Episode 352: Dear Mr. Fantasy

On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes into some of the deepest professional fantasies of ownership, management, and everything in between. Ownership wants a business that essentially runs itself, but to do that they have to empower their management to make the right decisions and give the dealership a level of autonomy. This is something that many owners have a hard time with. Management wants their job to be as easy as possible, hiring people who do a great job every single time and can make the shop the maximum amount of money. Techs want a great wage and plenty of work. Some of these things cannot exist in the same space, which is why it is so rare to have a shop that runs properly in the first place. Many owners treat their investments like they can run themselves, but force all management to run every single decision past them. Often times management is slow to make any decisions, and then will make the wrong ones. And this translates down to the techs as well, whop often provide significantly more friction than managementcan handle. It’s the old two translations of the word ‘utopia’: good place, and no place!
 
 Also Uncle Jimmy holds his fire on service advisors. 

This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome once again to Grease to Wheels, your automotive technician podcast. Coming to you from the rock and roll garage, out of the mouth of your uncle Jimmy. All right. Hey uh I want to apologize for not coming to you last week. I had a really bad week. I was not feeling well. And it was not a physical thing. It was a mental thing. Man, I was tired. I don't know what the hell hit me. I think maybe I had some sort of virus or something. I was sweaty and well, I should say I was more sweaty than usual. And uh I felt tired and I was so tired at one point I I almost cried. Actually, I think I did cry. I don't know. I woke up with a wet pillow. Uh anyway, I'm I'm back. I'm back. And I'm back to the mean old bastard that you know. I'm not gonna cry. Not at least until we get into this subject. Uh hey, uh, before I get started, I want to do my usual thank you to everybody out there working hard, breaking a sweat, and doing what you do, building it, fixing it, everything. Uh, all you people out there who are uh what you call what we call blue-collar workers, people who sweat, have tools and fix things and build things. I want to say, uh, and and I can't, I can't even bring you the sincerity that I feel in my own heart anymore because I just I feel like I have to do this every time I come on board with the podcast. But it's important to me to say to you that I appreciate what you do, and I think that there's a lot of people out there who actually do appreciate what you do and would say thank you if they if they knew that you were responsible for this, that, or the other thing. So with the absolute uh honest to God, 100% sincerity that I can muster in my own heart, I want to say thank you to all of you for going to work and doing what you do. It is uh it is greatly, greatly appreciated, and should be more greatly appreciated by a lot more people, but unfortunately it isn't. Okay. Now, uh the the podcast I wanted to bring to you this week was kind of, I don't know, born out of a an idea that really nobody knows what the fuck is going on. And I believe that that's true. Uh I believe that I don't, you know, there's a lot of things going on where I work that I have no idea about. There's always going to be things that go on where you work that you you don't know anything about. You're not privy to the information, you're not privy to what happened, you're not privy to the results or to the implications of whatever's happening there. And so what you do is is you live in a world where you are fed, well, you're like a mushroom, you're fed bullshit and kept in the dark. Uh, but not always, not always. So there are some things that you are a party to. And the same thing goes for the people who who run the facilities that we work in. There are things that they don't know, and you obviously know some of the things that they don't know, and uh quite frankly, they should know them. So, what I wanted to do was kind of bring to you an episode where we look at the difference between reality and fantasy for some of the people that we work with. Okay. And I was looking around for some information on this, and of course, I tasked uh Gemini with some of these questions. I went to the AI route, and I gotta tell you, uh, I'm as skeptical as some of you are about this new stuff. I don't really believe, honestly, that it can provide a lot of answers. But then in the last few weeks, I've asked it questions where it knows better what's going on in my own shop and in your shops than any of us do. And it comes up with answers. It also knows what some of the things that are going on mean. They know they are familiar with these situations and they have uh answers. It's just ridiculous. And this is a machine, folks. This isn't a person, okay? Now, Uncle Jimmy Your Uncle Jimmy, I can assure you, is a person. And all of the things that I say to you, and all of the things that come out of my yap are my opinion, and they're based on nothing, really. They're just based on my experience, and sometimes my experience does not match, and I would certainly hope in a lot of cases, it doesn't match your experience. Okay, I would hope that you have a good experience going on at work and that you like where you work and you like what you do, and everything is great and you're paid well. And I realize right now as I'm saying it that that's a fantasy, isn't it? Just I mean, seriously, there's not one of us who is really super happy with what we do. There's not any one of us who's really super happy with the amount of pay. We're not super happy with everything that goes on in our buildings, we're not super happy with the way we're treated, with the appreciation that we either get or don't get. We're not happy with uh how well some of our service advisors or the people who are in charge of selling our services and maintenance, we're not happy with how well they do that. Uh, we're not happy with where they park the cars, we're not happy with the weather, we're not happy with, you know, whatever. I mean, really is a huge list of things that we might not be happy with. But our management and our owners, they don't really know any of this. And quite frankly, they probably don't even give a fuck. I mean, really, why would they? I mean, what they are providing for us in the most simplest of terms is a job, sometimes health care. Okay. Yes, that's good. And then uh honestly, the ability and the opportunities to make money fixing cars for people, and in the process and you know, in return, really, you make them money by doing those repairs properly. And that's really the basic nuts and bolts of it. But what you run into is in some cases, and I want to say this uh as tongue-in-cheek as I possibly can, this whole entire podcast, because I'm not talking about one specific person. I'm not trying to call anyone out. I'm just saying that in my experience, I have found that service managers and people who are in charge of uh groups of technicians and shops, uh, for the most part, I don't have a real good grip on what's going on. And that's really what I have uh put together here is and then each manager that I've had to deal with has a different level of intensity as far as what they're trying to do, what they know, what they're gonna do, what they can do, and what they will do, and whether or not it's good or not. And then it's just there's a lot of area for a lot of improvement for some of these guys. And for some of them, not they don't need that much improvement. I have worked for some really excellent service managers who had good heads on their shoulders, understood people, understood customers, understood fellow employees, and understood how to be a fine human being and work with these people because there is no such thing as a perfect employee. Always remember that. And if you think that you're a good employee, that's okay. But I'm betting you you're not perfect that there are times when you can't, you just do shit wrong. You do shit people don't want you to do, okay? So any of these arrows, any of these rocks that I might sling at somebody else, remember, I definitely live in a glass house, and you do too, and so does everybody else. So if you're gonna throw stones, better watch the fuck out. They might come fucking flying back at you. And if you're in standing next to her or inside of your own house and it's made out of glass, guess what you got? Yeah, you got a bunch of broken fucking glass, okay? Just keep that in mind. Now, went with AI and asked it a bunch of questions to try to get an idea of how I wanted to phrase this, okay? I wanted to start out with business owners and service managers. And the first question I put to it was, what kinds of fantasies do business owners and managers have about their business? And here's what uh here's what came back. The fantasies that business owners and managers entertain often depend on whether they are in the scaling phase or the survival phase. And while the public-facing version of these dreams involves industrial domination, the internal fantasies are usually much more about control and efficiency. What they're talking about here, scaling phases that you're building up a business, and survival phase is where you're striving as hard as you can to just maintain the business and keep it open. Okay, and you might have different fantasies about both ends of it. And obviously, industry domination, I think that's ever that's something that everybody in business should really kind of strive for is their fantasy. You know, they want to be number one, they want to be the best at what they do, and they want to drive the competition out of business. And that's what it comes down to. But here's uh here's the most common fantasies business leaders tend to have, and this is this is what AI has said. The self-running machine, this is the ultimate fantasy, a business that operates perfectly without the owner's physical presence. And it involves two things here. It says total autonomy, systems and processes so robust that employees make the correct decisions 100% of the time. Now, gentlemen and ladies that are technicians out there in the world turning wrenches and fixing cars, you know that this is not true. Anywhere you ever work, anywhere you are ever going to work, anywhere you could work, the systems are not so robust that the employees make the correct decisions 100% of the time. You have people who do things half-assed. And in an automobile dealership or a repair shop, you're gonna