Episode 361: Pissing Match Part 2

On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we get into some of the statistics of the “should technicians get paid for Video MPI’s” debate — and if this were an election, they would call it a landslide. Even the majority of Management and instructors are on the side of “pay the technicians for Video MPI’s”. When it comes right down to it, the foreword thinking management that wants to pay for Video MPI’s is actually giving themselves leverage as to their quality, branding, and brand voice that is utilized in direct digital communications with their customers. This gives them a massive advantage over companies who don’t, and thus, get what they pay for. We also read off some of the better comments from Technicians themselves (who were 100% united behind the idea that they should be getting paid for them) as well as echo some of the ideas and systems that we promote at Surfwrench! It's not hard to find if you want to metaphorically throw rotten fruit at this tool, search "Video MPI" over on LinkedIn and look for the dude getting lit up. 
 
 Also Uncle Jimmy uses feminism to bludgeon the OP, and decides it might just be time for a combo of LinkedIn/GlassDoor for Mechanics.

GTW MERCH: greasethewheels.store

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

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, good afternoon, and welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Once again to Grease the Wheels, your automotive technician podcast coming out of the pie hole of your Uncle Jimmy. That's me, parked behind the microphone at the rock and roll garage, bringing you Grease the Wheels, the podcast. Hey, I got some exciting news for some of you crowbars, maybe all of you. I don't know. It depends how you feel about this stuff. I uh threatened to offer uh you folks some Grease to Wheels apparel, and it is now available. Finally, I finally figured out how to get it to go. And I made a few different little designs, some of which you may or may not like. But you know what? I don't care. You like them, you like them, you don't like them. Well, okay, tough. Too bad. Uh here's uh here's where you can get at it, though. It's greased to wheels.store. Grease to wheels being all one word.store. Now, I don't know how well it's gonna work because for some reason my bank is a bunch of fucking retards, and everything I tried to buy with my uh debit card uh failed, including my rent. So who knows? I might be doing this out on the street next week. Uh I've got to call them up tomorrow and fucking scream at them because they're not open right now. The rest of the world's 247, 365, but not my fucking bank. Anyway, uh greastowheels.store, get yourself some gear. I just wanted to tell you that uh I spent a good deal of time trying to create some of this stuff, and some of it looks stupid. Okay, not gonna lie to you. Some of it looks fucking dumb as hell, some of it looks pretty fucking sweet, and there's more to come. So if you don't see something that strikes your fancy, maybe hit me up on the uh Facebook page and let me know if what you'd like to see on a shirt, on a hoodie, on a hat, maybe I don't even know. Uh got got some of that out there, just a little bit, really. It's uh just kind of skim the surface. And honestly, some of it is probably gonna get me uh at least one or two cease and assist notices from people who have certain phrases trademarked. You'll you'll see what I'm talking about. And uh I expect to see them. So buy them up quick if you can or if you want to, because they're probably gonna go probably gonna go away real fast. You just can't you just can't repeat something that somebody else said, no matter when, where, or how they said it. Some people get upset with that, you know. So but anyway, greased wheels dot store. Uh it uh it's a site of design by myself, so be kind. It has a picture of the monkey, the monkey, yeah, monkey, and uh of my 68 cutlets on there, so you can see see what I'm talking about when I tell people I'm gonna fucking destroy the planet with that car. And hopefully you can enjoy some of the uh apparel. Uh, one last thing I want to say about this before I uh dive into today's subject. I priced this stuff as modestly as I could. I really did. Uh, and then the markup on some of it is super minimum. As a matter of fact, uh when I was trying to put some of these designs out there, I kept getting alerts saying, yeah, it's too cheap, you're gonna lose money. And I'm like, uh I don't want to do that. Uh I love you guys, but I don't want to subsidize your clothing budget. Okay, so uh, but the markups on a lot of this stuff is very minimal. Uh and it I did the best I could. I still want to make like a dollar, maybe. Or, you know, I mean, seriously, like literally just a dollar. And in some cases, that is exactly what's gonna that is exactly what's probably gonna happen. And I would think that after taxes, I ain't gonna make jack shit. So uh hey, if you enjoy it, buy a lot of it. If you don't enjoy it, don't buy any of it. It's America, it's a free country, you can do whatever the fuck you want. And for those of you who are outside of the United States of America, I did turn on the international sales uh options so that you can get some of this gear too if you want. I would just imagine that the shipping would be excruciating. So uh and I can I can't I can't do nothing about that. I can't well I can't do anything about that. Let me try that because that's double negative, but I really uh can't do anything about that other than uh offer free shipping, which I'm not gonna do, sorry. Um it's not this is not something that I'm doing actually to make money or make a lot of money. Uh if we make any money at all, it'll probably just pay for hot dogs and and beer or pizza. I don't know. We'll see what happens. But if you like it, you like it. If you don't like it, you don't like it. Uh get your hands on it. Uh, some of it, like I said, some of the shit's probably gonna go away. So, but there it is. And uh it's just me trying to put you guys in some gear and not take a lot of your hard-earned uh cash, not not uh dip into your hard-earned money and your apparel budget. Okay, so uh uh do what you can, do what you'd like with that information, okay? We're gonna move forward. Now, I was talking last week about a uh a post on LinkedIn, and uh I I gotta say, it has inspired me and uh inspired myself and Eric to be true to be honest with you, to try to come up with something similar for just technicians. And then we, of course, we were throwing out ideas like water over a cliff, and uh we we just it it really it's just spiral out of control, and I think it's gonna be a really good idea, and I think we're gonna we're gonna try to do something like that. If you have any ideas that maybe we didn't think of or maybe that you have thought of for a long time or whatever, just hit us up with them on the Facebook page. We will uh we will definitely read the comments, we always do. And uh honestly, there just isn't a whole hell of a lot of them, which is fine. I understand. You guys are busy and you like to keep your comments to yourself a lot of times, and that's okay. Uh, I can appreciate that, and I wish I was more like you, gotta be honest with you. Talking all the time and talking too much, and uh a lot of times I don't even have any idea what the fuck I'm talking about, but I'm still talking, which is really annoying to everybody, including me, believe it or not. Uh lots of times I stop and think to myself, do you know what the fuck you're talking about, Uncle Jimmy? And the answer comes back to resounding, nah, you haven't got a fucking clue. All right. But uh in this particular case, what I would like to do is hear from you, here's some of the ideas that maybe you have, maybe we'll incorporate them. Uh, and it's it's in it, it's in it the uh its most infantile stage right now. It is just an idea, and uh it's looking for, I mean, it's just been conceived