Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Matt Ebert - Crash Champions Founder & CEO | He Crashed His Car at 16 and Turned It Into a $3B Company With 650 Locations

Transcript

Matt Ebert - Crash Champions Founder & CEO | He Crashed His Car at 16 and Turned It Into a $3B Company With 650 Locations · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  Do you think that there's a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs that want to build in the trades, that want to start their own shop?
• 0:05
  There's money rolling up those industries similar to what we're doing in collision repair.
• 0:11
  So if you have one of those businesses or start one of those businesses, the great thing is you know that there will be a buyer for it one day.
• 0:18
  Today's guest is Matt Ebert, founder and CEO of Crash Champions.
• 0:22
  He started with a single auto body shop in 1999 and grew it into one of the largest collision repair businesses in the United States with more than 650 locations.
• 0:31
  Known for his entrepreneurial mindset and focus on building strong teams, Matt is dedicated to creating opportunities in the skilled trades.
• 0:39
  In this episode, we explore overcoming challenges, making smarter business decisions and turning setbacks into opportunities.
• 0:45
  What was the best strategy or the best way to do a deal?
• 0:49
  What was the worst way to do a deal that you would recommend nobody ever do?
• 0:52
  You can't fall in love with any deal.
• 0:54
  There is wisdom in not doing everything.
• 0:56
  Over your 26-year journey, what has been the hardest lesson you've ever had to learn?
• 1:00
  The one that I've struggled with the most is moving on from leadership when they hit their ceiling.
• 1:09
  My fitness pal is a success story partner.
• 1:11
  Now there's something that stops a lot of people from doing the one thing that would help them feel better in their day to day.
• 1:18
  Give them more energy, make them sharper, help them sleep better.
• 1:22
  I think we all want these things, right?
• 1:24
  It's tracking your food.
• 1:25
  It's not rocket science, but tracking your food.
• 1:29
  Tracking what goes into your body is the single best way to feel better, to live a better life, to have more energy, to show up better at work, better at home.
• 1:40
  And tracking your food is not weird.
• 1:42
  It's not obsessive.
• 1:42
  It's not something that only fitness influencers do.
• 1:45
  Because when you first hear, I track what I eat.
• 1:48
  It can sound like somebody who weighs every grain of rice and is panicking about a slice of pizza.
• 1:54
  That's not what this is.
• 1:55
  That's not what I do.
• 1:56
  And I use MyFitnessPal.
• 1:58
  What I do is I log what I eat and it shows me what's going on with my food.
• 2:03
  And there's this misconception that if you log your food, it's gonna take up an hour of your day, no.
• 2:08
  They've nailed it.
• 2:09
  And I've been using for context the MyFitnessPal app for years now.
• 2:12
  It's one of the first tools I've ever used, first apps I've ever used when I was on my own health and wellness journey.
• 2:17
  The reason being is because it's so simple.
• 2:19
  So they have a couple different ways to log food.
• 2:21
  Barcode scanner that handles any packaged products.
• 2:24
  You just scan it, it'll log it.
• 2:26
  They have voice logging.
• 2:27
  So I can say what I ate out loud.
• 2:29
  They'll log it.
• 2:29
  There's also meal scan where I can point my camera at my plate and it figures out exactly what's on my plate.
• 2:35
  And here's where the premium version of MyFitnessPal comes in.
• 2:38
  It breaks down my macros by meal, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, all separate.
• 2:42
  And that's valuable info because the distribution of my food across my day matters just as much as the total.
• 2:49
  So if most of your protein is at dinner and you're running on coffee and carbs until 2 p.m., well, your body is going all morning and most of the afternoon without what it needs.
• 2:59
  So if you feel like garbage around 3 and 4, it's going to show you that.
• 3:02
  So MyFitnessPal gives you meal by meal breakdown.
• 3:06
  And the premium also has a food analysis that shows patterns across the week where you're consistent, where things start to shift when life gets busy.
• 3:13
  So all of a sudden, that mid-afternoon crash is no longer a surprise.
• 3:18
  You understand what you ate and you understand what you feel like garbage, or rather you understand what you didn't eat.
• 3:23
  It also connects with 40 fitness apps and wearables.
• 3:26
  So if you use a smartwatch or a workout app, your nutrition and your training are all in one spot.
• 3:31
  Think about it this way.
• 3:32
  You wouldn't call someone obsessive for checking their bank account, for paying attention to their expenses, for making sure they're not overspending or have all these subscriptions that they're not using if they're trying to save up to purchase a house, right?
• 3:45
  It's smart to have the right data and people that check their bank account, they just want to know what's going on so they can make good decisions.
• 3:51
  This is the same thing.
• 3:52
  It's information about the one thing, food, that affects how you feel more than anything else.
• 3:57
  Because food is a foundation for your energy, for your sleep, for your weight, for your recovery, for your performance at work and at home.
• 4:03
  And you don't have to overhaul how you eat to get value from this.
• 4:07
  This is not about restriction or dieting.
• 4:09
  It's about having information.
• 4:12
  So do yourself a favor, start paying attention to what goes into your body.
• 4:15
  Go to podcasts.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott.
• 4:19
  That's S-C-O-T-T, all uppercase letters for 15% off MyFitnessPal premium.
• 4:24
  One more time, that is podcasts.myfitnesspal.com, code Scott.
• 4:34
  I saw a line, I guess a tagline on your site.
• 4:38
  The gold is on the other side of what went wrong.
• 4:42
  Explain what that means.
• 4:44
  You know, what that comes from is, for a long time in my life...
• 4:50
  I wish things could get easier.
• 4:51
  I wish struggle to go away, right?
• 4:54
  Like I remember going through some self-help stuff or whatever and like what do you want to get rid of in your life?
• 5:01
  And I'm like struggle.
• 5:02
  It would be, you know, my number one on the list.
• 5:05
  And I think what I came to realize finally is struggle is where all the opportunity is.
• 5:12
  And so if you quit trying to avoid it and embrace it, it's really...
• 5:19
  the solution to the struggle is where the gold is.
• 5:22
  And so I guess it's just changing, you know, a little bit of attitude toward what happens to you, right, is where it's all at.
• 5:31
  But that's what I finally figured out.
• 5:33
  Like, struggle's going to come.
• 5:34
  There's always going to be a hurdle.
• 5:35
  There's always going to be a challenge.
• 5:36
  There's always going to be problems.
• 5:38
  Rather than wish it away, I'm going to be a challenge.
• 5:41
  finding the solutions to those problems is where the, where the opportunity lies.
• 5:46
  How long did it take you to figure that out?
• 5:48
  Oh, 40 years.
• 5:52
  Like I'm a slow learner.
• 5:53
  Sometimes I think, um, yeah, it, it, I say that,
• 6:00
  Maybe I'm still figuring it out.
• 6:02
  Obviously, it didn't take completely 40, but to just step back and say, what does this all mean?
• 6:08
  So pieces of it may be what I would say, like in my childhood, I was never really...
• 6:15
  I haven't found it yet.
• 6:17
  If I have some God-given talent, I don't know what it is.
• 6:19
  Because I was terrible at sports, right?
• 6:23
  Take basketball, for instance.
• 6:24
  I remember being in gym class, and I'd be the last one picked, right?
• 6:28
  Sometimes they'll take the girl before me, or the really good captives would be like, we'll go shorthand and you take Matt.
• 6:34
  Like, that's how bad I was, right?
• 6:37
  So, yeah.
• 6:39
  But I'll own it.
• 6:40
  Like, I'm just not that good at it.
• 6:42
  So...
• 6:44
  Even in business or even getting in front of a camera, what I've learned for anything is that
• 6:52
  I can figure it out and I can get better at it over time.
• 6:55
  And so it kind of became a little bit of the blessing in disguise or the superpower of, I figured out that if I, if I really, really want to accomplish something and I apply myself and learn and study it, practice it, whatever you can get good at it.
• 7:13
  And so the gift of not just being easily good at something was, I'm going to have to figure this out, but the,
• 7:22
  If I do figure it out, I'm going to get there.
• 7:25
  And so it's kind of a gives you that superpower of persistence, stick to it, of this and just your own confidence that even though the first time you try it, it wasn't amazing.
• 7:37
  It's not the time to give up.
• 7:38
  It's not the time to quit.
• 7:40
  It's the time to just apply yourself and you can get there.
• 7:43
  I think it's that's it's it's so important to drive that message home.
• 7:46
  Yeah.
• 7:47
  Although I never applied it to basketball, by the way.
• 7:49
  You figured out a much better way to apply it.
• 7:52
  Maybe you could have.
• 7:53
  Maybe you could have.
• 7:54
  You never know.
• 7:54
  But in all seriousness, the first version of everything sucks.
• 7:58
  It always sucks.
• 8:00
  So before we press record, you were talking about we were talking about, you know, you're asking me when did you move down from from Toronto down to Miami to Florida.
• 8:10
  And I just keep thinking every time somebody asks me that, especially because we were just about to do a podcast, I keep thinking of how far the podcast has come since then and how absolutely horrible those first couple episodes were when I was sitting in a second bedroom in our condo in Toronto on Zoom.
• 8:25
  And I've said this story a few times, but just to give you context about how ridiculous this setup was, I...
• 8:33
  I was my laptop was on Gina's vanity makeup vanity, like where she gets ready.
• 8:39
  And it was sitting.
• 8:40
  So you can't see the vanity.
• 8:42
  You can't see the makeup.
• 8:43
  You can't see like her purses and shoes, which on the other side of the room, it's just the laptop facing me.
• 8:50
  And then there's like a white wall behind me.
• 8:52
  And that's where I started.
• 8:53
  Yeah, that's where I started the podcast.
• 8:56
  That's where I started.
• 8:58
  And I mentioned some of the names, like it was Grant Cardone, Scaramucci, Guy Kawasaki, Patrick David.
• 9:03
  These are big names.
• 9:05
  And these are the guys that I got when I first started out.
• 9:07
  No idea what I was doing sitting in that second bedroom, nervous as shit.
• 9:12
  And now since then, they've all been on again.
• 9:14
  But the point is, like, that first version was so horrible.
• 9:18
  And I don't think people understand it when they look at a podcast or whatever.
• 9:23
  the incredible business you've built with Crash Champions, 650 locations, like just enormous.
• 9:29
  The first version of Matt.
• 9:31
  Oh, it was a disaster.
• 9:33
  Which is, I think that's what's so important.
• 9:36
  It's like the prerequisite for success.
• 9:38
  It's not like, hopefully it's not good.
• 9:42
  Hopefully it's good.
• 9:43
  It'll never be good.
• 9:45
  It'll never be good when you first start.
• 9:47
  Yeah, it's...
• 9:50
  it'd be crazy to think it.
• 9:51
  Like, how could I just be awesome out of the gate?
• 9:56
  And we all wish we can, and I think we all try to be awesome out of the gate.
• 10:01
  It's just not reality.
• 10:02
  Like, that's what I've learned.
• 10:05
  Even in trying to...
• 10:08
  buy the right things to support the business or something.
• 10:11
  What I've learned is first you get the, can I swear?
• 10:14
  First you get the shitty one, then you get the okay one, and then you get the best one.
• 10:19
  And you're trying to get the best one out of the gate.
• 10:21
  It's rare that it's like a lightning strike if you actually get it right the first time.
• 10:25
  You said growing Crash Champions was more of survival at first.
• 10:30
  Uh, so cars got complicated, equipment got more expensive.
• 10:34
  Um, one shop couldn't carry all of it.