have an extraordinary amount of people who are gonna do things, well, let's just say it out loud, half-assed. Because all they care about is just getting through the day and not having to work as hard as as you want them to, or as hard as they are supposed to work. They want to try to get things done so they can get back to doing nothing. So you are not going to have people who make the correct decisions 100% of the time. You're just not going to. Actually, I am, but there are times when I can't, and there's times where, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna like shortchange it a little bit. And I have to stop, honestly, and I'm just as honest as I can be with you. I honestly have to stop about every three to six months and say to myself, okay, it's time to rededicate yourself to the job. Because it'll slip, and it slips very, very slowly and surely over a long period of time. And it's partially because of how I feel like I'm being treated at work. I'm I a lot of times I feel like I'm just a non-entity. I'm just another one of the fucking grease monkeys out back, and there's not a lot of appreciation. And whenever there's problems, there's bucketfuls of shit that come back into the shop and get fucking tossed around. But nobody ever comes back with the flowers, with the bouquets, with the fucking confetti and the balloons and says, hey man, you guys did a great job. I mean, sure, we hear it all the time. Oh, you guys are killing it back here. You guys are doing a great job. I go, talk is cheap, my friend. Talk is cheap. But as far as total autonomy, you're not gonna get that. If you have excellent, and I I want to repeat this, if you have excellent technicians, they know what to do. They know what to do. The problems that we have as technicians sometimes lie with some of these support staff. And I don't want to sit here and turn this into a bash fest of all the people who work around us and try to try to put the blame off on other people for things not going right in the shop. But it does happen. There are people who don't perform the way they're supposed to, and it and it causes problems. So to say that we could have total autonomy, uh, autonomy, let me try saying it correctly, total autonomy, it's not going to happen. We need to have uh a very, very discerning eye, a manager's eye, an owner's eye that is watching the operation and can step in when he sees that it's not functioning correctly. And sometimes, yes, it is a technician. The other one here is the other point that AI made was passive income, the transition from being a worker in a business to an investor who simply monitors a dashboard while they're on vacation. Uh, as far as service management goes, this is you it's a paid position. You're not the owner, you're somebody who has to kind of be on site to make sure things are going smoothly, uh as smoothly as you can make them go. Um, it's you're not gonna you're not gonna be able to do that remotely. It's not it's definitely not a remote job, okay? Uh number two, it says here the frictionless employee. Now, I'll just say right now, the frictionless employee, I don't know who that is. I I don't I've never heard anybody described as a frictionless employee. Uh, I know that myself personally, I provide a lot of friction. And I would, I would, I would say that for some of the managers I've worked for, they probably wanted to choke the shit out of me at times because when it's least uh when they least expect it or when they least want to hear it, they're gonna hear things for things from me that they're gonna have to deal with, and typically in front of usually the whole team or a few other people, and it's questions that you know I need I would like to know the answer to. It's it's questions about you know policies and procedures and maybe things that are happening that shouldn't happen, and maybe, maybe I mean, like I've documented a few times where I tell the service manager that everybody needs raises because inflation was out of control, and this was years ago. And the answers that came back were uh not acceptable, basically. And uh this is this is something that a frictionless employee is not gonna do, but uh definitely a frictional, which sounds weird because I'm actually a real employee, but not fictional, I'm frictional. Uh maybe they need to lube me up better. I don't know. I think that they need to lube us up all uh all of us up better, and and that will create less friction. And and I think that the lube that we need to be frictionless employees is really in the form of uh wages and pay and a pay plan that works. But uh that that's beating a dead horse, Jade, ladies and gentlemen. I just been going on and on about that since the beginning of Grease the Wheels and actually the beginning of time. So uh but here's what AI has said about this. Managers often fantasize about a workforce that requires zero management. And uh I think that in some cases, some of the people that I've worked for don't fantasize about it, they just assume they have uh a workforce that requires zero management because there was no management uh of of any type that really came out of them, uh came out of their office or came out of their mouth or came out of their you know their efforts. There was nothing. I mean, from some of the most basic stuff to some of the most difficult stuff that you would have to do. There was just no input, none, none at all. Uh it says here the mind reader, an employee who anticipates needs and solves problems before they are even identified. Folks, that's really all of us as technicians. We we are trained to identify problems, diagnose problems, and then solve them. That is if, of course, the uh financial wherewithal to solve them is supplied. Okay, and this is all this has been a problem, but typically our ability to solve problems extends well beyond the automobiles. It extends to situations in the shops, situations with customers, situations with other employees, situations with the parts department, situations with parts themselves in many cases. And there's a lot of different solutions to some of these problems. And yeah, you have some employees in your building who can solve some of the problems, but in some cases, if they're not, if they're not identified or or appreciated or even motivated, they're just not gonna. They're not gonna do it. You know, I think that every employee would love to be in a position where they behave exactly the way the service manager would like. But are they motivated to do that? No. Either by the pay or either by uh how they're treated, how they're regarded, the way they're looked after. There's a lot going on there, and technicians enjoy the exact same things that everybody else does. Men, women, children. You know, you want a child to do something, you have to kind of motivate them to do it. Your wife, same thing. You she's gonna want things from you, she has to motivate you to do them. Hopefully, those motivations are different than the ones they try to use on technicians. Uh, but either way, uh, being a mind reader, somebody who anticipates problems and solves them before they're even identified. Well, do you know somebody like that? Honestly, I'll tell you right now, I do that sometimes. I mean, I s we had uh the kid who cleans our shop. He went on vacation for a week, and old dead batteries that were cores got stacked up all over the place, and so did rotors and tires, and and uh myself, along with a couple of the other technicians, took it upon ourselves to clean the shop up and put that shit away, get it taken care of. Did anybody recognize that? No. Did anybody say anything about that? No. Does it matter? Not to me, it doesn't. I think to the other lads that helped me out with that, I think it does matter. So I said to them, hey, thanks for helping me out with that. But that you know, I'm not an official management type person who can, you know, provide some sort of uh reward for their uh uh efforts. I'm not in a position to uh, you know, maybe give them a bonus in their paycheck of $10, $15, $20 or something or anything like that. But I think that might have been what they were looking for, and they're gonna be disappointed they didn't get it. And the next time those problems pop up, they're gonna be less likely to try to help with them, okay? So being a mind reader, you're just you're definitely talking to the wrong group of fucking people here, okay? Uh, number two on this under frictionless employee, Uniform High Performance, a team where every member operates at the same level as the top 1%, eliminating the burden of training or performance reviews. Folks, this is never ever gonna happen for any of us, okay? New kid walks in the door and he doesn't even know how to spell the brand name properly. I mean, they're they're walking in. If they come from a tech school, they're walking in with a pretty good set of basic skills, but basic skills aren't gonna get you too far with these cars, the way they're built these days. They're not gonna get you that far. You're gonna have to you're gonna have to do a extracurricular training. You're gonna have to learn from some of the older guys. They don't seem to want to. In my particular case, that's fine. I get it. Did I want to learn from the old guys? I don't remember. I really don't. Probably not. I mean, I you know, I felt like I knew a lot of things. And and if somebody shows me something I never knew before, I I have a tendency to thank them. Go, holy shit, that's cool. Thanks, man. I'm gonna I'm gonna either quote you or I'm gonna I'm gonna do that this way from now on. I learned shit from everybody I work with, every single person I work with. I learn something from them. And sometimes all I learn is that I just need to pay attention because they're not. Uh as far as being a uniform high performer, you're never gonna have that in a repair shop, in a dealership or a indie repair shop. You're just never gonna have that because people are farther up the ladder as far as training goes, they're farther up the ladder as far as experience goes, they're farther up the ladder as far as the ability to do the job goes and the attention that they pay to it. Because the kids I see these days in our shop at least, they seem like they do the job as quickly as they possibly can so they can go back to looking at their phone. And then and you know what, honestly, uh, I don't give a shit. Okay, it just proves to me how valuable I am because I don't do that, and it's also something that they're gonna have to deal with at some point, and by the time they get to that point, these kids are gonna have that in their mind as something that they just do all day long, willy-nilly. And then when somebody tells them to stop or tells them