I used to work with a service writer who would do this to me. He would delete the RO if the customer paid in cash and just pocket the money. Caught on real quick because I write down and track all my hours. He was quickly fired.
The service writer where I work screwed me out of hours. I had it out with him and fists almost began to fly. That was about a year ago and now he knows I'm watching.
@@justinhayward5027 What's up!! I been good!! Yeah, I stop youtube for a while. But, planing to do a come back! I left Audi few months ago and now working for AAA as a tech!
Worked at a chain store for years , one important thing to mention some shops won’t let techs price tickets for the very reason they do not want the techs to see the price cuts labor hours included
Great video! Don't forget about free diagnostic, inspection, time overlap, coupon pricing....pretty much anything to pull labor from tickets. That a favoritism are a cancer on a technicians pay check.
As a service manager, I do a few things to combat the not paying the techs the proper hours. I encourage the techs to write down their hours for every ticket (they usually don't... but hey I told them to if they feel like they are getting worked over) I then watch the service writers gross profit metrics to make sure they are not underpaying tech times to inflate the gross that they are paid on. I spot check repair orders to ensure oil changes and rotations are being credited to the correct techs and the times are correct. I don't have a problem here but again, I inspect what I expect and anytime I catch an "oops" by an advisor, i "help" them understand how they just screwed that tech out of money to feed their kids and its hard to . One of the hardest things I have tried to do is ensure that the advisor is pulling history on a previously recommended service and making sure the tech that recommended is getting it or allowed to hand it off as he or she sees fit. I usually let the tech lay into them once or twice and it fixes itself =).
I worked at a dealership where the Service manager employed his son as a tech. Here's how it worked: the son would get all the cash jobs and all the gravy warranty work. The rest of us got the oil changes, ball busting warranty work and WOT (waste of time) customers looking for free diagnostics. I brought it up to the owner - his response was to stand up for myself and confront the Service manager directly. I did that and for the next 2 months, my billed hours for the week were half what I usually made. I eventually found another job for more pay right before the owner sold the dealership. The manager was fired shortly after and his son quit after less than a week because he felt the other techs were "being fed". This was about 2 years ago and neither have been able to hold a job in the automotive industry. My rage is targeted at the owner more than the manager because he could have done something about it. *** Future topic for discussion: Techs who steal from the shop. What they take, how they do it and why including supplies, customers with side work and using the shop as a personal business.
Had to quit while working as a luber at a Honda dealer due to never having a customer that would buy services. When I don't have work for 5 hours and the main 2 are slammed and have extra tickets waiting with their name its pretty obvious
I am retired now but it has happened to me so much in my 21 years working flat rate. It does suck and that’s why I think the flat rate system needs to change. Too many shops ripping off the technicians! I’ve even done many jobs for even at dealerships and I have not got paid for it. We definitely need to change!
I learned that early on. Once I started putting my hours each day next to the time clock stamps and totaling each Friday on the time card the hours stopped disappearing.
5:08... If you're a flat rate guy and NOT keeping track of your own hours you're asking to have money taken out of your pocket. Doesn't matter how nice or trustworthy the place you work for is, stuff gets "forgotten" or the wrong key gets pressed all the time.
Thts how should be.. tech tht writes it up should go back to them. But unfortunately doesn't work tht way in alot of places. Great advice on the 2nd half about tracking time & hrs. Love ur videos Flat Rate Master. Keep em coming!
favortism is a big issue i was up for job first on a Saturday. I arrived to work before the other tech and job was given to other guy i called out my manager and he just starts yelling at me.
I am salary and counting hours is a huge problem. For bulbs, sometimes they don’t charge labor and I’m like I need credit for the work. And then oil changes they give us .5 but I have seen some cars on alldata over 1 hour for oil changes. I also think techs should get something for checking out a car.
Working hourly in a heavy equipment shop, upper management recently changed our time clock and neglected to mention that it automatically clocks you off after 8 hours a day. I legitimately thought my shop foreman was going to bash our GMs head in when we found out a week later that no one was getting payed their overtime anymore (and working on forestry equipment and logging trucks, we generally get A LOT of OT) they changed the system after that needless to say, blamed head office for it in the end.
When I worked at the dealership and went on flat rate, I came under scrutiny (along with two other techs) for what we were billing. I started tracking my times and we got a report every morning to reconcile our tickets against. Tickets I had on my schedule list were showing up on the fireman's list. The foreman never touched a car during the day, but billed 12-15 hours a day. I went to the service manager and service director about it and got told to not worry about it because the foreman "fought to get us paid". It ended up putting a target on my back about being a trouble maker. I left shortly after. Another shop I was at would short us hours on jobs. If we did a water pump, the manager would "upsell" a coolant flush. He'd cut the water pump time and add the flush into the labor dollars. He got bonuses on fluid flush sales, we got shorted on our hours. He refused to listen to the fact that flushes weren't part of repairs. That was my shortest tenure at a shop ever; 7 weeks.
Sounds like the dealer I work at..the 4 guys that stood up to it over the years got kicked out eventually. They are the "bad" guys because they aren't being team players. It is sad
When I worked For Other Shops I Always Kept my Hours Recorded. The Lat Plce I Worked I had to watch it Really Close. He always tried to short Me. I Caught him so Many times. But I Made Good Money there. Until His Coke Habit got out of control
This is why I left working at a dealership. Hours promised vs hours billed was always incorrect. Favoritism was OBVIOUS, I was new at the shop and brought it up. Left shortly after that. A co worker who left stuck a screwdriver in all tires of the service manager for being a d*ck. Thought he had that one coming.
When I was hourly at a dealership the flat rate guys loved me I would do all interior work they hated and engine jobs . Until I would sell brake jobs and maintenance items then I was starving them out. Even though they might have worked on it recently and didn’t sell the work. I had hours bonus I was trying to hit . In a shop you have to watch everything. Great video
Try working in collision repair where all the hours are reviewed by insurance people that have never worked on a car . You can write a dent for 4 hours, they’ll change it to half the amount and there’s nothing you can really do about it lol. Paint shops are also losing a lot . The auto industry has turned into real time flag hours.
