480: Matt Ebert—The Billion Dollar Car Wreck

Matt Ebert didn't set out to build a billion-dollar business—he just wanted to fix cars the right way. Today, he's the CEO of Crash Champions, one of the fastest-growing collision repair companies in the country, valued in the billions and trusted to bring wrecked vehicles back to life. Mike sits down with Matt to unpack what really happens after a crash, why the skilled trades behind collision repair matter more than ever, and how a kid with no grand plan or college degree wound up leading a national powerhouse. Along the way, Matt tells how he got his start in the business, proving that sometimes the road to success begins with a single accident (or two) … and a desire to fix it. Many thanks to our excellent sponsors ZipRecruiter.com/Rowe http://www.ziprecruiter.com/rowe to post a job for FREE. GoodRanchers.com https://www.goodranchers.com/ Use code MIKE to get $25 off your first order and FREE meat for life. K12.com/Rowe https://go.k12.com/mps/national/career-and-college-prep/?product=public_schools_generic&leadsource=paid_audio&lead_source_detail=aware_prospecting&tactic=offline&vendor=podsearch&vanity_url=k12.com-rowe&utm_campaign=podcasts&utm_content=rowe&utm_medium=paid_audio&utm_source=k12.com-rowe&adobe_mc=MCMID%3Dnull See what's possible for your child with K12's Career and College Prep AuraFrames.com/Mike http://auraframes.com/mike Use code Mike to get $25 off their best-selling Carver Mat frame.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mike Rowe?

  The way I heard it Chuck, it's entirely possible that a guy can just be driving down the road, you know, 17 years old, in his beloved car, and lose control. 16, I think he was. Wreck it, and then be worth a billion dollars as a result. Is that what you heard? That's what I heard. I heard the most profitable car wreck in the history of the world is the story we're about to share on this episode of The Way I Heard It. Yes, it sounds exactly like the conversation that we just did, yes. Although, I don't think we connected the dots. No. Not the way I just did. I mean, I just talked to a guy named Matt Ebert.

• 0:47Mike Rowe?

  Matt Ebert is a guy who bought me dinner a year ago, and not just me. I was at Skills USA with a room full of people in a private dining room. I was speaking there, this thing, right? And they invited me in, and somebody picked up our whole tab. Right. And then the waiter gave me a note, and it was a nice note from a guy named Matt, who said he admired what we were doing at MicroWorks. Right. And he would love a chance to talk and share some of what his company was doing to help reinvigorate the trades. Yes. I Google him, his company's called Crash Champions. Yep. Turns out, this guy didn't go to college, just worked in an auto body shop. Yeah. Because he wrecked his car, and then he wrecked another one. Yeah, right.

• 1:32Mike Rowe?

  It was the second one that led to it, right? Yeah, and so, he's suddenly like in the business of repairing his own cars, and he realizes he kind of digs this, and so he finds a passion. And by his own admission, he wasn't very good at it. Yeah, yeah. But the son of a gun sticks with it, and flash forward a few decades, and he's got a $3 billion company called Crash Champions. Yep. That is doing everything different in the automotive repair game. So I learned all of this kind of a year ago from a quick Google search after a stranger buys me and my friends dinner. And I said to his, uh, his CMO, I guess it is.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15Mike Rowe?

  Some guy named Danny. I'm like, you know what, let, uh, you let that Matt character know, if he's ever in town, I would love to talk to him. Folks, that's what happened today. This is one of the greatest rags to riches success story.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29Mike Rowe?

  I'm so happy for his success and I'm so delighted to tell you that he's hiring to the tune of five or 600 people right now.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39Mike Rowe?

  AI-proof, six-figure jobs.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43Mike Rowe?

  And I mean, it just checks so many fun boxes for me and, uh, I, he just struck me as utterly authentic.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Super authentic, a really sweet guy, really nice guy and driven for sure. He wants to be bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think he has like over 650, was that the number?

• 3:02Mike Rowe?

  650 locations.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Across the country, yeah.

• 3:05Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, and it's interesting too, you know, I've been in talking to, um, Damon John.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:11Mike Rowe?

  The shark.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Shark Tank, yeah.

• 3:12Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. And, um, Damon, through some weird circuitous connection, reached out to Matt a couple of years ago and helped him grow, like really threw like rocket fuel on this thing.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 3:24Mike Rowe?

  And, um, so this is really a conversation about connections and about patience and about diligence and about humor and about modesty, humility and reward.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  When he talked about his first entrepreneurial job, really interesting, he said he'd never mentioned it before, I won't spoil it, but it's, it's funny.

• 3:46Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. I mean, this is a conversation that I think will stick with you because we don't hit anything too squarely on the head, but it all kind of adds up. And what you're left with, spoiler alert, is just the undeniable fact that miracles can still happen in this country to people who put in the work and who are too stubborn to quit and, uh, too curious to do anything but.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. This conversation is right in your wheelhouse.

• 4:17Mike Rowe?

  It's called the billion-dollar car wreck because that's basically what it was with Matt Ebert, right after this.

• 4:28Mike Rowe?

  Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training, like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week, highly immersive pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need to start a career in the skilled trades immediately.

• 5:10Mike Rowe?

  I'm talking about AI-proof, six-figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website. I first announced this program a few months ago, and I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. If you, or your spouse, or your kid, or your grandkid are looking for a straight path

• 5:54Mike Rowe?

  into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. That's meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy.

• 6:11Mike Rowe?

  Are you doing a podcast? Like, do you host one? Yeah. You want to come on it? I don't know. I'll see how this goes. Whenever you go. Are we good? We're up? Yeah. Oh, fantastic. All right. If you, you guys are welcome to hang, but you're gonna get bored standing there. It's gonna go for a while, so do whatever you want to do.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  They do it every time I do one. You wanna talk about boring?

• 6:31Mike Rowe?

  I don't, look, man, we, we've done hundreds of these. Nobody's ever come in with cameras before. What are they doing? Is this an attempt to just accumulate evidence before the trial or what?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  It's, it's great. It's an attempt from somebody who's not good at camera stuff to follow me around at certain times and probably for hours to get like a couple minutes, a couple minutes of usable stuff. Yep.

• 6:58Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, man, I, I get it.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Cause you can't reenact it, like, so you gotta get it in real time.

• 7:03Mike Rowe?

