Episode 351: Job Search 101

On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes hard in the paint when it comes to finding a new place to work — or if you are a new guy, a first place to work. There are a lot of questions that need to be asked when doing this, some of which are simple and extremely specific to who you are as a person, and the rest are a bit more hands on when it comes to site visits. What brand do you want to work on? Do you really only want to work on one brand, or do you prefer an incredible variety of broken stuff rolling (or getting pushed) in the door. Have you looked at the google reviews for the place? What types of tools do they have, and are they proactive about policing and acquiring more when needed? One of the best things that you can do is talk to the technicians at that shop, because more often than not they will tell you the real story that the Service Manager either doesn’t want to tell you, or is too oblivious to notice. We also get into some of the more covert methods where you can test out the service advisors!  Bottom line, when the technician shortage is this bad, and likely rot get worse as the old guys begin to retire at an increasingly rapid rate, you get to call the shots! 

Also Uncle Jimmy tells a service manager to their face, “everyone I have talked to about working here says, ‘DON’T DO IT!’
 
 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, good afternoon, and welcome to the Rock and Roll Garage, where we record Grease the Wheels, your famous weekly technician, automotive technician podcast, coming from your Uncle Jimmy here at the Rock and Roll Garage. Hey, before I get started, just want to say thank you for what you do. Thank you to all you blue-collar motherfuckers out there uh building it, fixing it, adjusting it, making it work, making it go. Thank you. Thank you very much. I mean it really literally from the bottom of my heart. I really do. I mean, I mean, what else can I say? What I got for you on tap this week is a uh podcast about finding another job and things to look for, things to stay away from, too, yes, of course, uh, and things you should consider. And I want to bring it to you in two kind of separate parts here. I want to bring it to you as a guide for people who are coming out of tech schools, new guys, guys who've never worked in a shop before. And then I also want to bring it to you guys out there who uh have two to five to ten years of experience and maybe looking for a different place to practice your craft. Now, I had uh employed fine folks at Gemini here, the uh artificial intelligence, AI, to help me out with this a little bit because, you know, after doing this for almost eight years now, kind of run out of stuff to talk to you about. And I've talked about this particular subject before, and I'd like to think that in the past it's been helpful, but there are different things going on now than there have been in the past, and the situation has become much more dire than it was in the past. Uh, it was just last week or maybe the week before, where I was informed that uh 68% of the technicians in the shops right now are 45 years old or older, which means that in a few years, when all these people are gone, all 68% of them, a lot of people are gonna be fucked. Really, seriously. Uh, you know, there's not enough millennials or Gen Zers getting into this particular field to fill the gap. I mean, 68%, that's two-thirds. So imagine your workforce as a shop owner or a shop manager or service manager, whatever you are. Imagine two-thirds of your employees being gone within the next five to ten years. Now, hopefully, you want to hang around for a long time and do your job, but if you don't have technicians, you're gonna be fucked. You really are. You're gonna have, you know, you're gonna be making appointments two months out, you're not gonna be able to get anything in, you're not gonna be able to get anything done, you're not gonna be able to get shit fixed. It's not gonna happen. And what's aggravating this, what is gonna aggravate the situation, is the fact that cars are gonna get older and older and older because who can afford a new car now? Not a whole hell of a lot of people I know. And even if they can, they're not gonna. They got other things they want to buy. And you know what? Most of my friends are mechanics anyway, so we could drive old shit all day long. I mean, seriously, I could drive my 68, and I found this car in a driveway down in San Antonio that'd been under an army tarp for 30 years. I put a motor in it and a transmission, got it running, got it adjusted the way I wanted it to go, and boom, I'm driving it. So, one of the things you have to consider about being a technician is that you're not gonna suffer from the technician shortage. You, it is for you, for all of us, it is an enormous advantage. I want to bring to you the uh age-old adage, the laws of supply and demand. The supply is low, the demand is high, they have to pay. They have to pay a lot for the supply. And as the supply dwindles, the price is gonna have to go up. And at 68% of people that work in this particular industry as automotive technicians, the supply is gonna drop off the edge of a cliff here shortly. So you need you need to figure out where you want to be when this all comes down the pike. Okay, as a new guy or as a guy who's gonna be around for a little bit. Now, what I did was uh, you know, an AI works pretty simply, you just put questions to it and it answers them in the best way it can, but it's not personal. You have to remember it's a machine and it's just using algorithms and and maps and infrastructure of uh ones and zeros. It doesn't know, it doesn't take anything personal. You can say whatever you want to it, and it doesn't, believe me, I have, it doesn't seem to react in a negative manner at all, which is really kind of cool. The first question I posted to it was how can I find a good automotive repair shop or dealer to work for? And one of the first things it said was finding a high quality shop involves looking past the job posting and evaluating the mechanics of how the business actually runs. And this is absolutely true, okay? You are gonna see a million and a million squared ads for mechanics. You're gonna want to sort them out based on what you want to work on, based on what you like to work on, okay, because you're gonna have your choices. You are gonna be able to pick and choose. And coming up, I mean, it gets worse every day, really, folks. That the the shortage gets worse every day. And it has been getting worse since I started doing this, but you're not really hearing about it. You have to kind of pay attention. And I've tried to keep my ear to the ground about this, but they're just the information has just been kind of stifled, okay? Because if if you find out, or if I find out, or if we all find out that there's a huge shortage, it empowers us, it makes us it puts us in the driver's seat as far as what happens with our occupation and our own personal careers. And nobody that runs a shop or a dealership or an auto group wants that. They don't want you to be in charge of what happens. Nobody wants that. They want to be in charge. They're the ones who are calling the shots and making and writing the names on the bottom of the check. They want to be in charge. And guess what? They're fucking not. Hey, I've talked to many technicians recently who have said, you know what? I can get a job working anywhere. I don't have to put up with the shit that's going on here. And then they leave, and then they find out that it was absolutely 100% true because they picked up a new job literally almost immediately. And they were they were pampered and and just it there was all kinds of things that were done to make them realize that wherever they were going to try to work or wherever they applied, they were pretty well wanted. They were they were needed. So keep that in mind, folks. The shortage is real, it exists, and it should empower you, much to the dismay of those who employ you. Now, there were some answers here, and uh some of the stuff doesn't really fit in too well because it never forgets what questions you asked it in the past, and it always tries to go back and st and and modify its answers to you being me, your Uncle Jimmy. And so some of that stuff I'm just gonna kind of skip over here. But it says here what you want to do if you're gonna consider going to work at a shop, you want to invest some time. It says evaluate the shop's infrastructure. And it says one of the first things here is you want to do a service advisor check, okay, because a great technician can be throttled by a weak service advisor. And believe me, that there really honestly has not ever been a truer statement ever uttered by anybody, including AI. A weak service advisor will kill your paycheck, will kill your business, will kill you. I've gone on and on and on about it. I'm I'm gonna kind of skip that this time, but no truer of a statement has been made. And so when you have when you're gonna go work at a shop, you might want to kind of get an idea for what kind of service advisors they have. And maybe, maybe you want to call them and present them with opportunities to sell you stuff, to bring your car in, whatever. Call them, call the service advisors at the shop that you're you're thinking about going and and working at and see how they handle themselves on the phone with you. I mean, obviously you don't have to go, hey, I'm gonna apply for a job there. Are you a piece of shit? And they're gonna go, no, I do a great job. But then you find out later if you call back and you maybe you disguise your voice, maybe you don't, and you just say, Oh, I want to bring in my car, man. I got this car, and it's not really running right, and then they kind of blow you off and treat you like shit. Well, guess what? You don't want to fucking work there, do you? No, because no matter who you are on the phone or even who you are at their facility, no matter what you drive, you need for these people to be respectful. You need for them to offer to look at and repair whatever it is they bring you. You don't want them brushing people off because of what they look like or what they sound like or what they drive. You don't want that shit at all. So a service advisor check really and they got it here just as number one. And I can't disagree with that at all because you could be a you could be the best technician in the world, but if nobody sells any of your recommendations, well, you're not gonna make any fucking money. And you would want to know that before you get in there. Now, obviously, probably one of the best ways to figure that out. I mean, you know, you could call them all up and say, Oh, I want to speak to Dave. And Dave goes, Yeah, what do you want? You know, then you know you're fucked, you're gonna be fucked if you work there because Dave's a piece of shit. Dave should say, Hi, this is Dave. What can I do for you? You understand the difference? The difference, it's it's the attitude, and that attitude shoots through a phone. That attitude shoots through a phone. The way Dave answered the phone the first time, he's reaching through the fucking phone and grabbing you by the throat and going, What the fuck do you want, asshole? And the second way is Dave's reaching through the phone to shake your hand and go, Hey, I'm I'm Dave, what can I do for you? Do you understand the difference? And as service advisor check, if there's a real good way to do it, I would love to hear it. It says here during your interview, ask to see a sample repair order or a digital vehicle inspection report that they've recently sent to a customer. That's not that's not really gonna do it. You want to know how good a service advisor is. And I'll tell you, really, the best way that I know of, and I think that this is this is honestly a good way to tell if a shop's good to work at, not just a particular