Worked in a shop where the owners did favoritism and also take your tools when you were not looking. They also would borrow a tool, break it, then say " you get paid enough to afford a new one, it's your problem not ours"
One of the shops I worked at paid someone else for the work I did. I wrote down everything I did and what it paid. I had a brake job I only got paid .5 for. At that shop brakes pay 1.8. I confronted my boss and he told me he had to pay another tech the 1.3 because he had his ass kicked on something. Needless to say I didn’t stay there much longer.
This was a HUGE issue at a previous shop I worked at. We had a service advisor who wrote about 70% of the cars, so naturally, he was too busy to try to sell every recommendation that came across his desk. He had enough volume, he didn't need to try to sell it all - he still made a killing. What he would do is check previous recommendations the next time the car came in the shop, upsell off of those and then assign them to his favorite tech. I caught him doing that once but management didn't care. A lot of us were pissed because everyone knew what was going on. The current shop I'm at is so busy, I honestly could not care less if my recommendations go to another tech. We've got enough work that several guys only do the work they want to do and give the rest to someone else. I normally prefer to "clear the ticket" myself but I have given away jobs I'm less proficient at so that I can work on a job I'm more proficient at.
Oh yes this happened to me ALOT. Not really diag getting cut from my total RO, that was kind of rare. But as of getting my recommendations tossed up for anyone to grab was constant and my boss was always complaining to me about my flagged hours and I told him why. Either advisors weren't selling, or my work was being tossed to whoever else. I got tired of it one day When I saw a car I had done the past 3 times, put in recs prev, and did they every time. They gave it to someone else for the work and when I asked my service manager about it, he said that if the customer doesn't make an appointment right away to come back specifically for that, the work was tossed up for anyone. I got pissed and call his ass out on the drive about that is why work never comes back to me and I was on his ass for 10 minutes in front of customers on the drive about it. He didn't like that The next day, I pushed out my toolbox.
I R&R transmissions all day long. Our transmission Rebuilder sucks and most the time we get comebacks and I have to pull it again. The shop likes to not pay on the second and third time it has to get done
We have a few safeguards in place that assure the tech who checked the car out gets the work once approved. First off, we have a highly qualified manager and honest technicians, so that's definitely a huge help. Every car that gets looked at has the technician's name logged into the work order notes. There's no claiming "I didn't know someone else looked at this car" because the tech's name is right there in the notes. All parts that get approved go on the parts shelf with a sticky note attached with the tech's name on it, thus identifying beyond any doubt who's installing those parts. That being said, there are a few legitimate exceptions. We have a few younger, somewhat inexperienced techs in the shop. If they write a vehicle up for a repair that's clearly beyond their skill level and could end badly if not properly repaired, that job will get done by me or one of the other more experienced techs. If myself or another tech is on vacation and a car needs to get done to make the sale, then someone else needs to step in and take care of that. Other than those 2 scenarios, you repair the vehicle you inspected. We're a flat shop (thank God), so making sure a tech gets the work he's entitled is definitely the right thing to do.
I use to see this all the time and the only way around it is if a existing customer returns and actually suggests the last previous tech who performed services on there vehicle and another thing even if a tech runs into a issue like that if they either catch it ahead of time or not its there responsibility to nip it inn the butt and speak up and stand there ground close mouth don't get fed ...If they do not stand there ground they will stand upon the sideline while favoritism will be at a all time high and they will stand at a glance watching others exceed and excel past them with either less experience or less know how
I’m on a guarantee. But that can be a problem. The service manager seems to think that he can fudge the numbers on labor . Do the old steel from the labor end and put it on parts. Problem is. Not only do I loose a boatload of money. But as you mentioned. The owner thinks I’m not turning like I normal would. I constantly have to fight to get my hours.
Christopher I feel your pain. I too was on a guarantee and was told I could keep anything billed over those hours. I thought, wow money to be earned here. I then realized he was cutting the flat rate in half and overcharging for parts and machine shop fees. This kept him competitive in the market, but screwing the techs. I finally just packed up and walked out one day after renegotiating did no good. He said, "Where are you going?" I said, "I'm going to find a good job."
Worked for a mazda dealership. Got my level 1 however they didn’t have enough work for the senior techs. Everything beyond oil changes. Went to them or the other techs. Then they let me go because I called up brakes 2mm in rear. I was wrong it was 1mm and ANOTHER shop told this to customer, and there was a TSB i was supposed to be in the know of 😆 so 2mm is ok to drive on?
When I worked at sears the salesman would ring up a return under the original salesman 👨💼, making him lose the commission on the sale. Instead of ringing up the replacement under that same person thus giving him back the commission, they would do under their own name. Which gives them the commission.
Dealerships that i worked when i started i was a oil tech we would have us doing inspections and then they have the other techs that are more experienced to what i understand but when you give the guy gravy jobs them. I understand but still the other guys gets work that you said it needs but you only get for the oil change. No incentive for this because you get the .6 for the oil change but the other guy gets the hight and better paying job
Where I work, there is always a difference between the hours billed to the customer and the hours paid to the tech. Tech gets paid the book time, and customer pays book time plus a labor time markup. Is this normal?
Watch this to. Say your certified in many areas for a manufacturer and your the only tech in the shop that can do the warranty work. If your good enough for warranty work, you should be good enough for the CP work too right? Specifically CVT stuff. Yeah, i blew a gasket. If I have to suffer on warrenty time, im getting my grayvey too. Especially since other techs didn't want to go to the classes for the warranty work.
manager tried this once and i fried his ass to HR. i got zero tolerance for that shit. work too long hard cuz someone decided to devalue my work somewhere down the line and instead lined thier own pockets for thie 'bonus'. didnt even want to bring the shit up but when ure missing 500 dollars over a period of time yeah. no
I think I have pretty much solved these problems. The techs are all paid .40 for every inspection. The advisors are on hourly base plus commission team pay. The advisors have assigned tech teams, two techs per advisor. The technicians gets a tech sheet with pay hours before starting job. The techs all punch time cards for every job and use flags they attach to every tech sheet. The tech keeps a tear off copy of every time card at the end of the day. At the end of the pay period a tech pay hours sheet is printed out and given to the tech to match up to their time card stubs. After tech verifies their pay hours are correct for the pay period they sign the tech pay sheet and turn it in to be paid off of. Techs know daily how many hours they flagged.
