Episode 350: Radio Free Grease The Wheels

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!  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Greece Wheels. Your absolutely out of control automotive technician podcast coming to you from the Rock and Roll Garage. Courtesy of your Uncle Jimmy. That's me. Hey, before we get started, it's the usual. Thank you very much for what you do. Don't want to go on too much about it, but uh, you know, if you're working hard, getting things done, building it, making it, breaking it, rebuilding it, whatever you're doing, baby, keep up the good goddamn work. I appreciate it. I really do. All right. Uh, I was toying with the idea of doing a uh what I would call an underground podcast this week, or a rogue podcast, maybe bring you propaganda from the dark side. Uh, and then it occurred to me that the whole goddamn podcast is pretty much underground and rogue, like from day one, really, because it's not sanctioned by anybody who is formally or officially in the business. It's just some fucking scab asshole technician somewhere in the world, barking shit into a microphone and trying to cause problems and stir things up. And I thought, yeah, that that pretty much describes it. But uh, you know, I wanted to do kind of a a radio free Europe kind of podcast this week where I recommend that you do things that disrupt your business and piss off the people who are pissing you off and just just generally being a partisan, you know, just blowing up bridges and and shooting at generals and corporals and whatever, you know, kind of doing a you know, inglorious bastards kind of a thing in the middle of uh occupied territory, which is what our shops must seem like at times. But then it occurred to me that that wouldn't be very responsible on my part. And well, although I've never been accused of being very or overly responsible, uh, I did have to uh kind of say, listen, don't uh don't do anything that if somebody does, they'll get fired. It's kind of why I don't have people on the podcast too, because I don't think that anybody who has any real legitimate claim to like a management position in an automotive shop, whatever, kind of really like fancy hearing about themselves on the podcast. And if I was to have other technicians on board, well then that's probably all you would hear is how this place sucks and that guy sucks and and how you hate it and how they they you know they have favorites and they give you know they have gravy sucking pigs and all that shit. So I kind of wanted to stay away from that. But I did come up with a few different crazy stupid ideas uh as far as if you really did decide you wanted to go rogue and not actually have a job after afterwards. There's a lot of things you could do, and uh, and I don't really want to uh inspire you to do them. I certainly probably would not do them myself. I kind of like where I work anyway. Uh it's not perfect and uh it's far from it, but uh it's better than a lot of places that I've worked, which were very, very far from perfect. Okay. So uh, but you know, some of the things I thought of, I thought of one of the ideas I had was to uh just kind of slow down and really uh not work quickly. And uh actually I'm already doing that now. Uh I just we don't where I'm at now, we don't have a real lot of work right now. And uh there's a lot of different reasons for it, uh, some of which are uh not man-made and some of which are man-made, and some of our self-inflicted. But uh, you know, I can and I'll be I'll get to some of that here in a little bit here. But uh what I what I thought of was that you know you could uh actually sandbag on some stuff and cause problems for people who cause you problems for a change. But that's not really the best idea in the world. Uh also, too, uh I felt like what you could do really is to keep a very intricate and detailed report of what is going on in your shop as far as like all the uh repair orders that you're working on, uh what you get paid, what you could get paid, what you should get paid, and what you're not getting paid, uh and detailing all of the uh all of the work that is not being sold. And if it's excruciating, like it is in my case, present it to someone who should be interested in how much work is getting done and how much work is getting sold. Uh just just keeping track. And I think after a while what you would find is that uh it's not coming out in your favor at all. Uh I know that in uh my particular case, just to point out, not Mac not being maximized, basically, is what it comes down to. Is uh they're not uh they're not selling the recommendations that I make and they're not bringing in enough work for all of us. And uh I think that uh there's a lot of quiet quitting going on where I work, honestly. I think there's a lot of guys who are like, you know what, if it keeps up like this, see ya, you know, and and a lot of the guys I work with are very talented, very skilled, uh have a lot of experience, a lot of training, and I I really hate to see any of them go, uh, but I have seen a few go. And uh at the rate we're going now, I think that the turnover could pick up speed, really honestly. I think that uh uh you know, if if these guys, a lot of these guys, I don't suspect anybody's really living paycheck to paycheck, but if it keeps up like this for a long time, it it could happen. So uh I'm not hoping for that. And and I don't want anybody to actually disrupt any of the good things that are going on in our shop, but uh in your shops, in some other people's shops and shops that you work in or have worked in, uh certainly you could you could create some sabotage of some sort, maybe maybe major sabotage or just minor sabotage. Uh you know, uh I actually put some of these things I put some of these questions in. I gotta I gotta tell you, let me just back up for a second here before I get too much farther. One of the things that I discovered, and I didn't really think about this too much until I started really asking it serious questions, was AI. I got Gemini on the Google, and so I've been kind of using it. And uh I f I f I gotta be honest with you, I have found because it's not human, so none of it's personal, and it doesn't really have its own point of view, it doesn't have any kind of prejudices, it doesn't discriminate, it just kind of picks up whatever you tell it and shoots it back at you with some stats and some figures and maybe some uh uh you know opinions and observations and things that it has gleaned uh from the internet. And what I find is that it is very non-committal, it doesn't point one way or the other, but it does kind of pick out from you how you feel about things by asking you uh some some questions here. What I wanted to do was kind of use it again to kind of you know put some stuff out there, and uh some of the stuff it comes up with is very, very interesting. I gotta be honest with you. Uh things that I think of in my own mind, and then I wonder if that's legitimate or not, and then I go into AI and it says, Oh, yeah, no, that that's how I'm thinking too. And I'm like, well, I'm not a machine, so but uh there was uh this this is the question I put to it, and I I just want to skip over this real lightly because I don't want to I don't really want to cause problems in your shop. I just would like for you to understand that you know it it is almost warlike the difference between what we do and how we do it and why we do it and the people who try to manage us. It's almost as if our country has been taken over by Nazis and we have to struggle to survive under a Nazi regime that doesn't want us to survive, to be quite honest with you. And uh, I mean, I know that that's that's excessive, but there are days when it does feel like that. So what I typed in here was what types of things can an automotive technician do to disrupt his shop if they are not doing the right things? This is so what this is saying is what I have asked it to do is tell me, hey, what can I do if my shop's a piece of shit, basically, and I want to and I want to be a pace piece of shit. Okay. Uh but this is what it says here. When an automotive technician feels the shop environment has become toxic or unethical, their disruption often manifests in ways that cripple the workflow, reputation, and bottom line of the business. That's kind of what I was shooting for. Um, but I again I want to be careful and I don't want I don't want to direct, I don't want to be the leader of some insurrection or even you know start like an automotive Al-Qaeda or uh you know a a la Akbar kind of fucking you know jihad or anything like that. But uh, you know, I just wanted to throw