and that's it. It hasn't grown yet, it's still in its early part of its first trimester, so to speak. So we'll see what happens from there. Now, I was uh talking last week about this guy who decided to make a post, and uh his idea, his post was about how dealerships and shops should really not have to compensate technicians for doing uh video MPIs, digital video inspections, service walk-around videos, whatever you want to call them. I'd I'd like to I'd like to come up with a with one name for all of them and then get over that, but we haven't done that yet. So uh we'll call them whatever we want to call them, and we'll be happy about it, and that's it. But uh what I have found was, and I wanted to start right out with this, uh there were 305 comments on this, and I was honestly unable to read all of them, okay, because my mind started to melt and pour out of my ear hole. And then there were uh this this kind of drove me a little nuts. There were 64 thumbs up comments. That's not a real great ratio for somebody who feels like they're right about something. That's uh if you take 300 and you you divide in 64, that's about 30 percent, maybe. No, it's less than that. It's about 20%. So 20% of the people who responded to this roughly feel like it's a good idea to not pay technicians for this. But then I went through uh some of the comments and and did folks, there's just too many of them for me to really comment on all of them. So I tried to pick out a couple, two, three, and then point out what the problem is, and then uh I wanted to chastise the gentleman who started this post because he is uh and the more I read some of his responses and the more I I get an idea for how he thinks, uh, the less I like him, the less I feel like he is the kind of person I would want to work for, because he calls himself an automotive operations leader, a business process optimizer. Uh sorry, none of that shit fits. Okay. Uh, as far as I'm concerned, he's not a leader. Uh he's a dictator. When he comes down, he tells you he's not going to pay you for doing videos. What I did was I went through and I tried to uh count all of the uh people and their roles and see where we fell with that. And then so I made I made initially, initially, I made two separate columns, technicians and then management. And I thought, you know, that's pretty much all there's going to be, right? Because I didn't really think about this part of it too much. But then I got down here and I found that there were a few instructors in here in the comments. Uh, and and there was, folks, I'm telling you, this this this thread went on and on and on. And I mean, it is filled up the uh the page. I tried to go through and and hit all of the uh open all comments and then hit the more when there was more stuff to read there, and it was it was overwhelming. It was overwhelming. Yeah, so just to fill you in here, I hit see previous replies so I got everything, and then I hit more so I could read everything, and I got about halfway through and I wanted to smash my laptop. I I couldn't take it anymore. Uh, this particular individual uh who has responded to this, uh, I want to read something that he wrote, and if I can see if I can find it, but uh he he wrote that he was a technician at a BMW and a mini uh dealership for 10 years, okay. And I don't know when that started or when that stopped. Uh he did not ever have to do videos. So as far as I'm concerned, his opinion is not valid. All right. If you and this is this is just the way I feel, if you've never had to do something, if you just watched it from wherever the fuck you watched shit from, and you feel like you know how to do it, and you feel like you know how it should be done, but you haven't done it, then my opinion is really, quite frankly, that you should shut the fuck up about it. It's like a man trying to tell a woman what it's like to be pregnant or give birth. It's just not something any man should ever fucking do ever. Your uh experience with the birth process is something that you will never ever in a million billion years remember or feel or know anything about. So, in response from half of the entire population of this planet that is female in nature, you as a man, a penis carrying human being, should shut the fuck up. You don't know what you're talking about, and that is what's true in this case, too. This particular gentleman doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. He tries to say many times here that uh it should only take uh two to three minutes to make a video, and that's not something that I feel like I should pay you for. I go, well, you could make a two to three minute video, and that's fine. Okay, and then and Eric and I have uh looked into this and tried to help people help train people to do videos and uh help them use specific terms and terminology in order to help people understand what they need and how important it is to need it. Uh, we've run into uh where I work at least anyway, we've run to uh a significant amount of ignorance as far as uh what somebody should be looking for from some of the components on their vehicle. But that's really a a subject for a whole nother podcast. But we've made an effort to try to put and I think it uh that what we have put together is more than valid and is extremely valid because of the experience that I myself personally bring to this. I have probably done in the neighborhood of 10,000 videos. Okay, I've been doing it for a while. Uh there are days when I did uh anywhere from eight to ten to twelve. There's some days where I don't do any. You know, if I've got an all-day sucker for a job and I've already done a video on it, I'm banging away on that car all day. I'm not doing videos on anything else. But I was working in a shop where we didn't have anybody to really concentrate on waiters, and so we had nobody that would concentrate on waiters and they would stack up. And so eventually you just uh you just drop what you're doing, you've got extra base, boom, you just start doing waiters, banging them out, and you're doing videos on those waiters, okay? And the videos uh where we were, we were not getting paid for them. And I gotta tell you, the the quality of the video was very suspect in a lot of cases from some of the other technicians. My videos, I think the quality has increased tremendously since the beginning. Obviously, I've been 10,000 videos. I would think that I have it nailed by now. Would you? I would. Uh, and I get an extraordinary amount of feedback on them. And what I want to say to you is that whatever they wanted to pay me for my videos, whether it be a tenth, two tenths, even three tenths, and even up to five tenths, okay, half an hour, I'm gonna tell you right now, my videos are fucking worth it. They're worth it. End of sentence. Because if somebody's not gonna buy something, they're not gonna buy something. That's it. It doesn't matter if you go up and you, you know, it doesn't matter what you say to them. It doesn't matter what you tell them, it doesn't matter what their shit looks like if they're not gonna buy it, if they don't, you know, if they don't have the money or they don't want to spend it on a car or they're gonna trade it in. You've heard all the excuses. If you've been up front or if you've been a service advisor, you've heard them all. I don't want that, but yet you fucking need it. You've had these, you've had this happen. I have seen people pull out with cords hanging on their tires. I've seen them pull out and drive off. And I don't hope that they die, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did, not with the condition of some of the vehicles. Okay, so there's a severe disconnect there between me, the video, and the people who need to see it and the people who need to understand what the fuck is in the video. Is that my fault? That is not my fault. Now, like I said, I do uh what I would call a pretty thorough video, they're typically just shy of five minutes each one. And I know that