I have a dope spreadsheet that I add every RO to. New columns for every week. Helps me track my hours and my averages. Also helps me figure out what my bonus will be in December (as it's based on hours flagged). When our check stubs come, I add that take home amount to the bottom and figure my take home/flag hour. This means that I can estimate, very closely, how much my paycheck will be a week ahead of time.
The foreman or manager doesn’t care about the technicians as long as the work is getting done. The favourites can fuck up and get nothing said to them but god forbidden the technician who knows how to do there job!
I worked nights at a dealership you had A,B,C rates . All the gravy was at C rate $10 it was crazy . My A,B rates were very high . . Paying me $35 for front brakes rebuild calipers, turn rotors or replace . I was nuts . And they acted like they were giving a present . They were Paying warranty transmission overhaul at B level. So there margin increased upping gross profit. What I kept to my self way I was a service manager at a dealership 25 minutes away . I couldn't believe there was no way to even up a techs hours that put the extra in to duplicate, diagnose, and repair . The other thing they would do is give you a warranty job , diagnose but had to order parts. They didn't flag the diagnose time. They would say diag is part of the repair we won't pay until it's back for the part . Many Many Many times I didn't get these jobs back . Many of the techs never caught it . The other thing management didn't do is sit down with the techs and show them the labor code book , and add one, broken bolt time . And how to write complaint, cause,correction and giving the warranty admin something to work with . It had to have the buzz words to get paid as well as possible. This was back in the day with flag sheets I always had 3 flag sheets customer pay and warranty with different time flags to use to show time on a repair. It was crazy to keep the code book a secret.
During my time at Firestone I worked at one store where the manager would pay his favorite on 3 or 4 of my end of the week tickets so he would book more hours. When I would call him out on it he would give me my hours owed but would never deduct the hours he paid his boy, so his boy always made out
Flat Rate Master, From my point being the customer I want to know who's working on my car. For many years I strived to find a local shop that I could trust. About 15 + years ago I found myself working with a VW dealership ( I never thought I would do that ) I developed a friendship with almost everyone involved in the shop ( going into the shop and BS with them) against management policy, it's all about relationships. So to this day, the shop foreman is my go-to guy. My daily drive 2002 VW GTI 1.8 Turbo 287,000 with stage 1 flash and a few other mods.
Thats whats going on at my shop now this past t week they had both bays held up all week for a gas tank and kept getting me the wrong parts. New guy was getting all of the jobs that I had already diagnosed and was waiting on parts
Reminds me of my first time sub contracting. My boss and I totaled my truck going from Job site to job site. He decided not to pay me my paycheck after my truck was totaled and I was no use to him. Worked for him for two weeks, lost my truck and didn’t get a dime aside from gas money (using my truck to haul equipment). I was 18... young and naive.
I wanna know you opinion on d rated pay. Because our shop have a limit on what jobs pay like alignment, brakes pretty much all easy jobs have a max limit
They try to give stuff back to the techs that recommend it but it doesn't always happen. I can think of several instances where I reconized the vehicle on someone elses lift doing things i recommended, I get a copy of the ro and snap a picture and go to my boss wft? But the other side of that which i see a lot is a tech previously beating up the car before hand and it comes in for an oil change "with high mileage and oppertunity" and you can't sell anything because of the history. Or same instance but it comes in for a warranty repair issue. I constantly explain this but that won't change. The only light at the end of the tunnel is 2 of the favoirtes will be retiring in the next 2 years. The time thing happens a lot, we as dealership techs keep track of time because we are constantly back flagged on warranty repairs. "they don't pay for that" UM the labor operation says add time.... diag time... ect. I can say almost never has my flagged sheet matched the hours I have wrote down. Luckly my boss is good about paying us the missing time. He also know if he doesn't poof we are gone and they can't find any replacements like they use to. Mistakes do happen but a lot is from the writers either giving stuff away or just their own stupidity. There also has been some shady shit that goes down like double paying us for a warranty job then back flagging us later. But the double pay happens after we apporve our hours for that week, then the following week we have -x hours. But this is why docummenting hours is very important.
Wage theft is a real problem in almost every industry. One of my previous employers had a time clock that rounded off tenths of an hour. That adds up quicker than you might think. Another one didn't allow technician to see actual hours billed or which work order your time was billed to. You clock in and out with a tablet and work orders are pushed to your tablet. Any internal time had to be allocated "Manually". I keep a big yellow legal pad on my toolbox and mark out every work order complete with time stamps. If a service advisor comes to speak to me about a job I write it down, if I have to look up parts or do internal work I make a note. It's amazing how my missing time issues have miraculously fixed themselves.
One thing is guaranteed where I work at is your time will be short every pay period. Our service writers never get it right. Fortunately management give us a printout of our time before pay go in and he will fix that time if it is not right. It shouldn't be that way but it is and even if I'm short 3/10ths I'm coming for mine. As a flat rate tech nothing is given for free. When the dealership is slow we are the only one's that get nothing if not one car show up.
Many years ago I worked for a shop that had a timid service writer. He was scared of tickets over $1000. He would chop labor like crazy to be below 1k. Used to piss me off so much.
Be like me when I tell them "I don't give a F__K what you charge the customer but I'm getting my time or I'll walk the F__K out of here right now." (It helps too that all my kids are grown, I'm debt free, and don't have to worry about not having a job for a while.)
My service manager doesn’t give up commission on parts, up sells or anything. Is that right? Like on a check engine light concern and you diagnose it and write it up for brakes and something else we don’t get anything for it even if they approve the job
I give my lube techs 5% of any inspection up sells (parts and labor) this is a bonus and not as common as I have been told. They don’t get anything for recommendations based on the customers original complaint(s).
Flat rate can be very frustrating in slow times. I got divorced in 2005 and three years later I was debt free and was no longer living paycheck to paycheck. Now the slow times are just boring and not as frustrating. I try to tell the young guys, when times are good, build a bank roll for those not so good times but most don't listen until they experience a few of them.