some ideas out there and let let management know, let people who are supposed to be in charge of us know that you know we're not happy with some of the fucking shit they do. I mean, they're not, you know, obviously lining us and piling us into gas chambers and you know throwing us into crematoriums and shooting us in mass graves or anything like that, but they are keeping us down, holding us down financially and sometimes even uh mentally, you know. So and then occupationally, even yeah, sure. Uh here's what it says while some disruptions are active choices, others are passive aggressive result of burnout or lack of support. Here's a breakdown of how a technician can disrupt a shop. Now, again, I want to just be careful, okay? This is I'm not trying to tell you to burn the shop down, okay? Don't fucking go and do that, okay? But I'm just telling you there's some uh there's some shit that you can do that will bring attention to your fucking dilemma, okay? Uh here's uh operational and and financial sabotage, flag hour dragging, slowing down work pace on purpose so the jobs take longer than the estimated time. Yeah, that'll drive some people nuts. Preventing the shop from turning over base for new customers. Uh and obviously that would be turning over base for you, so I can't say I recommend that. Selective cherry picking, refuse to take heavy or dirty jobs like engine swaps or rusted suspensions, and only taking easy maintenance work, leaving the difficult low margin tasks to pile up. Uh, that does not happen in my shop. Um, I have seen that happen in some shops. I've seen uh technicians who actually refuse to go to any further training or get any further education or even try to do something that's even remotely difficult because they made so much money just doing the easy shit. And uh that that that drives me wild. And those are the kind of people who get their tires punctured and their tools stolen and and and thrown away or or hidden and uh basically get uh sabotaged personally, okay. So you really don't want to do that. Um you certainly can, but you're gonna find that uh your fellow technicians are gonna start uh doing things to kind of fuck you up on that in that manner, okay? Uh and then the third one was tool and supply mismanagement being wasteful with shop supplies, uh brake cleaner rags and fluids, and then eating into the shop's narrow profit margins. Now they now I don't know where they got narrow profit margins from, okay? Uh a lot of shops I know make an extraordinary amount of money, and they can, and if they don't, well, it's their fucking fault, and certainly not mine, but narrow profit margins. Uh, if they working in a shop that has narrow profit margins, they've got big fucking problems, okay? Because I I've never seen a shop that didn't somehow come out on top and make money and really do well. Reputation and customer trust, the upsell strike, refusing to report legitimate safety concerns or necessary repairs found during inspections. Well, you know, I gotta tell you on this one here, the upsell strike. I'm not actually, I I would definitely not uh say to you to do something like that, especially if your service advisors are already doing it, uh they're refusing to upsell stuff. Yeah, they don't need any help with that, okay? Because it's way, way, way fucking easier to just tell a customer the car is fine and not attempt to sell upsell anything than it is to go, hey, you know, you need this, or and then have to have a conversation. And you know, it's it's obviously it's it's much more work to do the job the way you're fucking supposed to than to just say, here, here's your keys, have a nice day. Honest whistleblowing. Now, this is this is not something that you would want to do uh just on a whim. Okay, you don't want to do this. You I'm just telling you right now, this could cause big problems for you, and you might have to find another job one way or the other, even though it's legally guaranteed. Honest whistleblowing, internal or external, if the shop is pushing unnecessary repairs, a technician might subtly inform the customer or report the shop to the better business bureau. Well, honestly, if your shop is doing that, then yeah, you should report them, okay? And you're working for a bunch of fucking criminals, and that's not good, okay? So don't want you to have to do that. But if they're uh if they're fucking their customers over, then uh you might want to look it up. It's uh BBB, the better business bureau, okay? Technical negligence, cutting corners on repairs. This leads to comebacks, which cost the shop double in labor and damage customer loyalty. Uh don't do that. Don't take it out on the customers. It's not their fault. You're not getting paid, you're not getting treated right, you're not getting appreciated, and you're basically made to feel like a piece of shit. Okay, it's not their fault. So don't be doing that, okay? And then also two here, uh, it says cultural and team erosion, the information silo, experienced tech may refuse to mentor apprentices or share a specialized knowledge of tooling, creating a bottleneck where only one person can perform a certain high-level task. Well, uh, at least in my shop, we have some new guys and they don't appear to want to know anything from anyone who knows something. So it's kind of going on anyway, because they don't take direction very well, at least as far as I can tell. Uh, they certainly don't want to hear anything from the old guy because everybody in the shop has told the told them that the old guy is a nasty, grumpy old wrench thrower. So what are you gonna learn from him? Uh, maybe how to throw a curveball with a fucking seven mil 17 millimeter wrench. I don't know. Uh poaching talent. Uh, if a technician plans to leave for a better shop, they may convince other high-performing technicians to follow them. Sure, that is definitely one thing you could do if you're going to leave a shop. Certainly try to take some of the talent with you, right? I mean, you know, if you're gonna go somewhere and they're gonna pay you a whole lot more and have better working conditions and better hours and better pay and everything's better, then why not bring some friends along? Why wouldn't you, right? Uh, and then this is one that we have. We definitely have this constant vocal, toxic venting, they call it, constant vocal criticism of management in front of the other employees, which can lead to a revolving door of staff and a general loss of morale. I definitely have a guy for that job, and uh, and he is, I gotta say, top-notch, one of the fucking best I've ever seen. He fucking hates everything, he hates everybody, everything sucks, everything's bad. He's the only one who knows how everything is supposed to fucking work, and nobody will fucking listen to him, including most of us. Uh, yeah, it's uh it but you know what, it's funny at the same time because it in in his particular case, he makes the most money out of everybody in the shop. He should be the happiest, but he is absolutely the most miserable, grumpy motherfucker. And if you call him out on it and go, I'm not a I'm not a complainer. Are you fucking kidding me? I looked it up in dictionary what the word complainer means, and there was your fucking picture, asshole. So I like the guy, and uh some of the stuff he complains about, he's not wrong about, but also too, he won't shut the fuck up about it ever. So but these are all things that really I I would say to you that you wouldn't want to do, okay, because you want to be a good employee. Because if you do decide to go somewhere else, they might know somebody from where you were working, and they'll be like, Oh, is this guy any good? You go, Yeah, he was just not treated properly. And I'll be like, Oh, okay, so we'll hire him on. You know, you don't want to do anything to damage your reputation, and you certainly don't want to do anything to damage anything that the customers have going on. And so what you're stuck with is kind of a passive aggressive thing. Now, I did a podcast that and I looked it up, it was about five plus years ago now about being passive aggressive in the shop. And and I don't, I gotta say, I I really don't like it. Okay, I don't like uh not you know having an opinion or having something that you need to say to somebody and not saying it to that person, but saying it to everybody else. It's kind of uh counterproductive and it doesn't really work. And and I have found myself in a position to kind of try to help my fellow technicians say what they need to say and and get their point of view heard and so that you know they can they can say, yeah, me too, you know, but uh it