• 10:36
  Like explain, explain how, uh, survival actually led to, uh, it becoming successful.
• 10:43
  Sure.
• 10:43
  You know, that comment came from the conversation of, uh,
• 10:47
  People will ask, was it always your goal to run a national company?
• 10:51
  And that would be great if I could tell the story that way.
• 10:54
  But it really wasn't true.
• 10:56
  I was, I wanted to grow.
• 10:57
  I was one shop for a long time with a partner for 15 years.
• 11:02
  And then I was really anxious to grow.
• 11:03
  But to grow to me was just grow some more locations in Chicago.
• 11:09
  And then trends in the industry started shifting.
• 11:14
  industry was consolidating, there were bigger and bigger companies coming along and those bigger companies were getting a lot of the referrals from insurance companies, et cetera.
• 11:24
  And so it's kind of a world where people are getting big around you and that's where all the work is kind of going.
• 11:31
  And so it was survival.
• 11:33
  Like I basically was looking at a world where I said, it's going to be hard to survive being small.
• 11:40
  And so if it's going to be hard to survive being small, I got to get big.
• 11:45
  That's literally how much thought went into it.
• 11:48
  It wasn't a big dream to like go be in X number of states.
• 11:53
  It was realizing that the market is shifting, that a national company is where the future is in the industry.
• 12:02
  And so how do I how do I start to do that?
• 12:05
  And it didn't even get to that at first.
• 12:06
  It was like I need to be a substantial player in my market.
• 12:10
  And then it went to bringing in investors.
• 12:13
  And then the idea went to an opportunity came along to buy another company a little bigger than us that would give us some size in two markets.
• 12:23
  And then COVID came.
• 12:26
  People were told not to stay home, so nobody's driving, our business goes in half.
• 12:31
  And then all those trends of more and more being sent to bigger national partners because insurance companies didn't want to send out adjusters.
• 12:40
  They were trimming their staff.
• 12:41
  So administratively, the national companies were just more efficient and able to handle more.
• 12:46
  So that led to kind of reading the tea leaves, reading the room and saying, we need a race to create a national footprint.
• 12:55
  Yeah.
• 12:55
  So it really was survival mode more than a dream.
• 13:01
  Now it's kind of shifted to dreams of becoming the best and the biggest in the industry.
• 13:06
  But it didn't start that way.
• 13:07
  It really was, how do I stay alive?
• 13:10
  I'm curious, even before you started, was the first iteration of Crash Champions, was that
• 13:20
  not a business dream to stay alive and to, and to be relevant and to future proof and to make sure that, you know, your future of the business is secured, but before you even started, it was the same mindset applied to you as a person trying to sort of secure your own future.
• 13:39
  It's exactly what it was.
• 13:40
  Look, I grew up in a, in a small town, the town I lived in in grade school had 150 people in it in central Illinois.
• 13:47
  The town, you know, my mom and stepdad moved to in high school was a whopping 1,400 people.
• 13:53
  Oh my God, these are small towns.
• 13:54
  And my stepdad was a rural mail carrier.
• 13:57
  My mom was a stay at home mom.
• 13:58
  So there was a big career planning going on in my upbringing.
• 14:02
  I really didn't know what I was going to grow up and do for a living.
• 14:06
  I wrecked my car, needed to learn how to fix it.
• 14:09
  Got somebody to teach me and ended up loving it and figuring out, hey, maybe I can do this for a job.
• 14:15
  So it all came, even for me, it was a problem solution.
• 14:20
  Now I got, and it started out with just the way to make money.
• 14:24
  And then even in going into business, like I wanted to go into business for myself, but it wasn't dreams of getting rich or something.
• 14:33
  It was, I wanted to own my own business.
• 14:35
  I wanted to help people.
• 14:36
  I wanted to, I wanted to.
• 14:38
  own my own shop, but the first goal was just to make a paycheck.
• 14:43
  It wasn't the bigger, the thinking bigger,
• 14:48
  which is necessary for what, what I want to do and what I spend most of my time getting my team to do is think bigger.
• 14:55
  Now that came much later.
• 14:58
  I didn't, I needed some mentoring and reading and learning from other people to think big.
• 15:04
  I was merely just thinking of how to put food on my table, how to live.
• 15:12
  For the first, you know, say 30 years, you know, I mean, from till I was about 30.
• 15:18
  And then I started thinking about how do you do?
• 15:21
  Yeah.
• 15:22
  How do you do more than just survive?
• 15:24
  I guess.
• 15:25
  There was always a little bit of courage, but it was really just, I need to figure out my life.
• 15:30
  This is a way to do it.
• 15:32
  Yeah, I think even what I have learned about myself is I have a huge risk tolerance that doesn't seem to be normal.
• 15:43
  I don't know if that just came from nothing to lose.
• 15:47
  I mean, you know, when I got into my first business, I cash advanced 100 grand on credit cards, which is funny because I don't even know if I could do that today.
• 15:56
  But I had saved up, you know, I had applied for and amassed like, say, 10 credit cards with cash advance limits and then hit them all in one day to get 100 grand.
• 16:04
  And that seems like crazy probably to a lot of people, but I had nothing to lose.
• 16:10
  and I wasn't doing it like I don't have to pay these back.
• 16:13
  I absolutely was going to pay them back, but it wasn't in my mind.
• 16:18
  The risk was either I don't ever get to do anything or I take this risk because the money's not going to fall out of the sky.
• 16:27
  So if I want to own my own business, there's no choice but to take the risk.
• 16:32
  So I'd love to say I gifted with this extreme courage, but it really was like,
• 16:38
  given A or B seems logical, let's do it.
• 16:42
  But I do know now that,
• 16:46
  I do have an appetite for risk that most don't have.
• 16:49
  Did you have people around you that were entrepreneurial, that have built businesses?
• 16:54
  You have a reference that you looked at and you said, I know this person has built it like this, so that's what I'm going to copy?
• 17:00
  I had a partner.
• 17:01
  So you take on partners because you need money or you need somebody to run it, right?
• 17:06
  Or you need the skill they have.
• 17:08
  So I was, I mean, that was a blessing that came along as I ended up working for a gentleman that...
• 17:15
  we went and opened a shop together.
• 17:17
  And so I did have him to learn from for running, you know, of course, now that I've got much bigger, there's other mentors and stuff, but for getting started, that's, that's a great thing.
• 17:28
  He was, you know, almost 20 years older than me.
• 17:30
  He had an established business, a couple of shops.
• 17:33
  Um, and so it's a little bit of, I just had to learn and listen to him.
• 17:38
  Yeah, I think that's because I always try and figure out when somebody doesn't have, like, for example, parents who are entrepreneurs, or I always try and figure out, okay, because a lot of people who listen to this, they want to build something from scratch, but they don't have that person that they can learn from.
• 17:56
  And I think that I want to help people find that person, that partner in their life so they can learn from that person, have more courage to take more risk.
• 18:05
  But
• 18:07
  for yourself when you're first starting out, how do you know who you should listen to, who you should trust, who you should bet on so you can sort of take those big bets on yourself?
• 18:17
  Those that are successful at doing what you want to do.
• 18:21
  It's as simple as that.
• 18:22
  I mean, that's the safe bet.
• 18:24
  I mean, if you and I are buddies and we're talking about doing something and neither one of us have done it and we're going to grind it out together, figure it out together, that's nice and that's support and it's a partnership.
• 18:36
  Two are stronger than one, I'm sure.
• 18:38
  Yeah.
• 18:39
  the safer, smarter play is to find somebody who knows what, you know, if I'm going to open a restaurant, I should find somebody who knows how to cook as an example, right?
• 18:48
  Like me and you thinking our mom's chicken recipe is going to be golden.
• 18:52
  It's probably going to be a tough go.
• 18:55
  So yeah, the hack to it is,
• 18:58
  Learn from those who have done it, who have proven it.
• 19:00
  And then that's, that's, what's worked for me.
• 19:03
  You know, one of the, one of the things that you said, which is it's, it's so crazy to me, considering the scale of what you've built, but you said that when you started, you never imagined the size.
• 19:12
  He said, I had to learn to think like that big.
• 19:16
  Um.
• 19:20
  How do you get yourself to believe in what you're building before it gets there?
• 19:24
  Like, how did you shift your thinking to think big, to see the opportunity?
• 19:28
  If you said when you started, it was out of necessity.
• 19:31
  And then eventually it turns into not just necessity, but okay, where can we take this thing?
• 19:36
  And I think that being able to think big and to sort of remove the ceiling, like the ceiling, like what you think the business can hit, that's so tough for people.
• 19:47
  It's so tough for people in all parts of life when they're building a business and it's making more money than they've ever seen in their life.
• 19:53
  It's very hard for them to imagine it any bigger than this when they're, I mean, even when they, even when they, I've thought about this a lot.
• 20:02
  When your parents make so much money per year, for example, I think it's really hard for people to think for a moment, wow, that could be what my business makes in a month or a day.
• 20:14
  I think that's really, really hard to reframe.
• 20:19
  How do you think bigger?
• 20:21
  How do you imagine things that you've never built yourself before?
• 20:26
  So...
• 20:29
  Started reading, you know, I didn't go to college.
• 20:31
  So I always, you know, in my business lifetime, read a lot of books and, you know, yeah.
• 20:40
  And then took some seminars and things.
• 20:43
  It's interesting.
• 20:44
  Like I talk about the book Think and Grow Rich, for example, which is recommended by, you know, you just start learning stuff and Think and Grow Rich comes up.
• 20:52
  And, you know, what that book did for me is.
• 20:57
  It basically, the simplest, it taught me a ton of things, but the first thing I learned is it starts in your mind.
• 21:03
  Like, it's how you think matters.
• 21:09
  And I never knew that until then.
• 21:14
  Going back even further, it's interesting because I haven't, I actually haven't talked about this.
• 21:20
  There was a seminar, a gentleman named T. Harvaker did, and I don't even know if he's in business anymore.
• 21:28
  And I know that that first company isn't, but he was on CNBC one morning pushing his book and seminars.
• 21:34
  And his book basically pushed his seminars.
• 21:36
  But it was a millionaire mindset thing.
• 21:39
  And he on CNBC, he,
• 21:41
  in this interview, heck, this would have been 20 years ago, maybe 15.
• 21:44
  Yeah.
• 21:45
  20 years ago, at least said, I can talk to you for two minutes and know your money blueprint.
• 21:52
  And he described it as a thermostat, which I still use that phrase.
• 21:55
  If your thermostat is set to here, that's where you're going to be for the rest of your life.
• 22:01
  Take, take some bill, take, you know, Donald Trump, if he were worth like a million dollars, which some people would
• 22:10
  strive for and think is amazing, he would feel like crap.
• 22:14
  Yeah.
• 22:15
  Like if he was worth a million dollars, he'd be like, this is not... Like Damon John says it, like if Mark Cuban had my money, jump off a building, right?
• 22:25
  So, so...
• 22:27
  Those are the things I started to hear and learn.
• 22:31
  And I actually took his seminars, and that's where I started to think and understand that if my thermostat is set to here, if I only think here, then that's where I'm gonna be stuck.
• 22:42
  And so now I've flipped it to why not, you know, if you're shooting, if you're, if you're shooting for the stars, you might get to the moon.
• 22:51
  If you're only shooting for the horizon, you're not going to get.
• 22:53
  You're laying in your backyard.
• 22:55
  Right.
• 22:56
  So it, it, it took those kinds of mentors and reading from others.