At one time I worked at small town dealership. All other techs we're hourly except me. During lof I found intake leaking on 96-99 chevy truck with vortec engine. Week later another guy was doing it. Service manager didn't understand why I was pissed. Had to explain that owner hired me at flat-rate.
The dealer I left the advisors got paid commission off of labor profit only so they had an incentive to get us as many hours as they could. However they took away everyones ability to see other techs productivity because it started to become obvious as to who or what teams were getting fed the gravy aka airbags. Rather than spreading them around the shop a certain team was getting 3x what the rest of the entire shop got. Team leads threw a fit and hour lookup went bye bye lol
One other aspect I am suspicious of... If I make $40/hr and another guy makes $20/hr, they maybe more inclined to load him up with gravy and have me do all of the warranty work simply because the shop will keep more profit on each of his hours. And then tell you, well you don't want to be doing brake jobs and flushes all day, do you?
Yeah i have this problem at my shop now🙄....and me being the state inspector my recommendations/findings are thru the roof but 80% of those cars that come back the other techs are being assigned those repair orders😤so other techs are benefitting from my work🤦♂️
Great video , favoritism! happens a lot in flat rate body shops , a lot of ass kissing ! and it affects every body in the shop but management don’t care about you , they only care about themselves and making their numbers at the end of the month and you don’t even get a thank you from them at the end of the day .
Yeah, i inspect school buses, i am a hourly employee, and i inspect every thing in the shop or out in the field, my write ups, Don't go to me, they go to my coworker, which pisses me off because i found the problem and i would love to do more repairs than inspections. Fair is fair.
We don’t really have favoritism here, we got guys grabbing the low hanging fruit that makes there production look good leaving the harder work for others, I tell them we’re hourly, just do it or leave
Huge huge huge problems at the dealer. I see this almost everyday. Every tech is perceived differently around the shop and that very much effects what work one is given. I haven't seen any writers taking hours from tech but they will screw over the parts dept. a lot. Ex: say someone's doing brakes and the didn't tell the writer shims need replacement till after the job is sold. The writers will often times just tell the tech to put it on and add the shims to the RO at cost. In other words the parts dept. makes nothing off those shims. This is very unhealthy for a dealer because service parts and sales are all seperate businesses that all need to be profitable.
I’m pretty sure that this is going on in my dealership. My paystubs and my math haven’t been the same in the last few pay periods . We also have service writers that will do other nefarious things at my shop we don’t really have a dispatch. We have one 5 days out of the week but things get by him when either he’s not there or our system of just have bins for the RO. One bin is lvl1 (hourly lube) the other is lvl2 (flat rate higher mileage, brakes, tires, medium duty stuff) I’ve seen it very often where a lvl2 job is in the lvl1 bin on a very dead day. It’ll pay me an hour but the lvl1 is hourly and will only flag .6. It apparently happens multiple times a day and it’s frustrating when I think that I’m not making hours and could be having a pretty good day with these cars. For right now I’m staying but it’s going to be time to find a new shop if they don’t change or stop making excuses.
I learned this from working part time for a used car lot. And he was very shady I caught him several times cheating my hours and he kept admiring my scan tools and other tools then I come in one Monday morning and my toolbox and cabinet was tore all to hell and the tools he liked was stolen with my welders and a lot of specialty tools but his few tools wasn't touched and just so happens the cameras and security wasn't working almost 12 thousand dollars in tools gone and insurance would only pay 1500 I hate people like that
stocking to your title : yes a lot of shops steal from there techs. case in point a repair might call for 6 hours ,then the next go around identical repair foreman tells you it now pays 5 hours ,then a 3rd go around identical repair now only pays 3 1/5 hours to you later to find out every single time shop billed 6 hours to customers pocketing your money. this is how they screw you, looking up S.R.T. times on your own on every job
Flat rate techs HAVE to write down their hours. I can't count how many times I've gone back to the service writer(s) and had them add my missing labor in.
Yo Peter Paul will be in later this week..I have a few vehicles I need you to check out real quick, A few minutes, on your break, first time long time, complementary inspection, trumps personal vehicle,Mother Theresa’s coach And we will square up next Tuesday
@@stevenfarley6909 - if you're on salary but you are worth more than flat rate you're not in the right shop. In my experiences, techs on salary are usually good at what they do but are not very efficient.
![เกิดใหม่ทั้งทีก็เป็นสไลม์ไปซะแล้ว ซีซั่น 3 - ตอนที่ 65 [ซับไทย]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4EsinscQCfs/mqdefault.jpg)
This is exactly why I left the industry. Amongst many other reasons
Great video seen so much of that “favoritism” behavior in the dealer world.
I used to work with a service writer who would do this to me. He would delete the RO if the customer paid in cash and just pocket the money. Caught on real quick because I write down and track all my hours. He was quickly fired.
The service writer where I work screwed me out of hours. I had it out with him and fists almost began to fly. That was about a year ago and now he knows I'm watching.
93sundance The funk zone ?
Everything you mentioned is happening in the shop it's time to look for another job!!
Yo frank how you been man haven’t seen any posts from you! You still at Audi?
@@justinhayward5027 What's up!! I been good!! Yeah, I stop youtube for a while. But, planing to do a come back! I left Audi few months ago and now working for AAA as a tech!
!! What sup Frank !! We enjoyed ur channel .. R u going getting done again (posted new video)
@@pakliv3243 Yeah, try to get a small place so that I can make videos again. But, it's not easy to find a cheap place to work on cars.
Worked at a chain store for years , one important thing to mention some shops won’t let techs price tickets for the very reason they do not want the techs to see the price cuts labor hours included
Great video! Don't forget about free diagnostic, inspection, time overlap, coupon pricing....pretty much anything to pull labor from tickets. That a favoritism are a cancer on a technicians pay check.
As a service manager, I do a few things to combat the not paying the techs the proper hours. I encourage the techs to write down their hours for every ticket (they usually don't... but hey I told them to if they feel like they are getting worked over) I then watch the service writers gross profit metrics to make sure they are not underpaying tech times to inflate the gross that they are paid on. I spot check repair orders to ensure oil changes and rotations are being credited to the correct techs and the times are correct. I don't have a problem here but again, I inspect what I expect and anytime I catch an "oops" by an advisor, i "help" them understand how they just screwed that tech out of money to feed their kids and its hard to . One of the hardest things I have tried to do is ensure that the advisor is pulling history on a previously recommended service and making sure the tech that recommended is getting it or allowed to hand it off as he or she sees fit. I usually let the tech lay into them once or twice and it fixes itself =).