hasn't really worked out for me. I've become sort of the shop complainer, maybe the maybe the the guy in the shop who's not afraid to say anything to anybody because I honestly I don't care uh what people think about me, it's it's fine. What whatever they want to think about me, they're certainly going to, okay, and I don't really have a lot to say about it because uh people have all kinds of different opinions about the things that they see, the things that they feel, the things that they hear. And I can tell you with with the utmost of sincerity, is that I'm a very good employee. I always do my job absolutely the best I possibly can. I am and from what I have seen, and I'm not sitting here staring at other people in the shop, but from what I've seen, I'm probably the only guy in the shop who does who is consistent with the care that I show my customers' vehicles. I mean, I am always doing the videos, I am always setting the tire pressures, I am always topping off the fluids. These are things that I do because those are my standards. And I've noticed that throughout the shop, really, nobody else has the same standards. It's not my job to tell them how to do their job. And if I if it was my job, they wouldn't listen to me anyway. So it's kind of fine that that's not my job. And I would refuse that job anyway if they said, Oh, we want you to be, you know, whatever, the the the grand poo-bah of the shop, we want you to be the the gestapo leader of the shop, or we want you to be the fucking Einstein group and of of of what the technicians do. I'm not gonna do any of that. I can only be responsible for myself. So for me to tell you that you, you know, you can do these things to sabotage your dealer or your shop is really irresponsible of me. But that's what you get when you listen to radio free fucking grease the wheels. It's just we're out there and we have all of this negative and bad and stupid fucking shit that happens to us, and there's nothing we we feel like we can do about it other than to just do our job the best we can. And if it gets worse, we can leave. Okay, that's why it's called grease the wheels. And if we don't get paid enough, we can always leave because that's a good way to that's a real good way to get more money. That's a very good way to get more money. Because if you go somewhere else to work and they tell you they'll pay you less than where you used to work, you have to get up and leave. Don't ever, and I mean this honestly, folks, don't ever accept a job where they're paying you less than what you're making now, because it is going to take you a very long time just to get back to where you were. Okay, because when you get hired somewhere and they say, Oh, we'll pay you, you know, just pick a number,$30 an hour, they're telling you they'll pay you$30 an hour because it's about three to four dollars more than they're paying their next the guy who has the same amount of skills as you are that you have, and then when they bring you in, they're not gonna give you a raise for a very long fucking time. That is what I have seen in my experience. So never back go backwards on your rate of pay, just don't do it. It's not a good idea. It is gonna take you years to get back to where you were at a place that maybe was so horrible that you just had to get the fuck out. Always go up and pay, and that's the reason for switching jobs. And if you go to one place and they say, Oh, we'll give you less than you were making, you need to leave. You need to go away. You need to stand up in the interview and say, Thanks for seeing me. And then when they go, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you what are you looking for? And I go, Well, I was making 35. I'm not gonna go back to making 30. I would like to make 40. If you can't give me that, then I'm gonna have to seek another fucking place to work, and then walk out the door. They may or may not call you back, but they will do one thing is that they're not gonna be able to push you around a whole lot if they do hire you. Because the service manager is gonna remember that you stood up for yourself and said, Yeah, fuck you. That's not enough money, jackass. Now I developed in this podcast I was talking about from about five years ago, I had developed a whole bunch of things that you can say to management, whether it's a a foreman or a service manager or an assistant service manager, even a general manager, things that you could say that would give them the idea that you're not really happy with what you do. And these are super passive aggressive things that hopefully kind of trigger a thought process in their minds that you might not want to, that you might not want to continue working there if things don't get better. Uh, some of these things were like, you know, having a uh, you know, talking to a service manager in a very casual situation and say, you know, I'm gonna miss this place, and then just walk away, just like that. Give them a heavy siren at the end, uh, you know, and things like that. Oh, yeah, and or or if if something doesn't go your way and and and the service manager is giving you a hard time. So, you know, I used to like working here. And uh another one that I always liked was you, you know, whenever something wasn't right and they were like, Well, why'd you do that? And I go, you know, it's just we're trying to make it work and it didn't work, you know. And then they're like, Well, it didn't work. And I said, Well, that's too bad. I I don't give a fuck. You know, I don't care, you know, because really that's the end, that's the end of the rope for when you work somewhere, is that you just stop fucking caring. And I think that there's a lot of that going on out there. There's a lot of people out there who just show up, put their time in, collect whatever money they can get, and then they go home. And then after a while, they realize that you know it's just not very rewarding, not very fulfilling, and there's no appreciation, there's no thanks, there's no sort of, hey, thanks for coming in, thanks for what you do. And and you know, honestly, I I've got to be honest with you. I I tell my boys all the time, the people I work with, you know, thanks for what you do, thanks for being there. You're doing a fine job. All the time, I'm building people up. And sometimes I'm building people up that don't even really deserve to be built up, but I just need for them to try to get better and to feel like they need to get better. And that comes from me. And I am in no way, trust me when I tell you, I am in no way part of the management team where I work at all. Okay. It's just not gonna happen. All right, not for me anyway. I'm just too much of a I'm too much of a partisan. I'm Hogan's heroes, you know. Maybe that's not what it is, but I'm just I'm out there being a kind of a pain in their ass because they're just, you know, there's things that they're not doing right, and there's people they're not treating right, and and I kind of like to let them know, you know. So The other passive aggressive things I I have come up with uh is asking your boss if you can use them for a reference. Uh that kind of indicates that you're that you're looking for another job. One of the other ones I came up with is, hey, what do you think is a good font for a resume? Why? What do you mean? Why? I'm updating my resume, Dick. I need to make more money. And every time I ask you about it, it's oh, there's no money in the budget. I go, well, fuck your budget. You know, you know who creates the money that's in your budget? Me. And if you don't think I create enough money in your budget and I can show you the figures, then you know that's the fucking problem. Uh the other, what else? What else did I come up with here? These are these are really rehashed from this podcast from five years ago. Uh uh, ask them if you could order a grease gun because lots of shops don't have a grease gun at all. It really is not necessary anymore. But just say, hey, can we go go ahead and get a grease gun? Yeah, why would you want to grease? I want to grease the wheels on my toolbox. Uh just a shameful plug for the podcast, of course, there. Uh another one I like is uh, well, if you don't want to give me a raise, I'll find somebody who will. Uh, how about this one? Uh and I I use this on my uh on one of my managers one time. I said, Hey, uh, can you uh dig me up a uh two-week notice form? You know, form for putting in two weeks notice. What are you gonna put your two weeks in? I go, Yeah, I was thinking about it, you know, leave it half filled out on my toolbox so I can find it. Also, too, maybe you could say something on the effect to the effect of