• 23:01
  Magic Thinking Big was a book I read way back in the day.
• 23:06
  And so how we think matters, it really does because.
• 23:11
  It's the driver of our actions.
• 23:13
  When was, you know, you asked me earlier, like, when was the moment I knew the podcast was going to take off?
• 23:20
  When was the moment you knew that this was actually working?
• 23:25
  Interesting.
• 23:26
  So the first shop was working, but it had those years where I took like a $50,000 a year paycheck.
• 23:36
  I never took a ton of money out of the business because I always wanted to invest back in and grow.
• 23:41
  But I would have those years where I got that $50,000 a year paycheck and couldn't cash it because it was a lot of years of struggle.
• 23:48
  But
• 23:51
  Once I was able to, my partner financed the buyout, right?
• 23:56
  And we had done some real estate together, towing company together.
• 23:58
  He financed the buyout of it all.
• 24:00
  So that was a great leg up and a help to me.
• 24:03
  But when I started growing and got location number two, location number three and four, I did them really fast, like within a year.
• 24:11
  And one was like a greenfield where we started from scratch.
• 24:16
  One was a struggling business where I knew I could bring accounts to it.
• 24:20
  So I bought the building and the business for cheap, basically a little more than the value of the real estate, and then knew I could bring accounts.
• 24:28
  And then out of nowhere, my partner called me with some guys that were landlords of a body shop and said, hey, they want to just...
• 24:37
  sell this for the cost of the equipment.
• 24:39
  If you want to take, it seems like you're growing a body shop.
• 24:41
  You've won a third.
• 24:42
  If you want another one, I got an opportunity for you.
• 24:45
  So now I got from, from one to four, like overnight.
• 24:49
  And the one that I had originally is making money.
• 24:54
  The second one is breaking even the third one getting close to break even in the fourth one, losing money.
• 25:01
  So now all combined, like,
• 25:04
  I'm break even at best, but it's more stress and break even.
• 25:08
  Oh yeah.
• 25:09
  Oh yeah.
• 25:09
  It's, I have no doubt.
• 25:10
  It's a lot more stress and it's almost a house of cards because, and so I was scared to death for number five, because if number five didn't make money out of the gate, it's over.
• 25:25
  Like, so it was when number five came in, which coincidentally was, uh,
• 25:33
  my partner's
• 25:35
  first shop that I was a manager of before we opened ours.
• 25:39
  And he financed that one too.
• 25:41
  And it was, it made money.
• 25:43
  And so that fifth one I could do with confidence because I knew what it was, was my partner shop.
• 25:49
  And so, you know, credit to him for this thing all getting started because he never wanted to grow it this big, but without, you know, his mentorship in the beginning, without the arrangements he made with me, without shop number five being the one that
• 26:06
  make sure that it was going to do well.
• 26:09
  After that is when I started to get some confidence.
• 26:14
  Now, I was a typical entrepreneur who couldn't leave well enough alone and continue to put the business at risk for a while because I rushed open then number six and number seven.
• 26:27
  You do have a high risk tolerance.
• 26:29
  Yeah.
• 26:30
  So I was constantly teetering on that
• 26:34
  waking up at 4 in the morning to see how many checks are going to bounce if I don't move money around.
• 26:40
  So if I had to win a little slower, it would have been smarter.
• 26:42
  But number 5 was where I was pretty confident that this was going to work.
• 26:47
  Because then number 2, 3, and 4 got to making money too.
• 26:51
  So then you have 5 that are making at least a little bit of money.
• 26:54
  That's when I knew it was going to survive.
• 26:58
  So 5 in, you knew it was going to survive?
• 27:02
  That's so at this point and all the different body shops you're building at this point.
• 27:10
  They're all the way that you grew them, the way that you're growing them is all a little bit different because some of them like they're really not doing well.
• 27:17
  Some of them are doing OK.
• 27:19
  So you're worried about like, you know, five different strategies to make each one successful.
• 27:27
  Yeah.
• 27:28
  And it doesn't that doesn't obviously to a degree, it must have stressed you out.
• 27:33
  Oh, um.
• 27:35
  Or no.
• 27:36
  Again, not too much to lose.
• 27:40
  It's not like I had some massive net worth or something at this time.
• 27:45
  I had enough to do okay, but it wasn't in my head at that time.
• 27:52
  I remember starting to think this would have been 10 to 15 years after I started reading these books and going to seminars and starting to think bigger.
• 28:01
  And so to me, it was just simply the path.
• 28:03
  It was what I was going to need to do.
• 28:06
  So I never doubted.
• 28:07
  I never, it was very, you know, I talk about appetite for risk, but I wasn't like an idiot.
• 28:15
  I was very calculated.
• 28:17
  I knew the math, you know, what I think I was naive to that fortunately I didn't have happen in that time was...
• 28:28
  Something goes wrong in the world where the whole industry goes backwards 20% or something, because I really couldn't.
• 28:35
  If I had taken that 20% backwards hit, that would have been devastating.
• 28:40
  And I was looking back pretty naive to that being the case.
• 28:48
  But by the way, that's what led.
• 28:50
  That decision and then finally figuring out, again, survival mode was why I ended up bringing in a private equity investor because I did get to in a quick amount of time where I'm like, look, if I'm going to grow this thing, I need to protect it.
• 29:08
  I can only go so far with my own debt.
• 29:11
  And I mean, I had grown it through literally SBA loans, which I had maxed out.
• 29:16
  I got to the limit of what SBA loaned one person.
• 29:19
  I had seller financed, right?
• 29:21
  My partner financing and other sellers financing.
• 29:24
  Yeah.
• 29:24
  And then vendors even giving me rebate early and stuff.
• 29:29
  So basically vendor financing.
• 29:31
  So I had, you know, I used banks to borrow on the real estate, used sellers to borrow, used equipment loans to start a shop from scratch because you can finance equipment that's brand new.
• 29:42
  Can't finance use equipment, but new.
• 29:44
  So I had creatively found money in any way I could to open those locations and
• 29:50
  Now it's like, okay, what do I do to continue to grow and what do I do to protect it?
• 29:55
  And I had also, in the insurance industry, which is the referral source for us, I basically had like two accounts.
• 30:05
  And one of those accounts happened to be Geico.
• 30:08
  And remember, there's these big national companies now.
• 30:11
  And my thought process was literally this, like one big body shop company breakfast with Warren Buffett could totally change the way Warren Buffett does business.
• 30:22
  And then I got half of my business out the, or 40% of my business, whatever it was, is out the window tomorrow.
• 30:30
  again, let me bring in an investor to protect this, not just grow it, but protect it.
• 30:36
  And after the...
• 30:39
  Again, just describing the journey of like, it was a long time before it wasn't survival mode, can I?
• 30:45
  Yeah.
• 30:46
  But the survival mode, it's interesting because- With a goal to thrive, by the way.
• 30:53
  Survival with a goal to thrive.
• 30:55
  But I think it's so smart because you have, I keep thinking, oh, you know, he has such a huge appetite for risk, but not really.
• 31:05
  It's calculated.
• 31:06
  It's calculated.
• 31:07
  And you actually just see that there's actually very little downside when you're first starting out if things don't go right.
• 31:13
  I think a lot of people, even if they have nothing to lose, they overthink how bad something can turn out if it goes wrong.
• 31:23
  Yeah, I would encourage them to not.
• 31:26
  Because, like, I see it all the time.
• 31:30
  I've had to learn it.
• 31:32
  As the company grew and I started to get CFOs and like real decision makers, I would scare them to death because I didn't know how to communicate that I wasn't going to drive the company off a cliff.
• 31:43
  Now I know how to communicate, hey, if this doesn't go right, we're going to do this.
• 31:47
  And then if that doesn't go right, we're going to do that.
• 31:49
  And so, you know, I had to learn to communicate to others all the intuitions and all the strategy that if this doesn't go exactly what we think, here's what we're going to do.
• 32:00
  Yeah.
• 32:01
  where when I was small, I just went, you know, I knew it in my head, but I didn't know how to communicate it to others.
• 32:06
  But yeah, I see so many people for fear of failure, for fear of loss, or even I talked to business owners that are kicking ass that
• 32:17
  don't want a single dollar of debt.
• 32:19
  And their companies could be 20 times what they are if they just smartly use debt, but they're afraid of debt, so they'll never do it.
• 32:29
  No matter even if I encourage them, they're just not built that way.
• 32:33
  Life at the Speed of Play is a success story partner.
• 32:35
  Now, this is a book by Mark Pincus, the guy who founded Zynga.
• 32:38
  I've actually had him on the show.
• 32:40
  I met him in person and Reid Hoffman wrote the foreword, calling him one of the best idea people in Silicon Valley.
• 32:46
  The book is Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love.
• 32:49
  About 170 pages.
• 32:51
  It's already a national bestseller.
• 32:53
  It's his framework for figuring out whether an idea is actually worth going after before you put serious time and money into it.
• 32:59
  not theory, the way he actually does it.
• 33:01
  And he's repeatedly built successful businesses.
• 33:03
  On top of that, you can read it in a weekend.
• 33:05
  It can change your entire life and give you the right direction if you're an entrepreneur.
• 33:08
  So right now, if you go to getmarksbook.com slash success, you get two copies for $32.
• 33:14
  That's $16 each.
• 33:15
  Mark is paying for the second copy himself because he wants you to give it to somebody, a friend who's been sitting on an idea, someone who needs to push, whoever.
• 33:22
  That's getmarksbook.com slash success.
• 33:25
  Mark with a K. Buy one.
• 33:27
  Second one's free.
• 33:28
  My fitness pal is a success story partner.
• 33:29
  So people always ask me how I have time to track what I eat daily podcast newsletter.
• 33:34
  I run a full marketing agency.
• 33:35
  My days are super full and honestly, that's exactly why I do it.
• 33:38
  See, when you're running that many things, you can't afford to have your energy be inconsistent.
• 33:43
  Food is a foundation for energy, for sleep, for your weight, for recovery, for performance.
• 33:48
  And the days that I'm not paying attention to it, I feel it.
• 33:51
  The MyFitnessPal app makes tracking what you eat a non-issue.
• 33:54
  It removes all the friction.
• 33:55
  I just say what I ate.
• 33:56
  I can voice log it and it's done.
• 33:58
  Or I can point my camera at a plate with MealScan and it figures out what's there.
• 34:02
  I'm not sitting around entering ingredients.
• 34:04
  The app does the work for me.
• 34:05
  And it connects with over 40 fitness apps and wearables.
• 34:08
  So my training, my steps...
• 34:10
  my nutrition, it all goes to one place.
• 34:12
  One picture of what's happening instead of having to piece everything together or just go by feel or vibe.
• 34:16
  See, the whole thing takes seconds, not minutes.
• 34:18
  So go to podcasts.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott, all uppercase, for 15% off My Fitness Pal Premium.
• 34:24
  That's podcasts.myfitnesspal.com, code Scott.
• 34:28
  HubSpot is a success story partner.
• 34:30
  Now, every entrepreneur, founder, CEOs listening right now needs to pay attention.
• 34:35
  I have a question for you.
• 34:36
  When a buyer asks AI for a solution or a product that your business sells, does your business come up?
• 34:44
  The answer is that most companies have no idea.
• 34:47
  They don't know if their name shows up in any of the AI tools, chat, perplexity, Claude.
• 34:54
  And by the time they find out, they have lost tons of traffic and tons of deals to someone who did show up.
• 35:01
  HubSpot AEO.