I worked at a dealership where the Service manager employed his son as a tech. Here's how it worked: the son would get all the cash jobs and all the gravy warranty work. The rest of us got the oil changes, ball busting warranty work and WOT (waste of time) customers looking for free diagnostics. I brought it up to the owner - his response was to stand up for myself and confront the Service manager directly. I did that and for the next 2 months, my billed hours for the week were half what I usually made. I eventually found another job for more pay right before the owner sold the dealership. The manager was fired shortly after and his son quit after less than a week because he felt the other techs were "being fed". This was about 2 years ago and neither have been able to hold a job in the automotive industry. My rage is targeted at the owner more than the manager because he could have done something about it.
*** Future topic for discussion: Techs who steal from the shop. What they take, how they do it and why including supplies, customers with side work and using the shop as a personal business.
Had to quit while working as a luber at a Honda dealer due to never having a customer that would buy services. When I don't have work for 5 hours and the main 2 are slammed and have extra tickets waiting with their name its pretty obvious
were u flat or hourly?
I am retired now but it has happened to me so much in my 21 years working flat rate. It does suck and that’s why I think the flat rate system needs to change. Too many shops ripping off the technicians! I’ve even done many jobs for even at dealerships and I have not got paid for it. We definitely need to change!
I was fired from Subaru dealership after I called a service writer out for favoritism.
Good advice, always record your hours, even if you are salary or hourly or flat rate. No matter where you work or what you do keep track of the hours.
I learned that early on. Once I started putting my hours each day next to the time clock stamps and totaling each Friday on the time card the hours stopped disappearing.
5:08... If you're a flat rate guy and NOT keeping track of your own hours you're asking to have money taken out of your pocket. Doesn't matter how nice or trustworthy the place you work for is, stuff gets "forgotten" or the wrong key gets pressed all the time.
Keep track of your work. It helps keep them honest. LOL especially when they learn you're keep track.
We get paid by the hour plus overtime. I work in fleet. It’s the opposite here. We try to give it to the next tech. Lol
Thts how should be.. tech tht writes it up should go back to them. But unfortunately doesn't work tht way in alot of places. Great advice on the 2nd half about tracking time & hrs. Love ur videos Flat Rate Master. Keep em coming!
favortism is a big issue i was up for job first on a Saturday. I arrived to work before the other tech and job was given to other guy i called out my manager and he just starts yelling at me.
I am salary and counting hours is a huge problem. For bulbs, sometimes they don’t charge labor and I’m like I need credit for the work. And then oil changes they give us .5 but I have seen some cars on alldata over 1 hour for oil changes. I also think techs should get something for checking out a car.
Working hourly in a heavy equipment shop, upper management recently changed our time clock and neglected to mention that it automatically clocks you off after 8 hours a day. I legitimately thought my shop foreman was going to bash our GMs head in when we found out a week later that no one was getting payed their overtime anymore (and working on forestry equipment and logging trucks, we generally get A LOT of OT) they changed the system after that needless to say, blamed head office for it in the end.
Good on your foreman for sticking up for yall. It got results lol.
Thank you for always making great videos man
When I worked at the dealership and went on flat rate, I came under scrutiny (along with two other techs) for what we were billing. I started tracking my times and we got a report every morning to reconcile our tickets against. Tickets I had on my schedule list were showing up on the fireman's list. The foreman never touched a car during the day, but billed 12-15 hours a day. I went to the service manager and service director about it and got told to not worry about it because the foreman "fought to get us paid". It ended up putting a target on my back about being a trouble maker. I left shortly after.
Another shop I was at would short us hours on jobs. If we did a water pump, the manager would "upsell" a coolant flush. He'd cut the water pump time and add the flush into the labor dollars. He got bonuses on fluid flush sales, we got shorted on our hours. He refused to listen to the fact that flushes weren't part of repairs. That was my shortest tenure at a shop ever; 7 weeks.
I have been an advisor and now am a service manager and this gets my blood boiling. That's grounds for an A.. whooping.
Sounds like the dealer I work at..the 4 guys that stood up to it over the years got kicked out eventually. They are the "bad" guys because they aren't being team players. It is sad
SHould always publicly let everyone know what they do on Facebook
When I worked For Other Shops I Always Kept my Hours Recorded. The Lat Plce I Worked I had to watch it Really Close. He always tried to short Me. I Caught him so Many times. But I Made Good Money there. Until His Coke Habit got out of control
This is why I left working at a dealership. Hours promised vs hours billed was always incorrect. Favoritism was OBVIOUS, I was new at the shop and brought it up. Left shortly after that. A co worker who left stuck a screwdriver in all tires of the service manager for being a d*ck. Thought he had that one coming.
When I was hourly at a dealership the flat rate guys loved me I would do all interior work they hated and engine jobs . Until I would sell brake jobs and maintenance items then I was starving them out. Even though they might have worked on it recently and didn’t sell the work. I had hours bonus I was trying to hit . In a shop you have to watch everything. Great video
Try working in collision repair where all the hours are reviewed by insurance people that have never worked on a car .
You can write a dent for 4 hours, they’ll change it to half the amount and there’s nothing you can really do about it lol.
Paint shops are also losing a lot . The auto industry has turned into real time flag hours.
Worked in a shop where the owners did favoritism and also take your tools when you were not looking. They also would borrow a tool, break it, then say " you get paid enough to afford a new one, it's your problem not ours"
that would be when i would electrify my box. touch my shit with out permission thats what you get.
One of the shops I worked at paid someone else for the work I did. I wrote down everything I did and what it paid. I had a brake job I only got paid .5 for. At that shop brakes pay 1.8. I confronted my boss and he told me he had to pay another tech the 1.3 because he had his ass kicked on something. Needless to say I didn’t stay there much longer.