some of you are going, well, Jesus Christ, what the fuck, Jimmy? Five-minute video? That's way over the edge. Yeah, especially when you take into account America and pay for them, which irritates the living fucking shit out of me. Especially when I use my own phone, which I hate. I hate, I hate so much. And and these are things, okay, not getting paid for the video, and me using the phone to do them, my phone, which I pay for, and all of the crazy stupid fucking two-part authorization apps and the warranty apps and the tech connect apps and all this shit that's on my fucking phone that I don't get paid for, and that nobody nobody even thinks twice about just jamming more fucking shit into my phone. That pisses me off. And what is what it has done is in I think a lot of your cases, if your technicians out there and this kind of shit is happening to you as well as as it happens to me, you start to think, okay, if there's one more fucking thing that they're gonna have me do where I don't get compensated for something that I'm paying for or something that I'm doing, then I'm just gonna get the fuck out of this business, and they can all kiss my fucking ass. And that's where everybody loses, and I mean everybody. From Jim Farley at the CEO of Ford right down to your neighborhood Chevy dealer and all the dealers and all the shops in your neighborhood. You're gonna get the fuck out of this business and you're gonna go do something else where they pay you to do what you do. And sentence where they pay you to do what you do. Now, this gentleman that has created this thread apparently works at uh uh some sort of a shop. It's not a dealership. I don't think I don't feel like it's a dealership. It may be. Uh it wasn't clear. Uh I think it would be clear if it was a dealership, so that's why I say it's not. He has technicians that do videos and he doesn't pay them for them. And he has stood his ground. I will give him that. He has stood his ground in the most tenacious manner possible, but some of the shit that he has said, he he's he's backed into a corner. He's in a castle with a great big moat, and everybody's assaulting that that castle. I counted, I and I couldn't count them all. Okay, like I said, there was 300 plus responses, some of them many multiple paragraphs. What I found was that there were technicians who responded, there were people in management who responded, there were a few instructors, and there were some other people that had job titles that didn't make any fucking sense to me at all. So I just made a whole category called jack-offs. People who people who have no skin in the game and they're just fucking responding because I don't know why, honestly. But so I just made a category called jack-offs, and I put them in there. The resounding response is that technicians should get paid for technician videos. Absolutely. But even through all of this, this this guy, the author of this thing, just went on and on. Oh, I don't believe they should pay for them. I don't believe you should pay for them. I I believe that you should shut the fuck up. All right. Now he says he was a technician for 10 years and that he would have loved to do MPIs. Okay. Well, let me go fire up the DeLorean. We'll get there. We'll run that fucker up to 88 miles an hour, and we'll give you some sort of a device so that back when you were a technician early in the 21st century, that you could make videos. That you could waste your fucking time making videos for people who A, aren't going to watch them, B, don't give a fuck what you say in them. C, don't use them to try to sell, and D document things that should be documented, but but don't get documented on a paper MPI. They don't get documented when you write down what's wrong with a vehicle. And then after doing all that, we tell you, yeah, fuck you, we're not paying you for them. I'll bet you he would have changed his fucking tune. Now, let me see here. This is it. I it took me a while to find it, and I apologize. I want to hand it. This is a guy named Nathan, and he's a heavy equipment, uh, he's a heavy duty technician. And uh, I gotta tell you, I I I enjoyed this so much. This is what he wrote, and I'm not gonna read a lot of these. I don't want to make a really super long uh I don't want to make a really super long podcast where I read what other people wrote, but this is some of the stuff is pretty good, so I'm gonna do a little bit of that, okay? This question, this is what this guy Nathan wrote. This question is exactly why I left automotive. I've never seen such a cheap cutthroat industry complain so much about lack of text while also treating them like second-class peasants. There's a shortage of text now. Gee, I wonder why. And then he's got some thumbs up comments. And uh, well, look, there were other comments here too to his comment, but the author wrote back respectfully, okay, because this guy could probably beat his ass. So, yeah, respectfully, I think this misses the point. No, I think he hit the fucking, I think he hit the nail right on the head, pal. He didn't miss the point. It's what he writes next is technicians are already doing MPIs. Yes, yes, we are already doing MPIs. We have to do an MPI before we can do the video. Putting the camera on or recording the inspection isn't creating brand new work. Absolutely fucking is. Okay. Ask Martin Corzese or Stanley Kubrick if he was still alive or any other director, Quentin Tarantino, if putting the camera on a recording isn't brand new work. It's completely different from writing a script dick. It's documenting the work they're paid to do in a more transparent way for the customer. Okay, so what you're saying is, what you're saying is, in your response to this guy who is kind of, it seems like he's angry that you have this opinion, what your response is is like, well, you should just do it and shut the fuck up, which I said last week many times. You're gonna do an MPI, why don't you just film it? Why don't you just film me taking a shit, pal? Oh, how about that, huh? You're not gonna pay me, you might as well. Hey, and if I send that to the customer, say, here's what your car looks like, and then show somebody squeezing out a grunting out a fucking turd. It's like, really? Literally, because some of these cars are fucking junk, and you know they're not gonna buy anything, and yet they request a video on them. It's documenting the work they're paid to do in a more transparent way for the customer. The technician shortage won't be solved by paying extra for things they're already doing. Eh, wrong answer. The technician shortage won't be as severe if you pay for things that we're already doing. You got you know, he doesn't, he just doesn't get it. He just he he's just missing the fucking point. There is a there's an old saying out there, it's called the straw that broke the camel's back. And there's so you know, a camel can probably carry a ton of straw, maybe easily, but there gets a point where you're adding on more and more straw, and then eventually you get to a point where you add one more piece of straw, and that's too much, and it breaks that camel's back. And the term is called the straw that broke the camel's back. And in this particular case, this to me is one of the straws that is gonna break the fucking camel's back because there is so much shit that we are already doing that we don't get paid for, that we have long since stopped complaining about. Doing the MPI? Well, you're already doing it, yeah, and you're already not paying me for it. How about putting air in the tires? Well, yeah, you should be doing that, yeah, but you're not paying me for it. Am I doing it every time? Well, you should be, but are you? No, folks. I know, I know you're not doing it, and it's fine. I I say it's fine. I believe honestly that you should do it because the customers are not going to. And the end, in the end, the customer is the actual consumer here. It's not the shop. You don't set the tire pressures for the shop. You're