• 35:03
  It helps you show up in those moments with the right answers that your customers and your buyers are looking for when they go type in a question.
• 35:11
  It's before the first click.
• 35:12
  It's before they fill out some form on your website.
• 35:15
  That is the moment that HubSpot AEO is built for.
• 35:19
  So if you want your company to show up in AI searches when your customer is looking, check out HubSpot.com.
• 35:25
  They are the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.
• 35:30
  All the different shops you first bought, like out of those first five and all the different ways you finance some.
• 35:36
  And you're just doing deals left, right and center at this point.
• 35:39
  Like you're trying to figure out any way to get money possible, any way to get a shop possible.
• 35:43
  What was, looking back, what was the best strategy or the best way to do a deal?
• 35:50
  What was the worst way to do a deal that you would recommend nobody ever do again?
• 35:56
  Good question.
• 35:59
  You can't fall in love with any, any deal.
• 36:03
  I did.
• 36:05
  What I did in the early days is make, make a bad deal.
• 36:09
  For example, overpay would be a bad deal.
• 36:13
  And I just worked my ass off to make it a good deal or a good decision.
• 36:19
  I could have walked away from some deals.
• 36:27
  So I don't know if, again, I don't know if it's a bad thing, but I have learned that not just because the way I'm wired as an entrepreneur, missed opportunity is a loss in my mind.
• 36:43
  Other people don't even, don't, we don't have to eat everything.
• 36:48
  Just because it's a buffet don't mean you need to eat it all.
• 36:50
  And I'm like, no, it's there.
• 36:52
  It's for the taking.
• 36:53
  We need to eat it.
• 36:55
  And so...
• 36:57
  The smart, there is wisdom in not doing everything.
• 37:03
  But you figured it out.
• 37:04
  In fact, I would actually, now understanding a little bit more about the early days of the business, I would say that by doing a bad deal and figuring it out, it probably made you a better entrepreneur.
• 37:17
  Yeah, you learn the lessons and you learn how to make things work no matter what.
• 37:23
  The big hack in it all, too, was I got lucky with people.
• 37:27
  you can't do this on your own.
• 37:30
  And I got some really good, I was always finding a manager who had run something a little bigger, you know, when I was four shops, I hired somebody who had ran eight to come in and help me operate it.
• 37:41
  So that was the other kind of thing that I figured out, surround yourself with smart people.
• 37:47
  And I honestly figured that out from, you know, there's a time in my life where,
• 37:54
  I wasn't up to any good.
• 37:55
  You know, I was unhappy in my first marriage.
• 37:57
  I was drinking too much.
• 37:58
  I was hanging around with people.
• 38:00
  They just weren't going anywhere, right?
• 38:01
  We weren't.
• 38:03
  And my partner would say to me, hey, if you surround yourself with better people, your life would be better.
• 38:08
  And so at an early age, I learned, you know, that doesn't just apply in your personal life, but it definitely applies in business.
• 38:15
  Surround yourself with smart people, good people, and it makes it a lot better.
• 38:20
  You mentioned that, you know, everything that you built is because of people.
• 38:26
  how do you find good people?
• 38:27
  It's something that everybody needs, every business owner needs, but it's something that everybody struggles with.
• 38:31
  So how do you find the right people to build a brand, build a culture, et cetera?
• 38:36
  Sometimes, well, you're looking for the resume first, right?
• 38:41
  And...
• 38:42
  And sometimes you get it wrong sometimes.
• 38:44
  I got it wrong plenty of times.
• 38:47
  What I've learned is you want somebody who's smarter than you.
• 38:51
  You want somebody who's been through what you're about to go through.
• 38:55
  But the magic is when you get along with them too, when you like them.
• 38:59
  So it's way funner if I would, if I gladly sit down and have a beer with you, um, then if, uh, personalities don't click at all, cause you're going to spend a lot of time together.
• 39:10
  You're going to work hard together.
• 39:11
  There's going to be difficult times and that's way better.
• 39:15
  And the team's way stronger when the team gets along.
• 39:17
  If you like who you work with and you're all good at what you do, like that's where the magic is.
• 39:22
  And I've gotten lucky enough for long enough periods of time that I can say that's been the case.
• 39:28
  Uh,
• 39:28
  I've also introduced somebody that the whole team, and it's great now because the team will reject them quicker than I will.
• 39:35
  The team will run them out of the room so fast.
• 39:37
  If I bring in a clown, so to speak, the team, the team will hate them.
• 39:42
  And, and, and, and he'll be rejected by the team quicker than, than even if I want to be patient with them, the team will look at me like, what are you waiting for?
• 39:50
  This is, this isn't going to work.
• 39:52
  Um, so yeah.
• 39:56
  Smart people, but people you get along with.
• 39:58
  And I just say that basically nice.
• 40:01
  Like nobody wants to hang out with or work for an asshole.
• 40:05
  Like it's not and it's not that hard to to not be one.
• 40:10
  So that's that's the very it's a very low bar, but it's true.
• 40:14
  Well, none of us are perfect.
• 40:15
  We're all going to make mistakes.
• 40:18
  Everybody's going to... People disappoint.
• 40:20
  Even the people you love, I disappoint.
• 40:24
  There's no way that people are going to agree on 100% of things.
• 40:27
  There's no way that people are going to see every situation the same.
• 40:31
  There's no way you don't disappoint somebody.
• 40:33
  So you just need to have the common goal.
• 40:37
  You need to be...
• 40:38
  If you're passionate about what you're trying to accomplish, respect each other's gifts and what you bring to the table.
• 40:44
  When the bad times come, if you've got personalities that work and you have fun together, it helps.
• 40:49
  And when you do all these, and when you do acquisitions the way that you've done acquisitions, especially when you're first starting out,
• 40:56
  Before you have a playbook for it, because now you've done so many times, it's probably a little bit more concrete how you acquire a shop, how you onboard the people.
• 41:07
  What are some of the lessons that you learned from doing those first few acquisitions on how to bring people into the culture of the company when they haven't necessarily been hired into it?
• 41:17
  What I've learned is it's hard because you have to get them to buy in.
• 41:23
  And, you know, I talk about Danny, our CMO, when I hired him.
• 41:29
  The conversation wasn't to come and advertise the company to the public.
• 41:34
  It was literally, hey, I want to take your skills and learn how to promote marketing.
• 41:39
  what Crash Champions is all about to all these new team members.
• 41:43
  Because I can't personally touch everybody anymore.
• 41:46
  How do we build a culture?
• 41:48
  And to me.
• 41:50
  That was going to be a sales process.
• 41:52
  We were going to have to sell our own team on how what we believe we're going to need to define what we believe, what we want to do, what are our values?
• 42:00
  How do we not only figure it out?
• 42:02
  How do we articulate it and how do we get people to buy into it?
• 42:06
  And then.
• 42:08
  That's what we've been doing.
• 42:10
  It's... Every time you hire somebody new, you got to do it all over again.
• 42:14
  And it's 11,000 people now.
• 42:16
  I promise you, we have some people on the team that suck.
• 42:20
  We have some people on the team that aren't nice.
• 42:22
  That's just reality.
• 42:23
  We just try to...
• 42:25
  You know, we train for culture first with our management team, then we train for kind of day to day of the job, and then we train for the people skills.
• 42:34
  Like we teamed up with Dale Carnegie, built special training for our company, because all of those skills are needed for our team.
• 42:41
  So it's a constant effort.
• 42:43
  What I what I.
• 42:46
  have learned is keep it simple what you're about.
• 42:49
  So for example, we're helping people in a time of need.
• 42:52
  It's easy to understand that easy to get behind that.
• 42:54
  And we're helping people in a time of need in something that they don't face very often.
• 42:59
  And they're going to need to trust us.
• 43:02
  And so we believe the difference is trust is something that came from that, which is every time we interact with each other, every time we interact with a vendor or a partner or a customer, we have a chance to build trust or tear it down.
• 43:14
  Let's act in a way that we're going to build trust.
• 43:17
  Let's be transparent and remember that we're helping people.
• 43:21
  And so start with simple things like that, that nobody's going to argue and say that I can't, you know, you're not going to hire somebody and have them hate that.
• 43:28
  Yeah.
• 43:28
  They're not going to say, oh, I can't get behind this.
• 43:30
  This company sucks.
• 43:32
  Now, not everybody's going to... What's the right word?
• 43:36
  Nobody's going to...
• 43:38
  evoke it to the degree that I would love them to, but it's an easy, it's an easy cultural thing that people can understand.
• 43:47
  People aren't going to argue with and say your culture is stupid.
• 43:50
  Well, like I think people overcomplicate culture and then they have this like list of values sitting on a, on the wall somewhere.
• 43:58
  And then the team's like, well, I don't even see the CEO doing half of this shit.
• 44:04
  That's right.
• 44:06
  So why am I going to?
• 44:07
  And I think it's partly because, you know, it's overcomplicated.
• 44:10
  It's because you want to have all these different things your company stand for.
• 44:14
  But if you're not even living them yourself.
• 44:15
  So you live it yourself and then you also simplify it.
• 44:19
  So it's easy for everyone else.
• 44:21
  Yeah.
• 44:22
  And and so in every acquisition.
• 44:27
  It's been choppy because everybody has when you acquire something, you might have people.
• 44:31
  It might be a bigger business or a smaller business.
• 44:34
  But they've been part of building that business.
• 44:36
  They really believe that they did great things.
• 44:39
  And I obviously thought they did great things.
• 44:42
  I paid for it, right?
• 44:43
  Or like, you know, so it's a fine line of acknowledging the greatness of what they built and what they did and saying, okay, but now together becomes this.
• 44:55
  And I'll be honest, like, as it got bigger...
• 44:59
  we bought a company bigger than us that was bankrupt.
• 45:02
  So we were 200 shops.
• 45:03
  They were 350 and bankrupt.
• 45:06
  And I would have thought like getting them to vibe with our way, which is being successful would be easy.
• 45:14
  I can tell you that that team loved the,
• 45:17
  what they did, even though it didn't work.
• 45:20
  And I thought, you know you were bankrupt, right?
• 45:23
  Why are you defending this stuff?
• 45:25
  It didn't work.
• 45:26
  But they were part of building it, right?
• 45:28
  And they had...
• 45:30
  They were there for the good times of the company too.
• 45:32
  And some of the decisions that led to the bad had nothing to do with them.
• 45:36
  It was leadership decisions at the top that they were just, so it was, it was difficult.
• 45:43
  It took a long time to, to unite the team and, and it's a constant effort.
• 45:48
  You just have to, you have to communicate it well, keep it simple.
• 45:52
  And I haven't always done that.
• 45:54
  um i've learned through trial and error a lot of error to to make it simpler um and and keep it crystal clear it's hard when you're when you're growing fast but that's that's what you have to do but also i mean you do such a you're very humble you are very humble and i know like a few times you said like you know we we we screwed it up before we got it right but i mean
• 46:21
  I think that I'm going to segue into another idea that I want to go into.
• 46:27
  I think you do it so right because I just learned before we pressed record about how a lot of your C-suite and the people that are now running the company.
• 46:37
  are people that were in the shop at the beginning.
• 46:39
  So, I mean, there's something to be said for being able to not only acquire multiple shops successfully now over, you know, 650, but also like nurture people from the trades and in the shops into like these high level executive positions.
• 46:56
  So you understand, like you understand how to bring people up and how to train them and how to and how to get them on board with like what your vision is as well.
• 47:03
  And I don't know, is that the, I'll ask, because I don't know the industry.
