we're all scumbags and thieves and we're just trying to rip everybody off. You know that that's what everybody thinks, and you don't give a fuck, okay? So you have a strong mind, you're intelligent, you know what to do, you know how to fix stuff, and unfortunately, you probably don't get paid enough, okay? Because that's what part two is about, is about the pay. But one of the things I did want to add before I dive into that concern, that problem that we have, is that with society and the fact that they don't have any respect or any appreciation for what we do as auto mechanics and auto technicians, uh, there's no way to fix that. Honestly, there is no fucking way to fix that except for the videos that we make. Now, Eric and I were discussing this after uh the podcast last week, and he was kind of uh chagrined that I didn't really kind of dive into this too much. So I'm gonna give you a little brief synopsis of what the video can do for you, okay? And I know that you're probably a little tired of hearing about it and you really don't want to do videos. I get that, and I understand that completely. You gotta you gotta trust me. But also, too, it is a way for us to repair our reputation as technicians, okay? We've never ever ever had a good reputation as technicians as a as a as a genre of occupation. We have never, not once ever, had a good reputation. People look at mechanics, they look down their nose at mechanics, they don't trust us, they don't respect us, they don't have appreciation for us. And the best thing that we can do is create these videos that talk to them on a human level so that they understand that we are, as a matter of fact, human beings and that we know what we're up to, and we're there to try to help them out to make their cars safe, to make them run right, to make them keep going, to perform the maintenance and the repairs that they need. And we're not there to rip them off. For Christ's sakes, if we show them something's bad and we can illustrate in a video that it's bad, then guess what? We're not fucking ripping you off, asshole. You fucking need it, but yet we still run into that. Oh, I don't need that. But yeah, you fucking do. I showed you that cords you're hanging out of your tires, those are your tires on your fucking car, and you still don't want them, and I'm the asshole? Fuck you, you stupid motherfucker. I hope you fucking die in a highway in a horrible crash. I know that that's terrible. I know that that's terrible. I and I'm sorry that I have that I feel like I need to go there, but it it makes me so mad that people have such a horrible opinion of us when we're just trying to help them out. It's so fucked up. And honestly, I honestly believe that the only way we ourselves as technicians are going to be able to repair a reputation, because it's been broken forever. It it was broken like two days after the first car was invented, you know, 10 what, 25, 30 years ago. It's been bad ever since. It had it's never been good ever. Okay, and it got worse through the middle of the 90s when cars got so goddamn complex, or started to at least, that people, ordinary people couldn't work on them anymore. They couldn't fix them themselves. So they had to rely on us, and they absolutely did not want to. And so the only way that they could they could deal with it is to say to themselves, well, I can't do it myself anymore because it's beyond the realm of my intelligence as far as automotive, automotive mechanics go. So I have to have somebody else do it, and by God, I know they're gonna rip me off. And it's just not true. And so by putting a human voice, your voice, to a video that shows them, hey, everything's okay. You just need this or you just need that. Now, obviously, sometimes cars need a whole bunch of shit, and you can even just fucking tell them, say, look, I'm not trying to be a purse snatcher here or be a wall, uh, you know, a pickpocket and take your wallet and take all your money. I'm just pointing out what's wrong with your fucking car. I realize you're gonna say, yeah, I don't want any of that shit. I know that. But my job is to just tell you what you got going on and what you need. That's it. That's all I'm gonna do. And I'm gonna present it to you in a tone of voice that says, I understand your position. I understand you're not gonna buy anything, but you gotta understand what my job is, and my job is to show you what's going on, and here it is the truth. Unwashed, unabashed, and just plain and simple, right in your fucking face. And yeah, if you don't like it, tough shit. It's your car. Do whatever you want with it. If you want, really seriously, and I would help you with this if you want, stick it up your ass, okay? Because I I was told a long time ago, is it good? Yeah, then stick it up your ass. Good things don't hurt, okay? But ladies, ladies and gentlemen out there, uh wrench twisters of the world, if you get the opportunity to present a video of what's going on with a car to your customer, and you use a clear and concise language and show them all the stuff that's good, and then the one or two things that might be bad, it's gonna repair our reputation. It's gonna help build us up and make us first off human, okay? Because I think to uh a lot of our customers, they don't even feel like we're human beings, really honestly. Because I I've I've talked to some and I've I've interacted with some and I've had some people say things like, like, oh, you guys are just trying to rip me off. Well, it's not you guys, it's me, and I'm not trying to rip anybody off. I've got enough money, okay? I don't I don't need to rip you off to get ahead in life, okay? I don't need to do that. I'm not going to do that. There's enough honest work out there, ladies and gentlemen, that we don't have to rip people off, okay? There's enough broken fucking stuff out there that we don't have to we don't have to fuck you over, okay? We just tell you what you need. If you want to go ahead and get it done, we'll do it. Boom, we'll make the money we got we would have earned to do that. We'll move on to something else that's also broken and needs repair, and then we'll move on to something else after that. There's enough work. But ladies and gentlemen, if you're making videos, your voice, the tone of voice that you use, and the things that you say to your customers are gonna make them soften up on us. They're gonna make them trust us, they're gonna make them look to us for answers, they're gonna make them look to us to find out if something's wrong, when it's not, or maybe when it is, or what it is. So, really, it's gonna be important for us to perform a certain style of video. Okay, instead of just going in and saying, hey, your tires are good, your brakes are good, get get out of here, you rascal. You know, we show them, hey, here's what your brake pads look like, here's what your tires look like. All this stuff's good. Just take it easy, have a nice day. That's all you gotta do. It's all you gotta do. It's in your hands, it's in your hands. And if you want, Eric and I are putting together a package where we could come into your business and show you guys all what we're talking about, what works extremely well for your Uncle Jimmy. I can't even begin to tell you about the piles of compliments I get all day long about the videos I do. And it makes people, I think it makes people feel good about their car, about what they do and where they're doing it. You know, it makes them feel good about their car, it makes them feel glad that they came to us with it if they had a problem. And I'm hoping that it will make them feel good enough about the business that I work for to come in and actually buy a new one when they're ready for one. That's what I'm hoping for, really, because I want the business I work for, I want it to thrive. Now let me move on to number two. And I think for a lot of you, uh, and I said this earlier, for a lot of you, number one and number two are interchangeable, okay? Because how society views you is also how your fucking managers and your general managers and your auto groups and your owners and whoever is in charge of you, that's how they see you also. Now they won't come right out and tell you, oh, you know, you're all a bunch of scumbags, but thanks for coming in to work for me. It's like they're not gonna do that, even though that might be what they're thinking. I I've met a lot, a lot of different managers, general managers, service managers, even owners, and they they look at and they treat mechanics and technicians with kid gloves because they don't want to let them know what they really kind of think about them. They don't really want to kind of have it come through that they feel like we're a bunch of scumbags and thieves and assholes. They don't want, they don't want for us to feel that that's true coming from them. They know in their heart of hearts that they