service advisor, but go to Google Reviews. People are good at leaving reviews. And do you want to read them all? Well, you know what? I would say yes. I mean, if there's 145 of them or if there's 1200 of them, you know, maybe you could skip a few. Maybe you could skip a few, but are you gonna want to kind of have a piece of paper maybe handy to write down which service advisors kind of suck, you know, because you're gonna find out if you read reviews and they've got like 100, 150, 200 of them, you're gonna be able to sort out who does a good job and who doesn't. And then you call up and you say, Hey, you know, yeah, well, you know, who do you have working for you? You know, what's the names of all your service advisors? And you go through it and you find that the one guy who had excellent reviews up to about two months ago, you find out that that guy left. And that the only people you have left are the other people who all had shit reviews. That's a absolutely a fucking enormous red flag, folks. If you see some shit like that and you have to do your diligence, you have to do your due diligence to find this shit out, but you don't want to find out after you get employed there. No, no, no, no. You do not want to find out later. You need to find out now. And if you go through and you see where customers have complained about a service advisor and the way they handle this, that, or the other thing, and they still are working there, then you know that they've got problems and they are not sorting them out for whatever reason. The other thing it says here is that you're gonna want to see or at least uh find out if they use uh videos, uh service walk around videos, digital video inspections, whatever you want to call them, if they use them, okay, because that puts you in charge of what the customer sees, thinks, and feels about you and the car that you're looking at and themselves and their car. And that's separate over and above what any service advisor might say or do. Because I'll tell you right now, uh, a bad service advisor is not gonna watch your videos, a bad service advisor is not going to attempt to sell stuff that you were quoted or shown them that's bad in the video because they don't want to. You know, I'm I'm not gonna spend a whole bunch of time here telling you why. They're just lazy most of the time. But a video, if if your shop, if the shop you work in now or if the shop that you're gonna go work in or that you're contemplating going to work for does use a video, that's a very good thing. Unless, of course, you hate doing videos. So it could be uh a situation where it's bad or a situation where it's good, it depends entirely on you. You certainly want to know that. In my opinion, if a shop uses a video, you have you stand a much, much better chance, and I would say on a scale of 75 to 90 percent chance, better chance anyway, of selling recommended services and maintenance and repairs because you can sell them independent of a service advisor. And if your service advisor sucks, you may just sell it anyway, even though they don't like them or they're they're trying to sabotage your sale or whatever. I it's happened. I can I have documented cases where what I have said in the video has sold services and recommendations and maintenance and repairs and whatever. I have documentation that I have sold those solely due to the video. The service advisor didn't lift a fucking finger to sell these services, they didn't lift a single finger. So you want a shop where they do videos and where the videos are appreciated and videos are uh standard procedure for you. And if you don't like doing them, well, that's a whole nother thing altogether. If you don't like doing them, it's like just saying, well, you know, I'm I'm gonna be at the mercy of our service advisors to sell stuff, and you're just gonna you're gonna starve. You're gonna you're gonna starve, okay? The other thing you want to do here, and this was sec step number two here, as far as looking for a shop or a dealer to work for, is to it says here number two, vet the pay structure. I've talked about it a million times, and uh I'm it I'm getting kind of blue in the face about it, but I I want to just kind of do a uh quick cliff notes version of it, okay? The pay structure in most shops is flat. There's nothing anybody's really going to be able to do about that because flat rate works for the dealer. It can work for you if there's a lot of work, and you've heard this all before. You can it can work for you if there's a lot of work. If there's no work, you lose, you lose your ass in a lot of cases. Uh, I'm in that situation right now. Uh last week I worked uh 45 hours, I think, 45, almost 50, turned 23. I might be at 27. There just wasn't any work. And this is not going to change because of how advantageous it is financially for the shop. Now, I've been reading a lot of stuff on this lately, and there's a lot of different pay structures that other people have come up with flat rate with a production bonus, or a guarantee with a production bonus, or where you get paid for being there, and then anything over what you turn, you get paid a time and a half or something for. They call them hybrid models of pay plans, and there's as many as you can think of. You know, they'll pay you for being there for 40 hours, and then anything over that, they're gonna pay you a time and a half for any hours you turn above that. That sounds like that would work really good unless you're a lazy prick and you're just gonna take that 40 hours every week and call it done and maybe turn 23 hours, you know. I mean, if it, you know, if there's no work, that's not your fault. But if there is work and you still only turn 23 hours, then that is your fault. How how can they regulate that? How can they police that situation? How can they police a situation where you know maybe you're gonna get paid for 40 hours, but you only have like 20 uh 30 hours on Thursday, and then you get to Friday and they sell a 20-hour job. And instead of instead of just doing that 20-hour job on Friday and getting paid for 50, you somehow sandbag on that job so it goes on the next week's pay period and you take your 40 for that week because you've been getting killed all week, and then the next week you finish that job up on Monday. You start out 20 hours ahead already, and then maybe you make 60 or 70 hours that week, or maybe even 80. I mean, you're already 20 hours ahead, right? There's no way to really police that properly. I mean, management can come up to you and say, Oh, you know, are you gonna sandbag me on this job and not finish this 20-hour job up on Friday? And you'd be like, Well, I don't have all the parts, or you know, the excuses will come in fast and furious, just like if you were a service advisor, you know. So the pay plan, it's a tough one. It's a tough one. And everything I've seen, everything I've read says that they're gonna have to change it. And I can tell you right now that they're not going to. They're not going to. There's not an accountant in the world who will sign off on paying a technician a straight, flat guarantee all the time for 40 hours and then anything above that, because that doesn't work for them if there's no work. That doesn't it that cost the shop money. And it could conceivably, you know, if for some reason something goes wrong and you don't have work for a long time, it could conceivably run that shop out of business. Okay. And people who count money and look after accounts like accountants, which is you know what they do, they will look at that and just say out, say to themselves out loud, we can't fucking do that because this could go off the rails real fast, and we would have to close the doors. And then I would have to look for a job, and I don't want to do that. Nice and cushy here, earning a six-digit income, telling you how to keep other people from making a six-digit income. Now, what they were talking about here is obviously what to look for when you're trying to switch to a job. Okay, so you want to take into account how they pay their technicians, and obviously uh there's advantages and disadvantages to all of it, but if they are a strictly flat rate shop, which you're gonna find a lot of shops are, that what you need to do is have a car count versus tech count. Ask for average, this is what AI said anyway. Ask for the average weekly car count per technician. If the shop has 10 bays but only 40 cars a week, you're gonna be scrapping for hours. Okay, you got to have a sufficient amount of appointments per day per technician, per week, and then you have to kind of do the math. Is there enough work there so that I don't come in and starve and I don't starve somebody else out? Because that's a good way to get treated like shit when you show up. It really is. I mean, let's just say your shop is is barely make, you know, all the techs in your shop are barely making 40 hours a week because you don't have that much work, and then you add another fucking technician. That shit's gonna go over like a lead Zeppelin, it's just not gonna work. That's not a good situation at all. You why would you add technicians when you can't keep the ones you got busy? And yet shops do it all the fucking time. Shop I'm in is doing it right now. Keep adding technicians, and the appointment count appears to recently at least been going down every day. It was it last week, it was just absolutely pathetic. And I and then it's got a lot of the guys there updating their resume, which is not a good thing because I like the guys I work with, I would prefer they not go anywhere. But uh, here's something else it says to look for here the guarantee trap. While you prefer performance, ask if there is a draw or a base in 2026. Many high-end shops are moving towards hybrid models, which is uh a base, a solid base salary plus an aggressive flat rate bonus. This protects you during parts delays or weird diagnostic weeks while keeping the ceiling high. What they mean to say is that you get paid no matter what you do, and if there's a lot of work, you can make more and make the shop more. But the the the shop has to really they have to really invest in you is basically what it comes down to. And they have to know, and it's tough, it's tough to know, but that if they brought in a thousand appointments a day, that you would break your ass to get as many of them as done as you can. You're not just gonna lollygag and take the draw and call it a you know, call it a week, turn in an actual you know 20 or 30 hours and get paid for 40, no shop's gonna want to do that, they're not gonna want to do that for very long. And if you are obviously sandbagging, it may be a shop you're not working at for very long. Now, uh number three here says spotting invisible red flags. Now, this is you're gonna have to go to the shop for this. And what I would suggest to you is if you go to a shop, and this is one of the things here, it does say this here if you go to a shop to take a look at what it's got going on. Maybe you're going in for an interview and they give you a tour, go out of your way and pick a technician, maybe the grumpiest motherfucker you can find, and ask them, Hey, do you like working here? Is this a good place to work? And just watch the look on their face because their body language, especially if you're talking, if you're talking to a technician and a service manager or assistant service manager is standing right there, you are gonna have to read between the lines with this guy. He might say, Oh yeah, this is a really great place to work. And then when the service manager isn't looking, he gives you a wink and a nudge, or maybe it's just dripping with sarcasm. It's like, look, uh, I think a lot of us, uh I think a good deal of us might say to somebody who's looking to work in our shop, hey, this place sucks. Stay the stay as fucking far away from here as you can. This is a place, this place sucks. If it wasn't right