setting the tire pressures for the customer. And in that respect, anything that you do to the car, anything that you show them is for the customer. And the customer is paying. They're paying big. Oil change, 150 bucks for an oil change, you're getting 20 or 30 dollars, depending on what your hourly rate is. Yeah, the customer's paying for whatever it is you do, and it's not their fault. That the shop's keeping 75 to 80% of the money spent for the labor to do the oil change. It's not the customer's fault. So we can't blame them, and we're not going to blame them, by the way, okay? This is not about the customer's reaction or the customer's response. Not at all. Not even a little bit. It is about the dealers and the shops requesting that you do something and refusing to pay you. And that, my friends, is fucking wrong. There's nowhere in the world where that works. There's nowhere in the world where that flies. There's nowhere in the world where you get something for nothing. It just does not fucking happen. And this guy going on and on about it's really, it's gotten me pretty hot, okay, because this is a fucking mindset that you get when you get into management that technicians are pieces of shit and you shouldn't have to pay them for a fucking thing. For not one fucking thing. Now here's what he writes it'll be solved by higher base pay, better working conditions, and treating them as skilled professionals they are, adding a premium for video documentation feels like the wrong direction. No, no, it doesn't. And here's the thing, back up on this one for a second. Okay. You want somebody to do a video and you want them to do a the best they possibly can at it, but you're not willing to pay them. Well, I say and I said it in the response to this this guy that uh you get you're gonna get what you pay for. And some of our technicians do videos where they mumble and they they talk real low and real monotone and and it's just not good. It's just not good. Oh, sure, it works, and I'll tell I'll tell you, we did a little experiment, Eric and I, Eric the producer and I, we both tried to make terrible videos. And at the end of the day, when we got done and we looked at them go, well, they're not great, but they're not terrible. They are still a video of the customer's car, and maybe it's out of focus, maybe it's shaky, maybe it's grainy, but it's still a video, it still showed things. I mean, really, even if you do the shittiest video possible, which is something I'm gonna bring to you in a few minutes here, but even if you do it the shittiest video possible, it is still a video of their car and what's going on with it. I think if they want quality videos and they want the customers to to be excited when they see them and maybe, you know, decide that they need stuff when they uh see these videos, then what you're gonna have to do is A, pay for the videos, and B, what you're gonna have to do is hire us, Eric and I at SurfRunch Digital, to show your team how to do them. But it is gonna be worthless for us to show your team how to do them if you don't pay for them. It's gonna be worthless because they're not gonna want to do them. I have never met a technician other than this fucking tool who made this this fucking post, this, this feed or whatever it is, whatever you want to call them, whatever this this was, maybe a bait and switch or something. I don't know. It's whatever, whatever this guy's thinking. But in order to to have premium videos, you need to provide a premium. You need to pay for them. Then you can you can complain about the quality, and then we can come in and help tweak the quality, teach you what you gotta say, teach you what you what what will work and what won't work. You'd be very surprised at what works. And honestly, I I I have uh, you know, and I I don't know if I even feel like bragging about this, I have a very proven track record, folks. Very proven. All the time I can point out sales that were made simply because of the video I made. I get a hell of a lot of feedback. I know I keep saying it, but I really do. It's just nuts, and I haven't been paid for one ever. I actually, we were for a while. They decided to put the kibosh on that. It was not a very popular thing. Some other arrangements were made, and we're supposed to be happy about it. Anyway, uh, this particular individual goes on here, it'll be solved by higher base pay, better working conditions, and treating them as skilled professionals. They are adding a premium for video documentation feels like the wrong direction. And that is the opinion of uh management. And here's what our here's what our friend Nathan, the heavy equipment technician, wrote. That's because you're not a tech. If you want to add an annoyance to my day-to-day, you better pay. Otherwise, I'm looking for work elsewhere. As a heavy equipment tech now, I can tell you you are happy to steal automotive techs and pay them double what they make at the automotive dealer. Now, uh, yes, yeah, I think he's he's on the right track there when he says that. Look, the straw that broke the camel's back might not be the video, it might be something else you're not paying for. It might be something else that's not right at your dealership. We all leave for different reasons. We grease the wheels for different reasons. When they get greased, you sit there and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's the problem? What's the problem? The problem is you don't pay, jackass. Pretty much comes right down to it. But then this is what this guy writes. And I I I I I gotta tell you that this this made me laugh because this this reminded me of something that happened to me, actually. The author writes, you're right, I'm not a tech, but I did spend the first 10 years of my career as a technician. My first dealership was at a BMW Mini Cooper dealer. For this reason, I look at this differently. Oh, okay. So did that dealer make you do a bunch of stuff they didn't pay you for and you were okay with that? That's why you look at it differently? Okay. I don't see a video MPI as an added annoyance. Well, if you never did one, then how would you know if it's an added annoyance? As a tech, this is what he goes on to say. I gotta tell you, I love this. As a tech, I was trained to take pictures. Oh, so you're a photographer. Okay, and photographers, they don't make any money whatsoever, right? I was trained to pull filters and actually take them to the customer. Now, I had somebody do this to me at a quick change oil change place many years ago when I used to deliver parts for a uh uh warehouse that sold uh you know industrial equipment. I had gotten up very early to come to work and I was in the truck and I'm loaded up to go get stuff delivered, and they wanted us to change the oil, so I pulled into a quick oil change place that we used, and I was catching a couple of Z's while they changed the oil. And I woke up, I wasn't really asleep, but I had my eyes closed. I woke up and the fucking technician has got the air filter about three inches from my fucking face, and I just fucking screamed at it. I go, put that back in my motherfucking truck before I come out there and I fucking break your fucking jaw, dick. I don't want people sticking filters in my face, and I don't know what filters he's even talking about. The air for you were trained to pull filters. I mean, I'm I'm just imagining this tool dragging a fucking shitty looking oil filter up into the fucking waiting area and going, see, this is the filter that was in your Mini Cooper. And they're like, Look, I have to roll change to make the payments for my Mini Cooper, okay? I had to borrow money from my mom and dad to get the maintenance done. Put the oil filter or the air filter or whatever fucking filter he's talking about, put it back in the fucking car and leave me the fuck alone, will you? Just do what we fucking told you to do and stop fucking trying to sell stuff by sticking some snotty looking fucking piece of shit in my face.

