Grease The Wheels Podcast

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we complete the interview process by coming up with some intelligent questions to ask your interviewers. Admittedly, we have covered a lot of this in the last two episodes, so this is a bit more general (if you hate pushing cars, make sure you ask how they get dead cars into the shop) Asking the person you are interviewing with some of...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we continue to explore how to game job interviews with well thought out answers to the most common job interview questions. The important thing to remember when you are getting interviewed is that this is also an interview between you and the shop, so find out as much information as you can from the people that already work there. If th...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes over the top 50 questions asked during job interviews. We are still in the throes of “The Great Resignation” which started at the end of last year and is still going strong with people leaving jobs en masse. How is it affecting the automotive industry? Well, if the want ads are any suggestion, it isn't helping anyt...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy recounts a recent experience of taking a test for employment and flips the script by coming up with his own survey for you to send potential shops. Obviously sending it as an attachment with your resume might get you disqualified for the job right away, it’s just the nature of the industry. However, if you can snag an interv...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy finds an article on the internet that almost sounds like it was written by someone who listens to this show. The article: Four Reasons for the Technician Shortage, and the first one is money! This guy gets it! The only real part that we disagree with is the idea that the technician shortage could become a crisis, we only dis...

Send us Fan Mail O n this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we talk about listening, because it’s something that pretty much everyone in our industry is bad at. That’s not entirely true, tech’s are usually pretty good about listening to other techs especially when the information that can make their job easier - or just general shop banter. Other than that though, no one is listening. We also g...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels we talk about the inherent difference between Proactive and Reactive in the Automotive Industry, as well as some of the ramifications that being too heavy on one or the other can cause. As a rule of thumb, you should probably be a bit of both: being able to prevent fires in your shop or dealership is just as important as being able to handle them w...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy describes the contents of the automotive pandora’s box when it comes to all of the crazy chaos we run into. The difference here is that we have actually found some ways to attempt to minimize the chaos. People pay us to handle the chaos, and how well you handle the chaos can determine how much you are actually worth. So Uncl...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy eschews finding a top 10 list from the internet, and instead makes his own and tells you some of the ramifications of not following them! This week- it's Diag Tips!  Get the Whole Story: when a Service Advisor is vague and gives your Repair Orders like, “replace a tire” make sure you find out which one. “Has a leak”, we...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy does the boring and predictable thing of talking about goals for a New Years Podcast. However, this is going to be a little bit different, because as Technicians, our goal is to get paid for fixing broken things. One of Uncle Jimmy’s goals this year is to finally open the floodgates on a technological revolution that will le...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels Uncle Jimmy weaves a Dickensian tale about a miserly shop owner and his much more HR-oriented son. As we go, we examine how these businesses got their start, what happens when the second generation actually knows what they’re doing when it comes to the automotive industry, and the attitudes that each brings to bear in the running of day to day oper...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels we take a look at all of the points in your daily routine as an auto mechanic where communication breaks down. There are a hell of a lot of them. Any time you have angry people trying to communicate what is wrong with their car you are probably not going to get the whole story. By the time it gets filtered through the Service Advisor the...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we take a look at an internet article that has almost nothing to do with us: how to treat your employees better. This isn’t because the industry is actively looking to make things worse, more because it was written more for office work in mind. Because let’s be real, casual Friday is pretty much every day when you’re ripping transmissio...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we talk about those jobs that used to be easy- until the engineers got involved! The problem that this industry has is it’s blistering rate of change, and nowhere is that more evident in some of the insane ways that engineers have packaged these vehicles to resemble 10lbs of manure in a 2lb sack! Exhibit A: Changing the spark plugs on a...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we take a dive into the median salary for auto technicians by state. The worst part of this is that the highest median income actually comes from the District of Columbia which isn’t even a state, and all of the other highest median incomes come in states where the cost of living is outrageous to the point where people are fleeing (look...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the wheels, Uncle Jimmy dives into “11 Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Technician” with the resounding thud of “wow, only 11?” What are the things that no one tells you about before going into the automotive industry? Some of this is a bit redundant, because how could you not know some of these things. Do your training- yea, how is that not...

Send us Fan Mail On this week's episode of Grease the Wheels, we take aim at more automotive misinformation from the ill-informed passing themselves off as someone who knows about cars on the internet. So gather round boys and girls, customers and service advisors, techs of all types: this is one where we get to shred someone for being a moron! After all, the holidays are coming up, right? A...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we get into some of the astounding numbers of the automotive industry. Turns out there is a hell of a lot of money to be made in this industry, from the parts end to the wholesale end, to the retail end, to the service end. Everyone is trying to carve out their niche, but if they don’t have a good e-commerce game they are completely obs...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we get to the long awaited sequel in our ongoing series about service advisors. Now right off the bat, as we have said before and will continue to stand by, this has got to be one of the worst jobs in the entire automotive industry- and quite possibly ranks among the worst jobs on the entire planet! This is one of the things that makes...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy completely debunks an article called “20 Urban Legends That Mechanics Don’t Want to Admit Are True” but we’re not going to link it because of its poor structure and truth content. Seriously, this thing reads like a press release from the White House. This is one of the most ridiculous articles that we have ever read because...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we talk about making some changes. The only constant in this world is change, so being well prepared for it will allow you to exploit it when it happens. We talk about the changing automotive landscape as well as some of the changes that people make as they go through this industry. When you seek a change choose your confidants carefull...

Send us Fan Mail On This Week’s Episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy gets a bit of perspective written by a woman who went into the automotive industry about the pros and cons of being an auto mechanic. It rings pretty true with the existing discography of GTW, and this kinda bums us out that her experience was also that technicians typically don’t make a lot of money. We like to think that w...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy and Erik the Producer sit down and go over some tips and tricks for the interview process! First we cover the ground work when it comes to scoping out your new job: sites like GlassDoor and Reputation, as well as just their page on Google will have tons of reviews on their company. From here you can spot the potential red flags, or pos...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy takes aim and touches a few hot ones off at the customers! There are a lot of things that we wish customers knew, but one of the first ones that comes to mind is that manners are not optional. If you want to get your car fixed, sometimes it behooves you to be polite. We know that it is a major inconvenience, but odds are tha...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we actually explore several paradigm shifts that are all happening in the automotive industry at the same time. First off, and probably the one that we are most happy about, salesmen are going extinct. Seriously, the internet is the most brutally efficient salesman on the planet, they figured out how to sell polished wholesale units wit...