next door to my house and I could walk to work, I might not work here. You know, if I had to drive more than 10 minutes, I would definitely be the be out of here. It's not worth it. The chaos and the bullshit factor real fucking high. Here's some other invisible red flags that AI said to look for. Tooling and subscriptions, it says uh ask specifically which OEM scan tools they subscribe to. Yeah, for a lot of independent shops, the types of scan tools that they have and the subscriptions that they have and the abilities that they the things that they can perform with what they have subscribed to can limit what you can earn. If you can't program a car after you replace a module of some sort, you're gonna have to take it to the dealer and you're gonna lose money, and so is your shop. And if they don't see that and they don't want to subscribe to get the particular software necessary to complete a repair that you've done, then you're always gonna lose money that way. So you want to know have they made a significant investment in having the uh tools and the software and the firmware available to complete a repair that you might perform on really literally anything, okay? Because all cars have it now. There isn't really a car out there that doesn't have some sort of a body control module or a gateway module and has to uh go in. And be programmed uh for certain modules that are replaced. You know, you replace a module for a left front door and you have to code it to tell it that it's a left front door on a specific model and then it has to do certain things. If you can't do that, then you're gonna lose money sending it to somebody who can program it. You're always gonna lose money with that shit. So that's something that you're gonna want to know. You're also gonna want to know how many scan tools they have, especially in an independent shop. I mean, I worked at one where they were they didn't have one at all, and they were relying on a scan tool that one of the technicians owned himself, and it used to aggravate the piss out of them. And you know, he didn't get any extra, you know, he didn't get they there was just no acknowledgement that that all of the scan scanning that everybody was doing in the whole shop, there was like three of us, and we were all using this scan tool, and he finally just snapped and said, Fuck it, I'm taking it home, I'm gonna sell it. And so we were without a scan tool at all. These are the kind of things that happen out there, folks. Kind of gotta kind of gotta look to it and see if that's what's happening. You know, you gotta ask questions. Here's another one: the shop floor culture. Walk through the shop during a busy time, and and you know, if you're interviewing, try to pick a busy time, maybe one, one thirty, two o'clock in the afternoon, and look at the floor and the trash cans. Take a look at how the shop is maintained. It says a lot about management, a lot about the company, a lot about the owner, and a lot about the technicians as to how they like to do their job and how they like clean, they like to keep their shop. Now, I'm not saying that you, you know, it should be operating room sterile. There's no way, but you should see evidence that the garbage is taken out and the floor is swept and mopped with a with regularity. Maybe they have a floor machine, maybe hopefully it works. Maybe they even have a cleaning crew that comes in at night. That would be pretty evident because if they didn't have a cleaning crew and they didn't care about how dirty it got, it would get really fucking dirty in a hurry. And also, too, you want to find out if they actually expect you to clean it up at some point. Who cleans the shop? That would be a good question. They say, Well, the technicians clean the shop. I go, Yeah, well, this technician's cleaning your fucking shop, so thanks for your time. You know, get the fuck out of there. Do you did you go to tech school and did you work and get all this experience and all this training so you can come in and mop your own floor and take out your own garbage? Fuck no. That's not part of the plan anymore. If you work at a shop where they expect the technicians to keep the shop clean, folks, you gotta get the fuck out of there. That's all there is to it. This is not the way it is anymore. Okay, if they want their shop clean, they're gonna have to find somebody to clean it who doesn't bring wrenches and hammers and screwdrivers and tools with them. Okay, that's that's that's all I'm saying. Gotta have that. Also, too, it says a cluttered oily shop often indicates a management team that doesn't prioritize safety or efficiency, which eventually eats into your productivity. Also, too, if they don't give a fuck about how the shop looks, they're not gonna give a fuck about you. That's what it says here. Next support staff. Is there a dedicated parts person or a porter if a flat rate tech has to pull their own parts or even order their own parts, which I've heard of, or shuttle customers? That's not good. They're just losing you're just losing time. How can you get paid for shuttling people back and forth? Now, uh, it went on here to say where to search in 2026 for jobs. And what it said here was while indeed and LinkedIn are standard, specialized boards often have higher quality listings for experienced automotive technicians. Uh, one of them was autojobs.com, specifically tailored for the industry. Uh wrenchway, there they have uh uh it says the platform allows you to see shop profiles. It spelled profiles wrong, so AI is uh not as good, not as good as I as we all think it is. Shop profiles where shops have to upload photos of their service base and lists of equipment before you can even apply. Also, local parts reps. Really, uh anybody who deals with, you know, let's say you're looking to get into the local Chevrolet dealer and he has the same tool guy, the same tool guy that services your shop now is the guy that services that dealership. You could say, hey, that Chevy dealer across across the road and down the road a piece, they uh they any good at it? And he could he and he could tell you because he's gonna have talked to the technicians, he's gonna know some of them by name, and you could say, you know, hey, how do they do down there? And he could be like, Oh no, that place is a fucking total shit show. Oh, you have a name or a number of a guy I can talk to you. Go, yeah, they got a guy down there named uh I don't know, Chad. And uh, you know, I talk to him all the time here. I'll give him your number, and if he wants, he can give you a call. And then if he does call you, which he may or may not, you could just say, Hey, man, I'm thinking about coming to work for you. I mean, I've always been a GM guy, and you know, and uh, you know, I hear you're looking for help, and he'd be like, You need to look somewhere else. It doesn't get any better than that. I could tell you a tale. Uh, I wanted to uh go to a dealer that was in a different state for a very, really a pretty, very specific reason that had nothing to do with the dealer itself, but I wanted to go to this dealer so that I could be close to something that I wanted to be close to without naming any names or anything like that. And I asked uh several people who would would or should know about this shop, and I heard nothing good about this shop. Nothing, nothing. I had one guy, I he's he had worked there, and I said I was thinking about applying there, and he was in a position where he couldn't really say anything, and I get it, but he looked at me with this look like and it looks looks could kill, I'd be dead. He just gave me a look that said, Are you fucking nuts? You have to be kidding me. He didn't say a word, and I didn't, you know, I didn't divulge anything that anybody said to me to anybody specific, but when I did finally go in and talk to them, because I did actually schedule an interview with them because they were looking for help, they needed more people. Uh, I talked to the service manager, and to me, he was an atypical service manager. He was leaning back on his chair in his office, and he was talking to me like he owned the world, and that I was uh I should feel privileged to be allowed to live in it. And I was a little taken aback by that, but I've also really come to expect that from service managers, especially if you're gonna be talking to them about coming to work for them. And I had initiated the contact, so apparently uh he felt that you know I was pretty much gonna sign on with him and come to work for him, and he wanted to kind of let me know that he's he's large and in charge and he can lean back in his chair. And then what I did was I rocked his fucking world and I told him, I said, I couldn't find anybody who had anything nice to say about this place. And he went, What do you mean? What'd they say? What'd they say? What'd they say? I go, they didn't offer specifics, they just told me that this place sucks and that uh I should definitely not want to work here. I told him that, and he he the the look that came across his face was was priceless, really, because I don't mind get I don't mind running a service manager up, you know, I don't mind getting them all worked up. And so and this guy, he was like, Well, I I uh you know, he didn't have any real answers. And then he turned me over to the foreman. And other now the foreman in this particular case was really cool, and they had three foremen, and they were kind of out of their minds with some of the stuff that was going on, and I could see that, and I heard some of the things he were talking about, and I'm like, Oh man, this place, this place doesn't run well, and there's nothing that it can really do about it, and uh, but it sh it looked to me like it should have run real real well, and it just didn't. And so I did not go to work there, but I I have the number for the for the foreman, and if I change my mind and want to come work for him, he said, definitely give me a call. And I said, Okay, you know, and and he was cool, he was very cool, and he didn't not present uh to me the fact that the shop was kind of a shit show. I got that from some of the other employees that we interacted with when we took a tour of the of the place. Uh, it definitely turned me off some of the things that I found out and some of the things that I looked at. And then when I looked at Google reviews, they weren't really all that great, they were okay, but not great. And I'm not looking at at any point to sign on with a shop that needs to be fixed. Okay, that's not my forte. Uh, service manager's job is to correct whatever is wrong in his shop, to handle whatever situations are in his shop. So to me, uh, if you if you haven't got it handled and you're leaning back in your fucking chair and your shop is running kind of like shit, and you've got your your uh foreman kind of running around like chickens with their head cut off in some cases, then there's a huge disconnect between what you think is happening and what is really happening, and and I've had enough of that. I've had a lot of that in the past. I don't need any more of that. I don't need any more of that. I need somebody who is instead of having me under their thumb, is gonna cut me in their hand and help me do what I've got to do, help me earn money, help me fix cars, help me do the right thing by your customers. And if you're gonna lean back in your chair and not worry about any of it, well, I'm not gonna come to work for you because I need for you to worry about those things and be taking care of things like that. Okay, you can't just delegate everything, you gotta go out and put some of that shit in your own hands and fucking take care of it. That is at least my opinion. I could be wrong. Uh, here's some questions that you should ask your service manager. And this is if you're going to uh attempt to work in a shop, and this really goes for everybody new guys, old guys, young guys, even guys with