unknown 29:27

Dick.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

I was trained. He was trained to pull filters and actually take them to the customer. That is an amazing amount of horse shit. And of course, they didn't pay them for that. I and this is what he goes on to write here. I see the MVPI, which is another way of saying multi-point vehicle inspection, as a better, more efficient way to communicate the inspection I was already performing. Well, you perform the inspection, and at least this is this is the way I learned how to do it. This is the way I do it, this is the way I would recommend you do it if you actually are going to do it. Uh, you're gonna want to do the uh the inspection before you do the video. Because in my videos, just like with this podcast, I sound fairly confident. I know what I'm talking about. I've been in the car business a long time. I live, eat, breathe, and sleep cars. I know what I'm talking about. So if I go through and I do a video on a car and I start telling people what's going on with it, good or bad, there's confidence that shoots through their speakers. Ah, look at your tires. Tires look really good. You have great tread, five millimeters on a tread depth, 730 seconds if you don't like the metric system, and they're worn nice and even late, so you're good to go. Boom. Right? You know your tires good because the guy with confidence in his voice told you they're good. And that's because I looked at them before I did the video. So technically, I'm doing the video, I'm doing the uh inspection. Oh great. Another amber alert. Anyway, sorry about that. I have no control over that shit. You you know, but you know that. Uh and now I can't remember where I was here. Um, but the thing is with the video, I have to do the video after I already do the uh multi-point inspection because I don't want to be surprised during the video inspection. So I'm actually doing it twice. And even though sometimes, yeah, guess what? I miss stuff. And of course, you know, everyone's oh, you missed this. I go, oh, well, take the money back. You paid me for doing it. Oh, well, wait, you weren't, you didn't pay me. So go fuck yourself. You get what you pay for. And in my case, you get more than what you pay for because you're not paying anything. So anytime I do anything at all, hello, you should be happy. And you should fucking definitely not break my balls about the quantity or the quality of any of it. If you're not paying for it, then fuck you. Okay, that's it. Now there's another gentleman named Nathan, which is uh, you know, it's cool, and he's a uh technician. He writes here anything you require a technician to do for his job should have flaggable hours attached to it. If you, as a shop owner, want the tech to make a video, MPI, for potential upsells, then you as a shop should pay the technician for potential upsale as a flaggable hour for your expense. Expecting the technician to work for free to potentially make you more money is completely unreasonable. I agree. I agree. That's that's perfect. And their logic in why they shouldn't have to pay is that if you do a good enough video and you point out stuff that's bad and they buy it, you're gonna make more money. Well, guess what? So are you. In fact, you're gonna make way more fucking money than I am, and it's pretty much a gamble. It's pretty much a gamble anytime somebody pulls a car into your shop, whether or not they're gonna buy anything, whether or not they have the money. It's not like a casino where people go in and they have money and then they leave without it. People come into the dealership and they don't want to leave without the money, without their money. They don't they don't want to, and so they're gonna decline a lot of lot of stuff because they don't feel like they need it or they don't want it or they can't afford it. I get it. That part of the process doesn't play into this at all. If I show you that your tires are bad, sometimes I'll just say, look, your tires are really, really, really bad. If you're not gonna buy them from us, get them from somebody. Because if you wipe out, if you get a blowout and you start spinning sideways on the highway and you hit a school bus full of, well, you know, I can't handle that. All right, because I tried to tell you that you're driving something that's unsafe. I gotta go on and on about that. I'm not gonna talk about teenage cheerleaders. But what I found, and this is what I originally started talking talking to you about, was that technicians are a hundred percent, and there were quite a few here. I actually uh let me see, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, right around thirty-five, and I didn't even get to the end. Folks, this this this post went on, this feed went on and on and on and on, and I couldn't read it all. It was too much. My brain started to melt down halfway through. The technicians were 100%, yeah, you should pay for them. These are the same technicians that are out there doing the jobs that you can't get anybody else to do. You can't get other people to do them. Now, honestly, let me just say this. I've said this a few times before. The technician shortage only exists for people who run shops who don't know how to take care of people. They're technicians. Maybe they don't know how to take care of any of their employees for that matter, but the technicians especially. And this is why there is an excruciating shortage of technicians. And you know that the technician shortage is excruciating when someone who's not even really suffering from it, read i.e. Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, is complaining about it. He's like, hey, I've got dealers. No, you don't. The dealers own themselves, and they can't find anybody to work on our cars. Well, why don't you stick to fixing problems that you're having, manufacturing them? And while you're at it, walk over to the warranty department and tell those people to stop fucking the technicians over and not paying them for one reason or another, or to stop chopping times. How about that shit, huh? Why don't you do that instead of doing a podcast, instead of complaining about the fact that the dealers who sell your cars, not you, they're the ones with the technician shortage. They're the ones who are doing a very poor job of managing and running their own fucking dealerships, service departments. I'll tell you right now, one of the major problems that we have, and nobody's really addressing this, and it has nothing to do with videos, okay? One of the major problems that I've seen in every dealership I've ever worked in is that they have somebody in charge at the top who doesn't give a flying fuck about service, doesn't give a fucking shit about the fixed ops department, and consequently doesn't give a shit about the technicians, doesn't care even one fucking iota. Now I have seen, I have seen and worked for some general managers who did seem like they cared and made an effort, but there were some of them who made an effort and it was obviously excruciating for them. They couldn't wait to get back the fuck out of the service department after talking to maybe a couple, two, three of the technicians. They couldn't wait to fucking get back up front where they're dealing with salespeople. I mean, it's almost like, and I mean this, this has my been my experience, not not just where I work now, it's been the experience everywhere I've worked. The sales department feels like they're, I say this a few times, they're king shit on Turd Mountain. They are the reason for the dealership to exist. They sell brand new cars and sometimes use cars to people who need a personal transportation devices of some sort, and they can dress up and they can wear cologne and Italian shoes and talk on the phone and and just generally commiserate