Grease The Wheels Podcast

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy gets into how to get along with your coworkers better. As the weather begins to cool, yes even in Texas, the doors of the shop are going to stay closed more often and you’ll be working in closer quarters. The better that you all get along determines the overall vibe in the back of the house as well, so try to be helpful and c...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy wades into the foggy, brutal game that is internet reviews. In many ways reviews are one of the most important parts of your business, often taking massive precedence in the way that your company appears through search results. This allows customers to quickly form an opinion on your company, with huge potential upsides when...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy takes a serious look at mental health with way more F-Bombs than Dr. Phil could ever muster. Due to the potentially disturbing nature of this show, we are actually going to put up a content warning for marked discussions on Suicide, while putting a link to the relevant people below. This is a big deal in this industry, world...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy weaves between the extremely specific and the bigger picture when it comes to diagnosis. Having the right tools, being able to read things like wiring diagrams, and having an understanding of suspension components are all going to aid your diagnosis of vehicles - but one of the most overlooked ones is the new systems trainin...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the wheels, Uncle Jimmy enters the nebulous and often fantastical realm of warranty labor times. There are a host of problems with this system, mainly that no one can agree EXACTLY how the labor time is produced. The secondary problem with this is that the manufacturer is trying to pay their dealerships as little as humanly possible for what is oft...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we talk about the absolute basics that people should know about their cars in a revisit on the concept of “Automotive Kindergarten” . We exist because the vast majority of people who own a car today have no idea how they work. They just know that when they dont - it is going to cost them time and money. Where the misconception comes in...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the wheels, we apply some “yang” to last week’s “ying” of putting Service Advisors and Service Managers to the rack. The episode title comes from the customers in this case, which we make readily apparent. We go over some of the dumbest, most out of line, and most dramatically overblown customer reactions as well as some of their less than reasonab...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy comes off of summer break and gets medieval on Service Advisors. If you can see the cords hanging out of a set of tires, you really don’t need a tire gauge to tell you they are smoked. All we are asking for is that you ask for the sale, don’t avoid customers, and make sense with the repair order. That’s it! We get into some...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s (on time!) episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy takes a look at last week’s episode through a new set of parameters with a little more of a preservation minded end. There are a lot of reasons why people do not want to become automotive technicians, but the ones who do need to be properly developed. We can’t be chasing them out of the building with massive tool...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy makes some of his own lists as to why people are not joining the automotive trades, although the current slate of youngsters is picking it up more than the millennials and Gen X did. There are tons of reasons both internal to the shop and external that cause people to leave the automotive profession. Societal pressures for 4...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes into what the internet thinks is the top 10 causes of cars breaking down. Some of these haven’t been relevant in almost 30 years, while some of these we have never seen once in our wrenching careers - this is a bit dated so we have a fair bit of fun with it. In a weird semantic sort of argument, a lot of these are more...

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s heavily delayed episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy talks about the people who think the world revolves around them. We also do a seriously deep dive on the differences between being confident and being arrogant - turns out it's a pretty fine line dictated entirely by how you treat people! You can have tons of knowledge and use it for all the right reason...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy takes aim at the divide that exists in many dealerships between the sales and fixed ops departments. It has been noted by several sources that while many techs could sell a car in a pinch - almost no one in your sales department could do anything if they needed to prep a car for delivery, or fix something that was going wron...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the wheels, Uncle Jimmy ventures into pseudo actual journalism talking about the recent cyber attack and ransomware woes of CDK. This one was a big one- big ransome and big outage. This has completely crippled thousands of shops and dealerships across the country being locked out of the software that they use to run the business both front and back...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we go into some easy ways to avoid a coronary - taking your vacation! Studies have proven that people who actually take their vacation tend to experience a myriad of positive effects when they are out of the office, and this is especially true when your office is a shop. Too many techs take their days off in the form of a check, and thi...

Send us Fan Mail On this week's episode of Grease the Wheels, we get into the “20 Most Common Automotive Scams”.  Right off the bat, “scams” is a relative term here because the author thinks we’re still using freon. Half of them are fixed with paperwork - which you should always do, and the other half can be covered easily by video. There is no doubt that the overall public image of mechanics...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we get a little off topic with various developmental psychology articles. We’ve all heard the question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” and we’re not sure how many people came right out and said, “mechanic!” Turns out even asking this question is actually not the best thing in the world, because it can put undue burden on dev...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes full boomer and talks about some statistics involving cell phone use in the workplace. We get into just how much time we’re wasting, how we’re wasting it, and the incredible stats involving how likely we are to mess up after using our phones at work. There are some major streamlined processes in the automotive industry...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy dissects the most shortchanged part of the entire automotive industry - Human Resources! Hiring anyone who has tools and can fog a mirror is one way to fill your shop with bodies, but not paying attention to the shop chemistry can be extremely detrimental to the bottom line. When you hire the right people, the right things happen....

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy gets introspective about some of the main thesis points of the podcast in contrast with industry trends in the six years we’ve been barking into a microphone. Not a lot of podcasts age well, and some of our certainly haven't. We still don't have talking tool boxes but there are more important things at play than S4B. The pay...

Send us Fan Mail On this week's episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy suggests dissociating from yourself  to better analyze your job performance! Sargent Peppers was a genuinely cool album, showcasing the intrinsic creativity of the Beatles, but if you think about in work terms you get things like “Customer Service Voice” The better you can analyze your performance, the better you can do...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy talks about bad management practices. Bad management was the hallmark of the former Soviet Republics, but it also rears its ugly head often in the Automotive Industry. We get into some of the practices that make for bad management as well as relevant examples that are probably happening in your shop right now. From poor comm...

Send us Fan Mail On this week's episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy shows the flip side of the coin when it comes to customers. While all customers deserve a base level of respect and empathy, there are some situations where they are going to try to turn the tables. We also get into some genuinely useful customer service tips for the customer facing technicians, or anyone doing side wor...

Send us Fan Mail On this week's episode of Grease the wheels we get to the ethos of the automotive industry - making people mobile. As the people who keep the cars running, we play an absolutely vital part of this ecosystem. We also take a look at emerging automotive trends, which is hilarious because most of the stuff they're soothsaying in the articles has been the standard for 20+ yea...

Send us Fan Mail On this week's episode of Grease the Wheels, we talk about the much maligned doldrums of the flat rate pay system. When the shop isn’t making money - you aren’t making money. Whether it is a market adjustment to raising your door labor rate, to full blown economic meltdowns that make people put maintenance on the back burner - it is an incredibly cyclical beast. We also get i...