chickenpox. What is your average effective labor rate? Now, what he's trying to say here, what the what AI is trying to say here is high ELR effective labor rate means the advisors are selling your time properly. What he's talking about is your effective labor rate. You have a door labor rate, but do you always sell at that labor rate? Probably not. In a lot of cases, in order to get a job, you may discount labor and then you'll end up with a different labor effective labor rate. And you want to know if the labor rate is close to what they have advertised or if it's drastically reduced, because if they have a drastically reduced effective labor rate, it's gonna drastically reduce your pay. Also, too, you'll want to ask uh how do you handle comebacks on flat rate pay? Uh, that's kind of a problem. Uh, myself personally, I feel like if a vehicle comes back, it should go right back to the guy who worked on it within 60 days. Okay, I know some of you work on a 90-day thing, which means you're never gonna be unmarried or divorced from a car. It always comes back 89 days later, like I know that that happens a lot. Uh to some of you, it needs to be 60 days. Uh, and and and some of these customers really need to be spoken to in a stern manner, a stern but friendly manner. Say, listen, you know, if if we change an alternator for you, you can't come back with a wheel bearing noise and say ever since you. You need strong service advisors for that. And and I'm telling you, there's less and less of those every day. Uh, a strong service advisor who knows how to lower the customer's expectation and handle comebacks before they really are comebacks, okay? Because if somebody says, Oh, you know, I I had a coolant leak and we took care of that, and now I'm leaking oil, it's like, do you understand the difference between apples and oranges? This is a problem. You know, you could certainly call it a comeback and give it back to the same guy, and he's just gonna go, well, it's not really a fucking comeback, but now he has an oil leak, and oil and water don't mix at all, so they have nothing to do with each other. And now he needs an oil pan gasket. And he's gonna be like, Yeah, but I just had a coolant leak fixed. And I go, and your point is what? What is your fucking point? It's two different systems on the vehicle that are really not related. I understand that it's one vehicle, but there's a lot of different things going on, and they're not fucking related. This is a this is one of the things that you're gonna want to know before you start how do they handle comebacks? And if you get the opportunity to talk to a technician that works there now, that's really the best thing. You can because you're gonna ask him and he's gonna tell you, Oh, yeah, comebacks. We have lots of them, and typically it's not really a comeback, but we get them, and uh, we still get them and they still give a shit about it. And you don't want to work in a place like that because people and and and there's nothing that really anybody can do about this, but people feel like if they spend anywhere from$500 to$3,000 on a repair, that whatever else goes wrong with it over the course of the next year or so should be covered under some make-believe fucking warranty that they got because they paid so much to get one part repaired, and yet this is a completely different part. But they're like, Well, yeah, but I just I just spent three grand on that, and it's it's a problem with a lot of cars. This is a problem with a lot of cars, and I find it I I believe in my heart that it's especially high-line euro cars like the ones that I work on Benzes, Beamers, Audi's, where they will spend you know, two, three, four thousand dollars on a repair. Six months later, it needs a different repair for something completely different, and that repair is three, four, five thousand dollars as well. And then they need they come back in another six months and they need a completely different repair from the first two, and then they're fucking screaming at you, the service advisor or the service manager, or even the technician in some cases, that they have to keep spending money on this fucking car. And I'm like, it's the nature of the fucking beast, it was technologically advanced and and superior in many ways to a vehicle of the same age by another manufacturer that, oh, by the way, doesn't break down nearly as much because it doesn't have as much shit that can break down. It's it's there's an important distinction there. And if you have service advisors who really can't point that out, or even a service manager or whoever deal, like a BDC, if they can't deal with people who are gonna bring that attitude with them, then you're gonna have problems because you're gonna go in, you're gonna make an estimate for a repair that is completely different from the previous two repairs that drain this guy's bank account, and he doesn't have any more money. He thought he got a good deal on the car, he did not, he got fucked, he got somebody else's problems, he's been knocking them off one by one, and he got to a point where he doesn't want to fucking knock off any more of the fucking problems. He just feels like you need to handle it. You need people who can handle that problem. It says here, do you provide a training budget or pay for ASC certifications and travel? I think you need to find a very clear capital letter YES on all that shit. They need to provide training, not only for them for their own selfish purposes, so that you can work on more stuff and be better at it, but also for you to make yourself better and oh, by the way, more valuable, and then also ASC certifications, they're gonna have to pay for those fucking tests. That's all there is to it. If they're not gonna pay for them, don't do them. Fuck them, don't do them. I find that I have found in the past, and I've I've been a little vocal about it, but really there's nothing else out there that says to uh the non-automotive people in the world that you know what you're doing better than ASC certifications. You go up to your mom or your sister or or maybe your brother and you say, Oh, hey, uh, have you ever heard of ASC certifications? They go, Yeah, it has something to do with cars, right? So they've heard about it. And if you tell them you're ASC certified, they're like, Oh, okay, that means you're good at it, right? Well, okay. I don't let me give you the benefit of the doubt, okay? And myself too, because I have uh ASC master certification. Uh, I'm not all that uh I'm not all that thrilled with it. I mean, it's like, yeah, okay, I got it. Just let me say real quickly, it I didn't feel like it was that hard to get, but I also live, eat, and breathe cars. I just there's just stuff I know. Ask me about anything that has nothing to do with cars, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about at all. And then if you listen to this podcast for even a few months, you'll you'll figure that out all by yourself. But when it comes to cars, I know what I'm talking about, I know what I'm doing most of the time. Did I pass ASCs with a perfect score? No, I didn't, but I passed them and then I recertified in all uh was it L1 through eight? Yeah, I got all eight of them. I had to do that for the manufacturer that I work for. It was fine. Uh for some people that have trouble taking tests, they get themselves all worked up. But listen, one of the things that you should not get worked up about is having to pay for that shit. Your shop should pay for it because if they have, let's just say you have 10 technicians and you pay for them all to go get the testing and they all get the testing and they all get L1 through L8 and they're all master certified. That's only going to make you look good because you could say, hey, I've got 10 ASC master certified technicians, I've got the staff to handle whatever problem you have, Mr. Customer. Feel free to drop your car off with me. You are in good hands, trust me. Okay, so it's worth it for them to do that for you. And travel, if you have to travel to training, they should, I I mean, I believe that they should take care of that where I work, they do. And I can't complain even a little bit about the people I work for because they've always been very straightforward to get the tr to let me get the training I want. They paid for all my ASC testing. I got all of that done. Like I said, I'm a master certified ASC technician. Okay. Um, and that, you know, some people will say that and a buck 250, I'll get you a cup get you a cup of coffee. But really, it it is important because it's a recognition program that people who don't know anything about cars can recognize, and that's where it really works out for you. I mean, they could put a sign in the building that says uh we employ ASC certified technicians. It's like they said in Tommy Boy, hey, I can I can put a warranty on a box and take a dump in it and and warranty it, you know, but would you rather have a quality technician? Now uh I went on and asked this to ask it some more questions. What should a guy who is new to the automotive business as a mechanic look for in a shop? There's a lot of things uh that as a new guy I think are gonna be a shock. And and and if you've got any kind of experience at all, you know what I'm talking about. If you're a new guy and you're listening to this and you've never worked in a shop, I want you to go outside right now and take something big and heavy like a baseball bat or a hammer and hit yourself right in the balls. And that's training. That's honestly God training for working in a repair shop because it's gonna feel like you're gonna get kicked in the balls for about the first six months. It's just terrible. It's terrible. Now, uh we have lightened up massively in the shop I'm in on the new guys because just like I said earlier, 68% of us are are old, and it's not the ratio at my shop by any stretch, but we do have some technicians who are on the uh on the uh opposite side of 45 years old. And when we go, might not be a lot of guys there are able to fill in. Not going to say to you that they're gonna fall apart. I'm not gonna say to you that they won't be able to handle it. I think that there's a lot of guys who will be able to aptly fill in after some of the uh more well-trained and and experienced guys like myself leave. But there's some shops where if the old guys all left, you're left with nothing. You're left with a guy who was a car porter, you're left with a guy who can't spell his name right. I mean, it's just not that many technicians out there. There's some, yeah, there's some getting into the field, but so we have adopted a little bit nicer of a of an attitude towards our new guys, and and it's not really paying off for us because they forget to do a lot of shit sometimes, and we have to go over and we can't really smash them with with hammers and beat them about the head and neck area to make them do it right like they did with us when I was young. They used to make a big deal out of it. As a new tech, this is what uh this is what AI said, as a new tech, you don't know what you don't know. I love it. It's so straightforward and to the point. A shop that throws you into a bay with no guidance is a recipe for expensive comebacks and frustration. Agreed. 