• 47:07
  Is it the norm to find somebody who is working in a shop and then eventually the career path is executive C-suite for them?
• 47:15
  Yeah.
• 47:17
  It has been for us now.
• 47:20
  I mean, outside of you, I don't... Yeah, good question, because I don't know.
• 47:25
  It can be done this way, though.
• 47:27
  I can tell you that.
• 47:28
  So that's exciting.
• 47:29
  And that's what I talk about when I'm talking about the trades.
• 47:32
  I tell people, look, like...
• 47:34
  Learning the trade is awesome and nobody could ever take it from you and you can make a good living.
• 47:38
  But by the way, there's a ton of big companies, not just in our trade, but other trades.
• 47:42
  And so there's a whole career path to be had.
• 47:44
  And only 15% of our team is college educated.
• 47:48
  Most of us came up to the shop.
• 47:50
  I'll say this, though.
• 47:50
  You have to apply yourself.
• 47:52
  You have to learn.
• 47:53
  It's not just like it won't work if it's just you're next in line so you get the job.
• 47:58
  Yeah.
• 47:59
  like the executives have sought out training, education, mentoring.
• 48:05
  They've applied themselves.
• 48:07
  What I do tell everybody is, look, care and effort is where it's at.
• 48:14
  We can teach the skill, but you have to have the will.
• 48:17
  And so if you have the drive and the ambition and are willing to work hard at it,
• 48:22
  I think the sky's the limit.
• 48:24
  You know, the next CEO of Crash Champions might be a detailer in one of the shops today.
• 48:28
  I don't know.
• 48:31
  There's, I believe there's potential in everyone.
• 48:34
  How ambitious they are is up to them.
• 48:37
  And then making sure we recognize it is our job.
• 48:42
  It's our job to recognize the talent and reward it.
• 48:46
  and bring people the training that they need to take advantage of whatever gifts they have.
• 48:53
  I mean, that's how we went about it.
• 48:59
  And you don't always see the potential immediately.
• 49:03
  Sometimes it shows up later.
• 49:04
  It might take a minute.
• 49:06
  But I'm going to make an argument that if the next CEO of Crash Champions is a detailer,
• 49:16
  I feel like that person knows exactly what every single customer went through and what they expect and what they love and what they hate.
• 49:24
  Versus if you just went to go find some Ivy League exec ex consultant and drop them into the company, I think that would probably be not the best fit.
• 49:38
  Yes.
• 49:39
  So I say I have an advantage and that is because I've done all, I've sat in every one of the seats.
• 49:44
  It's been a long time since I touched the car, but decades ago, I, I, so I tend to not make decisions that are going to make the team's life hard.
• 49:56
  Or I try not to like when it's a bad idea that I know is not going to work and they're going to hate it and it's going to make their life hard.
• 50:03
  It's easy to squash it.
• 50:05
  Um, where, um,
• 50:07
  another outside CEO might not understand the effect that's going to have.
• 50:12
  So that's that little bit of advantage that I have.
• 50:14
  Now, I would say, though, outside ideas applied to our industry are also awesome.
• 50:26
  So if I had it to do over, for example, our middle management is all from the industry.
• 50:35
  And our executive team isn't.
• 50:37
  We've got a hand.
• 50:39
  It's a mix now.
• 50:40
  Outside, you know, CFO from outside, CLO from the insurance side, some coming up from the industry, CIO not from the industry originally.
• 50:50
  So we've got a nice mix there.
• 50:52
  Middle management, though, it's 99% from the industry.
• 50:58
  If I had to, like, craft that perfectly, I would probably look for, like, a 70-30 mix of...
• 51:05
  middle management that came from big companies and know what big company looks like compared to just we know what body shop looks like because I think the mix is important and we're having to teach and learn the hard way what big business looks
• 51:19
  operates like and how to be successful at that where if we had a mix in the management team that might go easier now maybe that wouldn't i haven't done it that way so i can't i can't say i did it both ways and this way was better but in my head if i had it to do over i would have i would have shot for like a 70 30 mix and you can still aim for that i think that i think that
• 51:42
  I think the reason why you're successful, ironically, is because it's like a it's it's so heavily weighted towards people with like car, like body shop car.
• 51:52
  They've touched a car at some point in their career.
• 51:54
  I think that's actually why successful.
• 51:56
  I'm just thinking of customer experience.
• 51:58
  So, yes, for sure.
• 51:59
  You know, maybe you lack a little bit of the big company experience, but sometimes a big company experience is what fucks up a company.
• 52:05
  Yeah.
• 52:05
  Yeah.
• 52:06
  It's important to remember that we're helping people and how do we do that well.
• 52:15
  What I'm describing is, look, we know how to fix cars.
• 52:19
  We know how to take care of people.
• 52:21
  We don't necessarily know how to manage people well.
• 52:24
  And that's hurt us because we've driven away good people at a shop level with bad managers because they knew the business, but they didn't know how to lead people.
• 52:34
  So we've also done a ton of training, training our team how to lead.
• 52:39
  And that's a constant effort to...
• 52:44
  Unfortunately, when you grow fast, that's what happens.
• 52:46
  Like you don't have a perfect leadership team, but you're striving for it and you're training for it.
• 52:51
  How fast have you grown again?
• 52:52
  I don't think we actually spoke about it on this podcast.
• 52:55
  We're talking about it before.
• 52:56
  So just to walk through the timelines, you went from one shop to like five, six shops and then financing everything.
• 53:06
  When does private equity get involved?
• 53:08
  How fast did you go from like the one shop to the 650?
• 53:11
  Sure.
• 53:12
  So from 2014 to 2019, went from one to eight and had three lined up to go to 11.
• 53:16
  And then I started looking for money.
• 53:25
  I was just going to do it with debt again, but the investment banker I was talking to encouraged me to talk to private equity, so I did.
• 53:31
  So we brought them in at the end of 2019, and we exited 2019 with 13 locations, probably $50 million in revenue.
• 53:40
  And then by the end of 2022, so three years later, we were almost 600 locations and, say, $2.6 or $7 billion in revenue.
• 53:51
  So super fast.
• 53:52
  So talk to me, first of all,
• 53:54
  Which was a thrill.
• 53:55
  You still have some hair, so it's going okay.
• 54:00
  But that's really fast.
• 54:01
  Yeah, it was awesome.
• 54:03
  I don't think there's other, not a lot of examples of companies that have grown that fast.
• 54:09
  Yeah, I'm super proud.
• 54:10
  I think it's a record in our industry, and I don't think it'd ever be touched.
• 54:16
  From a percentage of growth, I don't know what the math is, but it's thousands.
• 54:20
  The Kager's like a thousand or so.
• 54:22
  I don't know what exactly, but it's big.
• 54:24
  But you also were doing okay during COVID.
• 54:27
  So during COVID, you weren't growing at this speed, but it was almost like you survived and thrived during COVID, and then on the back end of COVID, it was just like an up and to the right.
• 54:36
  Because what we did during COVID is, well, first –
• 54:44
  First thing during COVID is business went to 50% immediately because everybody was told to stay home.
• 54:51
  I mean, we were, this is one thing I'm proud of.
• 54:54
  We were a necessary business.
• 54:56
  Like we, so I use that as a point of pride to our team.
• 55:00
  Like if you ever think or are embarrassed about what we do, like we're necessary to survival for the society in a time when everybody else was able, not everybody, but a lot of people were able to,
• 55:12
  stay at home.
• 55:13
  And, and so, um, from a business perspective though, couldn't get any worse.
• 55:20
  50% of the revenue is out the door and we have a really small profit margin.
• 55:24
  We're losing money at way sooner than 50% of revenue.
• 55:29
  And so the great thing about bringing in money at that time is they pushed me to lay off people and,
• 55:37
  And the good thing is that we didn't term them.
• 55:41
  We just laid them off and the government gave them a bunch of money to stay at home, which was good.
• 55:47
  But if it were me on my own without the institutional money and experience partnered with me,
• 55:54
  I know I would have hung on too long because of, I valued the people so much and I know how important they are.
• 56:00
  I would have not wanted to lay them off.
• 56:02
  I would have tried to pay them and I would have made the, put the business in it.
• 56:06
  It would have been in a bad spot.
• 56:09
  Now,
• 56:10
  Because I had an investor, I couldn't benefit from all the money that the government did to support businesses.
• 56:16
  So maybe that would have kept us alive.
• 56:18
  But I know from my own mistakes, I would have hung on to people when we couldn't afford to.
• 56:23
  The PE group forced me to lay them off.
• 56:26
  So that got the business able to survive.
• 56:32
  Then, you know, a few months in, we got comfortable with, look,
• 56:37
  the world is going to be a while before the world's normal.
• 56:39
  I will say we kept thinking it's going to be another month.
• 56:41
  It's going to be another month until, but we waited say three or four months in when we felt it wasn't going to get worse.
• 56:48
  And revenue at that time was maybe 65 to 70% of normal.
• 56:52
  And we got aggressive then.
• 56:55
  So rather you kind of had two choices, wait it out or now there's a bunch of people that would gladly sell their business because they're struggling to have,
• 57:07
  We got aggressive when everybody else was kind of sitting on the sidelines and it paid off.
• 57:11
  So there's a little bit of that risk reward.
• 57:14
  There were plenty of companies that took the strategy of wait it out more.
• 57:17
  We got aggressive when everybody else was waiting.
• 57:20
  And then after COVID, what do you think?
• 57:23
  I mean, aggressive and 650 locations over $2 billion in revenue are two different things.
• 57:30
  There's a little bit aggressive, but then there's massive scale.
• 57:33
  So what do you think and what did you do after COVID that allowed you to scale so quickly?
• 57:40
  Well, remember I've talked in the beginning about seeing the train has left the station on more and more work going to national companies.
• 57:51
  And so figuring out that
• 57:54
  our strategy as a regional company isn't really going to work or even a multi-regional.
• 57:59
  And what happened for me to realize that is great relationships that I thought I was performing really well and kicking ass for came and said, Hey, we've made a deal with the big company.
• 58:11
  We're going to send them to work now.
• 58:13
  When I thought like we were, they loved us.
• 58:16
  They were like, we get so much better performance from local MSOs rather than the big companies.
• 58:21
  And then during COVID instantly went away.
• 58:24
  We made a deal.
• 58:25
  It's going to the big company.
• 58:26
  And so that's to me, like, we need a race to be a big company.
• 58:29
  Let's form a national footprint.
• 58:31
  So we started.
• 58:32
  And by the way, we were, the two states we were in heavy were Illinois and California, which were.
• 58:40
  two of the biggest lockdown states.
• 58:42
  So it was a little bit of like, hey, we need to get in some other, we need to get in some red in the map where people are moving around for our business.
• 58:48
  We needed people moving and driving.
• 58:50
  And so it was that too.
• 58:52
  It's like Illinois and California are gonna be shut down hard for a while.
• 58:56
  We need to pivot the strategy.
• 58:58
  So again, it was really in response, like,
• 59:03
  It was both strategic as where's the industry going to be and where do we need to go, but also now what's not working about a strategy and what should we do different immediately.
• 59:14
  So it's a little bit of both, reactionary and set up the business for the future.
• 59:20
  And...
• 59:23
  waiting it out seemed like a terrible, terrible idea.
• 59:26
  When you scale that fast, how do you make sure nothing breaks?
• 59:31
  It does, quite frankly.
• 59:33
  Stuff breaks.
• 59:34
  You fix it when it does.