  Well, the tragedy is you can reenact it, but everybody today knows it. People can smell take two. You know what I mean? Like, you know, I just think authenticity is so in demand right now that people's bullshit meters are so finely tuned, like they can see a performance, they can see a second take, they can see anything that feels, I don't know, deliberate?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Well, especially from someone like me, cause I can't act and, um, and even the camera stuff is not my comfort zone. Probably, well, I, I actually know probably two. Three years ago is when we started doing camera stuff.

• 7:46Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  And that was just internal for our own team. And Mike, I was so bad at it. We did like, it seemed like a thousand takes, but it was probably like a hundred.

• 7:54Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  And you know what they did? They took the audio and made a cartoon.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  That's how crappy, that's how bad it was. Yeah.

• 8:03Mike Rowe?

  Or how good.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  It was unusable.

• 8:04Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. I mean, look, I think we're entering in this phase now where, you know, the more artificial, the more AI grabs hold of everything, you know, the more suspect people are going to become, or the more curious they're gonna be, or maybe skeptical. Like, it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be very refreshing to see people on camera who are uncomfortable or, or, or at least not terribly interested in, in doing it in a produced way. That is you, man.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  There's people saying that, that. However, many years from now, people will pay you for like a real human experience.

• 8:43Mike Rowe?

  We'll see.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Which I, that's pretty wild.

• 8:46Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Transformation of the world, but like where you'll crave a human experience so much you'll pay for it. That's pretty wild.

• 8:51Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. No, it's, I think it's all coming.

• 8:56Mike Rowe?

  Okay, so we met, where were we? It was Skills USA.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Skills USA, about, almost a year ago.

• 9:03Mike Rowe?

  And what, was that in Nashville? Was that?

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Atlanta.

• 9:06Mike Rowe?

  It was in Atlanta, right.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:07Mike Rowe?

  So just some people.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  I remember because it was hot.

• 9:09Mike Rowe?

  It was hot.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  And my guy, that convention center went through several buildings and our guy there decided to show us the shortcut, which was around all the buildings when

• 9:19Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  It was clear inside, like, you know, the walkways over the roads inside, air conditioned and

• 9:24Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  He thought the great way was to run around the building.

• 9:27Mike Rowe?

  Well, look.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  I tease him about that all the time.

• 9:29Mike Rowe?

  Full disclosure, people buy me drinks once in a while. Every now and then, somebody will buy me dinner. No, nobody ever bought the whole room full of people dinner before.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Oh, you're talking about how I actually

• 9:41Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Got to meet you?

• 9:42Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  So, yeah, great story on our side of that. We're sitting there at, obviously because of your message, which you've been at for decades, like it resonates with us.

• 9:53Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  So you're on a list of people that I would have loved to meet, my team would have loved to meet, because we're preaching the same thing only a few decades later.

• 10:01Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Right? And so, we're sitting there kind of planning out what we're gonna do tomorrow. At dinner and in your, you and your group walks and walks right by us into a private room. And I look at Danny and I said, alright, well, who's going in there, which we do know etiquette, like you're in a private room for a reason, right?

• 10:22Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  So, as much as I tried to force him to go in there, like, we knew better, so my game plan was, alright, I can't leave here and not try something. So went up to the hostess and I said, hey, I would really like to buy, I saw Mike Rowe walk through with his group, I'd really like to buy him dinner, if I can leave him a note. And they said, okay, so.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  You know, we even took a picture of me handwriting the note, told you what I was up to, the contact information and then that was that and the next day we're having lunch together. So, good old fashioned kind of guerrilla marketing kind of still works.

• 11:03Mike Rowe?

  No, look, it was, it was, it worked out for me, anyway. Yeah, I mean, never mind the agenda, like, from my perspective, it was, it was brilliant. I knew a little bit about Crash Champions. I knew that you had exploded and I knew that you-

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Well, that's cool that you even knew that. That's awesome.

• 11:19Mike Rowe?

  I did. I knew it had something to do, like, there was a Shark Tank thing that had happened and there was some relationship. I didn't realize it was Dame and John at the time. But because I was at Skills USA and because I've been there many times, you know, I know a lot of people who run companies like yours, they go there to recruit, not just to support. Like, you're there looking for potential employees.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:44Mike Rowe?

  Which, by the way, I mean, is there a better kept secret in the country than Skills USA? Like, in terms of youth groups, in terms of employer, employee readiness, you know? It just blows me away every year.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  That was the national competition, so honestly, those are even your leaders.

• 12:05Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Did you make offers on that trip? Did you hire, did you find people?

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Um, yes, yeah. No, I didn't meet them individually. I had a whole team there, so what came out of it, I can, I can report back. But, yeah, we're there to recruit and hire, for sure.

• 12:22Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. So, it was, and that clearly wasn't your first trip?

• 12:25Speaker 02

  No. It was mine. My team goes all the time. It's getting to be such a big deal that I decided to make the trip myself that time and just see the potential there.

• 12:37Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. So, I'm with my team, you're with your team, you buy us all dinner, you leave a note, I call, some guy named Danny answers, I think. We have lunch the next day and we say, "Look, at some point, somewhere down the road, let's pick each other's brain and see, like, if it might make sense to do something together." Because I didn't know your story then. But part of the reason I wanted to make sure we had a chance to do this with microphones and cameras is because I think your story is really important. I mean, it's entertaining as hell. It's interesting. You basically built yourself an empire, if I remember right, as the result of an accident, like a literal accident.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wrecked my car when I was 16. It was actually like the more details of the story, which I haven't told before, it was really my second accident, my second car, and the first one totaled. And so I had already had one insurance claim and scared to death to make another because as a 16-year-old kid, I probably wasn't going to be insured anymore. And for me at that time, the car was more than a car. It was freedom. I still remember the first time getting in the car by myself and realizing like this could take me anywhere, right?

• 13:48Mike Rowe?

  What was the car?

• 13:49Speaker 02

  It was the one that I wrecked and fixed was a Chrysler Laser, which is like a Dodge Daytona. That's the one that I fixed.

• 13:57Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  I don't know how many of them they made, but it's basically a Chrysler version of the Dodge Daytona. The one I wrecked and totaled was a Ford EXP, which was like a two-door Escort kind of version, little sporty Escort kind of version.

• 14:11Mike Rowe?

  Where do they get these names, man?

• 14:13Speaker 02

  I don't know, right?

• 14:14Mike Rowe?

  And a Escort.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:16Mike Rowe?