uh, hey, why don't you go ahead and schedule my exit interview now? What's some of the other ones? Uh oh yeah, it's just asking, say, hey, if uh if a guy was to quit, can he still get his vacation pay if he hasn't used it? Uh, because I'll tell you what, there's been a couple of times that I left some money on the table not getting my vacation pay. So that's not gonna happen to me again. It's one of the things you learn when you do something wrong. And I think about it now, it was probably only like four or five hundred bucks. So it doesn't, it seems like nothing now, but at the time it would have been real helpful. Let's also this is a good one. I do I did kind of like this one here. Uh asking the uh asking the service manager to say, hey, you you know where the U-Haul dealer is around here? You know how you know where it is? Why would I oh I gotta run a trailer big enough for my toolbox, you know. Uh also to ask him, uh, you know, uh, what do you know what the the if you go to the post office, can you grab me a form for forwarding mail? Why? Are you planning on moving? Oh yeah, when I get a new job, I'm gonna move closer to it. And then I had a I had a couple more here asking uh like when when your uh management team tries to get you to do something you really don't want to do, you just say, Oh yeah, my last dealer tried that too. It didn't work out for them either. And then uh the last on my list here, and uh this is all I have for you as far as this goes, asking about interview questions, go, hey, what kind of questions do you usually ask in an interview? You know, as if you didn't have one of your own. But uh when I was dealing, when I was looking at uh at the AI answers to some of these questions, and I know that we we talked about that last week, and but uh this is it's really interesting to me that this is not a human response. The question that AI asked me after the end of that, why I would sabotage my employer, uh, what specifically is happening in the shop that has you thinking about this, and I just put down not enough work, many declined repairs. And here's what it said to that, okay? Because I know I know that some of you are putting up with this, uh, and I I apologize if there's not enough work in your shop. It does seem like there has been a slowdown recently within the last couple of months. And geez, do you think it could be because of all the crazy shit that's going on in the world? Yeah, it definitely could be, Uncle Jimmy. That would be uh one of the reasons why some people are a little cautious about some of the stuff they're doing. And I wanted to just kind of answer that myself without the use of AI is uh look, people have cars and people drive them. If they don't bring them in for services and repairs and maintenance, it doesn't mean they don't need them. They're going to need them. And it eventually what'll happen is it will get to a point of no return and they'll start coming back in droves with problems that you haven't seen in a long time. They're gonna they're the the cars are not not breaking, they are still breaking, they're just not bringing them in yet, and that's and that's weird and bad for them. It's great for us, although it would be really nice if they would spread it out over time and let us deal with it with a nice even workflow, but that's not what's gonna happen. Because I've seen this before. And you you're busier than you can, you can't even you can't even breathe, you know. You can't even take a breath. You're just cranking work out, and then you start making money again, and all the complaints really sort of vanish when you're busy, okay? Uh, what it said here when I at when I responded with this answer, not enough work, many declined repairs, it says that is a frustrating death spiral for a technician. This is AI talking, okay? And I'm not sure I want AI calling it anything a death spiral for a technician, but I think they did kind of nail it here. When you aren't getting enough hours because the front desk can't sell the work you find, it hits your paycheck directly while you're still expected to be there and be available. Absolutely. You're there, you're just not doing anything. And there's been a lot of that going on where I'm at. If the shop is failing to convert your inspections into build hours, here's how those disruptions usually play out, often as a survival mechanism or a sign that the tech is done with the shop's management style. So uh what it go, what it goes on to say here is there's a bare minimum inspection. If a technician knows that 80% of the recommendations will be declined or aren't even being presented to the customer, they stop looking. The disruption, you stop doing deep dive digital vid video inspections, and I double dog dare you to say that three times real fast. Uh, you stop doing deep dive digital and vid vehicle inspections, you only write up the primary concern, and then the result is the shop loses even more potential revenue, and the average repair order, the ARO, they love they love acronyms, by the way, plummets, making the shop's financial situation worse. Folks, AI has nailed it. Okay, AI is not human and it doesn't really think, it just presents facts as it sees them. And this is these are these are the sharp, stick-in-yeah facts that it's presenting, is that if you don't find a way to keep the technicians happy, they're not gonna, they're just not gonna be able to recommend all the services you want them to, and then you're gonna lose revenue. Do you understand how this works? It says number two here, and this is something else that the technicians can do, is start prioritizing side work. When the shop isn't providing a living wage through flat rate hours, technicians often start running a shop out of the shop. Now, some places keep a tight grip on that, and I don't blame them really, honestly. Uh, but the disruption is using shop space tools or downtime to organize side jobs. And I have heard from many people that and some shops, even if they are busy, will some people will slide their side jobs through the shop because nobody's really paying attention. Now, do you want to be part of that management team that lets a technician turn you know seven or eight hours a day, but then on the side he turned an extra 10 hours and made like$800 fixing a car that you didn't have a won uh an RO on and the customer didn't pay you for, but they fixed it in your shop right in front of your fucking eyes and you missed it. Yeah, you need to wake up. You need to wake up. The disruption, using shop space, tools, or downtime to organize side jobs or work on personal projects instead of staying ready for the next ticket. Well, when you have to have a list of technicians who are ready for work, and then you dole out the work to the guy next on the list, then then you've got a problem. And and I don't know what those problems are because that's not the end of the business that I've ever been in. Why is your shop slow? I have no idea. Is it marketing? Is it advertising? Is it what you work on? Is it why you work on it? Is it where you're at? Is it the the attitude of the people who answer the phones? I don't have the answer. I don't have the answer. But I'm not management. If I was management, I would certainly try to find out what the fucking answers are. The result here it says management loses control of the floor and the shop is essentially subsidizing your private business. Aggressive documentation. Now, here's here's what they were talking about earlier. Here's what I was talking about earlier. Aggressive documentation. If the service advisors are the bottleneck, and it says in parentheses, they aren't explaining the repairs well or are scared to ask for the money, a technician can disrupt that dynamic by being brutally clinical. Now that's what your Uncle Jimmy tries to do. I am constantly questioning why they didn't sell this particular recommended repair or that particular recommended repair. And hey, you know what? Let me just take a second here to go into my phone, okay, because I get text messages every time something happens with an RO that I have. And let me just start on Monday. I would start on Monday, except for Monday, I didn't have anything. Nothing. I didn't have any cars that I could quote anything on. Nothing. So that's a problem. But then on Tuesday, I had one car that I made some recommendations on, but declined. So we go to Wednesday, and on Wednesday, there was exactly two cars, and all the recommendations on those were declined. And then we get to Thursday, and Thursday I had two cars, and the services recommended were declined on that car too. And then we go to Friday, and actually