with each other and and and it it looks fun and it looks easy and they are treated very, very well. And the showrooms always icy cold in the summer and toasty warm in the winter, and the cars are always shined up perfectly for them, and everybody else does everything else for them. And then you go back to the service department. And in some places, not mine, but in some places, it's a dirty, filthy dungeon, a fucking cave where cavemen work on machines that you sold maybe a year ago or two years ago or three years ago, and you don't give a fuck about that customer. You don't give a shit about that customer. That's our job to care about them, right? Right. It's two different places. Every dealership I've ever worked at, the service department and the sales department might as well have been miles and miles apart because theoretically they are not physically, but theoretically. And this edict that comes down from above that they're not going to pay for videos and that they feel like they shouldn't have to pay for videos. It's part of that. It's part of that. What the fuck do those scumbags out back want now? That's what it is. And some of the people I work for in the past have felt like have not been able to they let me just rephrase that, okay? Some of the people I've worked for in the past have had absolutely no way of hiding it. The contempt they have for the service department, the contempt they have for what the for technicians, for what we do and how we do it and how everything gets done. They have palpable contempt. Oh, sure. They'll come right up to you and and they will they will oh I I've seen this so many times. They'll come up to you and they'll treat you like you're your they're you're their best friend and you know they need something. Oh, hey, can you take a look at this? Oh hey, how's it going? Can you take a look at this? Can you can you can you tell me what's going on here? Can you can you fix this so I can deliver this car? And then you get all done with that, and then it's back to, yeah, fuck you, piece of shit. I'm not kidding you. This has happened to me so many fucking times. And if you work for even a couple, two, three years and you have to deal with salesmen occasionally, people from sales occasionally, you're gonna you're gonna notice this. It's very, very few of them who can come back and talk to you like you're a human being and have a conversation with you and even act like they they like you. They typically don't. I've had a couple of places that were really, really bad, really bad. And you just wanted to kill them. And they ask you to do something, and I'll tell you, I'm the most affable motherfucker in the shop. I know that they need to sell the cars because I can't service them in the future if they don't sell them now. So I kind of go at them and help them out with the stuff they have. But there's been many, many times where I just tell them, yeah, go fuck yourself, piece of shit, sucking up to me because you need something, dickhead. And that's where this is born. That's where this is this guy, uh his attitude is born from a sales point of view. Like, oh, well, we don't want to have to pay them to do that. We don't want to have to pay them any more than we have to. And that's really what it comes down to. That's really the bottom line. We don't want to have to pay them any more than we have to. Now I took uh there was a few people that actually agreed with this guy that we should not get paid for doing the videos. Okay, that's great. Everybody's allowed to have their opinion, even if it's fucking wrong. And what I found was, because I like I said, I made a uh a chart here, and I found that management was split about 60-40. 60% said that we should be paid for them, and 40% said that we shouldn't. And what I found was this was so fucking great too. Anyone who agreed with the author, that guy came back with a comment and he was basically deep throating them, just fucking maintaining eye contact and relaxing their throat muscles, and just deep throating that guy. Oh, oh, I like the way you think. Oh, I like what you're I like your I like what you're thinking. I think we actually agree more than we disagree, you know. Uh let me find let me see if I can find one here where he really kind of went off on the deep end here. Because there was a couple. Here's a Bugatti technician, okay, of all people, master certified Lamborghini and Bugatti. Love it. I fucking love it. Our jobs are not to update customers and show proof of things. If they want that, then talk to the advisor. Our job is to fix. You want us to take time? I mean, you want us to take time to record a video and show proof and explain that we should be compensated, was never part of the job until recently. Can't just keep adding tasks and just say, oh, it's part of the job. Or, or, and I'm for this. Okay, I'm I'm for this. He writes down, and I think that there's very this is a very valid statement he makes, or give us commission for every upsell as well. What if you got a commission for every upsell that is sold because you did a prime example of a video? I can tell you right now, I'd have a lot more money. I know, I know for a fact that the videos that I make sell. I've heard the comments, I've seen uh declines turn into approvals. Yeah, I've seen that. That's great. You know, you get you get a service advisor who just doesn't want to talk to a customer, they auto-decline everything you tried to upsell, and then they had to go back later and approve it because then the customer saw the video, they decided they wanted it, even though the advisor was kind enough to decline it for them. I love that more than anything. And then when it turns around, I go, Oh, they they declined it and then they just change their mind, or did they decline it and you had to change your mind? Uh and then, of course, our author writes back, I think that's where we fundamentally disagree. The job has always been to inspect the vehicle, communicate the findings, and help the customer make an informed decision. That makes sense. The job has always been to inspect the vehicle, communicate the findings, and help the customer make an informed decision. The method of communication has evolved from paper to digital, to photos to from photos to videos. So far he's right. We don't stop adopting better tools because they require us to do things differently. If we did, we'd still be writing MPIs on paper and calling customers from a landline. The goal is to improve the customer's understanding, and when that happens, everyone benefits, including the technicians. No, the technician doesn't benefit. If he does a video, I've done, folks, if you do videos, you know, here's the thing. I think a lot of us who have been who have done videos expect we expect nothing. We expect nothing. So when something gets sold, it's it's a lot of times it's a surprise. Now I get a lot of people, and and one of the things that I do is I tell them they don't need it immediately, they don't need it right now, they don't need it today. They come back. And then I get the sale. If I got paid a small commission, and I say small, it would have to be small. There's no way management's going to agree to pay me a large commission. Fuck no. Why should they do that, right? If they paid me a small commission on everything that I sold. They would get a quality of video that they've never seen before. See, that's the thing that they're missing. They want to fucking piss and moan over a tenth or two tenths for doing a video when they do honestly work. They work. Why wouldn't you pay for them? Why wouldn't you pay for them? Yeah, you're not selling on everything, but you're selling on enough things. And then they come back. I love it when they well, if you get if you sell something, you get more hours. Yeah, but you get