they don't want to do it, they're gonna get angry, they're gonna get upset, and they're they're not gonna want to join the top 1%. They're gonna want to lounge at the at the 90% or the 80% mark, and and when they get done doing an oil change or maybe doing a break fluid flush, they just want to stop what they're doing and look at their phone. Are they gonna set tire pressures? Fuck no. Are they gonna top off the fluids? Yeah, fuck no. They want to get back to looking at memes or looking at Facebook Marketplace. So uh for a for a uh manager or a shop owner to expect a frictionless employee out of somebody who just rolls in the door whose phone spends more time in their hand than in their pocket or on their toolbox, well, they're not gonna get what they want from them. They're not gonna be part of this uniform high performance team. And then the next the next uh bullet point here is what it is, is a bullet point, a total buy-in. And it says here a team that views the company's success as their own personal mission, working with the same urgency as the owner without the same equity stake. You can fucking forget that shit, folks. That that right there is definitely a fantasy. When you make $30, $40, even $50 an hour, but the outdoor labor rate is two, $200, $250 an hour. You can see the difference between the equity that you are gonna get and that your owner or your shop is gonna get. You can see it. It hits you in the face. You know, you you go to sell three hours, let's say $40 an hour, what are you gonna get? $120. What's the shop gonna get? At $250, they're gonna get $75, $750 off of you. Does it sound fair? It does not sound fair. Is it fair? That's a good question. What does your market uh support? Uh do your customers like the fact that uh you know that labor rate is good for them? Do you like the fact that you're making, I don't know, $30, $40 an hour, whatever you're making? Is that better or worse than where you could be? You have to decide for yourself. But I don't think in any case, any one of us out back with the wrenches and the screwdrivers and the tools and the wherewithal and the crazy uniforms and and all the shit that we have to put up with that we're gonna buy in to this team view that the company's success represents our own personal success. It's just not it's just a tough sell. It's a tough sell. I personally want the business I work for to do really, really well. I want the other technicians in the shop that I work with to do really, really well. But at the end of the day, everybody has a different definition of what really, really well is. And so the answer is no, the the team is not going to enjoy uh a uniform version of success. It's just not gonna happen. Now, here's what here's the next thing it goes to. Number three is the perfect client or customer. Let me tell you something. Customers come in every shape and size, color, model, whatever. Some are tall, some are short, some are fat, some are skinny, some are smart, some are stupid, some are just fucking terrible, and some are great. And there is there is no yardstick by which to measure a customer or a client. There, so there is No such thing as a perfect client. Now, as a service manager or an owner, you know, you have to know. If you don't know, you're going to find out. At some point, you're going to have to deal with customers yourself. Because the people that you have designated to service them, they're not going to be able to. They're not going to be able to. They're not motivated enough to deal properly with some of these customers. And maybe they're not motivated properly enough to deal with any of them. And that's on you. How do you motivate them? Are you motivating them? Is the pay good? Is the pay bad? So the perfect client does not really exist. It says this fantasy revolves around a business model where the revenue is high and the headache is low. What fucking business does that fit? It only fits really one that I know of. And it involves prostitutes, really, because the revenue is high there and the headache, well, it's not a headache. I mean, it's not, you know, as not for you, it's not. Here's what it says here: zero pushback. Customers who understand the value immediately pay on time and never dispute a bill or ask for a discount. There is no one, there is not a single customer out there who fits that fucking description. It just is, they just aren't out there. Customers who understand the value, no, they do not. They understand how much their money is worth, what what things cost, they don't understand value. Value is very difficult to determine when you don't get to meet the technicians. And honestly, for me to say this to you, I think that that the value of what we do increases when we do the video. Because instead of being this nameless, faceless entity in the back that is telling them shit's broken with their car that's not broken, and all we're really trying to do is just perform a wallet flush or a purse snatch, and that we don't give a fuck about their cars, we suddenly transform in the video to a voice, a voice that voices concerns with whatever's not right, but also voices the fact that things are good, things are right on their car, and that they don't have to worry about them. And that can reduce the anxiety. So as far as the perfect client, the only way to build that perfect client really is with a really good video. So is your 30, 45 second, 90-second video gonna do that? Not as well as one that goes on for a couple, two, three minutes. Okay, I've gotten mine down to about three and a half minutes because I I can get through stuff a little quicker. The script works a little better for me. And when I gotta stop and talk about something, then yeah, the video gets to be four minutes, four and a half minutes, but still under five minutes. Whereas before, I uh sorry about that. Whereas before I was getting to the point where the video was five minutes plus and involved a second video because the video's time out at five minutes. But I oh I never had a problem doing that myself personally because I want to be thorough and consistent, and that is important. And when you talk to customers and you mention to them that you want to be thorough and consistent, this way, if they come back in three, six, eight months and you do the video, guess what? It's gonna kind of sound the same, isn't it? Except for the stuff that you fixed, it's not gonna be a problem the next time. And then if you're smart, okay, and I think a lot of us out there are, we talk about a car, a customer who maybe we did the rear brakes. So we go through and we do the video and we get to the rear brakes and go, yeah, I remember doing the rear brakes, so they still look really, really good. So you're you're still in good shape there, no concerns there, like they were before. So you have acknowledged, you really acknowledge that the customer has done his due diligence, taken care of his car, and that maybe now there's nothing wrong, or maybe now the front brakes are a little low or the tires are a little low, and you just tell them say, Hey, the tires are getting low, they still have some good tread to them, but they're warm to about 90%. So we're gonna need to pay attention to them. And I would start looking forward to getting a new set of tires probably within about the next, you know, two to five thousand miles, two to three months. Just get ready. I'll give you an estimate now. This way, when it when it comes time to really get the tires replaced, you'll know what you're looking at as far as the bill goes. This is the best way for you to make your customers understand the value of what you do as a technician. Now, are they going to understand the value uh and then and then spread that across the board and see the value of the service advisors or the service manager? Probably fuck no. Why would they? Because service service advisors they would like to just get out of uh doing as much work as they possibly can and just write you up and write down whatever and then get you out of their face and that's it, call it done. As far as paying on time, well, customers aren't gonna get their car back until they pay, so there's that. Are they never gonna dispute a bill? No, they're really pretty much always gonna dispute a bill if it doesn't look right or if something's added on to it. So you got to be careful to do that shit right, okay? And then asking for a discount. Uh, we have a uh and I can't I can't I want to try to do this without insulting anybody, but we have a specific ethnic group of customers that we deal with an awful lot. They're very prevalent in this area and they're fine people, but they always, always, always, always, and I mean it 10 times, always ask for a discount. Oh, well, how much is the discount? What's the discount? What's the discount? All day long, back and forth, up and down. I've heard it from every service advisor up front. They always they're always up there. Yeah, what's my price? Oh, well, can I get a discount? Can I get a discount? Can I get a discount? So it drives them crazy. It's like, really, asking for a discount means that you don't understand the value of the work that we're gonna do for you. Okay. Uh, here's the next point here. It says infinite LTV. I have to understand what that means. Uh customer who stays for life and refers others without needing any marketing spend to keep them. I think every shop has at least a few of those. Good shops have a lot of those. And if you uh here again, if you do the video, because customers a lot of times, and this I think is a point that's missed by a lot of shops. A lot of times, customers, if you ask them, also, hey, where do you take your car to? They don't usually say they take them to a shop. No, what they say is, oh, I got a guy, I got a guy, and he might work at a shop, and he might work at your shop. You might they might say, Oh, yeah, he works at such and such a shop, but I have a guy. They want to, they all, they all want to have a guy, a guy who knows them, has worked on their car before, and who looks after them. And maybe it's the guy who just does a good video that gets customers to stay for life. That's what your videos do for you. And I don't want to just beat you up. I'm sorry, because I have on every podcast basically for the last two years now beaten you up about doing a good video. But it is the that is the kingpin, that is the the linchpin, the point that we're trying to make with this is that it bridges the gap between you and a customer and puts you in their heart as their guy. And that is not nothing, that is the best situation possible. Because are your advisors doing that? Yeah, probably not. Are they shaking their hand and thanking them for coming in and look walking