100%. Here's the three points it points out the lead tech factor. Ask if you will be paired with a mentor or a B-level tech. A good shop has a clear path for apprentices. Uh, I haven't seen a shop yet and out of the four that I've been in that had any kind of a clear path for apprentices. Okay, that's why Eric and I came up with this K-plan to uh have technicians follow along and reach certain milestones and certain goals and grow into the kind of mechanic that and technician that they want to be and and continue to grow and train and grow and train until they get to a point where they're old enough to retire, where they can retire. And hopefully by that time, they'll be fully 100% trained, they'll have gobs of experience, and they will be able to mentor guys coming along behind them, and they'll also be making an extraordinary wage and doing the job the best they can and understanding all the systems. You know, it's a lot, but there's no reason why you can't get on the train at the station and let it take you through all of these stations all the way to the time where you would retire. There's no reason why. But what most shops will do is to just assume that a technician coming straight out of fucking Compton, no, I mean I'm sorry, a tech school. Maybe there's a tech school in Compton, I don't know. But a technician coming straight out of tech school, there's gonna be a hell of a lot of shit they don't know. And also, too, if you have a a certain kind of a technique or you have a certain kind of uh aura about your shop, or maybe uh almost like a karma, you have a certain way of doing it. Let's say you had you uh your your dealer's name is John Smith, and there's a Smith way of doing everything, and you need to impart this to a new guy, you need somebody to go over and say, This is how we're gonna do it here. I don't give a fuck what you learned. If they told you to do something this way and I tell you to do it this way, I need you to do it my way. That's the Smith way or the Jones way or whatever, whatever your dealership is, you have your own kind of a path for the employment for the employee. You have a path, and you can call it whatever you want. You can call it the wagon trail, you could call it the trail of tears if you want. It's been, you know, it's not original, but you know, it might work in some places. But you're gonna want them to do things your way, and you're gonna have to show them. And if you don't, and you just expect them to read your fucking mind and figure it out for themselves, it's not gonna happen. You need to send somebody over there that does things the way you want them to do it, and to guide these people through the first six months at least, and maybe a year, till they get to the point where they can move into a position where they're not just a maintenance technician, they're not just a a a waiter technician. And this is a problem for some shops. You'll get technicians who feel like they're brilliant right out of stuff, right out of tech tech school, and they're gonna want to go to the main line where they work on everything, you know, transmissions and engines and rear ends and suspension and AC, and yet they're not fucking ready. Even Though they think they are, they're not ready. So you need to give them a good solid foundation and let them know that there is a career path and you're going to put them on it and you're going to start at the fucking bottom and you're not going to be out there working on heavy stuff, even though you think you can, even though you think you should, until somebody who does work on that shit and somebody who's been guiding you or trying to guide you says that you're all clear. Okay. That's the lead tech factor. Also, to if you at any time during the day sit there and look at your phone when there's either nothing to do or you're waiting for parts or you're waiting for a car or waiting for something, I can't use you. I can't use you. If you're going to sit there and waste your fucking time and my time looking at your phone and whatever it is you're looking at, then I can't use you. I really honestly can't use you. I need somebody who is going to devote 100% of their attention while I'm fucking paying them to the job. And if you have any downtime, you're going to look around for other parts of that job to do. Maybe do some further training, maybe clean up, maybe put tools away, maybe make sure all the fluids are full in the cars that you're working on. Make sure that the tire pressures are set. I can tell you right now, it's not happening in a lot of shops. It is not fucking happening. This is a lead tech factor. And it may or may not be a good thing for a new technician to have that kind of a lead tech factor. If they're a lazy piece of shit who just wants to sit there and look at their phone all day, then there's going to be fucking problems. Okay, so the lead tech factor is something that comes to you and from you. You need somebody to kind of shepherd you through the uh difficulties of starting a job in a shop where other technicians may try to shit on you. I've had that happen to me. I actually uh got into the shop, the first shop I worked in, and I had a technician who was definitely not happy to see me, and he thought he could lord it over me. And I let him know in no uncertain terms that if he didn't shut up, I was gonna break his fucking jaw. But that's only because I was bigger than he was and also not stupid. Here's another point here that AI makes shadowing opportunities. Ask how long the training period is before you are expected to fly solo on complex diagnostics. That is gonna be up to you. Do you understand how buses work? Do you understand how electricity works? Do you understand how to check suspension components properly? Do you understand what you're looking at when you're looking at a tire and it's not right for some reason? Or a bent rim or whatever? Can you recognize what's wrong without somebody having to point it out to you? Then yeah, you're good to go. You can fly solo if you can do all that stuff. If somebody comes in and says, Oh, I have a rattle in the back of my car, well, okay, go out and duplicate it and then locate it. It's not that hard, really. I mean, if somebody comes in with a complaint, you have to think about what it is, when it happens, where it happens, how it happens, and then try to find out what's causing it. And if you can or can't do that, that's the difference between making money or being a bust. Here's another thing, too, as far as the mentorship structure goes, tool allowance. Some shops offer tool room access or even a tool allowance and a sign-on bonus for techs to help build their own personal toolbox without drowning in debt on a tool truck. Yeah, I I've seen this a few thousand times myself, where uh Snap On or Mac or Maco or even Cornwell, and and there's even others out there that I'm not even familiar with at all, but they'll come into a tech school and they'll tell you, oh, we'll give you 50 to 75% off on a set of tools. They know you don't have any fucking money, they'll fucking shoot you a line of credit. You go and you buy whatever you want, and and really honestly, they should just stop doing that because they're not doing these kids any favors. Because honestly, and I know this from going to tech school and working with a lot of guys, and then keeping in touch with them later and finding out that none of them work in the field. And if they bought tools, they probably either had to give them back or they got them repossessed or they paid on them for a fucking hundred fucking years. So you got to be careful with the tool allowance stuff, okay? And if the dealership is gonna help you out, then definitely let them help you out. But I want you to know, and it's important to learn from somebody who has like a shit house of tools, like your Uncle Jimmy does, that you don't need a whole lot of stuff right away. You're gonna need some quarter, three-eighths, half-inch sockets, you're gonna need some quarter, half inch, three-eighths ratchets, you're gonna need some wrenches, you're gonna need some screwdrivers, you're gonna need some hammers, a couple of pry bars, and you can get the job done. Yeah, believe it or not. Maybe some pliers. Did I mention pliers? Sure. You're gonna need some pliers, you're gonna need a magnet, and you're gonna need lights, and that's pretty much it. And you can get started from that. And I'm telling you that if you if you plan it just right, you can buy all that shit cheap. And then, and the reason I say this is because then if you decide you want to do something completely different with your life, which happens a lot, unfortunately, then you're not out a billion dollars for tools. You're out for a basic standard set of tools, which if you're handy, and hopefully you are if you went to tech school, that you could use later on down the road. You don't have to sell them back to Snap on, you don't have to watch them come and take your toolbox with all your tools and leave you with a debt that you owe them because they had to repossess your stuff. There's certainly nothing wrong with going into like a Harbor Freight or a Northern Tool or any other one of these tool companies out there and buying inexpensive tools to get started. You'll figure out pretty quick what's gonna last and what's not gonna last. And then, if you want, then you could get real solid high-quality stuff from Snap on Mac and Matco and all these companies later on when you have the money, later on when you've decided that this is for you, that this is something you want to do, and that you're gonna need professional quality tools in the future. That's what I did. I did, I I rolled, I got I got lucky. I've talked about it before, but I got lucky when I went to uh brand training, they had very basic tool sets. We were able to do almost everything with just these basic tool sets, so I knew I didn't need a lot, and I went right down to the goddamn auto zone and I bought some of their Durlas stuff, and I still have it 23 years later. I've had to replace a socket or two here and there. I've lost a couple of two, three, ten millimeters, like like we all do, right? But I basically got the same tools, and I'm telling you, the the the three H drive deep six-point set that I got was fifteen fucking dollars. That same set in Snap-on would have been seven or eight hundred dollars. The quarter drive set was like eleven or twelve dollars. It even came with a with a holder that it's still sitting in 23 years later, and I've had to replace a few, like I said. But if you had to replace that quarter drive set in Snap on, that'd be four, five, six hundred dollars. Okay, you don't need high-quality tools right away, and you may find that eventually you don't need high-quality tools at all. I've been using these sockets literally so long uh that the writing on the sockets is in Sanskrit. Okay, I've been using them for a long time, and I have quite a few tools that I have supplemented uh that are snap on. Okay, that just happens to be the brand that where I almost always have a tool guy. All the rest of them, Mac or Macco, their their tool guys have been spotty in all the places I've worked. So I really don't go with that brand. I've always, always, always had a snap-on guy. And in many, many cases, they've been really good, super professional, friendly, nice guys. Uh, take care of you. They they look after you. Yes, they're a little bit expensive. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna deny that at all, but you know, and I don't want to be a spokesman or a salesperson for snap-on, but their stuff is pretty good quality. There's some stuff obviously is junk, and you'll hear people go, Oh, yeah, well, they can't make this worth of shit. And like, well, okay, whatever. But uh, as far as as far as for the service goes, they've been really good. They've been really good. There was a couple of places where I had a spotty Snap-on guy, but they endeavored to fix that situation and eventually did. So as far as tools go, uh, don't kill yourself trying to get a million dollars worth of tools right off the bat. Uh get what you need. You don't need that much. Get started, figure out what you need later. Uh the the rule is, and and this is for the experienced guys, if a if one of your boys borrows a tool once, okay. If they borrow it a second time, they should buy it. Because if you borrow it twice, that means you're gonna need it more in the future. Buy it. Certificates and training. Uh, this is what it says here. Technology in cars is changing faster than ever. Boy howdy.

unknown 52:11

Woohoo!

