Beyond the Blend is a conversational podcast series, designed to explore the personal and professional journeys of individuals in the lubricant sector.
Your hosts Steve Knapp and Rob Taylor aim to inspire listeners by sharing stories about careers, challenges, successes, and learning moments.
The focus is on humanising the industry, showcasing its diversity, and highlighting personal experiences to attract and inspire talent.
Guests discuss pivotal moments, including their greatest challenges or adversities and the lessons learned, to demonstrate the rich opportunities within the sector.
What changes when success stops being about your own sales and starts depending on the people you lead?
In this episode of Beyond the Blend, Steve Knapp sits down with Greg Edwards, Managing Director of Certas Lubricant Solutions, to explore a career that began with answering phones, making tea and cleaning the yard. Nearly twenty years later, Greg reflects on the opportunities, relationships and decisions that took him through customer service, sales and key account management into leading the business.
Greg speaks openly about finding confidence as a young salesperson in an experienced industry, why he chose to specialise rather than try to know everything, and the people who helped him develop. He also shares the challenges of handing over customer relationships and becoming the leader of colleagues who remember him as the eighteen-year-old who first joined the company.
The conversation turns to changing lubricant buyers and how sellers can remain relevant when customers have more information at their fingertips. Greg explains why understanding a customer’s operation matters alongside product knowledge, and how recruiting people from workshops and engineering backgrounds brings a different perspective to sales.
We also explore the evolving role of lubricant distribution. Greg sets out his ambition for Certas to become known for its services as well as its products, discussing fluid management, oil analysis, telemetry and the partnerships that support that direction.
Along the way, there’s Liverpool football, life as a netball dad and the motivation to make his father proud. His advice for anyone considering a career in lubricants is grounded in his own experience: learn from the people around you, keep challenging yourself and recognise the opportunities that change can bring.
A conversation about lubricants, sales, leadership and learning to let others lead.
Follow Greg Edwards on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregedwards88/
Enjoyed the conversation? Follow Beyond the Blend and share this episode with someone building their own career in the industry.
14 Oct 2026
Adrian Hill
What does 40+ years in lubricants teach you? Stay curious, stay agile and never stop learning.
Steve Knapp talks with Adrian Hill, Group Technical Director at Morris Lubricants, about four decades of change in the lubricant industry, growing technical complexity and why expertise only creates value when customers can understand it.
Adrian shares his journey from the laboratory to technical leadership, why reliability often matters more than lubricant price, how Morris Lubricants has turned complex technical knowledge into engaging customer education, and what working with Guy Martin has taught him about making the complicated simple.
They also explore the relationship between technical and commercial teams, the role of content and AI, and Adrian’s advice to the next generation entering the lubricants industry:
Be curious. Throw your net wide. Keep learning. Stay agile.
A fascinating conversation about lubricants, engineering, sales, education, communication and the people behind the industry.
30 Sept 2026
Wendy Hakken aka The Oil Lady
What happens when technical expertise, personal brand and a very human approach to selling come together?
Wendy Hakken, better known as The Oil Lady,joins Steve Knapp on Beyond the Blend to share an unconventional journey into lubricants that started with a chance encounter, took her into Chicago steel mills and ultimately built a career across distributors, Shell, OEMs and heavy-duty equipment.
It’s a conversation about much more than oil.
Wendy explains how learning the technical application, rather than simply the product, gave her credibility and helped shape the consultative approach that became central to her career. She also shares how The Oil Lady grew from an experiment in blogging and social media into a genuine personal brand that created conversations, relationships and business opportunities.
We explore what that means in an AI-enabled world. Wendy believes technology can be enormously useful, but argues that authenticity, judgement and the ability to validate what a customer really needs still matter. As buyers increasingly arrive with information already in hand, the salesperson’s role may be shifting from simply providing answers to helping customers verify, interpret and apply them correctly.
We also get into why lubrication is still misunderstood, why “oil is just oil” remains such a dangerous assumption, the value of staying close to the end user, and Wendy’s brilliantly simple philosophy: Lube It or Lose It.
Finally, Wendy shares the work behind Crew Collaborative, exposing young people to careers in construction and the trades, and why she now wants more people to discover the enormous variety of opportunities inside the lubricants industry itself.
Her advice? “You can blaze a path for yourself.”
And that feels like a pretty good summary of Wendy’s own story too.
Follow Wendy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendyhakken/
If this conversation resonates and you want to explore how lubricant buying and selling is changing, take a look at Selling Lubricants Smarter: https://sellinglubricantssmarter.com/
Beyond the Blend – getting beyond the product to the people, ideas and changes shaping the lubricants industry.
Who has been a guest on Beyond The Blend
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Bhavika Sachdeva
Keri Craig
Elisa Swanson-Parbäck
Mark Lord
Reach and audience
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Spotify
5.0 / 5
6 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 12 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
25
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
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