more money too. How come you don't have to invest your time in this? When this guy, this author agreed, agrees with somebody, which didn't happen very often here, I gotta be honest with you. Management went 60-40. Nobody else. Not instructors, not people who had no skin in the game, the jack-offs, as I called them. Everybody else was on our side. And I say our side as technicians, we want to get paid for it. Here's what somebody else wrote here. This is the same gentleman, the Bugatti technician, typical operations guy answer. And fixed stops guys wonder why techs constantly leave and are leaving the industry in record numbers. For reasons like this, we don't work for free. Well said. Respectfully, this isn't operations guy talk. Yes, it absolutely is. It's uh I'm above you on the totem pole, and I'm gonna dictate to you that I'm not going to pay for videos. I spent the first decade of my career turning wrenches. No, you didn't. You spent the first decade of your career taking grimy filters out of cars and going up into the showroom and sticking them in a customer's face. Oh I'm sorry. I'm sorry, that's always gonna make me laugh. If you're if your shop makes you do that, makes you sh go up and physically show people what's wrong with their car by taking a part out of it, um, you're working for a bunch of assholes. Because I'll tell you what, if I if if I took my car in to a shop and I was sitting on the couch watching, forced to watch the view and drink shitty coffee and have crappy bagels, and you came up with some part out of my car and tried to stick it in my face saying I needed it, I would take it out of your hands and beat you over the head with it. Don't fucking do that. You don't need to do that. I will take your word for it. If you make a quality video, I'll watch it. I'm intelligent enough to see that something's fucked up, but I'll probably fix it myself because I'm handy like that. Kind of a fucking technician, you know. Taking parts out of a car and showing it to the guy, that's just fucking nuts. I spent the first decade of my career turning wrenches before moving into leadership. You didn't move into leadership, you moved into management. There's a difference. I've been on both sides of this conversation. No, you haven't. You haven't done videos, which is exactly why I believe execution matters more than simply adding another pay component. No, you're exactly fucking wrong. See, the thing is, we talked about it last I talked about it last week too. And uh I I hate to be redundant, but I'm typically that's that's my thing. If your salary or hourly, this conversation does not exist. You're paid a set amount of money to do what you're supposed to do. End of sentence. If we ask you to do the video and we're just paying you a flat amount for all the work that you do, you should just do it. This conversation is limited strictly to technicians who are paid flat rate. And I think this is strictly my opinion, but I think flat rate sucks. And it sucks for technicians, it does not suck for the dealer. Flat rate is great if you're a dealer, and it can be great if you're a technician. Plenty of work, everybody wins. No work, the dealership or the shop doesn't have to pay you if there's no work, and you lose. And I think that that is actually one of the major reasons why there's a huge technician shortage. Because that type of pay says to technicians, when there's no work, it's basically a great big fuck you. There's no work, too bad. Fuck you. And then when you start to add stuff that you're not going to pay for, and believe me, when you talk about flat rate, there's so much stuff that doesn't get paid for. Waiting for parts, you don't get paid for that. Filling the tires up with there, you don't get paid for that. You know, topping off all the fluids, it really doesn't pay any extra for that. You know, you're just not getting paid for a lot of stuff. You get paid for putting a part on a car, and if it works, you're done. You put it outside. They ask you, hey, did you do this? Did you do that? You do this, you do that. And a lot of technicians will turn right to you, look you straight in the eye, and say, I don't get paid for any of that. And the video falls into that category as well. And you can jump up and down as much as you want. And this guy can jump up and down as much as he wants. There isn't a technician out there who took this guy's side at all. We do this shit because we want the job or we need the job, and the job pays well enough that we can put up with some of the extracurricular bullshit that goes along with it. But when the extracurricular bullshit gets to be too much, that's when we tell them to take their job and fucking shove it. We grease the wheels and we get the fuck out. And that's what's happened over the course of the last 10 years, and it's been going on longer than that, actually. Technicians have gotten the fuck out of this business because of that mentality right there. And this guy can't see the forest for the trees because he used to be in the forest with the fucking trees. And I think one of them fell over and hit him in the head because now he's like, oh well, you shouldn't have to pay for anything that you do extra. You should absolutely pay for anything he wants to do extra. Absolutely. Let me go on and find some more here. There was a couple here. Here's one. He's a BMW master technician, a master elite technician, is a master tech of 22 years. Seeing how the industry has progressed, I would challenge the five to eight minute many say it takes. I'm factoring in the time it takes to inspect, generate an estimate with parts and labor research can be cumbersome depending on the needed repairs and the complexity of the vehicles. Oh, that's not there's something we're not talking about at all. These vehicles coming out nowadays, way more fucking complex than when this tool was taking filters out of a Mini Cooper and showing them to people in the fucking showroom. Plus, an act of shooting a two to three minute video for me usually takes 12 to 15 minutes for newer cars that don't need much and can take up to 20 to 25 minutes for older cars with a host of issues. Yeah, see what you're what you're talking about there is that it's an entire process that, oh, by the way, has never been paid for and should have been from the beginning, and it could take up to 20 to 25 minutes. And I agree completely because of the same job title as this particular gentleman does, and when I do estimates, I have to, and this this is just a this is just an itinerary. I pull in a car, I can drain the oil and do a brake fluid flush. So I start to drain the oil, I hook up the brake fluid flush machine, I drain the brake fluid out of the master cylinder through the rear, the right rear uh caliper, and then I close that up. In the meantime, I do the inspection of the vehicle tires, brakes, ball joints, thrust arm bushings, oil pan leakage, whatever. I look it all over. There's five minutes, and then I go through and I do the video after I've done the inspection. That's another five minutes. In the video, I show them that I'm draining the oil, so there's no doubt that that was done. And then I show them the brake fluid and explain to them why we changed that. Because I think a lot of people don't understand why we might want to uh do a brake fluid flush. They don't understand that it absorbs water, they don't understand that it gets bad, not something that that was a normal thing even a few years ago. Then I show them that, and then I show them what's good on their vehicle. I go out of my way to show them what's good. They got something bad, if it's real bad, I'll tell them. If it's just eh, I might not even tell them. Just say, your brakes. Eh, they get a little low, but they're still good. Gonna need them soon. That's it. That's