SPEAKER_00 52:12

Yes, it is. And uh as far as uh as far as the brand I'm working for, they have a new car coming that is gonna require uh an extraordinary amount of training, which I'm looking forward to getting myself personally, and uh I don't know what's gonna happen. Uh they I think they seem to think I'm gonna retire shortly, but uh it's not really not really what I'm planning on doing, but uh I I do mention it every once in a while. So but uh yeah, does your shop pay for you to attend classes? They should. Do they cover the cost of ASC certifications? We talked about that already. I would think that if a shop is not gonna pay for you to get ASC certifications, but they're gonna want you to get ASC certifications, that's an enormous red flag. You should fucking look for the exit. Get the fuck out of there. They want you to do something, but they're not willing to pay for it. See you later. See ya! Manufacturer access. If you apply at a dealership, ensure they have a clear track for you to get factory certified. Yes, this is important. Uh, the place I work at, yeah. The factory, the uh, the the company, the manufacturer is very, very highly invested in the individuals who are in the dealerships working on their cars because they invest and spend an absolutely mind-numbing amount of money on design and engineering and manufacturing. And if you go to or if you watch what I do is uh I watch a lot of videos where they show us assembly line videos where they show that they're building the cars, the cars that I'm working on. And I like to watch them because I I just I I I see things that I think are I just I just I gotta tell you, I'm a total geek and a nerd. Love cars. I'll watch videos of people building cars, whether they're brand new or whether they're getting built in a shop later on and fabricated, half the shit's fabricated on them. Love that shit. So I watch a lot of videos of assembly lines. Uh I've seen almost all of them. Some of them I rewatch just because I I just love that shit. I have been to many factories where they build cars, and and it's always cool, it's always great. And as far as uh the company I'm working for now, I went to one of their factories that the one that's in the United States here, and they were building cars that I'm working on currently. So, and what one of the things that I will tell you, just unsolicited here, is that the manufacturer is very, very deeply invested in building the best vehicle they possibly can in the best manner they possibly can, and they pay extraordinary attention to the quality control. There is so much quality control in the factory. They they look at everything, they rub them with with cloths and chamis, and they check gaps, and they double check with a paint dab where the bolts are tightened and where they should be and where they're where they shouldn't be, and everything. They're really trying as desperately as they can to make a perfect, perfect car. And really honestly, they are in in my case, anyway. I think in a lot of cases, when that car leaves the factory, it's as perfect as it's ever gonna be. And quite frankly, it goes fucking downhill from there. Because once it leaves the factory, and I've said this a million times here, but once it leaves the factory, the quality control is finished, and the vehicle is all about the money from there on. And you'll find people, and this kind of breaks my heart a little bit, but you'll find people that buy a brand new car and then three weeks later it's filled up to the door handles with garbage and it's dirty and it's shitty, and they broke this, they ran into that, they bent this, they fucked them, they're fucking them up, they're out there fucking them up. They're undoing this perfect automobile in the most heinous manner possible because they just treat it like an appliance and not and not the uh high class, high quality, perfectly quality controlled vehicle that it was at one point. So for the manufacturer to be involved completely in getting you trained to work on them, that's a privilege. It really is a privilege. And what they're looking for is for you to care as much about their equipment and their vehicles as they do. So anytime you can get any kind of factory training, you should relish that. And that should be good, and you should consider that to be good for you. And anytime you do get training, and I've said this a million times, and it is just true. Anytime you get training, it makes you as a human being, as a mechanic, as a technician, it makes you more valuable. So it's very important. So let me move on here. Number three, shop equipment and safety. Your efficiency depends on your shop's overhead. And then it says here scan tools, look for a shop that has up-to-date specialized scan tools and scanners. Uh, lift quality, you want to check out if the lifts look like shit, if they look like they're gonna drop a car on your fucking head, or if they're well maintained and they look good and they have all the quality certifications and they inspected and all that. You want to look for that information systems if they use uh a factory information system, if they're a dealer, or if they're an aftermarket, if they have all data or pro demand or identifix or something like that. Yeah, you got to have access to information, bro. You can have a laptop all you want. You don't have access to this kind of shit, you're not gonna get too fucking far. Number four, it says workflow and management style. Now, workflow and management style is not something you can really see when you roll into a dealership, just it is an interview. And even if you're getting a shop tour, it's kind of tough to see workflow and management style unless you're there for a long time or you know, a good couple, two, three hours at the very least. Okay. So you're gonna kind of want to get a hold of a technician who works there and see what he feels about this. But this is what this says it says the relationship between the front of the house, and in parentheses, it says service advisors and the back of the house, which is you technicians dictate your paycheck. Absolutely. Uh, using digital video inspections, service walk around videos, these allow you to take videos and photos of broken parts. This makes it easier for the customer to say yes, which means more work for you. Yeah. And uh honestly, if you don't have a service advisor who can utilize this awesome sales tool, then you need to just house them. You need to get rid of them, they need to go away. Send them on their way. Uh, dispatcher style, this is another thing really tough to kind of get a grip on unless you've been there for a little while. But ask how work is handed out. Is it a next man up or does a dispatcher pick favorites? As a new guy, you're gonna want a fair shake at what they call gravy jobs. And again, this is AI. Like AI just seems to know exactly what what's going on in our shops. You want a fair shake at gravy jobs uh while you learn the heavy stuff, okay? Yeah, you really need to have somebody who is gonna dispatch fairly, and it's really and I'm gonna say this out loud, it is really easy for a dispatcher to channel certain stuff to certain certain people because it seems to work. And and you might get not so much cockblocked or or or left out of the mix, but you might feel like you are. So you have to, and I want you to be careful with this too, because being a dispatcher is can be a it can be a fucked up job because a lot of times, and uh in this situation happened to me, they'll hire a dispatcher and they'll say, Oh, we want you to do this to do this, and then later on they'll come back and say, Oh, well, we want you to do this as well. And you're like, No, I didn't get hired to do that, I got hired to do this. See, this is a problem, is that if you have a dispatcher, they might not be properly in tune with what the job description should be. And if it's if they're not given a proper, honest to God job description, and you want them to do something that they don't feel is part of their job description because you didn't give them one, then you're gonna have problems. I ran into that in one place. We needed the dispatcher to uh kind of corral and look after all the uh special order parts and whether or not those cars were coming in or not. And he didn't want to do that. He said, That's not my job, that's not part of my job, and it absolutely fucking was, as far as I was concerned, and then they asked him to do it and he said he wasn't gonna do it. He didn't honestly last very long because if you get a job and then you tell people you don't want to do what they want you to do, they're just gonna fucking put you out the door. That's as simple as it is. Should they have told him before they hired him or as they were hiring him? Yeah, they should have told him. Did they? No. Did they change their mind halfway through? Apparently. Did he want to do it? No. Should he have? Yes. Is this something he should have expected them to have him do? I think so. Yes. He didn't think so. So and he lost. He ended up losing that. Now they have uh a whole nother thing going on. So uh dispatcher style can be very important to your to what you got going on at work. If you got somebody who just gives you garbage, uh, you might have trouble with a dispatcher. You need to let them know. Hey, and I've told my dispatcher, my dispatcher is very good, and uh I have uh uh a tremendous amount of affection for him and what he does and how he does it. He is uh very uh energetic and it works well in our shop. And when he's not there, it's as quiet as a church. But uh he I've told him many times, I go, dude, there's nothing you can give me that I can't fix. I am trained in everything, I've worked on everything. As a matter of fact, it was a parts guy for a long time. I've sold it, I've bought it, I've installed it, I've fixed it, I've done it, I've done all of it, everything. Not bragging. I'm just telling you, I've done it all. And when some of the new guys say, Oh, I don't want to work on that, I'm not comfortable with that. I just roll in and go, Yeah, I'll take care of it. I've done it many times. And I don't like to hold it against them. I understand exactly what they're talking about. They've never seen some of the systems that I've seen, and they don't really feel like learning it because they're gonna learn it one time and they're never gonna have to see it again. Does it make sense for them to work on it? Yeah, maybe, maybe not. Depends on what you want your skill set to be. Here's uh here's the next up here in AI provided this for us red flags to watch out for. Okay, then this is for all of us, new guys and old guys. High turnover. If most techs have been there less than a year, there's a reason. And yes, and yeah, on top of that, there's a fucking problem. Number two, here it says bring your own everything. Well, if they expect you as a new guy to have ten thousand dollars in tools on day one without any shop provided specialty equipment, you're gonna want to tell them thanks, but no thanks. Number three, dirty break rooms and restrooms, and it even says it here, it says it sounds minor. But if management doesn't care about where you eat or you wash up, then they likely aren't gonna give a fuck about you. And I think that's true. Where I work, they take care of everything like that. So, and there is a there's a reasonable amount of care that they show about literally everything, and maybe it's good, maybe it's not good enough. But for me, myself personally, because of some of the shit places I've worked, everything is fine. Other people don't agree, that's fine. They have their own level, their own standards, their own level of of of whatever it is they need from a from a from a shop, from a business, from a manager, from a service advisor, they have their own level of of what they need, their own ideas of what they need, and they're different from mine, and they're always gonna be different. But you are gonna want to find out certain things and then decide for yourself if you're willing to put up with it. Because as I said previously, the amount of money has to be higher than the bullshit factor. If the bullshit factor overcomes and wipes out the amount of money that you take that you make, then you gotta go. You gotta go if it's not worth it. Okay, if you're if your pay is high and your bullshit factor is low, you're working in a great place. If your bullshit factor is high and your pay is low, you gotta fucking grease the wheels. That's really as simple as it is. Now it also wanted it also asked here, and AI did this, and I gotta tell you, that just it's it's just helps to put information out there when you can just look at something that was computer generated that works. It's just so weird. The next up here is interview questions for a rookie or a new guy. I call him a rookie. I I didn't even use the word rookie, but it it came up with that anyway. And and you could be a rookie if