need to have a service department and they need to have service technicians, but if it could get away with it, they fucking wouldn't. They would be like, man, we'll just sell them. Let somebody else fix them. No, you gotta have a service department because you don't sell perfect cars, nobody does. And sometimes they're broken even when they come off the fucking truck from the fucking factory. Sometimes they're broken after they sit on a lot for a little while. A lot of times they're broken when they sit on a lot for a long fucking time. And you could avoid that by being smart and having your car porters start them up and and drive them around a little bit every once in a while and maybe even bring them in the shop and put a battery charger on them. But guess what? You're not fucking doing that. So you're part of the fucking problem. And then you get mad at us as technicians for being the solution to a problem that you could have solved because you're being reactive instead of proactive. And I've tried to help my current employer, I've tried to help several times to mention I've mentioned it several times that we can put together a plan where they don't have to put batteries in the fucking cars because they sit too long and nobody starts them up and nobody does jack shit to them. Several times I've come up with different scenarios where we can figure out which ones we have to charge and which ones we don't have to charge, and then we can uh we can institute a program where somebody who normally sits around and looks at their fucking phone all day and bring the car in and throw it on a battery charger, which takes all of about five minutes, and you just leave it on there until it says it's 100%, and then you throw it back on on a lot. It really doesn't cost anything, and it saves it saves you money, but it also saves the environment from having to fucking figure out what to do with that battery. That's by the way, probably still good, but the car's gonna say it's not because that's one of the things our cars do. You leave a car on a lot, the battery gets too low, you go to start it up, it says, haha, that's all you got to replace the battery. And then, of course, they don't discover that until they go to sell it. And then, of course, that's the owner is is there with the check and he wants to drive off in the next 10 minutes, and we got to put a battery in. And it's always hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry. And it's all because nobody wants to be proactive. They just they want to be they're reactive. That's all they are. Now, when I talk about the money, I think a lot of you, like I said, don't give a shit what society thinks about you, but you are concerned with the money, how much you're paid. Now, I look some shit up and and I I gotta tell you, it brings it brings an honest to God tear to my eye to see some of these fucking figures, okay? And then to hear everybody complain about a technician shortage. I I'll tell you something right now. I'll tell you something right now. If you have a shop owner, a service manager, fixed ops manager, whatever you have, a general manager, or even the owner or vice president of an auto group, and they complain about a technician shortage. I want you to go out and I want you to buy them a really, really nice mirror and then come in and tell them, hey, I found the problem. I found the fucking problem. Here it is, and give them the mirror. The mirror gives them an image of themselves. They are the fucking problem. Okay. Now, look, I'm not so naive that I don't understand why they don't want to pass. I understand why they don't want to pass. I understand it. Because think about this for a second, okay? We're gonna I'm gonna lay out a scenario for you. Let's just say you're working in a shop, you've been working there 10 years, you know what's up, you know how to do what you do, you're really, really good at it, and you've got a lot of friends. Because I know a lot of you have a lot of friends. A lot of you have a real lot of friends. Uh, I had a lot of friends at one point in time, and then I decided I didn't want to work on their cars anymore. And guess what? I don't have any fucking friends anymore. So did I really have friends? I don't know. You'll have to you'll have to work that shit out. You'll have to work that shit out yourself, okay? But let's say you have a lot of friends and they have cars and they break, and guess what? They call you up, hey man, can you come over and take a look at my shit? Yeah, sure. And and I'll tell you, this is this is a God's honest truth. This happened to a friend of mine, okay? I used to work with him years ago, and and there would be days where a lot of days, and as time went on, more and more days where he didn't come to work. He'd, you know, whatever, he'd call in sick, or he, you know, he'd be like, Oh, I gotta go to the doctor, I'll be in after that. And he never comes in. And what happened was he had a lot of friends. He still has a lot of friends. Uh, I'm one of his friends, I'd like to think anyway, but uh, I don't need him to fix my stuff. But a lot of his friends don't fix cars, they don't know anything about cars, they just drive them and drive the fuck out of them, and they're broken a lot, and he fixes them for them. And so he started renting himself a little garage, a little, just a little space where he could work on his friends' cars, and he would make enough money working on his friend's car in one day so that you know he could blow off work and not make money there and make more. And eventually it morphed into a business because that's what happens to us, okay? Now, early on, all right, let me put this to you. This is just a scenario that I've come up with in my head. Early on, let's just say that this is going to happen to you. You're working in a shop, you have friends, you work in their cars, they tell their friends and their friends, and and then after a while, you've built up quite the clientele, and you actually quit your job working for somebody else and you start working for yourself. In the beginning, you as a technician, you're everything. You're the service advisor, you're the appointment taker, you're the parts guy, you're the lot guy, you're the technician, you're you're the accountant, you're everything. Okay. You do a job, let's say you do a brake job on a car, four-wheel brake job, you charge the guy$500 because you know the dealer's going to charge him a grand, and you get the parts, and he gets the parts, or maybe you get the parts, you charge him on top of that for the parts. You made$500 in one day. That's fucking great. And who do you have to pay? Well, nobody, right? I mean, let's say you're doing it in your garage at home, or you're doing it in some garage that you rent to do something else in, or maybe you just got a little space where you do it, or maybe you did it outside. Maybe you did it in his yard, you did it in a field, a bank parking lot, a supermarket parking lot. Maybe you just did it in at the airport while they were away on a trip. It could be anywhere. You could seriously literally do it anywhere. So there's no cost to that. And and so all the money, every fucking penny of that goes to you. It's all you. And you could even tell the government that, you know, hey, yeah, I'm not doing anything. You know, just tell, just don't tell them. Just don't tell them anything. You don't have to pay taxes on it if you don't tell them, right? But then you start to get overwhelmed because you know, more and more people are hitting you up and and you're making more and more money, but you you're overwhelmed and you're swamped, and so your building's got enough space for two guys to work on a car, so you hire a guy and you got to pay him. Now, suddenly, all that money that gets paid for that repair, you have to pay a slice of that to the technician, the other guy that you work with. And maybe, maybe it's still lucrative. It's still really lucrative because you're giving that guy, who even knows? What are you gonna pay that guy? You know, maybe it's somebody you know who's really, really good, and he's coming to work for you, and you got to pay him, I don't know,$30 an hour. He's and he's cool with that. So you pay him$30 an hour. That comes out of the pay, that comes out of the money that that gets paid for the repairs that he did, and you're still ahead. And then it just starts to grow from there. And I have a friend of mine who did exactly that. His enterprise, his business has grown exponentially, and he's very successful. But there's a lot of things that he has to pay out that I would imagine he probably wishes he didn't have to. And I understand that because from the beginning he didn't have to pay any of that shit. And all businesses are like that. They start out like that, where all the money coming in was kept, and now all the money coming in has to go a