On this much delayed episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy takes a look at the entire strata of the typical dealership and informs them of at least one major thing that they should take into consideration in order to make the process seamless. For ownership and boards of directors, it is very hard to get an accurate picture of a dealership’s overall functionality just by the numbers. The numbers can tell you a lot, but it is sometimes hard to put toxic shops or bad processes into numbers. Working the way down, the message gets much more explicit for the Service Managers. This person should probably be well-acquainted with the chaos of a shop scenario, and needs the customer service skills to deal with people who have problems with their car, or your staff! This position is best filled with former shop foremen. Sales people just need to stay in their lane and no disrupt the process too much, while Service Advisors simply need to ask for the sale. If a Service Advisor has the added benefit of video MPI’s this should be extremely easy! We also take ourselves and Lot Porters to task for a variety of issues, and finally Uncle Jimmy takes himself to task as well!

Also Uncle Jimmy gives a shoutout to his teddy bear as the thunderstorm in the background would have warranted a dramatic reading of ‘The Raven’ as an intro!

On this fairly-sporadic episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy wades into the terminally unhinged forum of LinkedIn to find a concept that everyone deals with in this industry. The term “Emotional Waste” is the concept of negative emotions creating undue stress and occupying an inordinate amount of someone’s time. We all see this, and some of the best people in the industry have the exact opposite going on - Emotional Intelligence. This is the ability to regulate and utilize your emotional states, as well as being able to effectively read a room or read a person. Being able to quickly get over things is a key skill in this industry.

Also Uncle Jimmy goes 3rd round in the Angry draft, despite a strong showing with a missing 10mm.

On this week’s Episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy takes a look at some of the real world ramifications of Texas discontinuing their state vehicle safety inspections. The first thing that stood out to us was that it was in fact similar to those in New York, and in fact throughout most of the Rust Belt where we know they are a really good idea. Entropy is the name of the game here, and if something is too rotten to be safe, or tires are too bald to provide adequate traction — they need to go. We also get into some of the socioeconomics of the state safety inspection, and how this has altered our own perceptions of this subject over time. When we we’re young and broke, we hated it! When we had seen some stuff and learned some stuff, we we’re a lot more understanding of why they are important. Bottom line, relying on the common sense of vehicle owners is, really without a doubt, one of the worst parameters we have ever seen. We have seen the “common sense” of vehicle owners and it usually ends up on “Just Rolled In”

Also Uncle Jimmy talks his favorite ways of evading(and altering) police attention while having an out of date inspections!