one of the repairs from Thursday were declined. And this is what kills me, folks. This really murders me worse than anything, okay? I got a decline on Friday at 6 56 a.m. Not seven o'clock, 6 56 a.m. So the advisor was just getting into work. There was no customers in the building. He had not called anyone at all. And he went and declined the services on this particular car. Must have been from Thursday. Must have been from Thursday. Now let me tell you what's happening at 6.56 in the morning. Number one, the customer is not calling into the shop to say he doesn't want whatever it was we estimated. Number two, the service advisor is not calling the customer to ask them if they wanted to get any of the repairs done that were on the estimate. Friday at 6 56 a.m. When you decline a repair or any recommendations on an RO, that is all you, pal. And you as a service advisor should probably be sent on your way. That really requires zero fucking effort on your part. Zero. Then we get to the rest of Friday. Okay, so that's one decline, two, three, and four declines on Friday with no not one single the whole week. The whole week. We're talking five full days of working on cars and looking at cars, not one single approved repair. Not one. Not fucking one. How in a fuck is anybody supposed to make money if they won't sell anything? Now listen, I I'm I'm gonna tell you, I this is the same thing I say every time. I don't expect them to sell everything. I expect them to ask for the sale on everything, but I don't expect them to sell everything. But zero, folks, in my book, that's zero. You are batting zero. Meanwhile, I have to bat a thousand. As the technician, I talked about that before. I have to be perfect. I have to come to the plate and get on base every fucking time. And they can just stand there and watch all these fat pitches go right down the middle and strike out every fucking time. And they still get to keep their job, they still get to keep their spot in the batting order. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Okay. So aggressive documentation, yeah, that's it right there. It's on my phone. You can do the same thing, just keep track of your ROs. What and what you should probably do is keep track of what you uh what you recommended, how much that would have made for the shop if they had sold it, how much it would have made for you, and then it was eventually declined. You know, and I want to just say this real quick too, okay? I really like I like the people we have as service advisors. Uh, I would like it if they would try a little harder. I don't know. They always say the same thing. You don't know what it's like. Well, guess what? I actually do know what it's like, okay? I spent many years, I want to talk 18 years selling auto parts to people who shouldn't be touching their fucking automobile with tools. I know what they're gonna say, I know what they're gonna do, I know they're not gonna do do what's right. I know that, and I'm not asking to sell 100%, but god damn it, when somebody shows up in your building and then you send them a video detailing what's going on with their vehicle, it's a fat pitch right down the middle, folks. They should drive it out of the park every time. You know, it's like, hey, did you look at the video? It shows that the tires are very, very bad on your car, very unsafe. You shouldn't really drive it like that. I've we've gave you we've given you an estimate. We've got a couple different brands, a couple different price points. We really need to make your car safe, and not just for your sake, but for everybody who's going to be on the highway around you with the tires you have now, take a shit. Oh no, they're not doing that. They email them, they email them the uh, even if they're in a showroom, they just email them the estimate and then down the road they go with bad tires. It's terrible. Here's what it said to me at the end of all this. It said, are the advisors even trying to sell your recommendations or are they pre-judging the customers' wallets and the customers before they even speak to them? What did I write? Yes. Well, that confirms it. The prejudging advisor, it's a common bottleneck where the person at the front desk decides a customer won't spend the money before they even present the estimate. This kills your flat rate hours and makes your hard work on the inspection feel pointless. If you want to disrupt this cycle or shake the tree to get things moving, here are a few ways to handle it. See, and this is AI. They recognize the problem and they're not even fucking human. The paper trail pressure, yeah, exactly. Uh documenting everything that you do. I just was talking about that. The result, when management sees these notes, they realize the shop is on the hook. If that car crashes, it forces the advisor to actually sell a job to cover their own back. I don't think that really anybody is uh, you know, if you make a video and you send across an estimate and somebody declines tires, it doesn't fall on anybody at the dealership. You did your due diligence, you showed them that their car was in bad shape. If they go out and they kill somebody, it's certainly because you didn't try. But you didn't try very fucking hard now, did you? And no jury in the world is gonna say, well, you didn't try hard enough to sell that stuff because you know all you gotta do is just say, yeah, you don't know what it's like. And then of course, because they're on a jury and not, you know, getting out of jury duty for whatever reason, they go, Yeah, I guess you're right. Here's what else it says request to show and tell. If the advisor isn't selling, it's usually because they don't understand the tech or don't believe in the repair. Uh, I'm not sure how much of that goes on. Do you have problems where your uh advisor doesn't believe what you're telling them? Then you have a real, real honest to God problem. Because you and I, folks, if you're a technician, boy, girl, man, woman, child, uh black, white, green, Christian, is Muslim, Jewish, whatever you are, whatever you are, whatever race, nationality, or sex you are, if you are a technician, you are the authority. Those clowns sitting up front in their chairs who don't ever get out of their fucking chairs, telling you that the customer doesn't have any money or whatever for their repairs, if they don't believe you, then they're in the wrong business, okay? Because even the new guys can look at a tire and go, hey, that tire's no good. Even the new guys can do that. They can look at suspension components to see they're bent, they can look at brakes until they're metal to metal, they can pull a dipstick out and look at the oil and go, ugh, they can see a broken windshield, they can see all these things. And if your advisors just decide they don't believe them, then they have to go. Send them on their way. Because that advisor is worse than having no advisor. I believe. If they don't trust you and they don't want to do the job and they won't talk to the customers, they won't ask for the sale, send them on their way. Send them, just send them. It's much harder for an advisor to prejudge a repair when they've seen the physical evidence. What they're telling us here is to bring the advisor out into the shop and show them what the fuck is wrong with the car. They think that that'll work. I'm sorry. AI, that probably will not work. If I went up front and I requested that a service advisor come back and take a look at a car, they might. After a while, they would catch on and go, Yeah, I don't have the time. Okay, whatever. Uh the digital evidence bomb. If your shop uses digital inspections, talking about service walk-around videos, take clear videos, send them through the system so they're attached to the customer's email. Our videos typically for all of you folks out there, they just go right to the tech, right to the customer automatically. Your advisors probably aren't watching them because it represents time out of their day, which they don't want to waste doing what they're supposed to do. Oh, I'm telling you, it did I didn't mean for this to start out as a uh service advisor batch session, but it's kind of turning into that. But I mean, we're just we're just rolling through some of the stuff that AI suggests for us to do as technicians to try to get more sales out of the cars that we look at. Is that so is that so dastardly? Is that so mean or evil or terrible? I don't think so. If somebody does, then you know what I say to them? Fuck you. Get back up front and do your fucking job. Get in fact, I used to say it to this one technician or one uh advisor all the time. Get back up front, you fucking