little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit here, a little bit there. And now all of a sudden it's not as profitable as it used to be. I understand that, and that's fine. However, as technicians, unless we've unless we're walking in the door brand new, we have value. And even the brand new guy walking in the door has value of some sort. Maybe he came from a tech school, maybe he came from another shop, maybe he went to college to learn how to do absolutely everything you can do to a car, from you know, doing the most basic oil change all the way up to uh doing engine rebuilds, tranny rebuilds, everything. Everything he can do bodywork, he can lay glass, he can rebuild a tranny, he can do everything. What's that guy worth to you? Well, you're gonna have to figure that out, aren't you? Yeah. And you know what happens? A lot of shops just lump technicians together in one group and call them fucking worthless. And they're only gonna offer so much money. Now, I went on a site just now. I went on a site just now, Brenchway. I think a lot of you are probably familiar with it. Uh, and uh these facts here, where are these facts from? These are from it's not saying that right now. Uh, let me move on to another one here. Here we go. Okay, this isn't this is an indeed site, and it says the average base salary for technicians in the United States is$28 an hour. Do you know what you can buy$28 an hour? Let's say you make$40,$40 a week. It said, in fact, it says$28,$48,000 a week.$1,000 a week. Now that's gross pay. That's$50,000 a year. You got a lot of places where the fucking government you have in this country anyway, the government has their fucking hand in your pocket. And so does the state in a lot of places, okay? Some states don't have an income tax, which is good. So what do you get after what do you get after taxes get taken out? At$1,000? You probably get six, seven hundred bucks. What can you buy with six, seven hundred bucks a week? Well, you can buy some stuff, yes. But can you buy a house? Yeah, not the way it's going now. Houses are costing, you know, two, three hundred thousand dollars for a good one, thousand dollars for a fucking junker, for a fucking run-down piece of shit house. Maybe, maybe it still has wheels on it, right? Where are you going with that? That, my friends, is the average base salary. So, what that means is for every one of you that makes a dollar more than that, or five dollars more than that, or ten dollars more than that, there's somebody who makes a dollar, five dollars, ten dollars less than that, right? So you got a new guy rolls into your shop and they're gonna pay him$15 an hour, and he's like, ah shit, that's really not that great. I could make that work in a Burger King, but I want to be a technician, so I'll stick it out. I'll stick it out. And so what they do is they they give him some crayons and they tell him he's got to do oil changes and be on the maintenance team, the lube tech team, and that when he does an oil change, he has to mark the the oil filter housing and the and the oil drain plug with crayon, and and it's it's just there's no trust there. Okay. So obviously your management doesn't think much of you, and why should they? You haven't proven yourself, right? But you've you've invested in yourself already. So you have value, but your management, the people you work for, maybe the owner, they don't see that. They're not gonna see that until they see you come into work for a couple of months, maybe a couple, two, three months, maybe a couple two, three, four, five months, six months, a year, maybe even. And then they're gonna decide whether or not you should have a raise. Maybe, right? Maybe. In the meantime, you're trying to subside on 15, 16, 17, 18, even up to$20 an hour, depending on what you start at, which it's tough. I mean, unless you're living with your mom and dad, you really almost can't pay rent at that wage. You certainly can't buy a new car, you certainly can't afford to save up for a house. Fuck, food's out of control, rent's out of control, everything's out of control. Do they fucking care? No, they don't care. They want to bring you in and pay you as little as they possibly can so that you'll continue to come in. And you are like thinking to yourself, wow, you know, they told me in school, and I I've heard this a million fucking times, folks, this is not bullshit. They'll tell you in school that you can make a hundred thousand dollars a year as a technician. Yeah. Well, you certainly can, but it's fucking hard. You gotta pay your you gotta pay your dues. And a lot of these kids who come to the Out of tech schools. It doesn't even matter how old they are. They could be 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, up to 21, 22, up to 25 years old. They're going to start them out at a really super low wage because they're not proven yet. Even though they come with a built-in value. They've they've actually gone to a tech school of some sort, a college of some sort, community college, maybe, whatever, they should have some value. But to the to the employer, they don't have any value. No, not yet. So they're just going to throw the minimum amount of money they possibly can at them. And then they're going to complain, like little girls, when these guys leave because they can't afford to work for that wage, especially after paying, you know, whatever they did pay to go to college or to go to tech school. And you're going to complain, oh, I can't get any new guys to come in. That's because you're not fucking paying them. It's as simple as it is. And then even then, as they gain more experience, as they get in get more training, which is the name of the game, gentlemen, and ladies and gentlemen. I mean, I know there's ladies out there, but I'm going to continue to say gentlemen, and you'll have to allow me to apologize for that. That's including you. But gentlemen, the training makes you valuable, more valuable to your employer. And if your employer doesn't see it, then your employer is one of those fucking people who's going to be out there whining about the technician shortage because you are going to fucking leave. The podcast is called Grease to Wheels, and this is exactly why, right here. Exactly why. Because if you're not being paid what you feel like you're worth, you need to get the fuck out. And this is this is the reason, okay? And I don't know if you're if you're not following this, uh, your Uncle Jimmy does follow this, but if you're not following it, let me fill you in. Early on when I was doing this podcast, the technician shortage was something that everyone was screaming about. Up and down, backwards and forwards, and everybody had the answer. But the problem is that there is not one answer. Pay is definitely an answer. Respect from society and from the people you work for, managers and and service managers, that's that's an answer. That's only one of the answers. One of the other answers, this is a big answer, but not the answer, is the pay. You have these new kids, and and they'll all tell you too, early on, and even now, they'll tell you, well, nobody's getting into this field. Well, you know why nobody's getting into this field? Because the the job sucks, the pay sucks, and you as an employer suck. And so you're gonna suffer until you fix all three of those fucking problems. All three of those problems. How do you make the how do you make the job not suck? Well, you know, obviously there's gonna be different equipment that you're gonna need to do it, and if you don't have it, the job's gonna suck harder. If you don't have the right tools, okay, if you make me buy my own tools, that's gonna make the job suck. If I have to uh work around some piece of equipment that you don't have because you can't afford it, or you don't want to buy it, or you don't think we know how to use it, and so you're not gonna buy it because we'll just wreck it. If you make the job hard for us, which a lot of fucking shops do, unconsciously, some of them consciously even, are they gonna buy you an AC machine? No, how can you do AC work then? Well, you can't, can you? No, you can't. If they don't have the proper AC machine, let's say you got a 134 machine and yet cars are coming in now and they've got 1234 YF. You're not gonna be able to do a fucking thing with that 12 that 134 machine. Nope. Gotta have a 1234 machine. Sorry, I know it costs you money. I understand. And when they have to pay big money for for a machine like that, or maybe for a tire balancer or for a tire machine, or maybe an alignment rack, when they have to pay big money for all that stuff, that means that they're not gonna want to have to pay you because it's gonna bite into their gross profit even more than just buying the machine. This is why it's tough. It's tough running a business. It is tough, I'll tell you right now, because you have to figure