• 59:38
  There were plenty of times, I mean, where stuff broke.
• 59:45
  The great thing about our business and probably any business,
• 59:51
  You don't get it right every time.
• 59:53
  Like you do have an upset customer every once in a while.
• 59:56
  So let's just take something simple like that.
• 59:58
  Like the customer's upset.
• 1:00:01
  They're unhappy with the way the repair looks.
• 1:00:04
  Or we told them we were going to be done by Friday and we took two weeks longer than we told them.
• 1:00:10
  Or there was a misunderstanding in something and they're upset.
• 1:00:14
  Well, the great thing about that is they've told you and you have a chance to make it right.
• 1:00:20
  Right.
• 1:00:21
  So whatever it is they're mad at you about, as a business, you can ignore them, tell them that's what they, you know, not care about your reputation, or you can...
• 1:00:33
  Try to make it right.
• 1:00:34
  Do everything you can to make it right.
• 1:00:36
  And what I learned in that is those are the customers you win for life.
• 1:00:41
  They'll be more loyal than the customer that had a perfect experience because they had something go wrong and you actually cared and you actually did something about it.
• 1:00:51
  Well, just apply that principle to everything.
• 1:00:54
  In a business, something's going to go wrong.
• 1:00:58
  You can't be a victim.
• 1:00:59
  You can't blame other people.
• 1:01:00
  You just, you fix it.
• 1:01:03
  You take action to make sure it doesn't happen again.
• 1:01:07
  And you take action to like make it better going forward.
• 1:01:11
  And that's little, to me, that's with little things and big.
• 1:01:15
  And the other thing is, is what's been, I think, powerful for me is transparency, right?
• 1:01:25
  When you try to hide, take for example, we got cyber attacked and that's a terrible thing because we're dealing with insurance claims and stuff.
• 1:01:35
  We're contractually obligated to protect information like and now you're hacked.
• 1:01:41
  Well, first, you don't know how bad you're hacked.
• 1:01:44
  You don't know if information's out or not.
• 1:01:45
  You got to figure that out.
• 1:01:47
  But you can also, like, do something dumb, like try to hide that.
• 1:01:51
  Or you can start to call partners and customers, et cetera, and say, hey, this is what's happened.
• 1:01:56
  And.
• 1:01:57
  This is what, you know, if you know what went wrong and be transparent, own it has worked for me.
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  If people want to go into entrepreneurship, just like I asked one last thought on everything you're talking about.
• 1:05:54
  You're being very like...
• 1:05:56
  honest about the shit that's worked and hasn't worked out on this journey.
• 1:06:01
  And I think that the important lesson is if you if you choose to bet on yourself and you choose to build a business, everything you're speaking about, the good and the bad, it'll probably happen to you at some point.
• 1:06:11
  Like it's like almost it's as inevitable as the first version of whatever it is you're building is going to suck.
• 1:06:19
  It's like it's all going to happen.
• 1:06:21
  All the stress, all the headaches, hopefully no cyber attacks.
• 1:06:24
  But at some point, if you're big enough, there's going to be something that is more stressful than you ever thought possible.
• 1:06:29
  It's going to happen.
• 1:06:30
  And transparency, dealing with it head on, realizing that, you know, you're still going to be around tomorrow.
• 1:06:38
  And this is kind of what you're signing up for.
• 1:06:48
  beyond your wildest dreams, the wealth it creates, the jobs it creates, all of that, it all comes with stress, but you know what you're signing up for.
• 1:06:58
  You know, and the final piece of that rapid growth was there was a...
• 1:07:03
  There was the third largest company in the industry that was in a bad financial situation.
• 1:07:10
  I had recruited some people away from that company, so I had a little bit of idea what was going wrong, what they were doing from how they were running it and what wasn't going to work.
• 1:07:19
  And so I just, the news about their financial situation started to come out in Moody's and the Wall Street Journal, etc.
• 1:07:34
  they had some debt coming up the next summer and I knew there was no way they were going to improve the business enough to like refinance that debt and so I did some research who's the bond holder and I called the Clear Lake who's our PE partner now I called them and said look like we've grown the business enough our partner's going to want to exit next year and it looks like to me you're going to own that company and um
• 1:07:57
  I think we can put them together, form a nice, again, knowing I needed a national footprint, I think we can put them together and I have a team that can run it and we'll create a nice national footprint business, putting the two together.
• 1:08:09
  So we should stay in touch because if you end up owning it and our current PE group wants to exit,
• 1:08:14
  And I mean, to hear them tell the story, they said, I called them and said, you're going to be the dog that caught the bus and you're fucked and you need me.
• 1:08:20
  But that's not how I did it.
• 1:08:22
  But I just recognized the opportunity was going to be there and wanted to make sure I positioned my company to do something with the opportunity should have come along and ended up working out.
• 1:08:33
  So that leaped us from 200 to 535.
• 1:08:38
  And then now it's just been still, is it still at this point individual acquisition or now are you looking to buy like larger groups?
• 1:08:45
  Both, both.
• 1:08:46
  I mean, we slowed down the growth for the past couple of years because when you do take on a bankrupt company, it takes a minute to, you basically, you know, I drew on a whiteboard to the team, like a small ship with a sinking ship that's bigger and basically drew a little chain.
• 1:09:03
  I'm like, we just picked up this anchor
• 1:09:05
  And what we need to do is pull it up out of the water and then combine it and give us a nice shiny new ship.
• 1:09:10
  But if we didn't do it right, that big ship was going to drag us down.
• 1:09:15
  And so it's been a battle.
• 1:09:17
  You know, stuff is more broke than I thought.
• 1:09:19
  Stuff was harder than I thought.
• 1:09:21
  Um, interest rates went up, the market went down, insurance premiums went up, all kinds of things came our way.
• 1:09:27
  Um, so you'd buckle down and get, get better and better.
• 1:09:31
  And so we've been doing that for the last couple, we've really got a great business now and have our self position to take off with growth again, which I think it come sometime next year.
• 1:09:40
  But it, I guess I'm describing a phase of, we kind of paused the rapid growth to get significantly better, better infrastructure, better people.
• 1:09:48
  Um, yeah.
• 1:09:50
  You can't just keep going, keep going.
• 1:09:54
  If the business is, we had to prepare the business to be better and get it ready to be bigger.
• 1:10:00
  But you're so good at understanding when to put your foot on the gas and understanding when to just pause and chill for a second.
• 1:10:10
  And it takes a lot of wisdom to understand when you do what.
• 1:10:15
  Because you're very good at growing quickly and taking risks.
• 1:10:21
  And even perceived risk, I think it's like risk to a degree at a high level where you're acquiring a bankrupt company that's bigger than you, that's coming with a lot of skeletons in their closet and a lot of baggage you're going to have to figure out and deal with, right?
• 1:10:35
  so good that's risk but make the move be aggressive but then okay you could really fuck yourself over if you don't pay attention to the thing you just did and you keep going you know at full speed and so it's like this balance it's like what season of the business are you in are you in a growth mode are you in a protection mode kind of like
• 1:10:56
  All this is so crazy.
• 1:10:57
  I don't know if you ever thought about this, but all the same things that you did, like when you were like before you're even an entrepreneur, like when you're figuring out how to like, like start that first shop.
• 1:11:11
  the growth and then growth, growth, and then protect, and then growth, growth, growth, and then protect.
• 1:11:15
  You've carried, the way you operate has never changed.
• 1:11:19
  Yeah, you've got to remember the long game.
• 1:11:21
  You've got to survive in order to... Yeah, so you grow, aggressive, risk, and then protect.
• 1:11:26
  Grow, aggressive, risk, and then protect.
• 1:11:27
  It's worked.
• 1:11:28
  And I think another maybe good thing to remember is...
• 1:11:35
  you don't want to ever lie to yourself.
• 1:11:37
  Like you don't have to always advertise where you're struggling or where you, but growth can hide a lot of sins.
• 1:11:44
  And I think the important thing is that,
• 1:11:48
  you don't want to keep growing to keep hiding the sins.
• 1:11:51
  You have to, you have to not lie to yourself and say, look, like this is broken.
• 1:11:56
  Growth is hiding it right now, but if we don't fix this, it's going to show up.
• 1:12:00
  And I, I, I do see, cause I see it in the management team sometimes, like they'll use the disguise.
• 1:12:10
  And, and as an, as a CEO or any executive, I, I wouldn't,
• 1:12:17
  You want to know where your flaws are better than anybody else.
• 1:12:21
  And you don't want...
• 1:12:23
  Hiding them might be the right thing for a minute.
• 1:12:25
  But long term, it's going to bite you in the ass.
• 1:12:27
  Yeah, you've got to know that you've got to fix it.
• 1:12:29
  Like you can't keep out running problems.
• 1:12:33
  They come back.
• 1:12:34
  It's like you can't hide from an upset customer.
• 1:12:36
  They're not going away.
• 1:12:37
  Crawling under your desk when they come to the front counter doesn't work.
• 1:12:40
  Go out there and talk to them.
• 1:12:42
  But I've seen people try to do that, right?
• 1:12:45
  They know somebody's unhappy.
• 1:12:46
  They see them come in the front door and the manager running, hiding the back.
• 1:12:49
  What is that?
• 1:12:50
  This is like a life lesson, though.
• 1:12:51
  This is a life lesson.
• 1:12:52
  Your problems are not going to go away.
• 1:12:53
  They're not.
• 1:12:54
  Like, face them.
• 1:12:56
  So in rapid growth, you have to know there's problems.
• 1:13:01
  It's our job to actually dig them out.
• 1:13:04
  What are we missing?
• 1:13:06
  Where are we broken where we think we're okay?
• 1:13:08
  Like you almost want to be relentless at finding your own flaws before they show up in a bad way.
• 1:13:14
  Have you thought about where this will end up?
• 1:13:17
  I mean, you're now, you're turning into that national.
• 1:13:24
  You are that national company now.
• 1:13:26
  So have you thought, you know, as a founder, where you want to take it?
• 1:13:30
  Do you want to IPO?
• 1:13:32
  Do you want to... Not in and of itself, but I think a business gets so big, that's the only way.
• 1:13:39
  But you never know.
• 1:13:40
  There's a lot of big companies out there with a lot of money.
• 1:13:44
  So maybe somebody who doesn't do collision work that's already a public company wants to partner a collision company with the one.
• 1:13:52
  None of those conversations are happening right now, but...
• 1:13:54
  I think my goal is to become the biggest and the best.
• 1:13:58
  And, of course, the biggest in the industry might laugh at me saying that because I'm a third their size.
• 1:14:03
  But, look, combined, the top three are only 25% of the market.
• 1:14:07
  Oh, it's still fragmented to a degree.
• 1:14:09
  Very, very much.
• 1:14:10
  Yeah.
• 1:14:11
  To me, we very much can be the biggest and the best one day.
• 1:14:14
  And that's who wants to quit at number three.
• 1:14:17
  I don't know.
• 1:14:18
  So that's where I'd like to take it.
• 1:14:19
  And then as far as like public or whatever, that's just eventually investors need to get the return on their money.
• 1:14:26
  So you have to do something.
• 1:14:27
  But there's other things.
• 1:14:30
  You have to be prepared to go public, I think, but that's not what we talk about.
• 1:14:34
  We don't even think in that way right now because it's not on the immediate horizon.
• 1:14:39
  There's so many other things to do in the meantime.
• 1:14:42
  What I have learned is a great business, money has show up.
• 1:14:47
  If you have a great business, you'll find investors, whether it's public or private or another company that wants it.
