Moving On Up:
One Man's Story of Climbing the Fast Lube Ladder

By Jessica Odom
NOLN Staff Writer

Before moving to the East Coast, Chad Weisbeck had no idea what a fast lube was. Now, 16 years later, he and his wife, Sylvia, own three Jiffy Lube locations in the Florence, South Carolina market.

In the summer of 1994, Weisbeck was living in Jacksonville, Florida, attending the local community college and looking for work as a waiter. He wasn’t having much luck. He said he didn’t have any money, or even a bed.

“Everything I owned fit in the back of my 1989 Ford Escort GT. I was living on the beach with five guys, sleeping on the couch and I was broke,” Weisbeck said.

Finally, he received an offer from a friend to come work at a Texaco Xpress Lube.

	Chad Weisbeck explains services to customers. Weisbeck started as a lube tech, but now owns three Jiffy Lube locations in South Carolina.

“I didn’t even know what that was, being from South Dakota,” he said. “I thought it was a service station.”

Weisbeck said that back home in Spearfish, South Dakota, express oil change shops were not the norm, and that most people got their oil changed at a full service station. Weisbeck took the job as a technician at Texaco Xpress Lube in August, and was ready to quit by the end of the first week.

“I got a large burn on my forearm from a Honda,” Weisbeck said. “It was hot; I was miserable. I whined to anyone who would listen.”

Weisbeck said that he jumped right in with literally no training. On his first day, he spent his time vacuuming floors. The next day, he was placed in the lower bay — by himself.

“I whined to my father one evening after a week working there, and he told me, ‘Listen to yourself!’ He told me that I hadn’t even given the job a chance yet and maybe I could make a difference,” he added.

Weisbeck said his father, who now has terminal brain cancer, has been the driving force throughout his life. It was that conversation with him that caused Weisbeck to make the decision to give the job at the Texaco Xpress Lube a fair shake — and he set out to make that difference.

“As a young technician, the one realization I had is that many employees were not giving their best efforts. If I applied myself, I could move up within the company,” he said. “By the end of the next week, I was asked to be assistant manager — and I didn’t even have my uniforms yet.”

Yes, two weeks in, while Weisbeck was still working in coveralls, he moved directly to assistant manager. While such a hasty advance was uncommon, he found it to be a breath of fresh air. But he found himself working the position without much support, so he doubted whether or not he really deserved the title.

There was one person though, that Weisbeck believes noticed his potential. Jim Orsi was the district manager at the time and quickly became someone Weisbeck looked to as a mentor.

“Jim had the greatest impact on me,” he said. The fact that Weisbeck was so far away from his family had much to do with this. “He was somewhat of a father figure, since he was older.”

Over the next couple of months, he was given every responsibility the location could offer while the store manager would come and go.

In October 1994, that Texaco Xpress Lube was purchased by Jiffy Lube. Five months into his employment, Weisbeck was given the opportunity to attend a Jiffy Lube manager’s course. Since he was being given the chance to manage the shop in which he started his career, he couldn’t pass it up.

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