out what you're gonna spend your money on. Do you need do you need to have the specialized equipment to do the job? Yes. Do you need to have the specialized technicians to do the job? Yes. How much you're willing to pay for both of those things? Well, there's only one I can really negotiate the cost of, and that's the technician. You know, well, if you don't do the right negotiation, that technician's gonna say, Ma fangoo, I'm out of here. I'll Veterzane. See you later. It's called grease to wheels for that reason, okay? If you're not being treated properly, if you're not, if they're not showing you any respect, they're not showing you any appreciation, and they're not paying you enough, grease the fucking wheels. It's pretty much as simple as it is. Now, how much are you worth? Well, that's a really good question, too. But this is the major problem. I and I say it it swaps with one and two, because the reason there's a shortage is because kids don't want to go out and go to school to learn how to do uh to learn how to be automechanics when society is gonna say, oh, you're a scumbag, you're just trying to rip us off. They're not gonna do that. Who would actually do that? Well, you and I, folks, the crazy bastards with the earpods and the uh the well airpods, earpods, whatever you want to call them, airpods, and the Bluetooth speakers who are listening to this right now, we know why would you why would you do this job? A, it's not glamorous, b, it's hard physically, c it's hard mentally, d, it is going to hurt you at some point in time. You are gonna injure yourself. That's not a question of if. That's just a question of when. Okay, that's all. That's all. Why would you do it then? If it's gonna, if it's gonna tax your mind and your body and hurt you, and you're not gonna get paid jacked fucking shit. Why would you do it? And that's why number one, I think number one is actually number one, because society also hates you for doing it. There is no upside to it. It's ridiculous. There's no, there's there's just no light at the end of the tunnel for you and I as technicians. People are gonna hate us, they're not gonna want to pay us, and they're not gonna be sympathetic to our plight. That's why we say, and then I'll tell you, I hear it all the time. People say, oh, you know, my kid wants to be a mechanic. Well, you better go back and slap the fucking shit out of your kid because it's a shit job. It's hard. He's gonna hurt himself, he's not gonna wanna, he's not gonna make any money, people are gonna disrespect him. Why would why would you fucking do it? And everybody involved has to work to fix this issue. Society has to learn not to fucking dislike us, they have to learn not to distrust us, they have to learn to look to our profession with respect. And there's no one out there that's gonna teach them how to do that except you and me through the video. I think that that's really literally the only medium that we're gonna have to reach our customers and change their perception of us. But number two on the list is how much appreciation and respect we get from our owners and our managers and how much pay we get. That's why I think pay is number two. You can think it's number one, it's fine. I'm not gonna argue with you. I I'm not gonna say, because if you have if you've come to terms with the fact that society hates you and that your managers hate you, and that people are just gonna treat you like a piece of shit, you come to terms with that like I have, you're and you're fine with it. Then it's then the money, the pay, the compensation becomes number one. And it's not there. It's not there. And I'll tell you when it went to shit. I'll tell you when it went to shit because I did some research on this for some podcasts I did up a couple, two, three years ago. And I found that 1972, and I know this long before a lot of you were fucking born, I don't want to hear that shit. Okay, I know I'm an old guy. Fuck you, right? Wait till you motherfuckers are old and people start driving you crazy with this. Oh, you're just an old bastard. Listen, in 1972, a technician, uh, a shop would charge right around, and I know you're gonna fucking love this, a shop would charge right around$10 an hour for labor. Okay, which is just a different time. Everything was cheaper. Gas was a quarter for fuck's sake, okay? But they would charge$10 an hour for labor. And the technician, depending on his skill and his ability and and whatever training he could possibly get, and and and how diligent he was at working, whether he showed up on time or whether he did the job right every time, he could negotiate his own rate of pay against that labor rate. That's what they used to do. And some of the best technicians out there at the time would negotiate a 45% pay rate, which meant if they charged$10 an hour, he'd get$4.50 an hour, which back then, honestly, not a bad deal at all, because stuff was all proportionally to priced. I mean, for Christ's sake, all the uh employees at General Motors went on strike in 1970, and I know it's ancient history to a lot of you, but they all went on strike in 1970. And when the strike was over, what they had gotten in as a concession for that strike was they got a raise. And when I tell you what the raise is, you're gonna go, what the fuck? Because the raise was 60 fucking cents. So this is what is and then since then, since 1972, cars have gotten more difficult to work on. At first, it was it was a slow trend, okay? It was transistorized stuff, okay? Because in 72, cars had uh mechanical points for ignition, they had mechanical points in the voltage regulator, and everything they did was mechanical. Okay, had switches, you turned it on, whatever it was turned on, you turned it off, it turned off. That's how it worked. But since then, it has gone right through the fucking roof in an upward spiral as far as how complicated cars got. Everything started to become transistorized in 1980. We got computers that ran the engine that would monitor what kind of pollution they make. As per the government, thank you very much. A group of people who should never tell anybody how to do anything because they can't fucking do anything right, but that's what happened. And then from there through the 80s, we had check engine lights and shit. So cars got more difficult for people to fix. They couldn't figure out how to count how many times a fucking check engine light flashed, and then we went to OBD2, which pushed us all the rest of us who could understand everything was going on, it pushed us all into the stratosphere as far as how smart we had to be. Did it push our wages up that way? Fuck no, it didn't, because all of the people who ran these shops just thought, well, why should I pay that much more for a technician now? That job's not that hard. Yes, it is. No, it's not. Yes, it is, no, it's not. And that's been going on for 30 fucking years, folks. When I look at this average base salary of$28.48 per hour for technicians, that is a 20th century wage. It's not going to get it done in today's world. You, you know, you and I know, and I think if you're working at a dealership of any kind, and and even the indies, the indies have it worse because they're working on all this stuff that has fallen out of warranty and it no longer shows up at the dealerships, okay? So they get it kind of a secondary wave of this stuff. But the stuff we've got coming out now, it's brand new, has so many fucking different systems on it, and they can all fuck up either at once or or over time or whatever. There's there's nothing simple about working on cars anymore. Nothing. And yet the pay does not reflect that$28 an hour, average base salary for fixing some of the fucking stuff that I'm working on. You gotta be fucking nuts. I don't make$28 an hour. I'm making a lot more than that, but that's because I have made myself as valuable as I possibly can. I have gotten all of my training. I did all of my ASCs, I just reserved in all of them, okay? And you guys, uh I know a lot of you guys are not really great test takers. I'm not that bad at it myself personally. Um, I do have trouble sometimes comprehending what a service bulletin or a recall bulletin is trying to tell me because of the wording. That was the reason for that kooky uh Dr. Seuss style uh technical manual, because some of those technical writers out there just assume a whole lot of shit that ain't true. They assume that I'm gonna understand what they're talking about when I can't or don't because they left a part of it out. I got one car right now. It doesn't work right, it doesn't work right because I can't get it to work because I have to do a test at the end of the repair. I can't do the test at the end of the repair. And I think it's because we have a firewall on our computer. How many of how many technicians back in the 1990s had to deal with that? Yeah, not that many, but