This was a HUGE issue at a previous shop I worked at. We had a service advisor who wrote about 70% of the cars, so naturally, he was too busy to try to sell every recommendation that came across his desk. He had enough volume, he didn't need to try to sell it all - he still made a killing. What he would do is check previous recommendations the next time the car came in the shop, upsell off of those and then assign them to his favorite tech. I caught him doing that once but management didn't care. A lot of us were pissed because everyone knew what was going on.
The current shop I'm at is so busy, I honestly could not care less if my recommendations go to another tech. We've got enough work that several guys only do the work they want to do and give the rest to someone else. I normally prefer to "clear the ticket" myself but I have given away jobs I'm less proficient at so that I can work on a job I'm more proficient at.
Oh yes this happened to me ALOT. Not really diag getting cut from my total RO, that was kind of rare. But as of getting my recommendations tossed up for anyone to grab was constant and my boss was always complaining to me about my flagged hours and I told him why. Either advisors weren't selling, or my work was being tossed to whoever else. I got tired of it one day When I saw a car I had done the past 3 times, put in recs prev, and did they every time. They gave it to someone else for the work and when I asked my service manager about it, he said that if the customer doesn't make an appointment right away to come back specifically for that, the work was tossed up for anyone. I got pissed and call his ass out on the drive about that is why work never comes back to me and I was on his ass for 10 minutes in front of customers on the drive about it. He didn't like that The next day, I pushed out my toolbox.
The reason I left my dealership to a diesel fleet shop and haven’t regret a thing
I R&R transmissions all day long. Our transmission Rebuilder sucks and most the time we get comebacks and I have to pull it again. The shop likes to not pay on the second and third time it has to get done
Favoritism is definitely going on where I work. I rarely get easy work but when I do, my shop foreman flips it to the same guy over and over
The man with the notes controls the room
We have a few safeguards in place that assure the tech who checked the car out gets the work once approved. First off, we have a highly qualified manager and honest technicians, so that's definitely a huge help. Every car that gets looked at has the technician's name logged into the work order notes. There's no claiming "I didn't know someone else looked at this car" because the tech's name is right there in the notes. All parts that get approved go on the parts shelf with a sticky note attached with the tech's name on it, thus identifying beyond any doubt who's installing those parts. That being said, there are a few legitimate exceptions. We have a few younger, somewhat inexperienced techs in the shop. If they write a vehicle up for a repair that's clearly beyond their skill level and could end badly if not properly repaired, that job will get done by me or one of the other more experienced techs. If myself or another tech is on vacation and a car needs to get done to make the sale, then someone else needs to step in and take care of that. Other than those 2 scenarios, you repair the vehicle you inspected. We're a flat shop (thank God), so making sure a tech gets the work he's entitled is definitely the right thing to do.
Happinging to me .
New boss says my productivity has dropped .
I have been there over 19 years . Everything is different but me . ??
I use to see this all the time and the only way around it is if a existing customer returns and actually suggests the last previous tech who performed services on there vehicle and another thing even if a tech runs into a issue like that if they either catch it ahead of time or not its there responsibility to nip it inn the butt and speak up and stand there ground close mouth don't get fed ...If they do not stand there ground they will stand upon the sideline while favoritism will be at a all time high and they will stand at a glance watching others exceed and excel past them with either less experience or less know how
I used to work for a shop and they were putting another techs name on the ticket when I did the work
I’m on a guarantee. But that can be a problem. The service manager seems to think that he can fudge the numbers on labor . Do the old steel from the labor end and put it on parts.
Problem is. Not only do I loose a boatload of money. But as you mentioned. The owner thinks I’m not turning like I normal would.
I constantly have to fight to get my hours.
Christopher I feel your pain. I too was on a guarantee and was told I could keep anything billed over those hours. I thought, wow money to be earned here. I then realized he was cutting the flat rate in half and overcharging for parts and machine shop fees. This kept him competitive in the market, but screwing the techs. I finally just packed up and walked out one day after renegotiating did no good. He said, "Where are you going?" I said, "I'm going to find a good job."
Worked for a mazda dealership. Got my level 1 however they didn’t have enough work for the senior techs. Everything beyond oil changes. Went to them or the other techs. Then they let me go because I called up brakes 2mm in rear. I was wrong it was 1mm and ANOTHER shop told this to customer, and there was a TSB i was supposed to be in the know of 😆 so 2mm is ok to drive on?
When I worked at sears the salesman would ring up a return under the original salesman 👨💼, making him lose the commission on the sale. Instead of ringing up the replacement under that same person thus giving him back the commission, they would do under their own name. Which gives them the commission.
Dealerships that i worked when i started i was a oil tech we would have us doing inspections and then they have the other techs that are more experienced to what i understand but when you give the guy gravy jobs them. I understand but still the other guys gets work that you said it needs but you only get for the oil change. No incentive for this because you get the .6 for the oil change but the other guy gets the hight and better paying job
Where I work, there is always a difference between the hours billed to the customer and the hours paid to the tech. Tech gets paid the book time, and customer pays book time plus a labor time markup. Is this normal?
Watch this to. Say your certified in many areas for a manufacturer and your the only tech in the shop that can do the warranty work. If your good enough for warranty work, you should be good enough for the CP work too right?
Specifically CVT stuff. Yeah, i blew a gasket. If I have to suffer on warrenty time, im getting my grayvey too.
Especially since other techs didn't want to go to the classes for the warranty work.
manager tried this once and i fried his ass to HR. i got zero tolerance for that shit. work too long hard cuz someone decided to devalue my work somewhere down the line and instead lined thier own pockets for thie 'bonus'. didnt even want to bring the shit up but when ure missing 500 dollars over a period of time yeah. no
Yep that’s my situation that’s why I left the shop I used to work for, yes the favoritism good god the BS never ends 🙄
I think I have pretty much solved these problems. The techs are all paid .40 for every inspection. The advisors are on hourly base plus commission team pay. The advisors have assigned tech teams, two techs per advisor. The technicians gets a tech sheet with pay hours before starting job. The techs all punch time cards for every job and use flags they attach to every tech sheet. The tech keeps a tear off copy of every time card at the end of the day. At the end of the pay period a tech pay hours sheet is printed out and given to the tech to match up to their time card stubs. After tech verifies their pay hours are correct for the pay period they sign the tech pay sheet and turn it in to be paid off of. Techs know daily how many hours they flagged.