  I mean, that goes straight into the oldest profession in the world.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  At least they're creative, though. I mean, it's not like it's, you know, the Model One or Two or Three or

• 14:24Mike Rowe?

  No, no, that's for sure.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  A or B or C. So at least there's creativity to it.

• 14:29Mike Rowe?

  You remember the Probe?

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't know if that's the best name.

• 14:33Mike Rowe?

  If you get the Probe together with the Escort, you know.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  You guys putting that together now, it's not a great name, is it?

• 14:39Mike Rowe?

  What about the Dart, man? I remember that that was one of my first ones. My granddad had a Dodge Dart.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 14:45Mike Rowe?

  And it had a

• 14:46Speaker 02

  My dad was a big Dodge guy.

• 14:49Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Well, the Dart, I think it was like in the swinger, they had a, it was a Slant Six.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 14:55Mike Rowe?

  Engine, right? And the things like they ran, like you didn't have to change the oil. They'd run 350,000 miles and the bodies would like literally fall apart around these things.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, if it was a Dodge, something had to go wrong.

• 15:07Mike Rowe?

  Oh, yeah, but it was never the engine, you know. AMC, like I remember the Remember the javelin?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  My stepfather was into the AMC's.

• 15:17Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Those were ugly cars.

• 15:19Mike Rowe?

  They were hideous, but three ninety, big block.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:22Mike Rowe?

  Absolute garbage frame and, you know, uh.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  But they also made like the gremlin, right? Like the.

• 15:29Mike Rowe?

  The gremlin.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  The Wayne's World car, the Wayne's World car.

• 15:32Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Right?

• 15:34Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, horrible. Man, it really is amazing when you think about the way style and fashion impacted the automotive industry and the look. You're talking about freedom, you know, the thing that the car represents and. But it all just everything about it, the look and the name and just like I'm, I don't describe myself as a car guy. I know a lot of them, you know?

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 16:02Mike Rowe?

  Let's kind of go there. What? How do you become a car guy?

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I happened to grow up in a time when cars were cool too. Like as a kid, you couldn't wait to drive, or at least I couldn't.

• 16:14Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  And I also couldn't wait to open the hood and take it apart or put a jack under it and take the wheel off of it. It was a lot simpler back then. Now it's a little scary if you don't know what you're doing.

• 16:25Mike Rowe?

  Where'd you grow up?

• 16:25Speaker 02

  To jump into it. So, uh, a few towns throughout Illinois, uh, my mom and stepdad moved me first in, I don't know, it must have been about four or five, or even younger, actually three or four to a town with a hundred and fifty people in it. Literally a hundred and fifty. And then, um, for eighth grade, they moved to a town with fourteen hundred people. So big city.

• 16:50Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Hated all of it and then came running up and live with my grandparents right after high school. So.

• 16:55Mike Rowe?

  But you had nothing to compare it to. It's not like you left a big city for a small town. That's all you knew.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  That's all I knew. Right. Yeah.

• 17:01Mike Rowe?

  Okay. So now the freedom thing starts to make sense. How are you going to get out of these little villas? You know, you need wheels.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. And my stepfather, credit to him, he raised the family on the, he was a rural mail carrier, but like big ambitions weren't, weren't part of the family language, right? So, um.

• 17:21Mike Rowe?

  He says a mail carrier?

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 17:23Mike Rowe?

  So he traveled extensively with the government?

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Well, same route every, uh, thousands of miles, right? Same route every day.

• 17:30Mike Rowe?

  What did you take from that? I'm only asking you this because you're, I mean, I'll clear this up in the preamble, but you're like, you're an entrepreneur's entrepreneur. You built something out of.

• 17:42Mike Rowe?

  I don't know what exactly. I guess we'll find out, but to have a front row seat to a guy in your life who does the same thing every day, day after day after day. You know, did that inspire, impact, motivate, frighten, cautionary tale? How'd you think of work at that age?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I viewed things completely different. I saw like so much opportunity out there and I don't know if I was like, why not me? That probably maybe came later.

• 18:15Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  But I did see an abundance of opportunity, maybe was jealous of it, maybe craved it. I don't know. But it seemed like in that small town, the whole goal was maybe like retirement. And I don't, however I'm wired, it's not that.

• 18:32Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  So hence the reason why I left right after high school and didn't want to want to stay there. So very different mindset and probably felt like nobody really related to the way I was thinking.

• 18:42Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  I don't think I felt that way. I think it was that way. Like most of the people around me did not relate to the way I was thinking at all.

• 18:49Mike Rowe?

  How'd you wreck the first car?

• 18:56Mike Rowe?

  Ever since Chapter started advertising on this podcast, I've been getting letters and emails from satisfied customers all over the country. Last week I got one from Joseph, a retired veterinarian in Texas, who just learned his Medicare plan was shutting down. I can't tell you Joseph's last name because his medical history is complicated and personal, but his situation is not uncommon at all. Given his medical history, Joseph was unable to find a local provider that would include the doctors he'd come to rely on. Happily, Joseph listens to this podcast and Joseph heard me talking about Chapter just last week. And Chapter exists for one reason, to help people on Medicare find the plan that's right for them.

• 19:42Mike Rowe?

  It's a free service. Anyhow, Joseph called Chapter. He connected with an advisor named Heidi. And Heidi caught something that most people miss. Because his current plan was about to close. Joseph had a limited window to continue with his current coverage through a new plan, without any additional medical underwriting. In other words, Heidi found a way to get Joseph the coverage he needed with the doctors he preferred. Then, she found great coverage for his wife, too. Moral of the story? Medicare plans are constantly evolving. You are too. Call Chapter. Make sure you're on the best plan for you.

• 20:21Mike Rowe?

  Also, people who switch plans after calling Chapter save an average of $1,100 a year. 804-Chapter. That's the number. Call it today, it's free. Whole thing takes about 20 minutes. 804-Chapter.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Fell asleep. I don't remember what story I told. I probably lied about it and said I swerved to miss something, I'm sure.

• 20:44Mike Rowe?

  Oh, sure.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:46Mike Rowe?

  Like an orphan.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I had left it, right? Or some animal, right? But I was in high school and I was working after school every day. Would work till about midnight, 1:00 in the morning.

• 20:58Mike Rowe?

  What were you doing?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Work on the weekend. Working at McDonald's. I didn't mind that job, actually, as a kid.

• 21:03Mike Rowe?

  Really?