I'm dealing with it right now. But all these cars with all their self-driving bullshit, and if any of that shit's out of a line or sees the sun at the wrong angle, or if a car gets too close or bumps it and knocks a sensor out of whack, then I've got to fuck with it. And that's on top of the regular stuff that's gonna go wrong. You know, all the valve timing stuff that some of these cars have. It's amazing that it works as well as it does to me, really. And they don't have regular thermostats anymore, they have heat management modules. You gotta see these fucking things for Christ's sakes. They look like the a fucking, they look like a landmine with hoses and wires going to it. They don't look, they don't look like something that goes on a car. They look like something that you wire into a tiger tank to blow it up. And I've got to fuck with these things. And our customers know less about the cars than they ever did. And so when they bring it in, they're full of stress and anxiety about what the fuck's going on with their car. And sometimes they're too stupid to know that they should stop driving the fucking thing. They just keep going. Oh, the oil pressure light came on. Well, I'm not home, so I'll just drive home. And then I'll try to drive again tomorrow, hoping that it goes away all by itself. Which guess what? It never fucking does. There's so many situations where people shouldn't drive a car and they do, and then there's a whole bunch of other situations where it's okay to drive it and they don't. I can't, I can't for the life of me figure out how to mesh the two correctly. It seems like they're all 180 degrees off. So we need to understand that our bosses, our shop owners, our our general managers, our shop managers, our service managers, fixed ops directors, they all want to have us do our job the absolute best we can, and they want to pay us as little as they possibly can. And there's an amazing thing going on right now. Okay, now you're not, like I said before, you're not going to hear a lot about the technician shortage. Okay, yeah, there's some people out there who are gonna going on and on about it and they're talking about it a lot and trying to figure out how to solve it. And even that we talked about it before, the CEO of Ford is trying to uh talk about it when it really, quite frankly, it's not his fucking problem. It's his dealer's problem. And when he talks about it, the thing he fails to mention is that every fucking dealer that has a fucking tech shortage is responsible for the tech shortage and also has the tools, read i.e. the fucking capital, the money to fix the fucking problem. Now, what I wanted to do was with this particular podcast, was I wanted to introduce you to something I call the bullshit factor, okay? Now try to imagine this for a second. You're working in a shop or a dealership and you have a lot of shit going on, you have a lot of stuff going on, and you have a lot of things that affect what you do. From starting starting with your customers and how fucking bloody stupid they are, or how intelligent they are, how much they know they how much they think they know and how much they really know, and when they show up, and when they don't show up, and what they want when they show up. Okay, so imagine every little variable that goes on with the customers. Now imagine service advisors who either don't care or try to care but can't, or have no empathy, or maybe too much empathy. Either one's kind of deadly, okay, as far as service advisors go. Maybe they're terrible at their job. Chances are they are. Uh, maybe they're really good at their job, but it can go either way. So you have a human being with numerous problems talking to another human being with exponentially numerous problems as well as a service advisor. And then you have car porters who typically aren't the brightest individuals in the world. Maybe they are. I don't know. Was Einstein a fucking car porter? I don't know. I don't think so. But you have car porters who are supposed to, you know, do specific things. They're supposed to, you know, in your in your particular situation, if you even have car porters, they're supposed to, I don't know, take a video of the car, maybe check to see if the check engine lights on, verify the mileage. You know, there's a whole bunch of things that they need to do. And the chances are is they can't do all of it properly. And in a lot of cases, they can't do any of it properly. Okay, so that adds an element to it, okay? And then there's your manager who is going to focus on things that it probably he shouldn't focus on because he's got other things that are more important to focus on, which he's going to completely ignore. Or maybe vice versa, he does a good job. Okay, and then I'm going to say to you that you can have service advisors who do a good job. You could have carporters who do a good job, you could have service managers who do a good job, and you could have technicians, some technicians who do a good job and some who don't. You could have a dispatcher who does a good job, you could have some that don't, and some who do it badly. Uh you could have parts guys who do a good job. Okay, all this stuff adds up from every human being that comes within your your hemisphere, your your circle, your circle of influence, or they have a circle of influence over you. All these people come together and you get what I call a bullshit factor. Now, let's say you're working at a shop that is really, really good. Okay, you have smart, intelligent, good customers. It trust me, it could happen. Uh you have smart and good service advisors. Uh, you're more likely to have good customers, but you could have you could conceivably have a good service advisor. You have lot guys and car porters who do their job correctly. You have a service manager who is on top of things and is proactive and knows what to do and knows how to take care of problems, knows how to solve problems before they become huge problems. You have a parts department that knows what they're supposed to do and knows how to do it and does it correctly. Okay. I would say that if you had all that and you're a good technician all by yourself, you're not part of the bullshit factor, your bullshit factor is, and I'm gonna it's gonna be a one hundred one to a hundred, your bullshit factor would be probably one to five, maybe, maybe, maybe ten. Which means that even though you don't really make like this killer wage, maybe you're making 35 bucks an hour and you feel like you're worth more, but you know what? The bullshit factor is really low. So for you, is it worth it to just make a decent living and not have to deal with a whole bunch of hassles? Probably. I would say yes. If you can talk to your uh service advisors and they're intelligent and they're not lazy and they know what you're talking about and they can sell reasonably well, and your service manager is somebody who shows you appreciation and and and says that he's got raises in the works for you because you do a good job, and you got car porters who do what they're supposed to do, and everything, everything with the car, the the car wash people are they're good, they're right on they're right on top of their work, they they get the cars done quickly, and you know the the work is scheduled pretty much properly. I mean, you know, you don't have a lot of waiters at five o'clock on a fucking Friday. Say the bullshit factor is real low, and you're making a decent, decent living. So you have to factor the bullshit factor against your pay. Now, what happens is you have, and and this is more likely, okay, you have customers who are ignorant and they're they're demanding and they're always constantly trying to beat your service advisors up for a discount, and they never want to buy anything that you recommend because they feel like they can get it done cheaper somewhere else or or whatever. So they're fucking assholes. Okay, your customers are mainly a bunch of fucking nitpicky discount looking for motherfucking assholes. And then you have service advisors who are not willing to deal with this. They're not good at dealing with it, they're not willing to deal with it, they're not gonna deal with it, and the way they're not gonna deal with it is they're not gonna try to sell them anything. They're gonna be like, this guy's giving me a hard time, he's an asshole. I'm not gonna tell him he needs pads and rotors for the back because he's just gonna say, Oh, I don't want them, I don't want them. And then and then you're just you're gonna lose, okay? So they avoid trying to sell things. So you you get a lot, a lot of declines. In fact, I've I've accused uh several of my uh service advisors of having an auto-decline button where they just see the recommendations and they auto-decline, enter, boom, gone. And they don't even talk to the customers because they already know they're not