I have a dope spreadsheet that I add every RO to. New columns for every week. Helps me track my hours and my averages. Also helps me figure out what my bonus will be in December (as it's based on hours flagged).
When our check stubs come, I add that take home amount to the bottom and figure my take home/flag hour. This means that I can estimate, very closely, how much my paycheck will be a week ahead of time.
The foreman or manager doesn’t care about the technicians as long as the work is getting done. The favourites can fuck up and get nothing said to them but god forbidden the technician who knows how to do there job!
I worked nights at a dealership you had A,B,C rates . All the gravy was at C rate $10 it was crazy . My A,B rates were very high . . Paying me $35 for front brakes rebuild calipers, turn rotors or replace . I was nuts . And they acted like they were giving a present . They were Paying warranty transmission overhaul at B level. So there margin increased upping gross profit. What I kept to my self way I was a service manager at a dealership 25 minutes away . I couldn't believe there was no way to even up a techs hours that put the extra in to duplicate, diagnose, and repair . The other thing they would do is give you a warranty job , diagnose but had to order parts. They didn't flag the diagnose time. They would say diag is part of the repair we won't pay until it's back for the part . Many Many Many times I didn't get these jobs back . Many of the techs never caught it . The other thing management didn't do is sit down with the techs and show them the labor code book , and add one, broken bolt time . And how to write complaint, cause,correction and giving the warranty admin something to work with . It had to have the buzz words to get paid as well as possible. This was back in the day with flag sheets I always had 3 flag sheets customer pay and warranty with different time flags to use to show time on a repair. It was crazy to keep the code book a secret.
During my time at Firestone I worked at one store where the manager would pay his favorite on 3 or 4 of my end of the week tickets so he would book more hours. When I would call him out on it he would give me my hours owed but would never deduct the hours he paid his boy, so his boy always made out
Flat Rate Master, From my point being the customer I want to know who's working on my car. For many years I strived to find a local shop that I could trust. About 15 + years ago I found myself working with a VW dealership ( I never thought I would do that ) I developed a friendship with almost everyone involved in the shop ( going into the shop and BS with them) against management policy, it's all about relationships. So to this day, the shop foreman is my go-to guy.
My daily drive 2002 VW GTI 1.8 Turbo 287,000 with stage 1 flash and a few other mods.
Thats whats going on at my shop now this past t week they had both bays held up all week for a gas tank and kept getting me the wrong parts. New guy was getting all of the jobs that I had already diagnosed and was waiting on parts
Reminds me of my first time sub contracting. My boss and I totaled my truck going from Job site to job site. He decided not to pay me my paycheck after my truck was totaled and I was no use to him. Worked for him for two weeks, lost my truck and didn’t get a dime aside from gas money (using my truck to haul equipment). I was 18... young and naive.
Dealerships have been doing this all my career including today
I wanna know you opinion on d rated pay. Because our shop have a limit on what jobs pay like alignment, brakes pretty much all easy jobs have a max limit
Great points well taken. Thx
They try to give stuff back to the techs that recommend it but it doesn't always happen. I can think of several instances where I reconized the vehicle on someone elses lift doing things i recommended, I get a copy of the ro and snap a picture and go to my boss wft? But the other side of that which i see a lot is a tech previously beating up the car before hand and it comes in for an oil change "with high mileage and oppertunity" and you can't sell anything because of the history. Or same instance but it comes in for a warranty repair issue. I constantly explain this but that won't change. The only light at the end of the tunnel is 2 of the favoirtes will be retiring in the next 2 years.
The time thing happens a lot, we as dealership techs keep track of time because we are constantly back flagged on warranty repairs. "they don't pay for that" UM the labor operation says add time.... diag time... ect. I can say almost never has my flagged sheet matched the hours I have wrote down. Luckly my boss is good about paying us the missing time. He also know if he doesn't poof we are gone and they can't find any replacements like they use to. Mistakes do happen but a lot is from the writers either giving stuff away or just their own stupidity. There also has been some shady shit that goes down like double paying us for a warranty job then back flagging us later. But the double pay happens after we apporve our hours for that week, then the following week we have -x hours. But this is why docummenting hours is very important.
Wage theft is a real problem in almost every industry. One of my previous employers had a time clock that rounded off tenths of an hour. That adds up quicker than you might think. Another one didn't allow technician to see actual hours billed or which work order your time was billed to. You clock in and out with a tablet and work orders are pushed to your tablet. Any internal time had to be allocated "Manually". I keep a big yellow legal pad on my toolbox and mark out every work order complete with time stamps. If a service advisor comes to speak to me about a job I write it down, if I have to look up parts or do internal work I make a note. It's amazing how my missing time issues have miraculously fixed themselves.
I started doing something similar years ago and it is amazing how your time doesn't get messed up when they know you're tracking it.
One thing is guaranteed where I work at is your time will be short every pay period. Our service writers never get it right. Fortunately management give us a printout of our time before pay go in and he will fix that time if it is not right. It shouldn't be that way but it is and even if I'm short 3/10ths I'm coming for mine. As a flat rate tech nothing is given for free. When the dealership is slow we are the only one's that get nothing if not one car show up.
This is a serious problem in the shop I work in. Won't go on a rant, but I totally agree with everything said in this video.
4.27 If a service writer is found doing this id say he'd be lucky to leave the building without having a so called accident.
Sounds like your place is run very transparent! Always good for business Mike!
Happens all the time
Great advice Mike!
Many years ago I worked for a shop that had a timid service writer. He was scared of tickets over $1000. He would chop labor like crazy to be below 1k. Used to piss me off so much.
Be like me when I tell them "I don't give a F__K what you charge the customer but I'm getting my time or I'll walk the F__K out of here right now."
(It helps too that all my kids are grown, I'm debt free, and don't have to worry about not having a job for a while.)
My service manager doesn’t give up commission on parts, up sells or anything. Is that right? Like on a check engine light concern and you diagnose it and write it up for brakes and something else we don’t get anything for it even if they approve the job
I give my lube techs 5% of any inspection up sells (parts and labor) this is a bonus and not as common as I have been told. They don’t get anything for recommendations based on the customers original complaint(s).
