When Matt Ebert uses his repair work of the car collision, he does so modestly, like his beginnings.
The CEO of Crash ChampionsThe $ 2.75 billion in sales last year came from a small town in Indiana, in which a university degree was not a matter of course or expectation.
“We didn’t have much from a financial point of view” Assets. “College and great career planning were never a discussion in my family.”
Ebert had an entrepreneurial spirit and started mowing lawns for people aged 10 or 11.
“For me, a car meant freedom,” he recalled. “I remember the first time when I was alone in a car and thought about how I could go everywhere now what I want.”
But at the age of 16 he destroyed his first car: a two -seater Ford Exp. He did not want to make insurance claims or have his insurance canceled, visited a local car construction man and asked him if he could show Ebert how to repair his car. The repair man did it – and that introduced Ebert to a career of repairing cars.
Courtesy Crash Champions
Six -digit jobs without a degree
Ebert took a job with the repair man after the high school and therefore came to the industry “literally”. Now he is overseeing a company that has been too recorded by sales of 130x since 2019 and employs more than 10,000 people.
And how Ebert 83% of his workforce has no university degree.
“I did very, very well in life, didn’t go to the college,” he said. “And I’m not an anti-college. I think there are definitely things for which the college is great. But I also know that it is not an opportunity for everyone.”
Eberts’ company is ahead of the curve when it comes to employing people without a four -year conclusion. Historically, the college was viewed as a disposable ticket for a lucrative career, but younger generations begin to not take the only way to success. Many Take over to clees take commercial jobs And are not burdened by student loans. In addition, some more than six numbers make it.
At Crash Champions, technicians earn more than 100,000 US dollars a year, said Ebert. In the first quarter of 2025 the US Census Bureau reported The middle weekly income of the country’s 120.9 million full-time wage and salary workers in the country was $ 1,194, which corresponds to around $ 62,000 annually. This means that crash champion workers earn about 1.6 times the average US worker.
“We see the college as a bonus, not as a prerequisite,” said Ebert. Of course, there are certain positions that require a certain conclusion, he added how your controller and Chief Legal Officer needed degrees.
Despite Do not need a college degree For most work, Crash Champions focus on continued learning. It created a program for the development of managers that focused on topics such as culture and binding, financial and operational leadership, strategic leadership, communication and recognition, continuous learning as well as championship and employment at the delegation. Thousands of employees took part in these programs.
Courtesy Crash Champions
“We can recruit the best technicians. We can train the best technicians (but) if they work for bad managers, they will go and go somewhere else,” said Ebert.
Crash Champions also offers an apprentice program in which it can start “from scratch to new”, he said. They are accommodated with a team member with whom they work for a few years and are then taken.
Growth history of Crash Champions
Ebert attributes many of the company’s services to its employees.
“A key to my success was to surround me with better people, more intelligent people than me, people who did things that I didn’t do,” he said.
Nevertheless, Ebert was the mastermind behind the company. After the high school, he went to the suburbs of Chicago and stayed with his grandparents for a few years and got a job in a physical business. At that time he still wanted to start his own business, but “being a young child who knew nobody”, he knew that this would be a challenge and said it was “a little bit about (his) head”.
However, Ebert explored various companies with an entrepreneurial spirit and finally opened his own U -Bahn Franchise of cash 100,000 US dollars for credit cards. Although this first location did not make any money, he decided to “think that this would be the way to make money”.
But he was wrong. He also made no money. He returned to his roots for auto repairs and turned to a local auto-consistent. In 1999 they opened a body shop when Ebert was 26 years old.
At the beginning of Crash Champions, this was called Lennox for the first time after a city in Illinois. Ebert changed the name of his business in Crash Champions, which comes from the idea that the body shop is a hero in the need for a customer after an accident.
“I wanted to make the shops beautiful, tear off some of these stereotypes and make it a place where people want to come, a place where people want to work,” he said.
Courtesy Crash Champions
After taking over the business, Ebert knew that he wanted to expand, and he received a fighting body shop who quickly bought the third and fourth locations of the business within one year.
At that time, Ebert still used the financing of Small Business Administration and “Basically grew so far” in the Chicago area. He wanted to acquire more shops, but was not able to work with an investment banker with SBA financing that suggested private equity as an alternative to debt. Ebert initially hesitated, but recognized industry trends such as technical progress in the vehicle repair would require more capital. The Covid 19 pandemic forced a shift in strategy, but Ebert also saw his business model at the national level.
Crash Champions’ great growth came in 2021. Service King KollisionAnother large company for the AutoModik repair had grown too quickly and made poor business decisions, which led to financial difficulties. The debts were due in 2022 and it would not be able to pay. The company’s bond believers mainly Clearlake CapitalWould probably take over, so Ebert Clearlake contacted proactively to connect the service of Service King with Crash Champions to expand his business.
Those who turned into 330 -running 650 locations of Crash Champions, and the company recorded sales of $ 327.1 million in 2021 to $ 2.1 billion in 2022. For this year, it predicts around 3 billion US dollars and plans to “grow” Ramp) next year, “said Ebert.
“I don’t want to stop until we are number one. We are the third largest in the country today,” said Ebert and moved into Caliber collision And Gerber collision & glass. “There is a lot of growth for the company. We have slowed down a little here in the past few years or two because we have grown so quickly, and we wanted to be more sophisticated and more willing to be even bigger.”