gonna buy anything. And are they wrong? They're probably not fucking wrong. I hate that part about it, but they're not wrong. But they're not also gonna ask for the sale either. Okay, they're just not gonna do it. They're just gonna totally wash their hands of this customer, hand them his keys and say, get the fuck out of here, you know, which is probably what they want to say, but they'll say, Have a nice day. Here's your keys, see ya, see ya. All right, and then you have a manager who is not gonna not gonna help them get better at what they do, he's not gonna help help you with your situation. And you got car porters who they don't do what they're supposed to do. They they don't put the hang tag on the fucking mirror, and they they don't write down the parking lot number. If they have if you have a parking space number, they're not gonna write it down, or if they do write it down, they write it down in fucking ancient hieroglyphics, so you can't fucking read it. You know, you understand. So the bullshit factor goes up as each one of these employees who is a support employee for you, basically, doesn't do their job properly. It starts out bad because the customer sucks, and it gets worse because the advisor sucks, and then it gets worse because the uh the the car porter sucks, and you can't tell the uh service manager that he needs to fix it because he's not going to, and then the parts department sells you gives you the wrong parts, or they quote the wrong stuff, or they don't understand what you're talking about, and they give you a hard time, then your bullshit factor is literally off the fucking charts. You're at 90, 95, or 100. So you have to decide is the pay I'm getting worth all the bullshit I have to put up with. And honestly, I think for a lot of you, it's not. It is not. You have to put up with so much fucking horseshit from your staff and your customers that it is not fucking worth it for you. I'll tell you, let me tell you about mine, okay? And and I think I'm paid fairly well. And my bullshit factor is I think is is it's medium, okay? I'm gonna say it's medium because I have some really, really excellent fellow employees. I have some excellent ones, okay? I have uh my the technicians I work with, I would go to the mat for all of them, okay? I would have their back. They've a couple of there's an employee I have in the building who wouldn't have anybody's back, but that's because he's trying to get ahead and he wants to step on people. Uh, so he's not gonna have anybody's back. He's just gonna throw people under the bus to make himself look good. But otherwise, I myself personally have uh a great respect and a great uh uh sense of camaraderie with the technicians I work with. Okay, I just do. Okay, I would have their back. They're not part of the problem, they are not a part of the problem whatsoever. Our car porters, they do a very good job. Sometimes they don't put the hang tag on the mirror right, or or sometimes they write down the parking spot number in hieroglyphics, but for the most part, they're doing the job pretty much close to 100%. They're doing a good job, they do a real good job. And then honestly, just a little side note I think the reason they do a good job is because the region we're in. is a is is a fairly upscale region. So the source of employees that we have is good. You're working in a shop that's near a ghetto, you're going to get people who don't give a fuck. They're going to come in they're going to want to they're going to want a job. They're not going to want to work, but they're going to want to get paid. You know, but where I'm at now, they'll they want a job and they'll do the job as best they can and then whatever money they do get, they're cool with it. So uh that that's that's good. And I have a service manager who would I don't know I'd like like I'd like to think he tries to solve problems but there's some problems he just ignores. And the problem that he ignores is with our service advisors. They don't seem like to me and maybe this is just me and I I I really I don't like to talk about them because if if one or two of them listens to this then they go oh yeah he he fucking trashed us again and then they go out of their way to not sell stuff for me. So they sandbag me and and I I got I got actual evidence of it. I have I have documented that this is what's going on. Okay. And I'll and I'll tell you about it here in a second. But our service advisors really don't work I don't think they work that hard to try to sell any of the recommendations we have. And I've checked around with some of the other technicians in the shop and and they're they're feel they have the same thing going on. You know they they make a judgment call on somebody who comes in and you know so that affects our pay a great deal. And let me tell you what happened to me a couple of weeks ago our pay period is two weeks. And I had a two week pay period my last one where I made 53 hours. It's not good. Not good at all. It's 25 hours a week. I just didn't make anything. And you might say well Uncle Jim you're just a lazy piece of shit. And uh you know I I can't really argue too much with that because I didn't have anything to do. But I did look at 11 different cars and made eleven different estimates on 11 different cars and recommendations mainly recommendations of stuff that was completely and 100% necessary okay I'm not going to try to pad my wallet by telling somebody they need something when they don't I don't I do not do that. In fact a lot of times I let people off the hook on stuff because I know that sooner or later they're going to need it and when they need it they'll need it then but they don't need it immediately. They don't need it right now and so I just kind of gloss over it. My boss would not be happy to hear me say that but yeah it's the way it is. I don't need to murder everybody all the time. And that's that's what I want to say about this okay on these 11 ROs the final total of everything estimated parts and labor would have been$60,000 on 11 ROs and this is just me one technician out of probably 25 and the opportunity for 142 hours. Now folks I got to tell you I don't expect the sale the service department and the service advisors to sell 100%. I do not expect that at all I I do in fact I don't expect even 50% okay I would have been happy with one fifth of that would have put me at about 80 hours and that I can live with and then I wouldn't even be telling you about it. I wouldn't be complaining about it. But I only got 53 hours and I had the opportunity to make 142 on top of the 53 and make the company I work for$60,000. But it just went away it just didn't get sold. And there's never there's never any reason okay that there's there's all there's reasons. I call them excuses. Maybe all 11 of them didn't want it. Okay. Maybe all 11 of them thought about it and didn't want it. Maybe all 11 of them were asked hey do you want to go ahead and do this? But I would tell you what I fucking highly doubt that. I will bet you that in at least eight of those cases they were handed the keys and said you're good to go. Have a nice day. You're all good. When they weren't maybe they were maybe the stuff I was quoting was just maintenance stuff. Could have been I don't know but I got to tell you that's a fucking problem and that's part of the problem with us and our pay nobody considers nobody would look at that and say oh that's why we have a technician shortage but that's the exact fucking reason for the technician shortage because I gave them a probably 90 to 95 maybe even close to a hundred hours I was there in the building with tools ready to do work that no one would fucking sell. That's part of the problem. That's a large part of the problem. So let me break it down for you. Let me let me break it down into two compartments. You if you run a shop and you're in charge of how much the technicians get paid and you have a technician shortage you're the problem because you're not paying enough simple as it is you're not paying enough you have to look and see what the bullshit factor is in your shop. And there's a lot of different factors to it on top of what I pointed out. There's warranty pay right and this is one of the things that you know I made a comment when I saw the uh the uh comments by uh Mr. Farley at Ford I I made the comment I said I think you're probably your warranty uh labor rate sucks you know you have a job that takes your expert with hand tools four hours to do and you make it 3.8 or you make it three and a half because you don't want to have to pay to repair a car that you already fucking built. And I don't blame you but you are penalizing the technicians because you don't want to pay. And I understand why you wouldn't want to pay a lot for warranty because not all that money goes to the technician does it? No, it goes to the dealers. And as far as you're