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and I also did like entrepreneurial stuff, like mowed grass all around the town and things like that. So, a lot of working, not much sleeping. Had drove up to see my grandparents and my dad and then was on the way home. And on the way home, middle of the afternoon, just on the way, because I needed to work that night, actually, fell asleep and rolled the car over.

• 21:26Mike Rowe?

  By yourself?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:28Mike Rowe?

  Lucky?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, lucky, because those were the days where you didn't wear seatbelts either.

• 21:33Mike Rowe?

  No.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  So, actually, it came to like hanging out the sunroof. And the car would, the car would have flipped over one more roll. Would have been way worse.

• 21:41Mike Rowe?

  But it'd have been two mets.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 21:43Mike Rowe?

  Wow. So, how old were you?

• 21:45Speaker 02

  16 then.

• 21:46Mike Rowe?

  And which car was that again?

• 21:48Speaker 02

  That was that Ford EXP.

• 21:50Mike Rowe?

  Okay. So, you totaled the EXP. You're 16.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 21:53Mike Rowe?

  How long till you get your next ride?

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Oh, good question. Some months, because I needed to save some money. Yeah, so then, I think I got a car in the middle that wasn't a car that I wanted. I think it was an AMC, actually. I don't think I know it was. Remember, I told you my stepdad was into those.

• 22:12Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  And then.

• 22:13Mike Rowe?

  Could have been a Pacer, could have been a Gremlin.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Right, right. Then I bought that Chrysler.

• 22:18Mike Rowe?

  Right. And now you're seventeen?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I always tell the story, I was sixteen and wrecked my car. Now that we're getting really accurate with it, when I really learned to do bodywork was seventeen.

• 22:29Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  So we just cleared that up on.

• 22:32Mike Rowe?

  Good. Listen, man, we are here. Look, this thing is called The Way I Heard It, so you can tell me any story you want, but people do watch this, so.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 22:40Mike Rowe?

  You have to live with it.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:42Mike Rowe?

  What was the nature of the second? Was that just a fender bender? Not, you didn't total it?

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course, teenager, heading to work in the morning, snowy day. Bridge, you know, it's always slicker on a bridge. Went to pass somebody on the bridge and kissed the guardrail.

• 23:00Mike Rowe?

  Round and round you went.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I didn't go around, I just kind of raked the side and.

• 23:04Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Got to still drive to work and then just had to, had to look at my car not looking like I wanted it to.

• 23:10Mike Rowe?

  So where'd you take it?

• 23:12Speaker 02

  That's where I knew the gentleman in the town that I worked in that did bodywork. He had a job during the day, did bodywork in a garage at night.

• 23:20Mike Rowe?

  What was his name?

• 23:21Speaker 02

  His name was Ray. Heck, I haven't talked to him in maybe thirty something years, so I don't know where he's at today, but he showed me how to fix that car and then, and then started working with him on other cars. My senior year, I would go to school for half a day. I was in a work release program, went to McDonald's and worked, say, from noon to like six. And then went and worked on cars with him from like six to midnight. Got up in the morning, did it all over again.

• 23:49Mike Rowe?

  So you're cutting lawns, you're slinging fries, and you're pounding out. You know, fenders and whatnot.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, all that for probably a few hundred bucks, a few hundred bucks a week.

• 24:00Mike Rowe?

  What did you like, you know, as a teenager? What made sense to your brain about working on a car? I mean, specifically, I guess, bodywork, right? That was your thing.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Well, it's rewarding because you see the transformation of something. So I've done a lot of construction in my life, too. You know, as like side, you know, real estate investments and stuff. And some of my favorite parts about that are, say, landscaping. Because like overnight, you take what's just dirt and you make it beautiful. Collision works pretty much similar. Like, it might not be overnight, but within a matter of a couple of days to a few weeks, you take what's a disaster and you transform it. It's pretty rewarding to see like work of your hands come together.

• 24:44Mike Rowe?

  Well, people ask me all the time, you know, what was it about dirty jobs? Why do so many people on that show seem to be having such a good time? And I can't speak for anybody but me, but it sure seemed like, over the years, that the thing they all had in common was that they always knew how they were doing in the course of their work.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Right, because you can see it.

• 25:03Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, you didn't need a supervisor to tell you anything. Because you're, the progress, you can see it, you can touch it, and you're your own evaluator, essentially. So that made, I mean, that was going on.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  So you saw that over and over and over.

• 25:19Mike Rowe?

  I saw it constantly, but you know what? I mean, what is cutting the lawn but for constant feedback? You know, it's tall, now it's short. You see the grass blowing outside.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  The lines look like this.

• 25:31Mike Rowe?

  The lines are straight. I'm doing it, like, I'm doing it, I can see that I'm doing it. I just think that's such a, it's such a simple thing. But for the last 30, 40 years, so many good jobs, you don't have any visual cues to know when you're done or how you're doing. This place looks pretty much the same at, you know, 10 at night as it does at 10 in the morning. No matter how many people I interview, it always looks the same.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  It's good insight. Yeah, a lot of people are looking at a computer screen. Right?

• 25:59Mike Rowe?

  Oh, well.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Or spreadsheets, or you name it, like, so it's tough to, you know, you see it maybe in financial performance or efficiency, but you don't see the product of your hands.

• 26:10Mike Rowe?

  Well, I definitely want to get into this with you vis a vis AI and what it's going to do to your industry, but I kind of want to walk my way toward it a little bit because right now, I'm thinking of a guy named Ray. Was it, you remember his last name?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Uh, Lazarek.

• 26:26Mike Rowe?

  Ray Lazarek. I don't want to make a meal out of it necessarily, but, I mean, you're not sitting here without him.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's probably very true. That's not probably true, that is true, yeah.

• 26:39Mike Rowe?

  There's no Crash Champions without him.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  No. Now, interesting, why I clarified that is, it's really, probably a unique scenario. My, I ended up working at, you know, different body shops, but the one that I ended up partnering with and opened a body shop, his name was Ray also, and his last name was Zarek. Now, pure coincidence that the names, like, two totally different people, not even similar at all, but the names were pretty similar.

• 27:05Mike Rowe?

  So funny.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  I don't even know if either one of them know that. Now, the Ray that I was a partner with, like, we're still, we're still friends. I'm so busy, I don't see him much.

• 27:14Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  But the gentleman from a teenage years, I'm not sure where he is.

• 27:18Mike Rowe?

  So how long did you work with that Ray Lazarek fixing cars under his, uh?