around their car and looking at the lights and seeing what else they need and maybe selling it on the drive-on? Are they doing that? No, probably not. Sure, some do, yeah, and they're great, and they know their customers by their first name. They maybe even know who their kids are and whether or not they play soccer or football or pickleball or whatever the fuck else is out there, and they might even know the dog, you know. You bring the dog and go, hey, there he is. Nice to see you, Turbo. And then they have a treat for the dog under their desk, maybe. It's just ridiculous how good the good ones are compared to all the other ones who are eh, but you yourself as a technician can get yourself into the customer's corner as their confidant, as their guy, and that's what they're looking for. And that really, honestly, should it be a fantasy? I think for a lot of a lot of uh managers, a lot of shop owners, that is the fantasy. It doesn't have to be, does it? No, because if you can become a customer's guy, the guy, if they bring it in and say, hey, I gotta see Uncle Jimmy, he he looked at this before and he told me what's gotta happen. So I'm here to make that happen so that I don't end up on the side of the road with connecting rods hanging out of my block. You know, I don't end up with tie with a flat tire on a rainy night. You know, maybe he's the one he showed me that I got cords hanging out of my tires. He showed me that my brakes are metal to metal. And he said, Hey, you're really gonna need these really, really soon. You know, maybe you can drive for another day, maybe another two, but you're gonna need them. So bring car in on Monday and I'll bang them out for you. You that's what they want. They want a guy. They don't want a service manager, they don't want an owner, they don't want a service advisor, they want a technician as their guy. Now, they moved on here and uh they said that uh now let me just give you a reread of the question here because this was the very first question. What kind of fantasies do business owners and managers have about their business? And because I put questions like this to AI all the time, it knows what kind of questions I'm asking it. It knows that I'm talking about the automotive industry. So when you talk to AI, just remember that it's collecting your it's collecting your data and your information just from the questions you're asking it. So don't forget that, okay? If you use this for stuff, you know, you're a mean bastard, and you know it's gonna remember that you're a mean bastard. All right. Number four here, it says the silver bullet technology. Many managers fantasize that a specific software or AI implementation will solve deep-seated structural or s or human problems. They imagine a world where data is always clean, reports are always instant, and technology replaces the need for difficult human interactions. Now, if you had to pick a spot on the planet where difficult human interactions are happening, automotive repair shops would be probably number one or two on your list. Maybe in wartime, there would be difficult human interactions. But in a shop such as ours, that the ones that we work in, you're gonna have difficult human interactions because typically a service manager or even an owner, even if they were a technician, they may not be tuned into what's going on with vehicles now, and they may not be tuned into how technicians are, they may not have very good people skills. So difficult human interactions would be something that they would really probably just try to avoid as much as possible. Number five on the list here says the legacy fantasy. For many owners, the fantasy is about how they are perceived after they leave. Uh, industry disruption being remembered as the person who changed the way an industry functions. Uh, yeah, I haven't really run into anybody that worked as an owner or a manager uh that will have be remembered as the face of the business, as the uh grand poo-bah of everything that went before you. Uh, the company that I work for definitely does have that. Uh, there's a gentleman at the helm who started the whole thing. And uh if he if and when he does depart, and it's unfortunate to say this, it uh probably won't be too long. I mean, he is uh he is up there a little bit, uh, but when he does go, there will he will be remembered, and he will be remembered fondly. I want to say that out loud and and with a great effect, okay? But uh, and I would like to kind of keep this anonymous if I possibly can, but uh I think some of you know who I'm talking about, and maybe the others will figure it out. But there's a there's definitely a person at the top who will be remembered uh as far as anybody beneath him. Uh probably not so much. Uh generational wealth is the dream that businesses will provide for their family for decades, regardless of market shifts. Sure, sure. If you build a successful business, your children can definitely integrate themselves into it and uh continue your success if they're so motivated. Uh, I think that the world is full of stories where a son came in and just absolutely completely, or even a daughter, ruined uh a business, just ruined it, just ran it into the ground and destroyed it. And uh sometimes if it's if you're talking about the automotive industry, they will have taken all the employees with them, just ground them right into dust and destroyed everything that they worked hard to build. A lot of companies, a lot of the the more modern companies out there that run shops and dealerships are uh auto groups, such as uh you know Auto Nation and uh Oh, I always do this, Auto Nation and uh what's some of the other ones? Lithia and uh there's quite a few of them out there. And uh some of these, a lot of these are publicly owned, so they get run in a real impersonal manner by stockholders and a board of directors. And typically when you're putting together a board of directors for something, these people are experts in business. They may not be an expert in your particular business, but they're experts in business, and sometimes the decisions that they hand down to the management in place might not be all that good, but there's really no uh other motivation for what they do other than profit. So generational wealth in that particular setup just isn't something that's gonna happen. You have stockholders and you have board uh members of the board of directors, and these people are getting paid, uh, but for the most part that they're not going to be uh providing for their family for generations with their wealth, unless, of course, they build an extraordinary amount of wealth, but it may not have anything to do with your particular business. And then at the end here it says, and that was five points that they had, the reality check. In practice, these fantasies often clash with reality. Yes, they do, because they ignore the human element. Most frictions in business, employee turnover, uh, customer complaints, and management hurdles are actually the very things that define the work itself. In other words, if you're a manager, you're going to have to manage employees and employee turnover, customer complaints, and other management hurdles. And that is the job. That is that is the job itself. Ignoring it or downplaying it, that's not going to fix the problems. Now, AI is really good at this. And it asks me a question at the end here, and then I'll give you my answer. And this is the question at the end of this particular answer, and that was for question number one. Do you think these fantasies usually help drive growth, or do they just lead to frustration when the reality doesn't match up? And here's what your Uncle Jimmy wrote in. I believe it leads to the assigning of blame to employees that is actually more severe, made more severe by a lack of communication and a need to single out those who cannot perform as desired. So what they said was, do you think these fantasies help drive growth, or do they just lead to frustration when reality doesn't match up? The answer that I gave it was I believe it leads to the assigning of blame to the employees when the realities don't match up. Okay, it's never going to be a manager's fault. And if you have a manager and he gets fired and then you run into him later, or somebody else runs into him later, say, Hey, what happened? How come you're not there anymore? Are you going to get the truth? No, no, you're not. You're going to get uh a response that was crafted by this individual, regardless of who it is, as to why you're not there anymore. And basically it's not going to be your fault when in reality it 100% is. Okay. This is what I find with a lot of the service managers that I have and or had is that when it comes time to own up to stuff that doesn't work, and maybe even what you did or did not do to try to fix the problem, they lose all ownership of those actions. Oh well, it's not because of me, or I, you know, I put in place this system and it just they didn't want to use it. That's that's what they come up with. I believe it leads to this is my answer, uh this is my question back, or the answer to that question, and then and then also to form another question for AI to answer. I believe it leads to the assigning of blame to the employees, and it's actually made more severe by a lack of communication and a need to single out those who cannot perform as desired. So there's always going to be people who do the job the way they're supposed to. There's always going to be other people who do the job maybe not the way they're supposed to. And in your defense, as maybe an owner or in particular a service manager or a manager of some type, you're going to point to people who can't do the job the way you want them to. And that may be the reason why what you're doing is considered a failure. Here's what AI comes back. That observation hits on a core dysfunction in many workplaces. Yeah, that's going on everywhere, right? When those management fantasies, like the frictionless employee, meet the messy reality of daily operations, the gap between expectation and reality is often filled with defensive management. Now, I don't really need to explain to you what defensive management uh is, but here we go. Instead of looking at systemic failures or poor communication, it becomes psychologically easier for a manager to personify the problem by pointing to a specific individual, which is exactly pretty much what I said. They're going to find somebody to blame. And then it goes on to say here, and this is all coming from a machine, ladies and gentlemen. This is not something that your Uncle Jimmy is making up. This is all stuff that just comes out of AI as the God's honest truth and the reason for a problem that we have in