concerned the dealers make too much money as it is because they take your shit they take your cars and they mark them up over MSRP. I'm telling you manufacturers suggested retail price comes from the manufacturer. It says it right in the fucking name how many times do dealerships quote prices on those vehicles that is over and above MSRP? They do it all the fucking time. And you as a manufacturer hate that because it makes you look like an asshole when you're not the other thing too is when you're talking about cars Ford Motor Company General Motors Toyota Mercedes Benz all these companies that build cars they work as hard as they can to build the best car they can and the quality control on a lot of these vehicles is absolutely second to none they come off the assembly line and 500 people have touched that car wiped it down checked bolts to make sure they're tight marked them with fucking pen pen, you know paint pencils and everything's good. It ran the headlights were adjusted the alignment was done everything is good. The wipers work everything fucking works everything is mint everything is exactly how it's supposed to be they ship it out the door and as soon as it goes out the door it stops being about the quality and starts being about the money and that's the problem with your dealers everything they do is about the fucking money and it should be it's capitalism. That's how it works. But it is also capitalism to everybody that works for you. And as a technician with honest to God tangible skills tangible experience tangible problem solving a fucking ability you need to pay that person. And you probably do you probably pay your top technicians well otherwise they wouldn't be your top technicians they'd be working at the fucking competition. The problem you have is is that you are trying to stuff all these new guys into this enormous fucking black hole that you have where you don't have enough technicians. And that black hole just eats them up because you're not going to pay them enough to put up with the bullshit factor that you have going on in your shop. And they leave you know it says it says in the latest uh thing from Runchway that 41% of them leave. It's close enough to 50% for me because the next year after three years you're going to have enough to leave that it'll be 50%. I know when I went to tech school I went to school I have quite a few friends from tech school that I kind of keep up with. You know I I talk to them occasionally and you know what almost none of them in fact in fact none of them are working in the business. None of them are working in a dealership. I'm the only one out of fucking probably half a dozen dudes and a couple of the a couple of ladies a couple of girls that I went to tech school with that are working as a technician. I'm the only one. They're all doing something else because the job genuinely sucks. You have to have an enormous amount of passion for it. Even if the bullshit level is low and your pay is high you still need to have passion for the job. And that's not something you can teach and that's not something you can buy and it's not something that you can gift somebody they have to have it. They have to have it and and no but nobody has it anymore. Cars are just machines to a lot of people people who grew up with the internet people who grew up with cell phones people who grew up with Netflix they don't need a car to entertain themselves like we did when we were younger and I'm saying some of those of us who are really old cars were like really the only thing we had in our lives that were different than everybody else. You know we didn't sit home and watch TV TV sucked. There were only three channels we didn't talk on a phone that much because it didn't move it was it was stationary and you certainly couldn't look at memes on it. And none of us had computers I mean I did but I that's an anomaly my dad was in that business so nowadays kids have so many different outlets for their passion. Cars ain't gonna be it so if you don't want to pay them to work on them then they're just going to say fuck you. The only way that you're going to be able to really the only fix for this problem and I came up with this fix a long time ago the fix is what I call what Eric and I call the K plan where you take somebody and you put them on a path like a little like a little railroad you put them on a path from the day they start to the day they retire you have milestones along the way where they're going to get certain amounts of training they're going to get certain amounts of raises and eventually they're going to get to the point where they're very well paid because they have experience and they have all the training and this is going to shepherd through the entire fucking process from cradle to grave you could say it's going to it's going to take care of them from the beginning when they start on day one all the way up to the day they retire which hopefully would be in 30 or 40 years. It allows it it takes into account everything that they're going to need to know. It's also going to be flexible enough to involve learning stuff that hasn't even been fucking invented yet. We don't have hydrogen cars yet but we're going to and you're going to need to train your staff to fuck with them. And eventually even if you have an independent you're going to need to train that staff to fuck with them because I call I it's called the K plan because it's a thousand points and it's probably more than that now but it all it is it is the absolute light at the end of the tunnel for everybody because you know as technicians there really isn't any advancement. The only advancement you really really are going to get as a technician is if you get the fuck out. Sorry that's your advancement okay if you're going to be a technician and you start tomorrow you say you say you start on Monday March 16th 2026 as a technician the only advancement you could see for the next 40 years is simply an increase in pay you are still going to be an automotive technician okay now by the time you were say 40 years what's 40 years going to be March 16 2066? Do you think cars will still be around then they may not be they may not touch the ground anymore. They may fly we may go everywhere getting picked up by drones big fucking drones that just take us where we want to go or bring us what we want we're never have to we're not we're not going to have we're not going to be automotive technicians. You may have to morph yourself into being a drone technician for all I know. But if you take a kid right out of tech school and you say to him listen here's the K plan here's where you start here's where you can end up you're going to get raises as you learn more stuff or we're going to have people mentor you. When you have a problem we will help you solve it. Say maybe you know you can't turn a wrench left-handed and a certain job requires you need to be left-handed to turn a wrench on a certain a certain repair and you can't do it. So we're going to figure out how to get you there. I mean it's as stupid as that sounds but that shit happens where you can't do something for one reason or another and somebody has to come along and pretty much either do it for you or train you to do it. You're going to have to offer that sort of a mentorship as part of the K plan. That's going to that's going to be what is going to help your bosses the people who own your shops the people who run your shops to take you on day one and put you on a path to earn the proper amount of money you need to earn for how valuable you are how much experience you are and how skilled you are they're going to have to they're going to have to to show you appreciation they're going to have to show you that they care about you even if they're just faking it. It would be probably better if they were sincere about it but even if they fake it it would be better than nothing. Because quite frankly if you own a shop and you have a technician shortage you have empty bays you are fucking losing money. You're losing money you need to put people in those bays you need to pay them in commensurate with the bullshit factor you have going on and their skill and their attitude and their ability and then you need to treat them well show them some appreciation shepherd them through a career either with you or possibly with somebody else doesn't even really matter the K plan should be universal. You know you should be able to work at an independent for five years switch over to a dealership of some sort maybe because the pay is higher and they'll say where are you in the K-plan? I'm at K15.5 I have uh AC air conditioning training and using refrigerants and and dealing with refrigerants but I have not uh gone through uh engine uh technology you know whatever but then they pick up where you left off from there and then they move you up through the K plan. Now you can