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Just, just a couple of years.

• 27:25Mike Rowe?

  All right.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it was pretty quick.

• 27:27Mike Rowe?

  What did you learn during that period that, you know, informed whatever was next?

• 27:33Speaker 02

  I learned enough to love the industry, so, from, really, like, not just the reward of seeing it, but I love the smell of a body shop, which people walk in there, probably be revolted, like, oh, what's the smell, right?

• 27:49Mike Rowe?

  Describe it.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  It's paint, smells like paint. Um, less today than back then. Back then, you didn't have booths that filtered the air. I mean, you were hanging fans outside. Yeah. You're hanging fans in the window and blowing it outside and doing it without a mask and. Yeah. Picking whatever color paint boogers out of your nose for the next couple of days. Like, that's literally how it was. I'd never thought about that. Yeah. Honey, look, it's purple. Yeah. Purple snot. But I imagine there was probably a little bit of a buzz to it and. Sure. Um, so you felt that and saw the reward and it was a little bit of a, a high for a teenage kid. So, under Lazarek, you learned to love the work. Like, you learned to appreciate it.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Now, I wasn't, to be clear, I wasn't good at it. I was a teenager, like, if I saw the job today, if it looked good, it was because he cleaned up after me. Like, you know, he would spend 10 minutes fixing whatever I did and probably made it look great, whereas my work in itself probably wouldn't stand the test of anything. I, I just think that's important. I mean, I was a dumb kid. I made dumbest mistakes, like the first job he got me. That shop did a lot of, like, big equipment too, not just cars, but I made dumb mistakes, like, they sandblasted there. And so, picture a tow truck with the boom on the back, right? Which, which would extend way out. Yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  They had sandblasted it and now it was my job to go and bring it in the shop and, and sand it. And, I mean, I had 300 feet to walk out and get in the tow truck, the boom standing straight in the air and. You don't put the boom down? I don't put the boom down. Drive right into the building. I mean, I did all kinds of dumb kid stuff, yeah. Well, I mean, I think that it's really. Front of the truck. I still remember the front of the truck pops up in the air. Everybody's looking at me like I'm an idiot. Like, how does he? Oh, I'm sure he was, he wasn't happy. Like, I embarrassed him, right? Because I, he's the one who brought me in there. But he kept you. Um, well, I was beyond him at that point. He wasn't the employer, so I don't know if he saved.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  He might have saved me. I don't know. But I had to go in the next day and apologize.

• 30:01Mike Rowe?

  Well, I guess, yeah, but the important thing in all of this is what you, I mean, it's literally a confessional. To be clear, I wasn't good at it.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  No.

• 30:10Mike Rowe?

  No, and, and I, I mean, not to belabor the point, but I'm so sick of books and autobiographies and, you know, people looking back, you know, because a lot of people are, I'm sure they've already asked you, but you're going to spend a lot of the rest of your life telling people how you did it because people are desperate to understand the playbook.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Oh, you think so?

• 30:35Mike Rowe?

  I mean, walk through.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  I guess you've been telling people's stories for a long time, huh?

• 30:39Mike Rowe?

  I've been telling a lot of stories, but I'm talking more about the questions, like the, as you succeed, and all you have to do is walk through a Barnes and Noble, if they still exist, and just go down like the self-help aisle and find, find the how I did it section. And it's going to be filled with books by billionaires who tell you, you know, this is, you know, and they're going to say things like, oh, yeah, I followed my passion, or I knew early on that I was good at this. I took my competency and I leaned into it. And then, you know, and it's all the same fricking story. I love the idea that you wreck two cars and you say, look, I learned to love working on them, but you weren't good at it yet.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  I didn't want to lose a vehicle. I didn't want to lose the freedom. I was, you know, a pretty restricted childhood. We didn't have any money. The last thing I wanted to do was lose the freedom. So I was desperate to make sure I could still drive that car the next day. So I don't know if it was leaning into any passion or anything I was good at. It was not wanting to lose the freedom. And then, like, but I did love, I did love the product of the business.

• 31:45Mike Rowe?

  You're, I mean, you're a teenager with a short attention span who stayed there under Ray Lazzaric for two years.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:51Mike Rowe?

  Presumably getting a little bit better at what you do when you're not driving tow trucks with the boom extended into the bay.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, good enough.

• 31:58Mike Rowe?

  Good enough.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:59Mike Rowe?

  So where do you go from there? Did you work that job through high school?

• 32:03Speaker 02

  So the job came right after high school. And then I moved to my grandparents, which was, so picture Central Illinois, the town that I worked in was 45 minutes north. And like, South suburbs of Chicago is another hour north. So from where I was living, got the job with him, pretty quickly, within months, went to live with my grandparents and just flipped the commute from heading north to work to south to work, got tired of the drive and got a job

• 32:32Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  At a body shop closer to my grandparents. So I worked there for a handful of years.

• 32:40Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  That's where I lost touch with the gentleman who introduced me into the trade, because I had moved away and then I had gotten a job, you know, as a not-so-good auto body technician in a small body shop by where my grandparents were. And ended up kind of growing a little bit of my skills and ended up, that's where the owner there introduced me to the office, where I started to interact with the customers, write estimates, et cetera.

• 33:08Mike Rowe?

  No college?

• 33:14Mike Rowe?

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• 33:59Mike Rowe?

  the costs and benefits. So if your current plan is still the right fit, they'll tell you. If there's a better option, they'll tell you that too, and they'll help you switch. Again, the service is free, and a review can take less than 20 minutes. This is the time of year to make sure you're squared away for 2027. So if you haven't checked your Medicare coverage lately, give Chapter a call. It's a simple way to make sure your plan still works for you. And with potential savings of $1,100 a year, it's worth a free review. 804-Chapter. Call them today. 804-C-H-A-P-T-E-R.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  No college.

• 34:36Mike Rowe?

  No thought of it?

• 34:38Speaker 02

  No thought of it. Remember, from the family I grew up in, it wasn't really ever set as a goal. In fact, it was probably more frowned upon from my family arrangement to go to college. So there was never ambition to go to college. I did really well in school, from a, say, grades perspective. But by senior year, I just wanted to make money. So that's why I was in that program to get out of school half the day and go to work.

• 35:09Mike Rowe?

  What did you learn from interacting with customers?

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Again, I'm an awkward little kid from small-town Illinois. I learned I wasn't good at that either, but...