all I gotta say. Don't gotta scare them. You're gonna need brakes right now. I don't do that. Then, if there is something wrong at all, or there's something I'm gonna recommend, that's gonna take me another five to ten up to twenty five minutes to take care of. Just like this gentleman said. So it is plausible to take half an hour to 45 minutes to do the video, to do the inspection, and then do the video, and then do an estimate, and then send it on to parts, and then finish up with the rest of it. So there's time invested in all that stuff, and you're telling me you don't want to pay me for it when if we make a sale, it's gonna earn you whatever your door labor rate is, and it's gonna earn me whatever my hourly rate is. And let me tell you right now, there's a huge fucking difference between the two. Huge. And you, if you don't pay for the video and you don't pay for me making the estimate and doing the MPI, that's something that you, the greedy fucker who's getting all the money, is not invested in. You're not invested in it at all. Your time didn't cost you a nickel because you're not paying. I'm telling you right now, and then I'm gonna I'm gonna put the end to this, okay, because I've been going on a long time, and I've been saying a lot of the same stuff over and over again, and I apologize. Uh, I think what I would like what I would like to do is a couple of things I'd like to do here. I would like for flat rate to go away. If flat rate went away, then this whole conversation about the video would be moot, wouldn't exist. Your salary would be based on your skill and your experience, and you would just do the video because it's required as part of your job description. It would be in your contract that you would sign as a salaried employee. Now, honestly, the best case scenario would be salary plus bonus, production bonus. That to me would be the best situation for all of us. And the video would just be included in the salary. You wouldn't have to worry about not getting paid for it, it would be part of what you do. And you know what too would help is if you got a small commission for every sale made due to your video. And you might think, oh, how can you tell if a sales due to your video? There's ways to tell. Trust me, it can be figured out. One of the things that I like I just want to say too, and that I love about this whole brouhaha, really, that went on here about getting paid for the videos, is that this is it's indicative of a larger problem. So this this entire conversation, this entire brouhaha, this whole uh thing that goes on with it with the service walk-around video, is we have to look at this from everybody's point of view and we have to decide where we're gonna come down. And it's all gonna be really pretty much down a company line for everybody except the customer. Let me just start right at the beginning, okay? As far as a customer goes, in many cases, if a customer has a and and this is this is true of all vehicles, if a customer gets a video and it shows the vehicle is in good shape and they don't need anything, or maybe they just need one thing, or maybe they get confirmation that something is bad that they complained about and that they get a clear, well-written estimate as far as what they need to correct the concern they have, then they they can enjoy the video. There are gonna be other people who won't enjoy the video because they take shitty care of their vehicle and it's all fucked up and whatever. But for the most part, I'd say a good 80% of the customers are gonna like having a video of their car because typically it's stuff that they can't see, especially if you do it from underneath. And in a lot of cases, you're gonna be telling them that this, that, and the other thing is good. Everything's good. There isn't a customer in the world who wouldn't be happy to hear that everything's good on their car. It could have 3,000 miles on it, 30,000 miles on it, or 130,000 miles on it. You tell them everything's good, except maybe this or maybe that, they should be happy. So what's gonna end up happening is customers are going to get used to getting these videos. They're gonna get you, they're gonna start to demand better quality of them, and they're going to expect them. And they're also gonna complain if they don't get them. That really, I'm sure it's happened in some places. It really hasn't started to happen as far as I can see, but I'm pretty sure that it will happen. I'm pretty sure there's some people who go, I didn't get a video. What how come I didn't get a video? As far as advisors go, I don't know if there's any help. I don't know if there's any way to help advisors out. Uh, a lot of them, you know, I don't want to lump them all into one group, but let me just say there's quite a few of them who would prefer to be doing absolutely anything else. They do not want to talk to the customers. We've documented that the advisor will say anything they need to say to get you to just leave without having to talk to you any more than it than they have to, including lying to you and not telling you about stuff that's wrong with your vehicle. We talked about that before. And then there's service managers who are gonna absolutely insist that you do a video on every single car and that it be of high quality, but then when you ask them to pay for it, well, we're not gonna do that. And then there's the technicians themselves who have to use their own phone, who have to download apps for work on their own phone and use their own phone to make videos with zero compensation. And according to this author of this post, the author of this thread, we should just shut the fuck up and do it. And I'm not down with it. I'm not down with it. And it for me, it is one of the straws that is going to break the camel's back, along with all the other stupid fucking horse shit that I have to do and and I have to put up with to do my job. And there is a fucking ton of it. There is a ton of it. And that's gonna be the subject of a podcast coming up, because I have made an enormous and enormous list of shit that pisses me off, that wears me out, grinds my brainstem into dust, and makes me want to just flip everybody off, grease the fucking wheels, and get the fuck out of this business. And a big one is not getting paid for doing a quality video. Oh, I do the quality video, and I am not getting paid for it. So what I would like to add, if you haven't uh what I would like to add is here, if you haven't found this feed on uh LinkedIn, if you're if you if you are trying to find it, I think you can find it pretty easy if you just look. But uh you could type in video MPI and it'll pop up. It'll pop up for you. You'll be able to get at it from there. Okay, so just to wrap this all up, as far as LinkedIn goes, it's not a place for us. It's just not. And so we're gonna see if we can come up with something that is just for us and watch all these uh uh jack-offs who are on LinkedIn roll over to the new site we're gonna build, to the new social media we're gonna put out there and uh start trying to tell us the same shit over and over again on that particular forum. Uh this is Uncle Jimmy. Listen, uh again, I I put together some apparel for you. It's at Grease the Wheels, one word, no spaces, uh, dot store. And you can pick up some gear. I try to make it cheap for you. I don't know how well it's gonna work because my credit card was declined because something's going wrong at the bank, and so I wasn't able to actually make the very first transaction. But uh hopefully it'll work for you. And if it doesn't, let me know. I'll figure out what's up with it and fix it. Hope you enjoy it. Hope you enjoy the podcast. I want to say have a great week. It's Thursday, so it's probably almost over. So uh, but anyway, that's enough of your Uncle Jimmy. See you.