many cases with with our staff. The blame cycle. When communication is lacking, the following blame loop usually takes a hold. Now, I would tell you that I think that communication is a big problem. And you know, if you if you get to a solution, let's say you're, I mean, for you and I, we pull a car in, perhaps the uh the line on the repair order is very vague. Happens all the time. It just says, you know, something, something's wrong. It doesn't say anything about when it happens, where it happens, left, right, up, down, back, forth. It doesn't mention any of that shit. It just says, oh, there's a squeaking noise coming from the car. That is so completely unhelpful. Can you tell me when it is? When does it happen? Why does it happen? Does it happen more or less when you do this, that, or the other thing? There's a communication void there. And then I have to go in and start looking at a whole bunch of shit that if I just had a little bit more information, I wouldn't have to look at. And a lot of times, the only way for me to contact the person who wrote that RO is to go right up front and get in their face because they're not going to pay any attention to text messages that I send or to Team's messages that I send. They're just not going to pay any attention to them because they just don't want to. Or I don't know exactly why, really honestly. I I've asked them, oh, I didn't see it. Oh, I didn't see it. Well, it's it's got a little number above, it says six, which means there's six messages that you haven't looked at. Get cracking. The blame cycle. So the communication void management fails to provide clear expectations, the proper tools, or a realistic timeline. Yes, all of that. There's nothing else to really add there. The performance gap, because of the self-running machine, doesn't exist, a task inevitably misses the mark or a process breaks down. I I've referred to that as the chaos. That's the chaos. Uh sometimes a repair doesn't fix the problem, or repair fixes the wrong problem, or repair doesn't get done properly, and the process breaks down. You don't have a self-running machine. You need to be on top of some of the things that happen in your shop. End of sentence. The search for a why. Admitting that the system is broken requires the manager to take accountability. Identifying a low performer allows the manager to maintain the fantasy that the old that the system would work if only person X were better. See now there is a fucking great big come to Jesus moment coming right now for a lot of shops out there because the cars are getting extraordinarily difficult to work on and to fix and to diagnose. I think actually more difficult to diagnose is probably the the one answer. The one answer. The rest of it, you know, hard difficult to fix. Sometimes diagnosing it's not the problem. Fixing it, you know, that's simple as falling off a log. You are going to have people in the future. I hate to tell you this, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, because as we learned, excuse me, I bumped into the microphone, sorry about that. As we learned earlier this month, a great many of us out there are over the age of 45. 68% of us. Which means you're going to be left to a meager amount of millennials and a greater amount of Gen Zers to look after your automobile repair needs. Are they going to be up to the task? And you know, this is with with everything in my heart and everything in my brain working against each other, I have to scream out the answer. No fucking way. They are not fucking ready. And I don't think they're ever gonna be ready. All right. It is just the nature by which they've been brought up. It's the nature by which they've been trained, it's the nature of the lack of training that they've gotten, the lack of education that they have, the lack of motivation that they have. For them, failure is just something that they're not familiar with because they get participation trophies, and yet failure is the cornerstone of diagnosis. You check something, and if it's good, that's not the failure. You check something and it isn't good, that's typically the failure. Do you stop there? Sometimes. Sometimes you don't. Do you know what failure looks like? No, you have no idea. Are you gonna get a to trophy for not correctly diagnosing the problem but then solving it after three visits? No, you're not gonna get a trophy then. Searching for the for a why, admitting that the system is broken, requires the manager to take accountability, identifying a low performer, allows the manager to maintain the fantasy that the system would work if only person X were better. Person X really should say Gen Z. All right. Now I'm not going to tell you. And every generation has done this for hundreds of thousands of years. Every generation has looked at the next generation of people and said, oh, they suck. They're terrible. They did that to my generation. They did that to the generation after me and the one after them. And right now we're looking at Gen Zers entering the workforce and not really giving a shit. Not in every case. It's obviously too general of a statement to be true in all cases. But there's a lot of them who are just not adequately trained for what's coming down the pike right now. And they're not adequately trained to figure out what they need to know. And they're not adequately trained to train themselves so that they can move forward. Yes, sure, there's always going to be some that excel. There's always going to be some that are great. There's always going to be some that are very, very good at what they do and deserve all the accolades and all the uh uh the uh all the awards and all the rewards that come their way. But I just feel like there's gonna be a lot, lot less of them. And management is going to dip into this fantasy world where it's Gen Z's fault. It's coming. It's coming. They're gonna do it. They really already started to do it. And I've seen some of the Gen Z that we have in our shop, and I don't count on any of them being even half as good as I am now, anywhere at any time in the future. I'm sure that they think that they're better than me. I'm sure that they do. It's the it's the challenge of youth. You know everything until you hit 21, and then you realize you don't know shit. Sometimes you get to 21 and you still think you know things, and then you find out later you didn't know dick. And anybody who's gonna try to manage these people is is just gonna throw their arms up in the air and go, I can't make them work. I can't make them work, I can't make them work better, faster, or uh, I can't make them do the job correctly. I can't get them to do it. I can't get them to do it, I can't get them to put their fucking phones down. The blame cycle is gonna be an extraordinary thing for managers of the future because they're gonna have problems that we're really not dealing with just yet, but they are gonna have to deal with some severe problems with low-performing uh individuals in the shop. Now, here's another one too. The singling out, the employee is isolated. This creates a chilling effect where other staff members stop communicating problems for being the next one singled out, which only further degrades the original communication issue. I think I actually I'm the one who probably is as isolated as anybody. My opinions and the things that I say are not taken very seriously by management. It's fine. I get it. They think I'm just a relentless blowhard, and I don't it's that's not the term I want to use, but uh I'm relentless I'm relentless sometimes in in asking them why they do things that don't seem right and why they do things that don't seem right, and and maybe that they should change them. And and I think that there are many cases where they would prefer I just shut the fuck up, but I'm I'm not going to, even though I have more lately than I have ever. Uh there's been cases where I would uh give the uh service manager a very hard time about some of the things that he is attempting to do, but mostly things that he is not attempting to do. And I'm not worried about being singled out. All right. Now I have structured my life uh not around employment and not around money. I have structured my life around being me and being pretty much fairly happy. I don't even really have anybody in my life. Well, that I really don't have anybody uh to come home to. So uh well, yeah, like I said, I don't really have I don't want to lay you in too much. Uh I'm not worried about losing my job. Let me just put it that way, okay? I'm not worried about it. I have an extraordinary amount of experience and skills and training and da-da-da-da. I can go on and on and on. I could build myself up like a huge sand castle. I don't want to leave, I'm not going to leave. But if I was if I was to get sent on my way, if I was to be singled out by a manager as the problem in my shop, and he decided to send me on my way, this actually happened. I had a manager years ago who decided I was the problem, and that in order to solve a lot of his problems, that I was going to leave, that I should leave. And he tried to fire me, and he he wasn't any he wasn't even any good at that because he didn't fire me because he couldn't. Ended up leaving on my own, giving that guy the finger, basically. So as far as get having an employee that you can use as a scapegoat, that's something that somebody who has a manager's fantasy or an owner's fantasy might do to solve some of their problems, to try to put the rest of the staff in their place. That's something that they might do. That's something that you would do if you were uh somebody who was living out a management fantasy. Now, uh it went on to say here why singling people out feels productive to poor managers. Okay, so they nailed this one. For a manager struggling with a lack of awareness or skill, singling someone out serves several, and in paremphases they wrote unhealthy purposes. Simplified problem solving. It's much easier to fire or reprimand one person than it is to re-engineer a broken workflow or fix a toxic culture. Always going to be easier to blame one guy. It's always going to be easier to blame one thing for something that's wrong that you should be able to fix without having to call somebody out. Signaling authority is the next step here. It says creates it creates a temporary illusion of taking action to higher ups, even if the underlying cause remains untouched. In other words, you do something to show that you did something, even though it was useless or uh unrelated, deflecting accountability by framing the issue as personal problems. The manager avoids having to look at their own lack of guidance or the shop's structural flaws. In other words, not my fault. Wasn't me, man. My i