• 35:21Speaker 02

  What I did learn is when the owner... Because again, so picture the situation, small shop. Say there's five or six of us in the back, and there's the owner and his wife in the front. The owner had given me that opportunity, and whenever him and his wife could go on vacation, all I knew is I wanted to do better than he did when he was there. And I'm just a kid, and there's no way he's going to think I did better. But in my head, I'm going to do better than he did when he was gone. So better than he did means work, get work out and get work in. So I was pretty stoked and pretty motivated to get that customer to trust me and leave their car to let us fix it. And I was pretty motivated to get the few guys around me in the back to, "Let's get some cars out and clean up."

• 36:04Speaker 02

  I want the shop empty and spotless and a whole bunch of new work sitting outside for when the owner gets back. Like, that's the way I always thought. I always wanted... I always felt I wasn't good enough. So I was always, I think, a little bit in those days trying to prove it. I would do stuff like... Punch out, like I was on hourly pay then, so I would work late. Say I'd work till like seven, I'd punch out and work another three hours. Thinking that I'm gonna look a lot better than I am, cuz I knew I wasn't that good. So my, my method of looking better was, I'm gonna get, you know, another three hours worth of work in and only get paid for the couple so that I look a little better than I am.

• 36:45Mike Rowe?

  So you gotta work them.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 36:48Mike Rowe?

  So you're not good with people.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  I wasn't naturally good at much of anything, so.

• 36:52Mike Rowe?

  You have no appreciable talent at all.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Thanks, thanks for pointing that out clearly.

• 36:57Mike Rowe?

  I didn't point it out, I'm just repeating it.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  But I, but here, Mike, what I do tell, I tell my team, what that did for me is create what I think is my superpower now, and that's the persistence and the, and the will to figure it out. Because I know if I stick with it long enough, I will, I will get good at it. I, I won't be great at it the first time, I won't be great the second, third, or fourth. But I know that if I stick with it long enough, I can figure it out.

• 37:26Mike Rowe?

  So we offer work ethic scholarships through my foundation. Yeah, that's what we call them.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  I didn't know that.

• 37:34Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  I knew about like your sweat.

• 37:36Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, we do a sweat pledge, that's that thing on the wall over there.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. But. It's great, by the way.

• 37:41Mike Rowe?

  Thanks, thanks.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  You didn't need to know that from me.

• 37:44Mike Rowe?

  No, no.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  But it is great.

• 37:46Mike Rowe?

  From all people, I mean, look, we, we talked to a lot of different people here, but, but the, the thing, the thing I like about you most is that it's, I don't think work ethic is enough in and of itself. At some point, you need a mix of competency, charm, creativity, you, you can't just, nobody wants to spend their life making little rocks out of big rocks. And, you know, so you need these other things, but there's a column of things you can't choose to do.

• 38:19Mike Rowe?

  It's just a card you get.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 38:21Mike Rowe?

  And then there's a column of things that are absolutely in your control. And showing up early, staying late, taking a bite of the shit sandwich when it's your turn. Right. These are choices. You know, gratitude's a choice. You can choose to be grateful. You can choose, right? So I'm always interested in finding people who, A, agree with that. But also, you know, how did you figure that out? Like, how did you get to that place? And that's obviously what we're talking about now.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:54Mike Rowe?

  So, I mean, your team today knows it. But at some point in young Matt Ebert's life, probably in his early twenties, he starts to realize, ah, I can't outthink you, can't outtest you, can't outcompetence you. Maybe I can outwork you.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, I think there was no, like, gift coming my way. There was no, even though there was, right? Like, somebody actually showed me a trade. So in hindsight, like, there were. But I didn't understand that at the time. I was a sixteen, seventeen-year-old kid.

• 39:28Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  Like, and I thought I was working for him for free, right? And I was, but I was also learning on his dime. And I got my car fixed. So what it was for me is like, there's no savior coming to, like, deliver the lottery ticket. If there's people around me doing better than me, there's people around me in different circumstances. How do I go create those circumstances?

• 39:53Mike Rowe?

  It's so funny you put it that way. You literally used the word lottery. Very first tenant on the sweat pledge says, "I believe I have hit the greatest lottery of all time. I'm alive. I walk the earth. I live in the United States. Above all things, I'm grateful." Right?

• 40:09Speaker 02

  For sure. Just think of how lucky we are to have the health we have, to live in the country we live with, the opportunity we have.

• 40:16Mike Rowe?

  I, I just, yes.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:19Mike Rowe?

  A thousand times, yes. The problem is, you know, not to go off on a tangent, but how do you, like, nobody wants a lecture, nobody wants a sermon. You can't tell people, think about how good you have it, now feel good about it. You know, sometimes you gotta wreck a car, or two.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Or three. I was my own best customer for a little while, not gonna lie.

• 40:42Mike Rowe?

  All right, so get me to the place then where like, when does the entrepreneurial thing afflict you? Because it must have, right? I mean, at some point, you're not, you're sick of being hired. So when do you?

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Oh, I always had it. I always had it. I don't know why or how. Like I said, I was pushing a lawnmower around town when I was 12, 13 years old, getting paid five bucks to mow somebody's lawn in that small town because I, I knew that was a path to get money. I was delivering papers, which was effectively buying papers from the newspaper, paying them a couple of months from now, collecting the money from the people now.

• 41:26Mike Rowe?

  Keeping the difference.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  Keeping the money, keeping the difference, spending the money in the meantime, just need to get it back before I got to pay the bill, right?

• 41:32Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Carrying those papers around heavier than I could carry, hide them in the bushes, in the halfway point and, and get it done. A little embarrassing, but you want to know what my really first entrepreneurial thing was?

• 41:47Mike Rowe?

  Take a wild guess.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  This is ridiculous.

• 41:48Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, I do, of course.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  This is ridiculous. I would, from my buddy, buy a, like a naked girl magazine for say, a dollar, and then I would tear out the centerfolds and try to sell the centerfolds for like 50 cents. And there were like three of them in the magazine. I'd make like 50 cents, right? This would have been as a super young boy. It's ridiculous when I look back on it. And it didn't last long because I think a buddy ratted me out like after like two weeks. So my very first ridiculous entrepreneurial venture was I was going to be some kind of porn king of this small town, like ridiculous.

• 42:27Mike Rowe?

  Five year old porn king. Great.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  It was, but, so look, I only told that dumb story to say, I don't know what was in me somehow. Like, I think and it's that, it's that risk gene.