you work somewhere for a month and you quit, you go somewhere else, you're still a fucking rookie. All right, so interview questions for a rookie are what does the career path from C Tech to A Tech look like here? Well, and I honestly that is a very, very valid question. And as a service manager, if you don't have an answer to that, that speaks fucking volumes. You have to know. Well, as a C Tech, you're gonna start out doing uh minor oil changes and maintenance and selling tires, and then what we'll do is we'll bring you along and we'll evaluate you every three months or every six months, and when we get to a year, we will do a review and then we may possibly move you up, send you to training, but we're gonna have to evaluate where you start and where you end up in six months or a year, whatever it is, you're gonna have to have an answer. And the K-Plan, I gotta tell you, you know, I we came up with this a long time ago, and and Eric spent a lot of time perfecting it, but the K plan is really the answer to this question. The question, you know, what does the career path from a C Tech to an A-Tech look like? It looks like the K plan. And the K-Plan allows for you to learn everything you need to know to be the absolute highest master technician, ASC master technician with all of the training and able to work on everything. It allows you to go from point zero where you are now all the way up to that, and then that career path takes you right to retirement, and you will receive raises along the way to indicate that your training is up to date, to indicate that your experience is getting better and better and better, and that you're doing better and better work. You're gonna make mistakes, things are gonna go wrong, things are gonna get broken, but we need to see that these things start to disappear from what you do, and that you move forward towards being good and then great and then exceptional. That's it. The K plan does that for you. You don't you don't even have to you don't even have to answer that question saying, well, uh, you just say we have the K plan. We would like to make it so fucking universal that every shop has it, every shop follows it, every shop uses it to diagnose their own technicians, to to put them in in that on the career path, and then monitor where that career path is taking them. Some people are gonna move slower, some people are gonna move faster, some people who can't take tests are not gonna get their certifications as quickly as somebody who's more. Literate, maybe, or possibly just understands better, or maybe doesn't have some sort of uh disorder, mental disorders, such as you know, uh memory, memory problems or ADHD or autism of any kind or Asperger's or whatever you could possibly have and still work as a productive human being. It is not a tool used to keep you down. It is not used as a tool to punish you for being different than somebody else or possibly being like everybody else. It is a tool that allows you to move forward at your own pace and get to where you want to go in a reasonable amount of time on your own time schedule. And then it allows for the dealership or the shop to say to you, hey, congratulations on getting to this point. Here's a raise, keep up the good work, here's the next step. Take a breather, earn some money, enjoy your new status, but let's get you to the next one. All right, when you're ready, we will tighten you up again, just like we did now. Here's the second thing it says, how do you handle it when a technician makes a mistake or gets stuck on a diagnostic? Two separate things, okay? If you make a mistake, and and this is I think that this is very important, is you have to own up. All right, if you're one of these people who tries to hide a mistake or blame it on somebody else or make it somebody else's problem, that's not good. That's not good at all. You need to own up and then learn from it, and then you need to you need to kind of be uh, what's the word? I can't even think of it, but you need to be suitably sorry for what happened and and admit that you have made a mistake and that you're gonna work doubly hard or double your efforts not to make that mistake again. Okay, I have to do that. We've all all of it, and I'm telling you, you could be new starting tomorrow or starting yesterday or whenever, and and you could be a guy who's retiring after 50 years the day after tomorrow. We've all had to do it. We have all made mistakes, we have all fucked shit up, we have all been in a spot where something got fucked up, and we had to say, oh yeah, that's on me. And that is the first step to making sure it doesn't happen again. Instead of wiggling around in your chair and going, well, it was because of this and it was because of that, and ying ying ying ying. No, none of that shit's any good. Now I will tell you that there's another thing going on, and this is just between us as technicians, and if you're listening and you're not a technician, pretend you didn't hear this. Sometimes when something goes wrong, and it could be minor or it could be something that's not minor, if you're in a position to kind of take care of that situation so that nobody really has to find out what went wrong because you were able to go back and make it right, then you need to do that. We kind of need to cover for each other. And over the course of 23 years, sorry about that, over the course of 23 years, I have done that many times. I remember even as a parts guy, I remember uh I had one guy who couldn't seem to get the oil filters on the cars right, and he put a lot of oil changes on the ground. And the boss told him that if he did one more, he was going to be fired, and then he did one more, and so I kept the boss busy so that he didn't see what happened, and a couple of the other guys helped him clean up the mess so that he didn't know, so that he could keep working there because we didn't want to see him get fired. And and I don't I feel like eventually he did get to the point where he was doing it right and he wasn't having a problem. He was just not concentrating on what he was doing and he was forgetting a step, and it was it was he was putting oil changes on the ground. He'd catch them and fix them, but it was happening a lot, and then it did finally stop after they kind of threatened him, but we had to catch one more in the process, and this is something that we do as technicians. Now, there are some technicians who won't do it, who won't cover for somebody for whatever reason. Maybe they're just a fucking asshole or whatever, but they'll run right up to the service manager and go, Oh, oh, oh, so-and-so left something loose. Oh, oh God, he should be fired. That doesn't really help anybody. First off, it makes you look like a fucking asshole. And God forbid, if you do something wrong, you are definitely gonna fucking hear about it. You need to kind of cover for each other. It should be a brotherhood, really. I mean, I know it's tough. And you know, when sometimes, sometimes when shit and I this happens to me not a lot, but it happens to me every once in a while. Sometimes I'll work on I'll get some car that had some work done on it at some other shop, and it looks awful. It might be might be just be really awful. Like uh in a good example, I had a car the other day, had brand new brake pads on it. Okay, great, but the rotors were fucking razor fucking thin. And I didn't say, oh, whoever did this should be fired, or I didn't say whatever shop did this, it's no good. You don't go back there, whatever. I didn't do that. Okay, that's not my style. If you want to do that as a technician, run the shop across the street down, or the the shop on the other side of town down, or somebody else that works somewhere else, that's fine. You can certainly do that, but maybe you should give somebody the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they couldn't afford pads and rotors, and they wanted a pad slap, and they're just like, Well, you need to do something, and so they gave they just gave them pads, and it's not really on the technician, it's more on the service advisor in that particular case. But these rotors were fucking razor thin. I actually quoted all brand new brakes all the way around. I go, this is not a good situation. This is just going to give you uh very extensive brake pedal travel, which you don't want, and you'll have it at a time when you don't when you really need to have the brakes work exactly the way you're supposed to, instead of the way they work now, which is barely, but I didn't run anybody down in that situation. Here's another one. What is the shop's policy on tool insurance for my personal box? Well, and honestly, I don't know what mine is. Uh, I remember at one time many, many years ago, we took detailed photographs of all of our tools in our toolbox and forwarded, sent them in an email to the uh shop uh foreman so that he could keep track of what we had in case something happened to the shop. Nothing ever did, but in case something did happen to the shop, you know, somebody wasn't gonna say, Well, I had uh, you know, a five thousand dollar scanner in the bottom drawer of my box after the shop caught fire, and then you go back and you look, and it's just one of them fucking handheld actron things, and you're like, Yeah, that ain't five thousand dollars, asshole. But you you know, we really honestly you should, and then this is for all of us, myself included, really. We should find out if we have insurance on our tools. I would like to say, uh, yeah, really, without any trouble, yeah, of course we do. Uh, but I work for a large dealer group, and uh, I can I can pretty much just about vouch for them that of course they do, you know. All right. Now it asks me, uh, and it it ai thinks I'm talking about myself here, so it asks me if I'm leaning towards a dealership or an independent shop. I'll tell you right now, these are two different things. I mean, radically different things too. Okay, you work in a dealership, typically going to work on one brand of cars, and you get used to working on one brand of cars, and you become literally upset, honestly, if they bring you something that isn't one of your brand. Um, and and I depending on my mood, literally daily, by the way, I work on anything. Do I want to? The answer is no, of course I don't want to, but I can. I mean, uh, you know, I've said out loud uh for everybody to hear that I can work on anything and I can do everything to a car, and I've done it, I've bought it, I've sold it, I've put it on, I've you know, I'm yeah, I can do it. Okay, but I don't want to. Uh, as far as being working at Independent, I found it excruciating to you know work on an Audi one minute and then go to working on a Ford Transit van and then working on like a mid-80s cutlass and then a a fucking sprinter van and then a fucking Bentley. I mean, literally, you know, a Porsche Kayan. I mean, we were working on fucking everything. It was killing me. And I and I I I let them know every once in a while. I said, God damn, do you ever say no? And of course they don't. You know, if you're running a shop, you just want people to bring you cars so you can fix them and make money. Yes, okay. But if you're a mechanic, you're like, what the fuck? Uh it's become kind of a joke, really. Um, but uh, if you're working for an independent shop, you better be ready for the gambit. You know, yeah, I mean, literally, you are gonna see everything. The the stories abound them, we'll skip them for now, okay. Uh, here's what I also came up with. Uh, it asked me, it says, Would you prefer to work at a dealership or an independent shop? And then I answered, either as a new technician, what are the pros and cons? Okay. And this was very interesting, and I just want to go through this and we'll call it a night. Uh, dealership, specialization, and structure. Dealerships are generally better for those who want a clear path and deep knowledge of a specific brand. Yes, I agree. That's why I like it. Here's the pros. Manufacturers' training, yes, you get factory certified training, which is a resume goal mine. Most dealers pay for this and travel costs, warranty volume, yeah. You get to do warranty work. Yay, warranty work. Sometimes it's just steady work. It may not be the most well-paying jobs in the world, but you know what? If you do if you do something 25 times in a month after a while, you can do it literally with your eyes closed. And I have actually I've actually laid the gauntlet down. We have a job now on the cars I work on where we have to replace the starter because apparently some of them were not so good. And I've we've got it down to the point where I think I could honestly do it blindfolded. Uh but uh you know, I'm not gonna do that. But but this is steady work, and then without it, we would definitely be starving. Also, too, you have uh access at a dealership to uh high-end OEM specific brand tools and scan tools and specialty equipment and