no-selling son of a bitch. It was they would always listen to a few laughs, but it was true in a lot of cases with that guy. If the lack of work is affecting your ability to make a living, the most effective disruption is a direct one. The move. Bring your flat rate sheets from the last three weeks to the shop owner, not the advisor, shop owner or the general manager or the service manager, and show the gap between what you recommended and what was sold. I actually created one of these sheets for a week last month, uh in March, the last week of February, the first week of March, that showed, and I I think I documented it before on this podcast, it showed that I always uh I had written recommendations for about sixty thousand dollars worth of work and uh that would have netted me about a hundred and forty-two hours for that pay period. Now, honestly, I here again, I don't expect them to sell 100%. I do not, but I only had 53 hours that pay period, and I certainly could have used about a good 30 or 40 more from this 142 that did not get sold. So you tell me who's fucking the dog at work. Certainly not your Uncle Jimmy. The result, shop owners hate losing money more than they hate confronting a lazy advisor. If the owner realizes the front desk is leaving money on the table, they will usually fix the advisor's behavior or find someone who can sell. What a mouthful. And yet that was AI that came up with that. That was not your Uncle Jimmy. I'm just reading it off my screen here. It says here, uh, does your shop have a steady flow of cars coming in, or is the parking lot looking as thin as your repair orders? I said my answer was steady flow in and then back out again. If the parking lot is full, but your bay is empty, the shop isn't broken, the sales process is. Uh free estimate burnout, we definitely have that going on. We have a free hour of diag burnout going on right now. People keep bringing back their cars, getting diagnosis from us, and then taking it to another shop to get it fixed in a less expensive manner. Uh, and it's wearing us out. And and really, uh, we have some customers who have done it three, four, and five times. And uh we just smile and and and say thanks a lot and come again and we we top up their fluids and fill up their their tires with air and send them on their way with these enormous estimates, which they get repaired somewhere else, sometimes at home, sometimes they do it themselves, although most of the times they can't. And this is something that is going to bite them in the ass one of the one of these days, okay? Because our sh our tickets show history. And if you get to a point where you're just you just keep asking for free diag, and we keep going in and going, eh, you know, you need this, and then they go get it somewhere else, and then you come back a few months later and go, oh, and you know, you give them free diag again and say, Oh, you need this. After a while, we're just gonna say, hey, no, you don't need anything. And then maybe their car will just blow up. And what are they gonna have to say? What are they gonna say? Oh, you didn't diagnose my car properly. And we'll say, Well, I'll tell you what, why don't we give you your money back? Oh, wait, it was fucking free. So get the fuck out of my face. Now, obviously, being nice to customers is probably more important than telling somebody to get the fuck out of your face. And even then, in that case, you know, if if you had a car and you've looked at it and you've given them a lot of free diagnosis, and then suddenly something goes wrong with it, and it's not your fault, it's not really anybody's fault. Cars just give up and quit and die, you know. It happens, and sometimes it's nobody's fault, believe it or not. And they decide they want to buy a new one. They're always gonna remember that you were nice to them when they didn't have a lot of money, and maybe they have money now, or maybe they want a new car and they're willing to finance it, whatever. They might come down to you and say, Hey, you know, I I was uh breaking your balls for many, many months with my car, and you guys were always gracious about it. So here we go. I'm gonna buy a new car from you, pay you back for all the times you were good to me. Now, I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen very often, but it could certainly happen, okay? It could certainly happen. And maybe if the customer made a commitment at some point and said, you know, I would really like to be able to afford to get this done, but I'm gonna wait a couple of weeks or maybe a month, and then they did come in and get a repair done that they needed pretty desperately, actually, then you'd see, you'd be able to see and feel that they just don't have the money or the wherewithal to get whatever it is done at your shop. You know, it's kind of like saying, hey, you know, we're not gonna hold that against you that you didn't have the money for the repair. But if you keep doing it over and over again but never getting the work done at our place and get it done somewhere else, that's kind of a bullshit move. But it but it happens, okay. Now, uh, here's another thing that says if you want to disrupt the status quo, start tracking the sold versus recommended ratio yourself, personally, as a technician, because a lot of times people can manipulate data on a computer very easily. I mean, if you do an oil change on a car, but then you recommend maybe two, three, five, ten thousand dollars worth of work and it all gets declined, all they have to do is just kind of put that under the service manager's number, and all of a sudden you look good for selling uh oil change on that car, and somebody else takes the hit, somebody else who's not going to get the hit for not selling the work, the rest of the work. That has happened a lot. I know that they're doing it at our place. They think they're funny, they think they're smart, they think they can make themselves look good artificially. I'm telling you, they fucking can't. Uh the other one here is uh direct communication. In some shops, tech start talking to customers directly in a parking lot or the lobby. Yeah, I I've done that. That spooks the shit out of them. They go, they go, Oh, were you talking to that guy? Yeah, I told him all the things he's supposed to hear instead of having to hear them all fucking bass acquires from you. Why this is happening in and out. If the cash flow, if the flow is steady, the shop's marketing is working, but the service advisor likely has one of these issues. They are of the order taker mentality where they only sell what the customer asked for. They have a lack of urgency, they don't explain wire repair matters, and they might be price shopping. And I think that a lot of people just assume they're they're doing that. Uh and then it went on to ask me, and this was funny, how many hours are you actually flagging versus how many hours you should be hitting based on the cars you've seen today? And this was my honest response. In a two-week pay cycle, I should have between 100 to 120 hours. And and I mean 50 hours a week is I can do that easy. I could do that like falling off a log. But my last pay period for two weeks was 75 hours. Very pathetic. Now, if the work's not there, if the work is genuinely not there, I can't complain. But if I have a whole week full of cars that I diagnosed where nothing was sold on them, then it's just out of my hands, is all. And I really kind of can't handle that much longer. Okay. Uh what AI had to say about that was that is a 30% to 40% hit to your expected income. In the world of flat rate tech, a 75-hour period when you are geared for 120 isn't just a slow week. It's a financial emergency. This from AI that doesn't have to pay rent, doesn't have to buy food, doesn't have to pay the internet bill. If the cars are flowing in and out and you're only flagging three point 37.5 hours a week, the shop is essentially stealing your time by making you perform inspections that they have no intention or ability to sell. Here's how you can use this data to disrupt the current lack of sales and address the bottleneck. Now, when I went in and I asked them how to sabotage uh this the system right at the beginning, it kind of took that as a theme all the way through this, okay? And from there, from there, where was I? I uh uh from there, it just kind of held on to that particular kind of an attitude for me. And it said, if the cars are flowing in and out and you're only flagging 37.5 hours a week, the shop is essentially stealing your time by making you perform inspections that they have no intention or ability to sell. Here's how you can use this data