• 1:14:52
  Our job is to build a great business that everybody wants, and then you have people knocking at the door with money.
• 1:15:02
  And that works if you're small or big.
• 1:15:04
  If it's a great business, people will knock on the door with money to buy it.
• 1:15:08
  At this stage, I guess two questions.
• 1:15:11
  Did you ever think it was going to get this big when you first started your first... No, no.
• 1:15:16
  I mean, I, again, didn't even know what I would do for a living when I grew up.
• 1:15:20
  And I simply...
• 1:15:24
  didn't want to have the answer always be no, that I can't afford it, can't do it.
• 1:15:29
  Didn't want to get beat up for the clothes that my mom put me in and sent me to school, right?
• 1:15:35
  So it was really like just that.
• 1:15:40
  being able to not have the answer always be no.
• 1:15:44
  It wasn't a big, lavish dream.
• 1:15:45
  It's just grown over time again with the change in my thinking.
• 1:15:49
  What lights you up and gets you excited now about the business?
• 1:15:55
  I mean, the scale's enormous.
• 1:15:57
  What do you get excited about?
• 1:15:59
  Oh, a ton of stuff.
• 1:16:01
  But probably the biggest is the growth in people.
• 1:16:04
  The effect we've had on people...
• 1:16:07
  Look, nobody wants to know a collision repair company until they need it.
• 1:16:11
  And then, you know, that's the reality of it.
• 1:16:16
  Whether you know it or not, the truth is that someday either you or somebody you care about is going to have an accident.
• 1:16:23
  And you're going to want to go to somebody that you can trust to make sure you or your family are treated right.
• 1:16:28
  And that to me is a great thing.
• 1:16:30
  It's a great service we provide.
• 1:16:32
  Yeah.
• 1:16:34
  So there's that.
• 1:16:35
  We're able to fix cars and donate them to people in need.
• 1:16:39
  We're able to teach people a trade that they can make a living on.
• 1:16:42
  But that growth in people is the unexpected thing that I didn't see coming.
• 1:16:48
  I've gotten to see people's lives change from the career path that the company's able to give them since we've gotten bigger that I never even imagined would come.
• 1:16:59
  So that's been really, really cool.
• 1:17:02
  And now we happen to be in an industry that's transforming.
• 1:17:09
  And it's transforming because of technology.
• 1:17:11
  So think about a car just five or six years ago.
• 1:17:15
  Now the car can almost drive itself.
• 1:17:17
  There's all these advanced driver assist systems.
• 1:17:20
  You know, for decades before, cars were really unchanged.
• 1:17:23
  I mean, they added airbags.
• 1:17:25
  Unibodies came around in the 80s, I guess, or whatever.
• 1:17:27
  But fixing a car has been pretty much the same now.
• 1:17:32
  I describe it this way.
• 1:17:33
  A 777 airplane has 15 million lines of code.
• 1:17:37
  Today's automobiles have 150 million lines of code.
• 1:17:40
  Like they're complicated.
• 1:17:42
  And so it's an amazingly different industry than it was just a few years ago.
• 1:17:47
  And so that means we have to adapt and change.
• 1:17:49
  We have to get better.
• 1:17:50
  We have to train.
• 1:17:50
  We have to learn.
• 1:17:52
  And then the way that,
• 1:17:55
  Things are processed.
• 1:17:57
  Like, I think the industry is going to be in a big transformational period, and we get to be a part of that.
• 1:18:02
  And so, and it's short technicians.
• 1:18:04
  Like, all trades are short of people.
• 1:18:06
  So we're out there talking about the opportunity, letting them know, because I think our technicians make more than people know.
• 1:18:11
  You know, average technician makes $100,000 a year, which isn't huge money, but it's way better than the average U.S. wage.
• 1:18:19
  And I just want...
• 1:18:22
  Everybody, you know, like everybody's afraid of like AI taking away white collar, a lot of white collar jobs.
• 1:18:29
  We have an industry, you can be proud of what you're doing.
• 1:18:31
  It creates opportunity for people.
• 1:18:32
  And maybe it's not for you, but it's been fun to like start to get the word out because it's been fun.
• 1:18:38
  it's literally never been done.
• 1:18:40
  Nobody's ever like said, Hey, collision repair is a great career.
• 1:18:43
  You should look at it.
• 1:18:44
  And I think we had the opportunity to do that, attract people to the industry because it's super short of people and a whole lot of technicians are a baby boomer age ready to retire.
• 1:18:53
  The problem is about to get bigger.
• 1:18:55
  Supply and demand is real.
• 1:18:56
  So the guys are probably going to get paid more and more for what they do.
• 1:19:00
  Cause that's just the way things work.
• 1:19:02
  So I'm super excited about,
• 1:19:07
  what's really our problems for the industry and all that struggle I used to run from, I'm, I'm trying to embrace it and have us as a company be a solution.
• 1:19:16
  We set up a, um, a 501 C three because, um,
• 1:19:21
  What if competitors and insurers and everybody, like it's a problem.
• 1:19:26
  It's a problem for everyone that there's not enough collision repair technicians.
• 1:19:31
  It's a problem for the consumer because if repairing a car starts to cost more and more and more because there's a shortage of people, insurance premium goes up, which then affects everybody who owns a car.
• 1:19:43
  And so...
• 1:19:44
  it's, it's a bigger problem than crash champions.
• 1:19:47
  It's a bigger problem than any other one company, us figuring out how to solve it for the industry, but also for the consumer and vehicle owners is, is super kind of cool and important.
• 1:19:59
  It's not, it's not curing cancer.
• 1:20:01
  It's not making people live longer.
• 1:20:03
  There's, it's not putting infrastructure on the moon.
• 1:20:06
  So it's not as big as,
• 1:20:08
  some companies are thinking or trying to do, but it's, it's what I've known my whole life and it's a pretty cool time period.
• 1:20:15
  So I'm excited about it.
• 1:20:16
  And that, uh, that I think was your question originally, maybe I kind of went on a little soapbox.
• 1:20:22
  No, I like it.
• 1:20:22
  It was, it was, the question was what lights you up that lights you up.
• 1:20:25
  That's all.
• 1:20:28
  I want to just talk about trades for a second because we've been going into the business.
• 1:20:34
  I think people, they've learned a lot from sort of like how you've built and how you've thought through all the different stages of the business.
• 1:20:40
  There's a lot of wisdom there.
• 1:20:42
  But one thing that you're super passionate about and I think is something that can definitely be talked about is the trades and the fact that, I mean, ever since I was a kid, I'm
• 1:20:56
  You know, everybody always kind of knew there was money in the trades, but I don't think a lot of kids went into the trades.
• 1:21:02
  I don't think a lot of people are looking for that.
• 1:21:05
  They're all going to university or college or like, especially, you know, with my with my group of friends.
• 1:21:10
  And I guess it really hasn't gotten much better is basically what you're saying.
• 1:21:13
  It's not like there's a ton of people going to the trades, even though they know they can make good money.
• 1:21:18
  And now everybody's stressed about.
• 1:21:20
  A.I.
• 1:21:21
  taking their jobs and.
• 1:21:23
  AI can write a legal brief and AI can do admin work better than a lot of people can do it.
• 1:21:29
  So why do you think that, how do we get people into traits?
• 1:21:38
  What's the answer?
• 1:21:39
  Like why is there such a reputation or a stigma or why do people stay away from it?
• 1:21:44
  How do we fix that?
• 1:21:53
  parents and everybody, you know, parents want what's best for the kids.
• 1:21:57
  I want what's best for mine.
• 1:21:58
  And, and when the, when the world around you is presenting like college and, and white collar, whatever you want to call them, type of jobs are there.
• 1:22:09
  are the better jobs are the better future.
• 1:22:11
  Like that's what you start to push your kids toward because you want a great future for them.
• 1:22:16
  And then shop class gets taken out of school and welding class gets taken out of school because the whole push is you got to go to college.
• 1:22:23
  If you want to, if you want a great future, you got to go to college.
• 1:22:26
  And I, I,
• 1:22:28
  Look, I believe that there are great futures in going to college.
• 1:22:32
  And if you're going to be a doctor or if you're going to be a lawyer or if you're going to be an accountant or a CEO, like there's there's a ton of jobs.
• 1:22:41
  That you need to go to college for.
• 1:22:42
  But I also believe that there's a ton of jobs that you don't.
• 1:22:45
  And people made fortunes.
• 1:22:49
  fixing or building homes, fixing or building cars, or any type of service around the world long before there was the technology there was today.
• 1:22:56
  And there's still fortunes to be made in all those things.
• 1:23:00
  I,
• 1:23:02
  I understand how it happened and why, because we all want our kids to have great futures.
• 1:23:07
  And for decades, that's what parents were in education was trying to do.
• 1:23:11
  Now it's kind of over levered, which is created, which is what also tends to happen with everything.
• 1:23:17
  Right.
• 1:23:17
  You go too far one way and then you got to come back.
• 1:23:19
  So now everything's went too far this way.
• 1:23:21
  There's not enough.
• 1:23:22
  skilled trades.
• 1:23:23
  There's not enough skilled workers in the world.
• 1:23:26
  And so now here's where the huge opportunity lives.
• 1:23:30
  So it's getting out there.
• 1:23:34
  You see it all the time.
• 1:23:35
  You see...
• 1:23:38
  big corporations announcing $100 million to train apprentice programs.
• 1:23:42
  And you see, heck, I was even watching news one, and I think it was, I hope I got this right, I think it was Metallica was raising money to contribute to, like, skilled workers.
• 1:23:53
  And I'm like, what do they have to do?
• 1:23:54
  Like, you just, it's amazing where, like, places you wouldn't even think of are starting to, like...
• 1:24:01
  And it's not to say don't go to college or there's not great things to do that route.
• 1:24:05
  It's just to say, hey, in case nobody's looking, there's also great opportunity here.
• 1:24:11
  And I think it's out there pretty hot and heavy now.
• 1:24:13
  It's been messaged pretty well.
• 1:24:17
  But you don't fix it overnight.
• 1:24:19
  I mean, it takes a while to learn these trades and to learn how to.
• 1:24:24
  And for us now, for example, we have gotten...
• 1:24:27
  A lot of traction.
• 1:24:28
  There's a lot of young people interested, believe it or not.
• 1:24:31
  So there is a shift now because people are, because at the end of the day, it's like you just want to have a good career, a good life for yourself.
• 1:24:36
  Yeah.
• 1:24:36
  It doesn't matter if you're fixing cars or if you're writing a, you know, if you're, if you're writing a brief or something like that in a white call, it's like you want a good career and a good life.
• 1:24:45
  That's the goal.
• 1:24:46
  That's right.
• 1:24:47
  And here's what I say about it.
• 1:24:49
  If you learn a trade, you'll know it forever.
• 1:24:51
  And maybe just do it for now.
• 1:24:53
  Maybe you want to go to college, but how about learn to trade, get paid while you work, save your money, and don't have to go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to pay for the college.
• 1:25:04
  And I don't know about you, but I have a ton of friends that went to college and didn't do anything with it.
• 1:25:10
  Most, actually.
• 1:25:12
  Outside of the people that got the med school or they passed the bar and now they're a lawyer.
• 1:25:18
  I know a lot of people that spend a lot of money on liberal arts degrees.
• 1:25:21
  Yeah.
• 1:25:22
  doing anything with.
• 1:25:23
  So that's all it's about to me.
• 1:25:25
  Like all of it's good.
