When Matt Ebert talks about his car crash repair shop empire, he takes a modest way, just like his beginnings.
CEO Crash ChampionRevenue reported last year was $2.75 billion from a small Indiana town where getting a college degree was neither given nor expected.
“Finance, we don’t have much,” he told him. wealth. “There has never been a discussion with my family in college and large career programs.”
Ebert is entrepreneurial and starts mowing grass for people aged 10 or 11. His real interest was the car, though, and he couldn’t wait to open the cover on his first car, change the oil and take off the wheels.
“To me, cars mean freedom,” he recalls. “I still remember the first time I was sitting alone in the car, thinking about wherever I want to go now.”
But at the age of 16, he ruined his first car: a two-seater Ford Exp. He didn’t want to file an insurance claim or cancel the insurance, he visited a local auto mechanic and asked if he could show Ebert how to repair the car. The mechanic did, which led Ebert to work in a career in repairing cars.
Courteous Crash Champion
Six-digit jobs without a degree
After high school, Ebert worked in a repairman, so he entered the industry “literally”. Now, he oversees a company that has seen revenues grow 130 times since 2019 and has more than 10,000 employees.
Like Ebert, 83% of his workforce No university degree.
“I did a really good job in my life and didn’t go to college,” he said. “And I’m not anti-university. I think there must be something great about college. But I also know that this is not everyone’s chance.”
Ebert’s company is leading the way in hiring people without a four-year degree. Historically, college has been seen as one-way tickets for profitable careers, but younger generations are starting to capture it is not the only way to succeed. many Zers Gen is working in business And not burdened by student loan debt. Also, some people do more than six numbers.
Ebert said technicians earn more than $100,000 a year in crash championships. In the first quarter of 2025, the U.S. Census Bureau Report The median weekly income of 120.9 million full-time and wage workers in the country is $1,194, or about $62,000 a year. This means that the workers who crashed the car champion scored about 1.6 times that of ordinary American workers.
“We think universities are an incentive, not a requirement,” Ebert said. Of course, he added that certain positions require specific degrees, such as how their controllers and chief legal officers need a degree.
although No university degree required For most jobs, Crash Champions focuses on continuing to learn. It creates a leadership development program focused on cultural and retention, financial and operational leadership, strategic leadership, communication and recognition, ongoing learning, and delegation of mastery and team employment. Thousands of employees participated in these programs.
Courteous Crash Champion
“We can recruit the best technicians. We can train the best technicians, but if they work for bad managers, they will leave and go somewhere else,” Ebert said.
He said the crash champions also offer an apprenticeship program where they can “start technicians from scratch.” They place them with team members who have worked with them for several years and then are alone.
The growth story of the crash champion
Ebert attributes his employees to many of the company’s achievements.
“The key to my success is to be around myself with better people, smarter people than me, those who have done things I haven’t done,” he said.
Despite this, Ebert is the mastermind behind the company. After high school, he moved to the Chicago suburbs, lived with his grandparents for several years and found a job at the body shop. At the time, he still wanted to start his own business, but “becoming a kid who doesn’t know anyone” knew it was a challenge and said that opening his own body shop would be “a bit over the top”.
Ebert studied different businesses in an entrepreneurial spirit and eventually opened his own business subway Franchise Cash Join $100,000 credit card. Although the first location didn’t make money, he decided to open the second one “think it would be a way to make money”.
But he was wrong. That doesn’t make any money either. So he returned to the roots of the car restoration and came into contact with local auto mechanics who co-opened an airport in 1999 when Ebert was 26 years old. His business partner was 20 years older than him, retired in 2014 and sold the business to Ebert in 2014.
This became the beginning of the crash championship, which first used a small town in Illinois as Lennox. Ebert changed his business name to a crash champion, which stemmed from the idea that Bodyshop was the hero the client needed after the accident.
“I want to make the store good, remove some stereotypes and make it where people want to come, which is where people want to work,” he explained.
Courteous Crash Champion
After taking over the company, Ebert knew he wanted to expand, and he got a struggling Bodyshop, which soon snowballed the company’s third and fourth locations, about a year later.
At the time, Ebert was still using small business management financing, and he was “basically growing” in the Chicago area. He wanted to buy more stores but couldn’t raise funds with SBA, so he worked with an investment banker who suggested private equity as a debt alternative. Ebert was initially hesitant, but recognized industry trends such as technological advancements in car repairs will require more capital. The 19009 pandemic forced a change in strategy, but Ebert also saw his business model nationwide.
The major increase in crash championships is in 2021. Service King CollisionAnother big auto repair company grew so fast that it made bad business decisions that led to financial problems. The debt will expire in 2022 and this will not be paid. The company’s bondholders are mainly Clearlake Capitalit is likely to take over it, so Ebert took the initiative to contact Clearlake to merge with Crash Champions to serve King’s business to expand its business.
These turned into 330 collapse champions’ current 650 locations, with the company’s revenue soaring from $327.1 million in 2021 to $2.1 billion in 2022. This year, it is expected to be about $3 billion and plans to “growth this year).
“I don’t want to stop before we get first. We are the third largest in the country today,” Ebert said Caliber collision and Gerber Collision and Glass. “The company is growing much better. We’ve slowed down a little bit here over the past year or two because we’re growing so fast we want to be more complex and ready for it.”