to disrupt the current lack of sales and address the bottleneck. It says the daily average reality check to make 110 hours in 10 days, you need an average of 11 hours a day. No shit. Hey, AI can do math. Right now you're averaging 7.5, which is not that great. The disruption, stop waiting for the advisor. If you finish a job and there's no sold work, don't just sit there, physically go to the desk and ask which of the six cars I inspected this morning is going to pay my mortgage because right now I'm sitting at zero for the day. And I'm telling you, the one crazy ass, dumb son of a bitch out there who would do that is sitting behind the microphone right now. I I will, I'm gonna start asking the service advisors. I was like, how am I supposed to make any money if you won't sell anything? You know, it's just a question, you know. The goal, make it uncomfortable for the advisor to see you standing there. If they see you as a bill, they will they will have they have to pay rather than just a tool in the back, which is exactly what I am on a tool. They may feel the pressure to actually close a deal. Now I'm not asking them to close a deal. I'm not asking them to overcome the objection. I'm not asking them for that shit at all. I realize that that actually requires uh a little bit of effort. I realize that. All I'm asking them to do is ask for the sale. If they get shot down in flames, if they get rebuffed in the most vicious manner possible, I'm fine with that. Just ask for the sale. You don't have to pull any fancy psychological tricks out of your bag and say, oh, well, you know, you you with bald tires, you're putting everybody on the road in jeopardy. You don't have to do that shit. Just say you have bald tires, would you like to replace them today? We have your car on a lift, we have the tires in stock, bing, bang, boom, we can get you done. All I need for you to do is ask for the sale. I'm not asking you, I'm not asking you to be Glengarry, Glenn Ross. I'm not asking for any of that. Just simply ask for the sale. And they'll tell you all day long, well, that guy doesn't have any money. I go, well, how do you know? You know, and I I've used the example a million fucking times that so never judge a book by its cover. Don't fucking do that. I have to tell you guys that all the time, and nobody's listening. How about this one? Request a no-sale audit. That's a fun one. Since you have the numbers, you have the leverage to demand a meeting with a service manager or owner. Now, I've actually talked to our general manager about this, and uh he is extremely interested in the sales portion of our particular dealership. And I get it. You know, you gotta stay on top of those guys too, but they also don't put up with a whole lot of bullshit from those guys either. I mean, if our service advisors were working up front trying to sell cars and they had the same track record that they have in the service department, they would have been fired many, many, many months ago. They're closing at somewhere between 15 and 25 percent. It's like what that means is that for every four customers that come in the front door to sell them a car at 25%, you're selling one out of four. No sales manager in the world gonna be happy with that ratio. Not fucking one of them. Yeah, that's okay for the sales, for the service department. The argument I'm producing the inspections to support a 120-hour pace, but the front desk is only closing at a 75-hour pace. We're losing 45 hours of labor revenue every two weeks just on my rack alone. Yeah. Think about the money it costs you when these people don't feel like they want to do their job. Now, again, I want to say to you, this did not start out, this did not start out as as an effort to bash service advisors, but they really are the absolute linchpin to what we do, what we what we're trying to do. And this is AI. AI doesn't have any prejudices, it doesn't discriminate, and all I've done is ask it simple questions like what would you do? And it comes back and it asks me questions. And here's here's the next question really how are the other guys in the shop doing? Are they also starving, or is there gravy work only landing in certain base? Uh and I wrote, and this is just fair, all slow, we're all slow. We all could stand to have a lot more work. Some guys do seem to get gravy at times, but that's not the problem. I mean, our dispatcher does a good job, he tries to spread it out evenly. Some people sometimes seem like they have more work than others. I may even seem like that at times because I get I do get a fair amount of people who come back for repairs. What I uh credit that to is that maybe the service advisor did actually ask them if they want to go ahead and get it done, but they just said they can't do it right now. So I do get a fair amount of upsells, and I can't I can't complain about that, and I'm not going to complain about that. I get a fair amount of upsells from stuff that I recommended in a video months ago, even. I think on uh Friday last week or it's Thursday last week, I got a car that I recommended front brakes on back in October. And guess what? It still fucking needed them. They didn't heal over, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't scab up and heal over, they didn't fix themselves. Then from there, uh what AI did was it asked me if I've looked around for other jobs. It said, when was the last time you looked at the now hiring boards at the dealerships or high-end independence nearby? The answer that I put in is, oh, there are plenty of opportunities out there. Many are no better. Okay. Now I want to just be clear about this too, okay? I've worked in places where service advisors did their job fairly well and the and the business ran at a very, very good pace, a very good clip, and a lot of things got done the way they were supposed to be done. But I've also worked at a couple of places where the customers actually hated bringing their cars there, hated to deal with the with the uh advisors, hated to deal with the technicians, just hated everything about where they worked, and it was tough to make money there. So every every building, every shop has its own kind of uh personality, and it's a collective personality of all the people in it. And it's tough, I think it's very tough to change the perception of a shop once it gets kind of uh pigeonholed into one vision or the other as far as the general public goes. So you need to start off on a really good foot. And and I think that we actually, where I'm at now, have tried to do that, and maybe we're just being easy on the customers and not really breaking their chops about getting stuff done, and maybe just letting them off the hook for stuff that they need to have done and not really uh killing them with overcoming the objection on sales, okay? And I don't this is me, this is your Uncle Jimmy backing up and saying, yes, maybe this is just the way it's done when you when you start a dealership, because like I said, we're still pretty brand new. We're only in it about 20 months so far. We haven't even been here quite two years yet. And it does take a while to build a customer base, which is which is really, I'm beginning to see now, is very important to uh getting to the numbers that you want to see as far as as service goes. Your sales department could sell a thousand cars a month after 20 months. What have you sold? 20,000 cars. Are they all breaking down at the same time? No, they're all still fairly brand new. So I want to give our service advisors the benefit of the doubt, but they have stretched it, they have stretched that to their limits. They have stretched that to the limits, okay? So the last when was the last time you looked at the now hiring boards at the dealerships or or high-end independents nearby, or for me to add on to that, indeed, or even LinkedIn, you can find jobs on LinkedIn, you can find jobs all over the internet. And for technicians, folks, I tell you all the time, I tell you all the time, there is a shortage, and it is going to become excruciating very soon, very soon, because a lot of us, I didn't realize until last week that there's an awful lot of us that are just going to be phased out over the next probably two to five years. Either we're going to retire or we're just going to decide it's not worth it. And and technicians that are 45 years or older, 45 years old or older is probably the best way to say that actually, the correct way. Once they're gone, there's a giant void there. You're going to hear a huge sucking sound where the technician shortage becomes catastrophic. And it's going to it's going to cripple the industry. It's going to