Matt Ebert entered the auto repair industry by accident—literally.
“I wrecked my car when I was 16,” he says, recalling his youth in small-town central Illinois. Not wanting to lose his insurance, Ebert adds, he needed to fix the car himself—and living in a small town meant he knew pretty much everyone in the area. “There was a gentleman that was an auto body guy that fixed cars at his house at night as well, so I asked him to show me how to fix my car.”
Thus began a long journey through the automotive world that, these days, finds Ebert at the head of Crash Champions, an auto repair chain with a reported $2.7 billion in annualized revenue and around 650 locations. (The company’s home office is still in Illinois, in the Chicago suburb of Westmont.)
“I’ve had to learn from mentors; I’ve had to learn from mistakes; I’ve had to learn through reading constantly,” the Crash Champions chief executive says of his career. “If I don’t grow, then the business will be bottlenecked by me. … The company, for example, today, is a $3 billion company. It’ll be a $5 billion company as soon as I’m ready to run one.”
He adds: “I’ve always looked at things as, it is my job to get myself more capable, more advanced and more ready.”
But the path to where he is now was a circuitous one. After his teenage car crash, the local mechanic started teaching Ebert how to fix cars, then gave him a job after he graduated high school in 1990. But opening his own auto body shop didn’t seem realistic at the time, so—eager to be an entrepreneur one way or another—Ebert instead became a Subway franchisee.
But that was a hard business to make money in, he adds—so soon enough, he got another body shop job. By 1999, he and a partner had co-founded their own outfit in New Lenox, Illinois.
“I remember parking my friends’ and my own cars in the front parking lot to make it look like we had some business going on,” he says. “It starts with just trying to make a living and pay the bills.”
Ebert spent the next 15 years studying and learning the business—then called New Lenox Auto Body—so that by the time his partner was ready to cash out in 2014, he could hit the ground running and quickly scale up. Within a year of buying out his co-founder’s stake, the company had four locations, Ebert says—scale being a necessity to keep up with more consolidated competitors.
Hoping to extend his reach beyond Illinois, Ebert started thinking about bringing private equity partners on board to “grow it beyond just a regional player.” A deal came together in summer 2019, at which time the chain, by then rebranded as Crash Champions, had eight locations. The influx of new capital then allowed Ebert to roll up another 23 shops in Southern California, plus three more in Columbus, Ohio.
When the pandemic first sent everyone home, Ebert saw his revenue cut in half, he says—but the crisis also offered opportunity.
“It kind of accelerated the shift of more and more work going to direct repair partners of the insurers and bigger national companies,” Ebert says. “That dynamic led to [us] adjusting our thinking to, ‘If we want to meet the business where it’s at and where it’s going to be, we really need to think about creating a national footprint as fast as possible.’ So during COVID, we seized the opportunity to go. When others might have been scared or hesitant to act, we acted quickly and used it as our point in time to grow.”
Beyond just aggressive M&A, the CEO attributes his success to a few different strategies. Hire people smarter than you are, he recommends; prioritize company culture, since that’s how you keep talented people; and stop waiting for the perfect moment to do what you need to do.
“You have to take action, not wait for everything to be perfect,” he explains. “You want to get it perfect over time, but it’s a little bit of: ‘Start moving and don’t be paralyzed.’”
He’s also implemented a policy of transparency at work, under which he shares things like the company’s revenue and profits with his team. Asking people to perform well without knowing those details, he says, is like trying to win a basketball game when you can’t see the scoreboard.
He also swears by the importance of process when it comes to running a company as large as his.
“At scale, you just can’t find 100 percent rock stars,” he explains. “It doesn’t exist. So you’re going to … maybe get 30 percent rock stars, but it’s the processes and procedures that get the rest of the 70 percent of non-rock stars doing the right things at the right time.”
When you’re running a conglomerate with hundreds of locations around the country, that sort of delegation is a must.
Brian Contreras
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