• 42:41Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  It's, and look, look at it. Like, I knew if I got caught doing that. There was nothing but trouble to come from it.

• 42:49Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  But I saw the money opportunity and I want me some money. And I didn't believe in stealing it, actually.

• 42:57Mike Rowe?

  But.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Not that peddling porn was any better, but.

• 43:00Mike Rowe?

  But reselling a thing. I mean, actually, you know what? It's the newspaper model. I didn't know it worked that way. I never had a paper route, but you're basically buying wholesale from the company.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  As a 12 year old kid, I didn't know that's what they were teaching me.

• 43:15Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  And now I think, looking back on it, the newspapers taking pretty good advantage of some 12 year old kids.

• 43:21Mike Rowe?

  You think? Well, think about, I mean, to bring it back to your world now, like, like, uh, like the original taxi model. Like that, that's what that is, right? I mean, my buddies in New York, they would, who drove a cab, you basically rent the thing for $200.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:36Mike Rowe?

  And you drive it all day.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Pay for that medallion to use it.

• 43:40Mike Rowe?

  The first 200 is for the company. Yeah. Yeah. And then you keep everything you make after that. So how long is your shift? How long you want to drive that thing?

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Hey, it's the same thing in the business I run today. The first X amount goes to pay everything else.

• 43:54Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  If you happen to do over that, you get to keep it. That's the way it still works.

• 43:58Mike Rowe?

  So what the hell happens, man? You're just, you're, I mean, right now, we're halfway through your twenties and it's, it's pretty clear you're in the vocation you want to be in.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Except for the problem with collision repair and a kid from a small town, like, how am I going to get anybody to come and if I open up Matt's Auto Body?

• 44:19Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  How am I going to get a customer?

• 44:20Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Um, because there's 10 other body shops in this other, in this small town, like.

• 44:26Mike Rowe?

  And there are 1,400 people living there. How many actions can there be?

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Well, I had moved up to a little bigger town by my grandparents, but still, like, my real thing was I don't know how I'll get any customers. I can't go into, even though I'm half like an assistant manager at this one shop. It's not, I didn't have the boldness yet to think that I could get any customers to come. I was confident I could run one. I didn't know I could, how I could finance one or get customers. And I really wanted to own my own business. So I kept studying like franchise magazines. And. Subway had a very small franchise fee. For a reason, they're not.

• 45:04Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  It's not a business you want to be in. Sorry for any Subway franchise owners out there.

• 45:09Mike Rowe?

  Jersey Mike's is killing it on the other hand.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this was pre Jared, before Jared was a child molester.

• 45:15Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah, that was an unfortunate turn.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Then he was a health guy.

• 45:18Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Before they got excited about the Jared, lost a bunch of weight eating.

• 45:22Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Turkey sandwiches.

• 45:23Mike Rowe?

  Early Jared.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  So I had saved up a bunch of credit cards with cash advance ability.

• 45:30Mike Rowe?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Never used them because I someday, I had no money, how am I going to get money? So I cash advanced a hundred grand on credit cards. And grabbed a partner and opened a Subway business. Which wasn't making money and then opened a second one. A third one and a fourth one. And ended up having to, at the same time as keeping those businesses, I had to go back to work to actually make money. And got a job at a body shop.

• 45:59Mike Rowe?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, you had a hundred grand out on credit cards and you're buying Subway franchises?

• 46:04Speaker 02

  I don't know, Mike, if I could do that today. Like, I don't know if I have a limit on a credit card that would allow me to do that today, but I had, I didn't use the debt. I just kept applying and increasing the ability to get it. And kind of wrote all those cash advance checks all in the same day, hit them all at once.

• 46:20Mike Rowe?

  God, so you had four Subway franchises at one point?

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:26Mike Rowe?

  But you're not, are you making money? You're not making money?

• 46:28Speaker 02

  I wasn't making money and so I went and got a job running somebody else's body shop. And then Jared came along and actually started to make a little bit of money. And I told Ray, the gentleman I was working for, running his body shop, that I, hey, I've got this business. I think I should go run it. It's starting to show signs of making money. And he basically convinced me like, what are you doing? How much money are you going to make making sandwiches anyway? Why don't we open a body shop together? And so.

• 46:57Mike Rowe?

  And now you're what, twenties?

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Would have been mid, mid to early twenties, twenty-three to twenty-six, somewhere in there.

• 47:08Mike Rowe?

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• 47:52Mike Rowe?

  They also reinforce the heel and the toe with double plated nylon to stand up to the wear those boots put on your socks. Remember, it's not the feet that wear out your socks, it's your boots. And they back their socks with a 10-year durability guarantee. If you get a hole or a tear in the first decade, they'll replace them for free. If you're a hardworking guy dealing with sweaty, uncomfortable feet, I'm telling you, these are worth trying. I wear mine every day and I'm glad to have the company on the podcast. CamelCityMill.com. Use code ROW, get 10% off my favorite work socks. CamelCityMill.com, code ROW. Okay, then what?

• 48:33Speaker 02

  We partnered up on a body shop together. So he had two at the time. This was number three. So I had 45% of one body shop with a gentleman that owned two other ones. And he had opened a third one as well.

• 48:45Mike Rowe?

  And you were getting the business though? Your earlier point-

• 48:48Speaker 02

  He was getting the business. Like you need a partner for two reasons. You need somebody to run it or you need money. He had the money and I could run it because I had been running his. But he also had the contacts to be able to-

• 48:59Mike Rowe?

  But what about the other problem? It's like, like the cursive retail, especially for an entrepreneurial hustler who's willing to tear the centerfold out of a girly magazine and sell it at 2X.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  I've never told that story, by the way.

• 49:12Mike Rowe?

  Well, yeah, believe me, it's gonna get passed around now. Retail is so passive. Like you have to wait. Like you got your brick, you got your mortar, you got your service, you got your four walls, and then you sit there. In your case, like Subway, you wait for somebody to get hungry. That happens all the time, three times a day at least. Here, you gotta wait for somebody to roll their car over. You know, unless you're you, that doesn't happen all that often.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  Create your own business.

• 49:38Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  Um, well, so because accidents are pretty rare, so it's really like a once in every 10 year event, probably for average consumer. Um, a lot of times when they're calling their insurance company, because that's the first thing you do when you have an accident. And the insurance company, they ask, you know, do you know where you want to fix it? Most people don't. And so the insurance company will make suggestions to repair shops. So my partner had those connections and did work with those carriers. So he was able to then say, hey, I'm gonna open another one. And he got one or two insurance companies to recommend us when, when people would have an accident. So there was a source of work to get it started.