do everything you're extremely valuable to them. Okay they do everything they can to keep you from being injured. They offer you lifts of of all types to lift parts and tires and and brake drums and whatever else you know you never have you should never they'll tell you this is one thing the Germans have on us they never pick up anything that weighs more than 40 kilograms or more than 40 I don't even know what it is more than 40 whatever it's they've got a limit as to how much they'll pick up they look at a box it says that it weighs X and they say I'm not picking that up I'll end up in the hospital. That's not how Americans work. They have a box that says it weighs you know fucking 300 pounds I see if I can lift this up and then next thing you know you're in traction you know we're just not that smart sometimes. But number two on my list of reasons why there is a technician shortage is because of the pay. And I'm staring at this thing right now that says that$28 is the average base pay. That ain't going to do it folks. It says the high is$47. Now I've got that blown away. So obviously they don't really know what they're doing when they when they calculate what the average what the low is and what the high is they don't have it they don't have it down. I know there's some of you guys out there who are making an extraordinary amount of money. And I haven't even touched on flat rate. I haven't touched on that uh and I'll tell you why flat rate is never going anywhere. I'm sorry I hate to be the bearer of bad news it is not ever going to go away ever because it works for the dealer it just works too well for the dealer. When you have a lot of work flat rate works because your technicians are going to break their ass to do it all because they can take a job that pays three hours and do it in 20 minutes and while they're running time on that job they can do another job that pays three hours and they can do that in 20 minutes. And by the end of the day and this has happened it has happened to me and I'm sure it's happened to some of you guys you could have 20 25 hours in one fucking day depending on what you're doing and how skilled you are at it and how quickly you can get it done. And I don't like flat rate myself personally even though that's exactly what I'm working under because it can work for me if my service advisors would sell my recommendations. But they're not doing that and they're not going to do that. I believe 100% that they're sandbagging me they're gaslighting me. I send an estimate and they just automatically decline it. Although they can't do that anymore because there's timestamps on it. So they have to wait a few minutes to make it look like they talk to the customer and then they decline it. Because if they do it right away it's obvious they didn't talk to the customer if they take five or ten minutes and then decline it well I talked to the customer and they don't want any of it. Uh-huh bullshit you didn't talk to anybody what they what they do is they'll email the estimate to this person. Okay it comes in it's on the computer and they just email it to them. They might as well wad it up and throw it in the trash and sometimes they email them the estimate even though they're standing right in the fucking showroom in the waiting area they still email it to them because that's the fastest way to have somebody not do a job not get a job done not get work done on their vehicle is to just not let them know. Oh I emailed you the estimate oh okay I'll have to go home and look at it. What I'm in the building they're in the building right fucking now they're not going to do it. But I'm sorry I hate to tell you flat rate's not going to go away because if you have a lot of work the dealer wins and so do you and if you don't have a lot of work the dealer still wins because he doesn't have to pay you anything and you don't make any money. You have a pay period like the last one I had which is so fucking pathetic that I'm either I don't that it I just added it to my list of reasons why I would I would retire. And what sucks is that I get I get contacted all the time by other shops people that I know are like hey we're looking for a guy and I'm like fuck I could be the guy and they pay an or they pay enormously because they have tons of work and they sell tons of work. You know I could I could go anywhere I want to go I have all of the training and I have tons of experience and a lot of shops would get right down on their knees to get me to work for them. And don't forget that yourself okay even if you've just been doing it for a couple years you have a couple years of experience and maybe you're just now getting off the lube team there's still a lot of places that would take a chance on you no problem whatsoever. You just have to remember that every shop has a bullshit factor. And most shops are probably right around 50% bad ones are in the 70 to 80 to 90%. So you have to decide for yourself if the bullshit that you have to put up with is worth it for the wage that they're going to give you and I will say that in 75% of cases it's not. And those are the fucking guys who are screaming that they have a technician shortage. So what you want to look for is a shop that has a low bullshit factor. They pay a high and decent wage they have a lot of work they have good service advisors. You could go work there and make a very very fine living you could it's be very lucrative to go work for them. And you can take a shop that you were working on that was just fucking pissing you off and tell them to kiss your fucking ass. It's called greasy wheels for a reason boys and girls because one of the reasons there was a technician shortage is because some shops pay and some shops know how to run things and know how to do things and take care of technicians but most do not they chase more people out of the business every day. Every day they chase people out of the business and then turn right around and whine and cry the technician shortage I can't get anybody to come in and work for me because you suck. So that's number two on the list. Now there's a lot of other things that go into why there's a technician shortage that are part of why there's a technician shortage and they're coming up. It's parts three and four I figure we'll make it a part three and four because I don't want to spend too much time going over the disrespect that society has for us and I don't want to spend any more time going over the pay because we both know society doesn't have any respect for us and they treat us like shit and think we're a bunch of thieves. And the people we work for think the same thing and they're not willing to pay us they're not willing to pay us what we're worth. And I'll tell you what if you talk to somebody who owns or runs a shop and you ask them if they have a technology shortage and they say they don't then those are the shops who have figured it out and pay a very respectable and reasonable wage and have very respectable technicians and do a lot of good work and have happy customers. And everybody else who's whining and moaning and complaining doesn't have any of that shit. All right. All right that's enough for your Uncle Jimmy I got to go to bed so I can go back in and listen to my phone beep every time the recommendation gets declined. Actually I've got to try to get a car going and uh I got to figure out why the company I work for has a firewall in place or some sort of antivirus in place on my computer that is canceling all of the diagnostic and all of the end of service testing that I need to do. My bullshit factor I'll be honest with you my bullshit factor is actually pretty low and my pay is pretty good. So I'm not going to complain too much. It could definitely be better. Hopefully for you it gets better you start looking at your bullshit factor and your pay and you and you decide that it's not worth it anymore look around. You could move to another shop or you could even move to another profession. You certainly could it is after all called grease the wheels and I want to say thank you to all of you out there for listening and putting up with your Uncle Jimmy all these years if you've been listening for years. If you haven't well then you know where you been I'm trying to help you out okay and I'm trying to help the people out really honestly who complain about a technician shortage to wake up and smell the coffee. Go to the bathroom in front of the mirror grab yourself by the neck pull your head out of your ass and look at the mirror and realize that the problem is you if you're not spending enough to keep your technicians in the building quit fucking complaining about it and raise their fucking pay simple as that. Alright? All right that's enough for your Uncle Jimmy for this week thank you very much once again for listening and at that particular point of time we always just like to say see ya