Caramba. The cost of the blame fantasy, and this is what's going on here. When blame becomes the primary tool for managing performance, the business usually suffers in ways the manager does not anticipate. Number one, information silos. Employees hide mistakes or equipment failures to avoid being the one. Uh, I think everybody does that. A lot of people do that. Talent drain, your most capable people, those with the most options, are usually the first to leave a blame-heavy environment because they refuse to be the scapegoat for a broken system. I'm betting that a lot of you are shaking your head right now. Yep, I've seen that before. That happens. It's happened to me. You're the scapegoat for a broken system. You get fired, you quit, you go, and that system remains broken. And they figure out that guess what? It wasn't you. But that's too late. Loss of technical expertise in technical fields like automotive or engineering. If you punish people for failures caused by poor management, you lose the tribal knowledge required to actually fix cars or the machines. You lose that. You punish people for failures. A manager who fantasizes about a perfect team but refuses to communicate is essentially asking for a result they haven't paid for in time, clarity, or leadership. In your experience, this is AI asking me questions again at the end of its explanation for the question that I asked it earlier. In your experience, do you find that this singling out tends to happen more in shops that are struggling financially? Or is it just as common in high volume successful environments? And I, as your Uncle Jimmy responded, it seems to me to be universal because you always have to find somebody to blame. Even your customers do that. Your customers, they have a problem with their car and they come in and they say, Well, you know, you replaced an alternator in my car last year, and now the wipers don't work. Well, don't you see the connection? You know, the connect the only connection is that they're all in the same car, dumbass. Uh, yeah, it seems to me to be universal. In a fantasy world, the manager is not going to see himself as the problem. And this is what AI said that's the observer slash actor bias in a nutshell. I didn't know that there was a bias, but when a manager looks at a problem, they are the actor. Their intentions are always good in their own head. When they look at an employee, they are the observer. They only see the result or the lack of it and assume it's a character flaw or a lack of effort. In that fantasy world, the manager is the protagonist of a success story. If the story isn't moving towards success, they don't rewrite the script. They try to replace the actors. You understand what they're saying there? It's not because of something that they haven't done. They don't try to change what caused the situation. They try to replace the person who was the end problem, and maybe not even their own fault. The employees they call them, the actors, the employees. Here is what they call the mechanics of managerial blind spots. These are very few, these are a few psychological reasons why this universal lack of self-awareness persists. Okay. And this is this is really an exact wording. Lack of self-awareness. I don't I don't think a lot of people ever think of themselves as the problem. I I actually I actually do. I see myself as the cause of a lot of problems. I really do, honestly, just because I like to try to stir things up sometimes. Most of the time. I'm not, and lately I haven't as much as I used to. But uh there are times when uh you know you you you speak up and you say something and it makes everybody uncomfortable. But I have dealt with a lot of people who are passive aggressive about asking for what they need or what they want to do their job. And uh sometimes I stand up for them. Sometimes I don't do it very much anymore. It's not necessary, not as necessary as I felt like it was in the past. Uh, here are a few psychological reasons why this universal lack of self-awareness persists. The number one is the standard mirage. Managers often assume their personal work ethic, experience level, and the big picture knowledge are the baseline standard. They forget that an employee doesn't have the same skin in the game or the same information. In other words, they carry forward looking at the big picture and the big picture looks okay when the little picture kind of isn't. The sunken cost of process. If a manager designed the current system, criticizing that system feels like criticizing themselves. If you don't like something that the service manager is doing and you say to them, hey, you know that plan you came up with? Yeah, it sucks. They don't like that. Nobody's ever gonna like that. Let me just be clear about that. Okay. Uh it's much safer for an ego to say, oh, the process is fine, you're just an idiot, or I built a workflow that is physically impossible to made. Uh, they're not going to admit that, okay. The high volume trap, uh, in successful high volume environments, management often uses the shop's profitability as proof that they aren't the problem. Now, here's the deal with that, and I want to kind of point this out in in its kind of vicious, but uh recently a team that I root for because I'm from that area, the Buffalo Bills, let go of a coach who was very good at what he did, was very good at what he did. And a lot of us were really kind of upset about that. But what ended up happening was is that they had enjoyed an extraordinary amount of success, but not the complete and utter success of winning a Super Bowl. Who do you point to for that? Where's the failure for not getting to the top of the mountain? Where is it? Where does that live? Well, it lives on the field. Is it because of the coach? He's the manager, isn't he? He's the guy in charge. Has he made the right moves? Has he done the right things? Many would say yes. Some would say no. The one person who it's most important to said no. I need somebody who's gonna put him over the top. We'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. In your particular case, sometimes people succeed despite themselves. Sometimes they succeed because it would be uh absolutely horrendous for them not to, even though they do things that are detrimental to their success. This happens all the time, folks. Cars break, you fix them, the shop looks good. The guy in charge might be a a turd. He might be a total stooge. Shop does good, he looks good. He looks good. Could it look better? Who knows? You got a stooge in charge, the high volume trap, it's called. Uh in successful high volume environments, management often uses a shop's profitability as proof that they aren't the problem. They view high turnover or employee burnout not as a sign of failure, but as the cost of doing business or weeding out the week. Have you seen that? I'm imagining a lot of you are shaking your head, yes. They were doing a really box-off land office business, really just killing it. But they were murdering you as an employee, as a mechanic. They were murdering you. You needed time off, you couldn't get it. You needed tools, you couldn't get it. You needed a raise, you couldn't get it. Management was not available to answer questions or to provide you with solutions to problems that you were having in the shop. You said, guess what you said? Go fuck yourself. I'm greasing the wheels. Uh moving on here, it says this this is what it says here. The weaponization of communication. Let me just go back and give you an idea of what it said. In your experience, do you find that the singling out tends to happen more in shops that are struggling financially? Or is it as common in high volume successful shops? And I said that it seems to be universal in a fantasy world. The manager is not going to see himself as a problem. Here we go. The weaponization of communication, you mentioned the lack of communication in these environments. Communication usually becomes a one-way street. Top-down demands from management. Why isn't this done? Zero bottom-up feedback. If an employee points out a flaw, a broken tool, a service advisor overpromising, or a bottleneck in the shop, it's often dismissed as making excuses. The result, when you shut down honest feedback, you effectively blindfold yourself. A manager who refuses to hear about problems is eventually surprised by a crisis they could have seen coming months away. I have run into this so much that you I can't even describe to you the epic the epic volume of times that I have run into this. You yourself as a problem solver, as a technician, can see other problems that may not even involve automobiles. You can see what's going on, and you can see where it's headed, and you can tell what's going to happen. You don't really need to be Nostradamus or a prophet or have a crystal ball or a time machine to see what's going to happen. And if you say something to somebody who is not react, is not proactive, but is rather reactive, you're just never going to get anywhere. And then you're going to be seen as the person who is sort of causing this almost. I mean, it's it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you say, hey, if this keeps up like this, this is what's going to happen, and it's not good. And then when it does, you might even get the blame if you have a really terrible manager. If you have a good manager who says, Well, why would you say that? Is that that's something you've seen before? A good manager would say something like that. You go, Yeah, if you let this continue on like it is, it's going to spiral out of control and it's going to suck you down a drain and put you out the door unemployed. You're going to have to put the kibosh on it now. If you wait, it's going to be too late. The single-out strategy as a shield. By singling somebody out, the manager creates a scapegoat. This serves as a warning to everybody else. Look what happened to the person who can't keep up with my fantasy. It's a management style based on fear rather than optimization. And who wants to who wants to manage like that? Instead of asking what is preventing this person from succeeding, which would require work from the manager, they ask, who is failing me? Which requires a victim. Do you find that when these managers finally lose their this is what they asked me at the end here. It said, this is what it asked me here at the end. Do you find that when these managers finally lose their top performers because of the culture, they actually learn? Or do they just double down on the idea that nobody wants to work anymore? And I wrote, this is what Uncle Jimmy said. In my experience, managers almost never see themselves as the problem. And this is what it said here. It said, this