Good channel. I’m not an automobile mechanic. Just interesting hearing about auto shop life. Flat rate must be challenging when business is slow.
Flat rate can be very frustrating in slow times. I got divorced in 2005 and three years later I was debt free and was no longer living paycheck to paycheck. Now the slow times are just boring and not as frustrating. I try to tell the young guys, when times are good, build a bank roll for those not so good times but most don't listen until they experience a few of them.
At one time I worked at small town dealership. All other techs we're hourly except me. During lof I found intake leaking on 96-99 chevy truck with vortec engine. Week later another guy was doing it. Service manager didn't understand why I was pissed. Had to explain that owner hired me at flat-rate.
The dealer I left the advisors got paid commission off of labor profit only so they had an incentive to get us as many hours as they could. However they took away everyones ability to see other techs productivity because it started to become obvious as to who or what teams were getting fed the gravy aka airbags. Rather than spreading them around the shop a certain team was getting 3x what the rest of the entire shop got. Team leads threw a fit and hour lookup went bye bye lol
Wow this whole video sounds just like my old shop. Walt auto here in syracuse,ny
I've delt with both and its a major problem.
It's why I don't do it for a living anymore so much BS I'll only do it as a owner operator at this point
One other aspect I am suspicious of... If I make $40/hr and another guy makes $20/hr, they maybe more inclined to load him up with gravy and have me do all of the warranty work simply because the shop will keep more profit on each of his hours. And then tell you, well you don't want to be doing brake jobs and flushes all day, do you?
Yeah i have this problem at my shop now🙄....and me being the state inspector my recommendations/findings are thru the roof but 80% of those cars that come back the other techs are being assigned those repair orders😤so other techs are benefitting from my work🤦♂️
Great video , favoritism! happens a lot in flat rate body shops , a lot of ass kissing ! and it affects every body in the shop but management don’t care about you , they only care about themselves and making their numbers at the end of the month and you don’t even get a thank you from them at the end of the day .
That happened to me all the time.
Can you talk about techs who seek excessive labor times on routine services?
Hit the nail on the head!
Yeah, i inspect school buses, i am a hourly employee, and i inspect every thing in the shop or out in the field, my write ups, Don't go to me, they go to my coworker, which pisses me off because i found the problem and i would love to do more repairs than inspections. Fair is fair.
We don’t really have favoritism here, we got guys grabbing the low hanging fruit that makes there production look good leaving the harder work for others, I tell them we’re hourly, just do it or leave
Good info.
The discount to zero free install to make the sale shit is the most common one
We had the "Tower system" at our dealership.
Talk about favoritism
How did you guys move away from it?
Hell yeah, horrible system. They give the 100% guaranteed sales to their favorite sales person, who holds with them. The rest go through the wringer.
Huge huge huge problems at the dealer. I see this almost everyday. Every tech is perceived differently around the shop and that very much effects what work one is given. I haven't seen any writers taking hours from tech but they will screw over the parts dept. a lot. Ex: say someone's doing brakes and the didn't tell the writer shims need replacement till after the job is sold. The writers will often times just tell the tech to put it on and add the shims to the RO at cost. In other words the parts dept. makes nothing off those shims. This is very unhealthy for a dealer because service parts and sales are all seperate businesses that all need to be profitable.
Great video seen all the tricks bro
You gotta keep track of your hours no one will look out for you but yourself
I’m pretty sure that this is going on in my dealership. My paystubs and my math haven’t been the same in the last few pay periods .
We also have service writers that will do other nefarious things at my shop we don’t really have a dispatch. We have one 5 days out of the week but things get by him when either he’s not there or our system of just have bins for the RO. One bin is lvl1 (hourly lube) the other is lvl2 (flat rate higher mileage, brakes, tires, medium duty stuff) I’ve seen it very often where a lvl2 job is in the lvl1 bin on a very dead day. It’ll pay me an hour but the lvl1 is hourly and will only flag .6. It apparently happens multiple times a day and it’s frustrating when I think that I’m not making hours and could be having a pretty good day with these cars.
For right now I’m staying but it’s going to be time to find a new shop if they don’t change or stop making excuses.
Time to Roll ur tools boxes outta there's .. See y'all later
A certain place I worked wrote the book on this.
I learned this from working part time for a used car lot. And he was very shady I caught him several times cheating my hours and he kept admiring my scan tools and other tools then I come in one Monday morning and my toolbox and cabinet was tore all to hell and the tools he liked was stolen with my welders and a lot of specialty tools but his few tools wasn't touched and just so happens the cameras and security wasn't working almost 12 thousand dollars in tools gone and insurance would only pay 1500 I hate people like that
Dang
stocking to your title : yes a lot of shops steal from there techs.
case in point a repair might call for 6 hours ,then the next go around identical repair foreman tells you it now pays 5 hours ,then a 3rd go around identical repair now only pays 3 1/5 hours to you
later to find out every single time shop billed 6 hours to customers pocketing your money.
this is how they screw you,
looking up S.R.T. times on your own on every job
Very common issue I see it everyday at my dealer
Flat rate techs HAVE to write down their hours. I can't count how many times I've gone back to the service writer(s) and had them add my missing labor in.
Yo Peter Paul will be in later this week..I have a few vehicles I need you to check out real quick, A few minutes, on your break, first time long time, complementary inspection, trumps personal vehicle,Mother Theresa’s coach And we will square up next Tuesday
I love the "Hey check this out for me. I'll get you paid on something else."
Unless you are personally friends with the service advisor then it will happen to you.
DOUBLE DIPPING A BIG NO!! NO!!👎🏾
Parts and labor!! Lol
Sounds like dealership where I work....
If your sick your out of luck
Flat-rate should be illegal..
I would never work hourly or salary, I’m worth more than that. Flat rate is the most fair system when implemented properly.
I am salary. I am worth more than flat rate.
Steven Farley I hope it’s six figures or you’re selling yourself short.
@@stevenfarley6909 - if you're on salary but you are worth more than flat rate you're not in the right shop. In my experiences, techs on salary are usually good at what they do but are not very efficient.
I love flat rate. There are times when I cuss it (ie no work) but I would lose lots of money in the busy times.