• 1:25:26
  There's opportunity everywhere.
• 1:25:28
  That's the great thing about the United States of America.
• 1:25:31
  There's opportunity everywhere.
• 1:25:35
  We're talking about one that I think has been overlooked for a minute and
• 1:25:39
  So you sat down with the government and you were talking to them.
• 1:25:43
  You did a podcast recently.
• 1:25:44
  Yeah.
• 1:25:46
  Tell the audience sort of like how that happened, what they were asking you about.
• 1:25:50
  Because obviously that's interesting.
• 1:25:51
  Like, okay, so now the government is understanding that there's an issue with
• 1:25:54
  like lack of people in trades.
• 1:25:56
  And they probably have an idea of what is that going to impact in the future.
• 1:26:01
  And that was the exact subject.
• 1:26:02
  Obviously, you know, the current administration is making changes and the Secretary of Education's job is almost to, like, put an end to her job, it seems.
• 1:26:13
  And so, but in this whole conversation, what was great talking about with Secretary McMahon was she's trying to bridge...
• 1:26:24
  She's Secretary of Education.
• 1:26:25
  She's not anti-education.
• 1:26:26
  But she realizes there's the bridge there between a career and the education.
• 1:26:31
  And how do you bridge that?
• 1:26:33
  And it's an opportunity for us just to talk about the apprentice program that we have and figure out how it can help, how we can make it more attractive.
• 1:26:40
  If the government is going to do something to help people.
• 1:26:44
  apprentices or help companies, apprentice people.
• 1:26:47
  It's a curiosity thing.
• 1:26:49
  Like, I don't know if any of the programs that they put in place are going to necessarily help us as a company, but they put together programs that are going to help the individuals that want to learn and states are doing things.
• 1:27:01
  So I, it's more of a conversation for me just to get to know what's out there so that I
• 1:27:08
  us help other people and selfishly solve a problem for ourselves.
• 1:27:13
  Let's be transparent about it.
• 1:27:14
  I need to train people.
• 1:27:17
  How do we go about doing that right?
• 1:27:19
  How do we put together a program that works?
• 1:27:21
  How do we fund it?
• 1:27:24
  And so that's a simple curiosity conversation probably on both sides.
• 1:27:29
  She would like to know what companies are doing to solve the problem.
• 1:27:32
  I would like to know what the government's putting together to solve the problem and how could we possibly work together.
• 1:27:39
  And that's all the conversation's been about.
• 1:27:42
  For a lot of the audience...
• 1:27:45
  They're very interested in building businesses and entrepreneurship.
• 1:27:48
  And I think that a lot of them gravitate towards, you know, maybe building a tech company, you know, could be like a consumer goods company, like dabbling in AI.
• 1:28:03
  Do you think that there's a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs that want to build in the trades?
• 1:28:08
  That want to start their own shop?
• 1:28:10
  Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing about watching the trades now is there's a lot of investment money running to them.
• 1:28:20
  I mean, you name it, roofing companies, HVAC companies, electric companies, there's money rolling up those industries similar to what we're doing in collision repair.
• 1:28:32
  So if you have one of those businesses or start one of those businesses, the great thing is, is you know that there will be a buyer for it one day.
• 1:28:42
  There's I mean, the whole talk is about how much electricians are needed for these data centers and builders and plumbers and everything else.
• 1:28:49
  So when when there's huge demand demand.
• 1:28:53
  That's what entrepreneurs do.
• 1:28:55
  They're solving a need or they're making something better.
• 1:28:58
  And so if you like any of the trades and you're an entrepreneur, it's kind of a golden opportunity time.
• 1:29:06
  One of my, I have a good friend, Tommy Mello, and he's the founder of A1 Garage Doors.
• 1:29:11
  And he, you know, he just did a deal with KKR for a billion dollars.
• 1:29:17
  And that's all.
• 1:29:18
  From garage doors?
• 1:29:19
  Yeah, from garage doors.
• 1:29:20
  Isn't that awesome?
• 1:29:21
  It is.
• 1:29:22
  It really is.
• 1:29:23
  I think that, you know, I think that too many people have this, this.
• 1:29:28
  this very narrow vision of, to your point, like, okay, this is how we should build a career.
• 1:29:33
  Go to college, get a white-collar job.
• 1:29:35
  This is how we should build a business.
• 1:29:36
  Oh, you know, I'm an entrepreneur.
• 1:29:38
  I'm sitting at home.
• 1:29:38
  Maybe I'll, like, vibe code some AI tool, right?
• 1:29:42
  But there's so much money out there.
• 1:29:44
  And whether, and I think that if you want to,
• 1:29:48
  get a job in the trades, you can make a ton of money.
• 1:29:50
  Like I didn't realize that everybody's making over a hundred grand, which is pretty good.
• 1:29:54
  It's pretty healthy.
• 1:29:55
  Um, or if you're an entrepreneur, you can start a business in the trades.
• 1:29:59
  You probably have to know what you're doing first.
• 1:30:01
  So you probably have to be, you'll have to be the person doing the job and then you turn it into a business, but there's also probably opportunities for acquisition too.
• 1:30:08
  I'm assuming a lot of people are retiring and
• 1:30:11
  Yeah, you know who says it?
• 1:30:13
  Damon John is somebody who says it well.
• 1:30:15
  He talks about, look, there's nothing new.
• 1:30:17
  Look at Shark Tank.
• 1:30:19
  The biggest deal, he says, is Bomba Socks.
• 1:30:21
  The second best deal is The Sponge, right?
• 1:30:25
  It's just something reinvented or a different spin on it.
• 1:30:32
  There's opportunity in a lot of things that you don't have to come up with to change the world idea.
• 1:30:42
  to build or start a kick-ass business.
• 1:30:46
  And I think maybe people overthink and think they need the latest, greatest, or they're trying to do it overnight.
• 1:30:53
  And my success is no overnight thing.
• 1:30:58
  It's a 25-year in the making.
• 1:31:01
  And I think that's the part that the...
• 1:31:04
  maybe world because of social media and everything.
• 1:31:06
  It makes things seem like it can be, it's the world we live in.
• 1:31:10
  I mean, everything, everybody expects it overnight.
• 1:31:14
  Heck, and that started a long time ago.
• 1:31:15
  I mean, I mean,
• 1:31:17
  Remember when the big thing was you get eyeglasses in an hour, you get your oil change in five minutes, like the world is just geared for you can have it now.
• 1:31:25
  Credit cards give it to you now.
• 1:31:26
  You don't need to wait till you have money.
• 1:31:28
  So like, I guess it's why would it be any different for people thinking success to just be now?
• 1:31:33
  But my experience has been it's going to be hard.
• 1:31:38
  You've got to have the stick-to-itiveness to get there and the ambition.
• 1:31:44
  Some get the overnight success, but I don't think it's common.
• 1:31:49
  No, I think that actually because we're so screwed up and we think that everything is immediate, that the patience and playing the long game, that actually is the superpower.
• 1:32:00
  that the person who can do it for 26 years, they're going to be the ones that win.
• 1:32:08
  Over your 26-year journey, I'm curious, you've given over a lot, but what has been the hardest lesson you've ever had to learn?
• 1:32:15
  The one that I've struggled with the most is moving on from leadership when they hit their ceiling.
• 1:32:24
  because you've, you've kind of grown from here to here with them.
• 1:32:28
  Um, you like them.
• 1:32:31
  Um, and you just keep wanting it to, to work.
• 1:32:35
  It,
• 1:32:37
  You have to, you have to move on, recognize when people have hit their ceiling and not be afraid to move on because you're doing them a disservice.
• 1:32:45
  They're frustrated.
• 1:32:46
  They're not going to say it because they, they don't want to let you down.
• 1:32:50
  Like, that's the part that I learned about it.
• 1:32:52
  Like you feel like the jerk who's going to term them.
• 1:32:56
  There's a level, I've seen it a few times.
• 1:32:58
  There's a very level, a level of relief on their end too.
• 1:33:01
  Yeah.
• 1:33:02
  because they're trying to make you happy.
• 1:33:04
  They're trying to, and it's just, it's gotten beyond what they know or what they know quit working, whatever.
• 1:33:10
  But moving on from leaders at the right time, it's been the tough thing.
• 1:33:14
  And I've heard that from a lot of people.
• 1:33:16
  They'll say, what would you do if you had to do over and move on quicker?
• 1:33:20
  I think that, listen, like when somebody isn't working out in the company, I don't think there's a single entrepreneur that's ever going to tell you it's easy to let somebody go.
• 1:33:29
  It's always the hardest thing.
• 1:33:32
  bringing on the right people and letting go of the wrong people because the business at the end of the day is just all about people that's all it is it is like the most valuable skill that you'll ever learn and it never gets easy either ever ever yeah it's been the one that i've always waited too long to do but now the company's so big and the people reporting directly to me when i wait too long i affect for that one person i'm affecting thousands and so that's what i have to remind
• 1:34:01
  You're worried about this hard conversation with this one person.
• 1:34:03
  What about the other 11,000 that are counting on you to do the right thing?
• 1:34:06
  That's what I have to tell myself.
• 1:34:09
  What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
• 1:34:11
  That's hard because I've gotten so much good advice.
• 1:34:14
  But I think the simple one that my partner said, surround yourself with better people, your life will be better.
• 1:34:20
  So people want to connect with you and they want to learn more about Crash Champions.
• 1:34:28
  Where's the website?
• 1:34:29
  They can go to all the social.
• 1:34:31
  Also, drop your podcast as well, and then we'll put it in the show notes.
• 1:34:34
  So all the different links.
• 1:34:36
  Sure.
• 1:34:36
  So Matt Ebert CC is the handle on all the social media platforms, so you can find me there.
• 1:34:42
  Podcrash with Matt Ebert is the podcast that we're doing.
• 1:34:47
  Way early stages compared to...
• 1:34:50
  you're awesome one here.
• 1:34:51
  And then, um, of course, crash champions, crash champions.com.
• 1:34:55
  The last thing I'd like to ask, you know, you've given over all this advice and you've been in this game for so long now.
• 1:35:02
  Um, if you could tell your 20 year old self, one piece of advice, the most important advice and you know, just that, that young 20 year old version of Matt would have heard this and it would have changed his life.
• 1:35:14
  What would it be?
• 1:35:15
  And why?
• 1:35:16
  make sure and, and, and enjoy the ride because you're constantly striving after the next goal or whatever.
• 1:35:25
  And the next goal, if you're not careful, just becomes okay.
• 1:35:30
  Now what?
• 1:35:30
  Like in, in, it's going to be okay.
• 1:35:34
  It's going to be great and enjoy, enjoy along the way.
• 1:35:38
  Don't stress so much.
• 1:35:40
  Like it's probably impossible advice because I still have to tell myself that, but,
• 1:35:47
  what's the worst that could happen if you're alive and healthy and I got a wife I love and supports me I got two great kids like got my health like living in a great country how bad how bad can it you know so like
• 1:36:07
  kind of look around, you know, smell of flowers, whatever you want to say, like enjoy it.
• 1:36:13
  And I'm learning to do that.
• 1:36:15
  Be present.
• 1:36:17
  Don't always be in your head for what else is going on elsewhere.
• 1:36:20
  Like those are things that I'm learning to do now, maybe to a –
• 1:36:25
  25% of the level that I should, but my younger self never did that.
• 1:36:29
  It was just off to the next, off to the next, off to the next, where now it's like the other side of 50, you start to think, like, there's only so long you get, like, got to enjoy it.