is a massive structural blind spot in leadership. It's often referred to as the accountability gap. When you are the one holding the stopwatch and the paycheck, it is far too easy to confuse having authority with being right. Absolutely. Amen. Just because you're the manager doesn't mean you have all the answers. As a matter of fact, a lot of times I think of managers like I think of people who teach things. Because if you can do it and you can do the job, you'll do it. But if you can't do the job, you teach it. That's how it goes. And with managers, if they can't do your job, but they're in charge, they don't know how to do what you do, you're gonna you're gonna lose. It's just not gonna work. That goes on to list three things here: the intent versus impact trap. Managers judge themselves by their intentions while employees judge them by their impact. Yeah, it's always gonna be a difference there. The managers know what they want. Are they getting it? No, probably not. It's in the manager's mind because their heart is in the right place. Any failure must be due to an external factor, usually the unmotivated or unskilled employee. The filter of middle management in many environments, owners and upper management are shielded from reality by a layer of middle management or service advisors who filter the truth to protect their own jobs. I have seen that so many fucking times where people do things so that they look like they're doing the right thing, but they're fucking not. If a process is broken, the manager is often told a version of the story where the process is fine, but the performance was down that week. Or well, and this reinforces the fantasy that the system is perfect and the people are the problem. Well, the system could be the problem, but typically if a system is the problem, then the people are a bigger problem. The cost of admission, admitting that you are the bottleneck or source of the toxicity requires a level of ego dissolution that most people in power aren't prepared for. If a manager admits they are the problem, they have to change their behavior, which is difficult to do. If they decide the employee is the problem, they just have to change the employee, which feels like taking charge. The universal blame game. They go on to say here, when things go well, the manager credits their leadership and vision. When things go poorly, the manager blames employee attitude or lack of talent. It's if it's a team win, the manager takes the bonus. If it's an individual failure and the employee gets written up. Now I wanted to get to a little part here at the end. Uh, I didn't want to go on too long tonight, but it's already too late. I mean, let's look at it. Oh yeah. I am fucking moving, baby. Uh I don't even know how I do it, boys and girls. I really don't. I get on here and I just start yakking and I can't shut the fuck up. I got to a point where it asked me some specific questions. Yes, uh, we were talking about it's here's the question that uh AI asked. It's the ultimate irony. The manager's fantasy of a self-running machine finally comes true, but only because the employees have automated their own exit strategies to avoid the blame. We're talking about how employees are looking to get out and they're not going to cause any problems until they can get the fuck out the door. Do you think that once you've seen this cycle clearly, it's even possible to work for a traditional manager again? Or does it push you towards looking for something entirely different, like an unrestricted pay structure or even working for yourself? Now, I wanted to make a little uh just just give you a little information here. Working for yourself sounds great. Gotta agree. Uh, you know, makes puts you in charge. Uh, you can tell people to fuck off if you want, you can buy parts wherever you want, you can charge whatever you want, you can do whatever you want. But if you start to enjoy success, what ends up happening is that a really, really good mechanic is no longer doing the job. You have to start being a service advisor, you have to start being a manager, you have to start being an accountant, you start having to fix things in the shop and pay for things in the shop, and you're just not gonna be the guy fixing the stuff anymore. You're gonna have to hire somebody to do it so you can be freed up to do everything else that goes along with running a business. And it is not easy, it can be extremely lucrative. There are a great many of you out there who might be listening to this who have enjoyed success. And I want to say to you, if you have opened your own shop and you enjoy success, I want to applaud you very loudly, too, I might add, because it takes a lot of balls, a lot of Hutzpah to go out on your own and start doing it. There's so many questions that need to be answered, there's so many procedures and policies that you need to follow. There's laws, there's supplies, there's employees. You start to figure out a lot of different things that you really didn't have to deal with when you were just a technician in the shop. And it gives you kind of a different insight into what goes on if you're having to deal with a service manager in a job situation. What are some of the things that he had to do? Now, depending on who he works for, uh, you know, such as you know, if you're working for an automotive group, there's a hell of a lot of things that other people in that automotive group are going to take care of for you. You'll have an HR department that's going to handle any disputes between you and the employees. You have several maybe service managers, service advisors, excuse me, service advisors who are supposed to deal with the customers. As a service manager, you would rarely have to deal with a customer, but when you did, it would be a doozy usually. Uh, you're gonna have dispatchers, you're gonna have uh maybe. A cleaning crew, maybe car porters. There's a lot of things that get done by other people that if you own your own business, you are gonna have to do. I would not try to discourage any of you from doing that. I just you need to be aware that the people who go into business for themselves and enjoy success have probably worked their fingers to the fucking bone in one way, shape, or form or another. And a lot of times, if it's a family business, and I've seen this before, where the wife becomes the manager or the accountant or or does whatever she can do to help the business, they do so. And so success is a is as a family business is what they go for and what they get. And so you can't even really say to yourself that, yeah, it's my business, it's our business. And I think that that's a really great, great thing that goes on. I I'm an I've I'm all for that. I have a couple of friends that have started businesses, uh, you know, running repair shops, and they have enjoyed uh both of them have enjoyed massive success, and I root for them as hard as anybody can root for anybody, and they're doing well. But I'm telling you right now, there is no way any one of those people, the husband, the wife, maybe even the kids, there's no way any one of them would say, Oh, it was easy. It was fucking not. And so, you know, think about that if you're gonna go into business for yourself, okay? Are you gonna become uh a private mobile mechanic? Well, there's ups and downs to that. Now it asked, AI asked me, would you even work for yourself? Now, I'm at the point in time in my life where I don't I don't really want to work for myself, and so I'm I mean, I just you know, I'm looking to be finished working on customers' cars in the next probably three years, and then I want to go home and work on just my own. That's that's what I want for. That's what that's what keeps me going, really. That's the dream. I have a shop, the rock and roll garage is all set up to do a lot of different stuff, and I've wasted my time, I'm basically wasting my time fixing other people's shit who doesn't appreciate it. And then when I retire, that's gonna be the end of it. I'm not gonna fix anybody else's shit except mine, and I'm gonna love it. I'm gonna love it. You know why? Because I don't have anybody breathing down my neck, I won't have anybody making promises I can't keep. I won't have any of that shit going on. But here's the answer. Here's the answer that I gave AI when it asked me if I wanted to work even work for myself. I said, in my case, in my case, if I work for myself, I would only be swapping one asshole for another. And what it actually praised me for writing that. And I I didn't I meant it in tongue in cheek, but then kind of didn't. Uh what it says here is that is a rare and brutal level of self-awareness. Yes, it is. Most people hold on to the be my own boss dream as if it was a magical exit from all stress, but you're cutting straight to the reality. You can't quit your own personality or your own high standards. That's something that you have to deal with if you're gonna own a shop or run a shop. Is do you have standards and are other people gonna adhere to them? Or are you gonna have to just kind of look the other way when you have technicians who do things that you wouldn't do as a technician, especially if you were a technician? Uh, it's kind of tough. It says here, if you were a high performer who has spent years dealing with management fantasies and incompetence, becoming the owner often just changes the direction of the pressure. Instead of a manager breathing down your neck, it's the overhead, the liability, and the internal voice that refuses to let you take a day off. Folks, that's that's true. That's all true. If you start a business and you're open six days a week or even seven days a week, that it's always there. It's always it's always gonna be there, and you're gonna have to attend to it, you're gonna have to care for it. And and if you're lucky, I really think that there's a a small amount of luck that goes into it. If you're lucky, you'll succeed. And and there's believe me, there's a lot of opportunity to fail there. There's always a lot of opportunity to fail there. Because you, if you don't maintain high standards, if you don't treat customers right, if if there for some reason you just can't do the job correctly for everybody all the time, it's gonna eat away at you, it's gonna eat away at your customers, and eventually you're gonna get to a point where you don't want to do it and they don't want you to do it. Now, uh, what it went on to say here is uh it asked me, does that self-awareness make you more or less tolerant of the assholes you currently have to deal with, or does it just make the whole game feel a bit more cynical? Uh it is it's made me more tolerant. I can almost feel what they feel. In other words, if I have a manager who