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  • How This Mechanic Built an Auto Repair Powerhouse

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    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.

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    Brian Contreras

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  • How This CEO Took Charge During a Crisis and Built a Fire-Fighting Powerhouse

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    Fire Rover is all about responding quickly and efficiently to crises: the Farmington Hills, Michigan-based tech company—which has now cracked the Inc. 5000 list five years in a row—works to detect and extinguish industrial fires before they get too big.

    So it’s fitting that Will Schmidt, Fire Rover’s CEO, joined the company in a moment of crisis, too.

    Schmidt says he initially met the Fire Rover team at a trade show in early 2018, back when he was still working for Pacific Western Bank. The fire-fighting company so interested him that he made a trip out to their Detroit-area headquarters for a tour.

    “It didn’t really fit into any box that I had at the time—it was a little small and so forth—but [I] nevertheless wanted to keep in touch,” he recalls.

    About nine months later, Brad Gladstone—who’d founded the company in 2015—passed away. Conversations about what Schmidt could do to help during that period of transition eventually led to him taking on the CEO role in fall 2019, he says: “The idea was hatched to come out and…flip from the side of investing and telling people what they should do, to actually getting in the hot seat.”

    Fire Rover’s fire-fighting tech can be broken down into two parts: detection (which involves using thermal cameras, light sensors and smoke-detecting computer vision software to notice an industrial fire early) and suppression (which finds remote operators reviewing the situation and releasing a targeted suppression stream as needed).

    “Typically, we’ll be applying suppression five minutes before something like a traditional sprinkler head would pop, because it takes some time for the heat to accumulate at that sprinkler head,” Schmidt explains. “Because we’re highly concentrated, we’re able to use about 88 percent less water, typically, to put this fire out, which means they can get back to work quicker, less cleanup, less damage from the fire and less damage from water.”

    That such a fast-growing tech company (No. 1,434 on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list) is being run out of a suburb north of Detroit may surprise people used to looking to San Francisco, Austin and Boston for innovation. But the CEO says the Midwest has a good regional talent pool of mechanics, electrical engineers and plumbers he can draw on.

    Becoming CEO meant Schmidt had to move his family from St. Louis to the Detroit area—a transition complicated by the onset of COVID soon after. Still, it ended up working out for the company. Since joining, Schmidt has sought to scale and professionalize Fire Rover, which he says has finally given key employees the flexibility to take vacations.

    “The business is probably 10 times the size it was,” he says of his tenure, estimating that the employee headcount has sextupled since he came on board.

    Maintaining good relationships with customers—many of whom are in the waste management, scrap metal and recycling sectors—has been key to that growth, he adds.

    Sales opportunities are also growing as industrial fires among Fire Rover’s core customer base become more common, Schmidt says, which he attributes to waste facility’s efforts to process more material and boost efficiency.

    “A lot of times, you’re pushing the edges of physics,” he explains. “Moving that material creates more friction and things [like] that, so many industrial processes are inherently a little bit more dangerous than they used to be as people seek to become more efficient.”

    While Schmidt comes from a finance background—“spreadsheets are my natural gravitation,” he tells Inc.–he points to his company’s culture as a key driver of its success. 

    “As you bring people on and rapidly expand,” he says, “making sure that culture is well defined—whether that’s written-down core values, or you sit down and tell everyone about the founding of the company and what your expectations are—that’s, to us, been part of the secret sauce.”

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    Brian Contreras

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