cripple the industry because the the generations behind us, the kids behind us, are not going to be able to keep up. Some of them will try and some of them will put in a valiant effort. Some of them won't try. A great many of them won't try. And the cars, oh yeah, by the way, they're getting harder to fix every fucking day. Yes, they are. I've talked about that a million times too. There's stuff that shows up that not only do I not know anything about, I have no idea how to how it works or why it works. Why they did that. Why did this get to be like this? What the fuck is going on with this? All the time. New cars come out with new shit on them. Nobody said a fucking word about any of it. I get to figure that out. Yeah, I'm almost I'm getting really tired of that fun. That's not fun anymore for me. I would like for a car to be the same as it was from one year to the next. Not gonna happen, Uncle Jimmy. Sorry. And the new kids, they're gonna have to start figuring out shit a hell of a lot faster than they are now. Because once the old folks are gone, myself and anybody over 45, there's it's gonna be anybody there to hold your fucking hand. You're gonna have to hold your old hand. And then for the generations behind you, you're gonna have to hold their hand. And I'm telling you, it's it's gonna be like lemmings. They're all gonna fall off a cliff. They're all gonna I just I just don't see good things happening in that in that. And that's because it's because the dealers treat the technicians the way they do. They don't pay them as well as they're supposed to, they don't look after them, they don't appreciate them, and and it is gonna rear its ugly head and bite them right in the ass. I I foresee I foresee waiting periods to get your car worked on in the future of months, weeks and months, because they just don't have the help. They don't have anybody who can do it. Now let me let me bring you the end of this particular podcast here. It asked me, it said it and I'm gonna I'm gonna leave with this, okay? I'm gonna finish off with this. It says here, AI asked me, if you could design the perfect shop for your style of work, what would the service advisor be doing differently than the ones you have now? And I wrote, greet the customer standing up with a handshake and looking at the fucking vehicle, checking for lights in the dash, looking at the tires, looking at the services that are due. And then AI writes back, now remember AI is not human. It sounds like you're looking for a service advisor who acts like a professional partner, not a glorified secretary. What you just described is the walk-around, and it's the single most effective way to sell work because it builds trust through transparency before the car even gets into the shop. If your current advisor is sitting behind a desk prejudging based on a computer screen while you're starving for hours, that is a failure of basic salesmanship. Here is why that perfect advisor routine changes your paycheck from 75 hours to 120. These this is why all the stuff I mentioned in the response to AI's question matters. The handshake and stand-up, the psychology, the problem. When a divisor stays seated, it creates transactional power dynamic. The customer feels like they are just a number. The fix, standing up and shaking hands establishes a relationship, and that's what everybody in the building wants, except for the people who have to establish the relationship. It makes the customer more likely to say yes later because they you have made a personal connection with that person, the dash light check. The problem, techs often find an MIL light or a TPMS light after the car is in the bay, but by then the customer is already gone and doesn't want to spend more. The fix. If the advisor sees the light with the customer, they can ask, hey, did you want me to have the tech scan that while it's here? That's an instant diagnostic fee you aren't getting right now. Well, yeah, they have to let them know. Say, well, for a fee, we'll let you know what that is, or we'll take a look at that. You know, especially if they're under warranty, you don't have to worry about the cost, okay? So that's one thing. And then of course the tire and service walk around. The problem, selling tires or maintenance over the phone is hard. Selling them when the customer is standing next to a bald tire or dark fluid reservoir is easier to fix. If the advisor points out a wear item at the curb, they are planting the seed by the time you confirm it in the bay. The customer is already expecting the phone call. It's no longer a surprise expense. Holy shit, really? This is AI. Why doesn't why don't we just bring in an AI service advisor? Like I talked about that one time. How to disrupt the desk to force this? You have to create a situation where they see the money they are losing by being lazy at the front desk. Okay, and they're talking about a general manager or the service manager. They have to be able to see how much money they're losing. This is why you might want to document that. The inquiry flip. Next time the manager deflects, don't ask for more work. Ask for a lost sales report, ask how many tires and alignment checks were performed at the curb this week when they say zero. You have the data to show why the shop is failing. The lead by example. If you see a customer pull in and the advisor is just sitting there, you walk out, you greet them, and you do the walk around yourself. I could certainly do that. And you know what? We've thought about that too as a solution to have a uh a technician on the drive on to actually help the customers get a good look at their car and go, hey, see these tires? These tires are not so good. The brakes that I see through the spokes of the rim, and they're looking pretty awful, very unsafe. Oh, look at that. You got a check engine light. You're gonna need to have us look at that so that we can get that taken care of. Okay, and then to to put the uh to put the kibosh on this episode, just so that you don't end up as a pirate, I just want to make sure you don't really do anything, honestly, to disrupt the business too much that is gonna cause you to get fired or asked to leave or possibly even arrested, okay? Let's not do that. But radio free grease to wheels does suggest that you go up front and you stir things up a little bit by letting people know that you expect more from them, okay? Okay, so here's a final thought, and this is from AI itself after all the input that I gave it here. Uh, you're leaving, and this is if I decided to leave, quit, or retire, uh, you're leaving an industry that is currently facing a massive shortage of people with your skills. You are exiting at the top of your game, regardless of what your management thinks. Are you planning to get your toolbox out of the shop immediately, or are you going to take some time to phase out of the workplace? And that's a question that it has asked me, and that's a question that I've asked myself. How much longer am I going to put up with this? How much longer are the guys I work with going to put up with this? And you have to ask yourself that question, with the absolute massive potential that all of us have as technicians. And I'm telling you, there's some guys out there in the shop who could turn in a two-week pay period 150 hours without really any trouble. They come in early, they work late, they get a lot done, they're very quick, they're very efficient, they're good at what they do, they're way better than I am. A lot of the guys I work with are better at what they do than I am, and I'm not bad at all. I wouldn't call myself a hack. I have a lot of uh respect for what my customers expect from me, and I try to give them 100% every time, but they gotta be thinking about getting the fuck out because the hours aren't there, and they are everywhere else. And if you're in a shop that doesn't have a lot of work, then you got a lot of questions to ask because there is a shortage out there. There are people waiting a long time to get into certain shops, and if there's some reason why they're not coming to your shop, you need to figure out what it is, get them to fix it, or grease the wheels. All right. All right, that's it for your Uncle Jimmy. Listen, uh, don't sabotage where you work. Uh that shit will follow you around, okay? So um if any of my suggestions hit home and you felt like you could do them, don't. Okay. Don't sabotage your business. You already have people who are probably doing that. All right. And what they should do is they should stop fucking doing that. All right. All right. Listen, uh, at the end of the podcast, every fucking week. It's the same. See ya.