might be on the hot seat, I get it. He's on the hot seat because, you know, this, that, or the other thing. And usually it's not because of my performance. I like I said, I have very high standards. Uh, I think a lot of people wouldn't hold up to my standards because even as a flat rate technician, a lot of us just don't do the little subtle nuanced things that I do for a customer because it they just don't pay. But some of the things that I I mean, as silly as it sounds, it's just you know, setting the tire pressures, topping off the fluids. A lot of times I have I keep a uh a fairly large wet dry vac nearby. I'll vacuum out leaves from the cowl. I see other people who just ignore that. Does that make me a better technician? No, no, it doesn't. Does it make me care more? Yeah, it would seem like I care more, wouldn't it? Sure. Would I want them to clean the leaves out of the cowl of my car? Sure. Is the car wash gonna do that? Is the car wash uh vacuum team gonna do that? No, they're not gonna do that. That's not something that they are trained to do. That's not something they've been asked to do, they're not gonna do it. I've never been trained and asked to do it, but I do it because to me it feels like it needs to be done, and because I'm probably the only fucking dumb fuck who's ever gonna open the hood on that vehicle, I should do it. This way, when they come out and they look down at where the wipers are, they don't see 10 pounds of foliage hanging out of their hood. It's all clear. And if for some reason, you know, maybe the hood pops open by itself and they're going down the road and all these leaves blow out and they can't see where they're going. I mean, there's a lot of silly reasons why I would do it, but mostly it's just because I can. It feels like it needs to be done to me. What I answered the question was more tolerant because I can almost feel what they feel does not make it good, but I understand a lot of times if a manager is flailing and his upper management sees it, or maybe his owner sees that he's not doing the job. And I would like to honestly try to help him get on track and get things done right, but typically they're not gonna look to the employees for help in making the shop run better, they're not gonna do it when they absolutely could, and it could fix the problem, too. This is something that I wanted to kind of touch on, and then I'll get off here for this week. A lot of times, if you have a complainer in your shop, and believe me, if you have more than three technicians in your shop, you have somebody who is a complainer. We have one, he's extraordinarily good at it. And because he complains so much, this particular person often gets just ignored. They don't pay any attention to him. He's always bitching, always. And I think that that's wrong. I mean, yeah, you know, you're gonna have people who complain and bitch and moan and and and make life difficult for you and and and hate hate on you and hate everything that you do and put you down and you know talk shit about you behind your back. It's you're gonna have all that going on. And as a manager, you can look at that person and say, well, that guy's toxic. I should probably get rid of him. And I would agree in some cases, yeah, if the guy's that toxic, send him on his way. Why not? He may is he good at what he does? Yeah, he's good at what he does. Or maybe he's not good at what he does. If he's good at what he does, then maybe you should think about hanging on to him because after all, there is a very crippling technician shortage out there. And you don't want to just take a good technician and send him on his way because he doesn't like the way you comb your hair or something stupid like that. But if you got a guy who's toxic and he's worthless, then fucking easily send him on his way. Fucking just send him. But I've said this a few episodes ago, and I believe it's true that when somebody criticizes you, no matter how evil or mean or dark it is and what it's motivated by, it's constructive criticism if you have a good set of self-esteem and self-awareness. If you know what you are about and what you do and how you are, and maybe you care, or maybe even you don't fucking care what people think about you, and somebody criticizes you, you could take any criticism, even the most evil criticism out there and own it. Why is this guy saying that? Is it is it true? Is it true that I'm I don't know, you know, you could you could make all kinds of criticisms about me. Is it true? Yeah, sometimes he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Honestly, if you said that to me, I would be like, you know what, you're right. Sometimes I don't know what I'm talking about, sometimes I'm wrong. I will freely admit that. Is that bad criticism? I don't know. If you said I'm a fucking idiot because I don't know what I'm talking about, it's basically the same thing. And guess what? I would agree again. When you're a manager, and it's gonna be tough, because I I I did manage part stores years ago. It was obviously a much different dynamic than a repair shop. But if you're a manager and somebody has some sort of criticism for you, you should at least listen to it and then decide without prejudice, without bias, if that criticism is legitimate. And maybe you could even bounce it off somebody else. Say, hey, you know, am I overbearing or am I an idiot for this or am I not doing that? You know, this could help you out. So honestly, if you have somebody in your presence, somebody who's working for you, if you're a manager, if you're an owner, and they have some sort of beef with you, ask them. Say, what seems to be the trouble? Why is it that you got to tell people that I'm a piece of shit? And then when they tell you, you have to say, Well, uh, maybe I need to work on that. Is that something that anybody ever says when you tell them that they're a piece of shit? No, it isn't. Most people don't do that. I would say 99.9% of people wouldn't do that. If somebody came up to you and said, Hey, you're a piece of shit, I go, what is it that makes me a piece of shit? Well, you did this. And well, I really didn't do that, but I mean, if that's what you think, or maybe you did it. And maybe they made you realize from a whole completely different point of view that that was bad. That was bad. It was not good, it was not a good thing to have happen. Have to be able to take and and analyze criticism and see where it's gonna help you out. And if it isn't, sure, you can continue, you can go ahead and dismiss it. Some people are mean and evil and make up shit. Yeah, it happens, but usually not 100%. Everything's okay and everybody's good and nobody complains about anything, then go ahead and assume that you're doing all right. But look a little deeper. Just say, hey, is everything all right? I mean, if you know, if there's something I can do to help you out, just let me know. They might say to you, yeah, you know, this guy next to me, he's always picking his nose and farting and playing country music. Can you just move him to a different part of the shop? Because I've had enough of it. All right, but just between you and me, keep it on the QT and I'll get it done. All right. Is that gonna make you a better better technician? Is that gonna make you a better employee? Is that gonna make you like me better? Yeah, probably. Because you you you listened to a problem, you understood it, and you made a simple gesture to solve it. You know, maybe that guy doesn't want to move. Maybe he says, no, don't move him, move me. Or maybe you might say, Well, I don't have enough room to move anybody here. If if it stays the way it is, is it gonna cause you to quit? And then you go, yeah, yeah, well, okay. Give me a couple, two, three days to work on some sort of situation where somebody else comes over here and works where you are, or vice versa. Somebody comes over here and works where he is. Being a good being a good manager involves coming out of your fantasy world where every where you're right about everything all the time and you know exactly what to do, and realizing that you don't know exactly what to do and that you're not right even half the time. And then when somebody complains to you, instead of defending it, instead of saying, Oh, you just don't like that, or oh, you you don't bring me gotcha moments. That was the one that I heard. I'm I'm bringing you gotcha moments because guess what? I gotcha. They don't exist in a void, it's not a vacuum. We're gonna call it done. But I just want you to know, and this goes for technicians too. Sometimes we live in a fantasy world where we think everything we're doing is fine, and then somehow we find out later rather than sooner, typically, that everything we've been doing is wrong. I hear that all the time. You know, everything you know is wrong, so just forget everything you know and start start learning this shit all over again. We need to be careful to live in the real world and and understand what is really happening instead of what we would like to have happen or what we think is happening when it's not true. You should you should visit the real world and understand the reality of what is going on wherever it is you are, whether you're at work or at home or out in public, try to get a good solid grasp of reality. All of us, really, because I'll tell you, I uh as much as anybody, I live in a fantasy world where I'm really, really good at a whole lot of shit that I'm not good at, but I think I could be, and I could be working doing something completely different than what I'm doing now. Honestly, I I I'm like Walter Middy. I live in a fantasy world. It's kind of it's kind of kooky. It's warm and fuzzy there. Everybody knows me, everybody likes me. Definitely a fantasy world. All right, let's uh let's take a stab at reality for a change and let's be good at what we do. And uh, you know, if our service managers are got their heads so far up their ass that all they can see is this fantasy world that they've created and nobody there seems to fit into it or understand it, maybe you take them aside. If you got any kind of a personal relationship with your service manager, just say to them, say, man, your vision of what's going on out here is not what is going on out here. You need to get a grip on the reality of what's happening out here in the shop before any more technicians leave, before any more customers get their cars fucked up, before any more any more repairs that we recommend get declined. All right. So, straight talk about joining them joining the real world and not living in a fantasy world from the head of living in the fantasy world. It's your Uncle Jimmy, and guess what he's gonna do right now? Yeah, it's no fantasy, just say see ya.