information that you would not get if you were at an indie. And then generally uh dealerships offer much better healthcare insurance, 401k, and paid time off. Here's the cons. Cons are repetitive work. You will likely spend months doing PDIs or nothing but oil changes and recalls before getting to real diagnostics. That is, if you're a new guy, uh I would say most new guys in our places start out on a maintenance team, and it's really just kind of a litmus test to see can he change the oil without fucking it up? And I'd say most of the time, I'd say probably 95% of the time. Yeah, you you know, you get a kid in from anywhere, really, and they can change the oil without too much trouble. And and if they can do that and do it with a with a relative ease and with consistency, and do the video and top off the fluids and the tire pressures, then yeah, you've got a real winner on your hands, at least so far. Okay, so you get to you get to mold them like a hundred pounds of clay. Uh the book mentality, uh, you must follow rigid manufacturer procedures. Yeah, boy, we're going through that right now, which can stifle creative creative problem solving. Um, yes, a little bit there as far as the problem solving goes. A lot of times a uh factory tester will tell you to check something and you know it's fine. So you kind of skip over it, but then they're also looking at the time. You know, did you skip over it in 3.5 seconds? Yeah, they can see that you did that. That means you didn't do that work. That means they might not pay you for it. It's kind of sucks. And uh a lot of places uh that have warranty, you know, a lot of new cars warranties out there now, they really, really would rather not have to pay to have you fix them. And so they're gonna try fairly hard to kind of write off claims and not pay claims because something wasn't done exactly the way they wanted it done. So, yeah, the book mentality, it's it's a real thing. Hierarchy and favoritism, large shops can be political. That always sucks. Gravy jobs always seem to go to the same person. I've I've actually seen people threaten other people over that kind of stuff. So um, if you see that going on in a shop, you might want to update your resume and get out because they're always gonna, it always seems like there's gonna be some guys who make an extraordinary amount of money doing uh a lot of easy jobs, and then you have to, you know, you have to be up to your elbows in a diagnostic that isn't gonna pay jack shit. It's not not very uh not very lucrative for you, okay? And then there's the flat rate pressure. If you aren't fast yet, flat rate pay can result in very small paychecks, especially during slow weeks. Yes, that is absolutely true. As far as flat rate goes, it makes customer pay king of the day, king for a day. Because if you start to quote for uh a job in customer pay and you multiply by the warranty time like we do, you're at you're honestly gonna make more money. And if it's something that you've done under warranty a couple of times, you're definitely gonna clean up because you've figured out how to beat the warranty time, and now you're multiplying the warranty time times you know 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, whatever it is, you're gonna clean up. So uh flat rate pressure, you can you can use it to your advantage in some cases, just to get good at something. And then when it becomes CP for the rest of the people who didn't have that problem while it was under warranty, you can make Buku Dinero. Now it goes on here to independence shops, okay? And the pros are broad experience. This says you're like we said earlier, you'll work on a Ford one hour and a BMW the next. You'll become a Swiss Army knife technician very quickly. Uh, and that's a pro. Being able to work on a lot of different stuff, that's not a bad thing. It will help you out because someday, you know, maybe maybe you're working for a brand, and this has happened to people, folks. It has happened. You're working for a brand and they're not doing that well, they're not selling that many cars, and maybe you're doing okay, but then one day they just decide they don't want to sell them anymore. I I can tell you from experience, I used to work at a dealer that was Chevrolet at Oldsmobile. Well, guess what? Oldsmobile's been gone since 2004. So if you were an Oldsmobile technician, and you basically were just a GM technician, but if you were an Oldsmobile technician, well, you're not an Oldsmobile technician anymore, are you? No. And then I went to work later at a place called uh Courtesy Pontiac Buick GMC. Well, guess what? No more Pontiacs. That went away, what, 2008? Yeah, and it's terrible. These were two brands of cars that were very, very good cars that people still have a deep affection for them. I know because I'm one of them. So to be a to be somebody who works at an independent and able to work on everything, yeah, it would be a good thing for you because the brand of cars that you work for at a dealership might fucking dry up and go away. Happens all the time, unfortunately. Direct mentorship in a small shop, you're likely working side by side with the owner or lead tech who has a vested interest in making sure you know what to do. I can remember we had a lot of we had a we had quite a few new guys at the indie shop I worked at for a little while, and we would show them stuff all the time. You know, we'd be like, oh, this is how you're supposed to do this, this is what this is supposed to look like, this is what you're looking for in this case. We were always there to help them out. It was it was a situation where we really kind of felt like family. So it was kind of cool. It wasn't like, you know, oh, I know everything and you know nothing. It was never like that at all. So that can be good. That's definitely a pro. They call it a pro here. Customer interaction, yeah. In the indie shop I worked at, the customers were in the shop an awful lot, and they got to know some of them and really liked them a lot, which honestly makes me think that it it's possible that if I wanted to, I could be a service advisor because I'm not unfriendly. Uh, not most of the time, anyway. I'm not somebody who's gonna be evil and mean to people, and I will try to figure out how to how to talk to them correctly and address them correctly and speak to them in in a language that they can understand what I'm talking about and explain to them why they need something or why they can wait. Customer interaction, not ever going to be a bad thing, unless, of course, they're screaming at you. But even then, that gives you an opportunity to figure out how to handle that kind of person. Okay, and if you can do that, then you then you could pretty much you write your write your write your own paycheck for being a service advisor, because that's the worst part about being a service advisor, is that they're gonna try to blame you and the business and the technicians that you have for everything that's wrong with their car. And if you can learn to deal with that, which is actually, I gotta tell you, it's kind of easy. You just shut up and listen. And then when they're done talking, you go, okay, now what are we gonna do about fixing this? What do you want us to do? Flexible culture. That was another issue, another item here. Less corporate red tape. Sure, sure. The shop I was working at didn't have any corporate red tape. I was dealing directly with the owners, and uh, they were pretty cool. So, so I was cool with that. Uh, you know, there's a lot of things to really like about that uh type of job. But here's the cons, okay? And these are real. Figure it out, figure it out fatigue, they call it. You won't always have the exact tool or service manual for every car. You'll spend more time researching. Uh, yes, there was one particular car that I couldn't get into time absolutely correctly. And I read and looked at everything I could possibly look at to get this thing to be timed properly, to run properly. And it took somebody else who had more or better knowledge of this vehicle to come along and say, well, there's a screw underneath here, and you turn that and it moves the distributor ever so slightly until the timing is correct. Could I find that anywhere? No. Okay, you have to figure it out sometimes, and sometimes you just can't. Limited resources, you may have to share in a generic scan tool with three other guys. We talked about that. Varying benefits. Many mom and pop shops struggle to offer competitive health insurance. Yeah, I was fortunate the shop I was in had pretty good health coverage, and unfortunately, I needed it, uh, but it was there, it was there when I needed it. And then the other thing here, too, is inconsistent flow. If the phone doesn't ring, you might find yourself sweeping floors instead of turning wrenches. That did not happen at the shop I was in. We were able to work on everything and did, and we were cheaper than the dealers in town, and so we were pretty we had we had a lot of work. We were not very often where we didn't have anything. In fact, I remember the there was one point where the power went out for a week and we just kept working in the cold because we had a lot of fucking shit to do. We had a lot of stuff to do, and we got it done. But uh, that's one of the things that goes on. So, in conclusion, what I would like to add is that if you're trying to get into the business, find out as much as you can. This is really this is actually good for for both being uh trying to get into the business and then uh actually being in the business and uh wanting to move around, maybe change shops. Try to find out as much as you can about the shop you're going to. This will pay off for you if you have a shop in mind that you want to work at and you find out from more than a couple of people, never take one person's word for it. They may have been like the grumpiest bastard on the planet and nobody got along with them because they were and they didn't like it there because nobody listened to them and and they were evil and mean and it's just obnoxious. Don't take one person's word for it. Try to find seek out and try to find as many people as you can to find out what's going on at a shop and definitely read Google reviews. Okay, this is this is gonna give you an idea of what the customers think of the place, and this can also be a very good indicator as to whether or not uh a shop or a dealership might be a good place to work. Also, to figure out for yourself where you want to work, okay. As I've said before, obviously in the north they're keeping wages down artificially, I believe. In the south, they're not doing that, so you can you can make a substantial amount of money working down here in Texas where I am. There's a shortage everywhere, but down here they seem to be trying to address it by honestly throwing money at it. I mean, I think it's working because we don't really have a technician shortage in the shop I'm in. But there are shops that do there are shops that do have a technician shortage. So if they decided they wanted to cut me loose, and I'm surprised they haven't already, but if they decided they wanted to cut me loose, they certainly could, and I'd be able to find another job probably before the day was over. But uh myself personally like where I'm working, and it's very lucrative. Okay, so uh if if you have a shop that you're looking at or shop that you're working at now, and it's not what you think it should be, it's not working out for you, or you don't think it's gonna work out for you, by all means figure out if you're able to get the fuck out of Dodge and get to another shop somewhere in a different part of the country or the world. We talked about it last week. The shortage is everywhere, you can work everywhere. If you know how a car works, you can fix them no matter where you are. If you're in the Himalayas, or if you're in Death Valley, if you're in the the Congo or if you're in the Yukon, if there's a broken car there and you got some tools, you could probably fix it. You're a very valuable commodity. You have no idea how valuable you are, and you won't know until you start looking around, talking to people, applying for jobs, seeing what they have available, checking them out online, checking out their reputation, checking out their reviews. Make it use all of your resources to your advantage to figure out if a shop that you might want to work in is worth it. You don't even know what you could be saving yourself from. All right. All right, that's enough of your Uncle Jimmy today. Want to say thank you to Gemini for helping me out with some of the questions, some of the stuff that I was going to talk about. Remember, it's called greasy wheels for a reason. There is a shortage. If you don't like what's going on, check out, check out. All right, because I'm gonna do that right now. And when I do do that, when I do I just say doo doo. When I do that, I usually just go see.