• 50:22Mike Rowe?

  So when do you go out on your own?

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Um, 14 years. Um, remember, I was the minor partner. He was 20 years older than me and he didn't have to run it, right? And we didn't make a lot of money. You don't make a lot of money on, on a, each car, we only make a couple hundred bucks. So, you know, we make money now because we fix a whole lot of cars. So, you know, that business for him was, you know, something he started. I ran, it wasn't trouble for him and he wasn't ready to retire. So it was really 15 year partnership. And probably the last few years, I was kind of getting to where I hope he retires soon because I, you know, I was watching other companies around me. The industry started to consolidate.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  And in fact, at the time, Chicago was the most consolidated market in the US. So I thought I was missing all this opportunity where everybody around me was killing. Starting to build big companies and my partner didn't want to grow anymore. He didn't like the industry anymore.

• 51:24Mike Rowe?

  So you're what, 40?

• 51:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, 2014 was when I bought him out. Um, so yeah, trying to think. Seventy-two to forty. I would have been forty, forty-two, right?

• 51:38Mike Rowe?

  Forty-two years old.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:40Mike Rowe?

  That's funny. That's when I sold Dirty Jobs.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah?

• 51:42Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Okay. I only pointed out, you're a very different person at forty-two than you are at twenty-two.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:49Mike Rowe?

  You've learned some things.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had done a lot of book reading. I had done a lot of going to, you know, seminars to learn. My partner would give me a hard time. I didn't have to do that to do okay. Like, well, I need it.

• 52:03Mike Rowe?

  You wanted to.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:04Mike Rowe?

  Did, were you doing it because you thought you wanted to arm yourself for prosperity reasons? Or were you curious fundamentally?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Both. Curious, knew I wanted to do something bigger. Even for a time, maybe thought collision repair wasn't gonna be it.

• 52:22Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was searching.

• 52:25Mike Rowe?

  Okay, so you buy them out. You've got a couple of shops now, under your name that you wholly own?

• 52:30Speaker 02

  I just had a half of one.

• 52:32Mike Rowe?

  You had a half.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Now I had a whole one.

• 52:33Mike Rowe?

  I got a whole.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  And then it started growing.

• 52:35Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, but how do you start growing? I mean, would you?

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Uh, one shop at a time.

• 52:41Mike Rowe?

  What's it called at this point?

• 52:42Speaker 02

  What do you call it? Well, it was New Lennox Auto Body, so I had to rename it.

• 52:45Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  So hired a couple ad agencies to give me some name suggestions, went through hundreds of them, hated them all.

• 52:51Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  Um, and then the one agency came in and interviewed me and my, I only had a handful of employees, but interviewed a couple of us to see what we're all about. And so they came up with, like, what we're really doing is helping people in a time of need. So they came up with this concept of, hey, you're kind of a hero in a time of need for a customer. The logo's a cape. We give away capes to all the customers' kids, you know, which is like a ten-year marketing plan for, you know, every kid wants a cape and in ten years they're gonna drive. Let's, let's give them.

• 53:21Mike Rowe?

  That's a long tail, but that's smart.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Hope they remember us.

• 53:24Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm. So it was an agency who had the Crash Champion idea?

• 53:27Speaker 02

  They came up with it, and as soon as I heard it, I loved it. And I had asked my wife, now who was my girlfriend at the time, all our customers, all, everybody was doing little surveys on what would be a great name.

• 53:38Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  And then threw away what every feedback gave me when I heard that name. I said, that's the one.

• 53:46Mike Rowe?

  Which now makes me sound really smart for starting our conversation with the probe and with the pacer and with the grim like like names matter.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  They do. And I thought this is a name that I could be proud of. And I thought it was a name that stood out. So surveys say actually, when it comes to vehicle service, a year later, the consumer doesn't remember the name of the place they had it done. You'll remember the person that you dealt with. You'll remember I dealt with Matt or I dealt with Joe. And you'll remember it was the building next to McDonald's, but you won't remember the name of the the service facility. Only 1% is what data says.

• 54:22Mike Rowe?

  Unless it's a franchise.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  Even then. So I thought Crash Champions was unique enough. I had a chance. Now, from 1% to 100, no way. But I felt it was unique enough that if I heard it, it wasn't a generic name.

• 54:39Mike Rowe?

  That's interesting.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  I certainly wouldn't want to put it on an airplane.

• 54:42Mike Rowe?

  No, but like, where did Midas come from? I mean, I know King Midas, but how does Midas become ubiquitous for mufflers? How does Jiffy Lube? Like, I mean,

• 54:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:53Mike Rowe?

  I can't believe the word.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  Maybe the biggest in the first.

• 54:55Mike Rowe?

  Right? Maybe. Maybe. How big are those companies today?

• 55:00Speaker 02

  What, Midas?

• 55:01Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  I don't know. I very much sometimes still too much focus on what I'm doing rather than what others are doing. But they're big enough to be a household name where Crash Champions is not.

• 55:13Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. How come? What are you waiting for?

• 55:16Speaker 02

  Well, we don't have the money to advertise. So especially when you think about a grudge purchase and then every 10 year event, like the odds of like putting your name out there enough for people to know it and remember it when they actually need it are pretty slim and advertising is pretty expensive. So that's one of the reasons why putting me out there as the founder and social media is our effort to be able to afford to get our name out there.

• 55:41Mike Rowe?

  Smart.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  Or even doing this.

• 55:42Mike Rowe?

  That's why you got a guy following you around with a camera.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, just for those two minutes of like footage out of a whole day. Yep.

• 55:51Mike Rowe?

  I love that. But you know, I think people, I don't, how many locations now?

• 55:57Speaker 02

  650.

• 56:00Mike Rowe?

  You have 650 locations all over the country.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 56:05Mike Rowe?

  But advertising is too expensive.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're a single-digit margin business, so there's not much to spend.

• 56:11Mike Rowe?

  Back to the point where the average repair is a few hundred dollars.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  The repair is a lot more, the profit is just...

• 56:17Mike Rowe?

  The profit is a few hundred dollars.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:19Mike Rowe?

  So the only way to make a bunch of money is to fix a lot of cars.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  So I say you got to fix more cars next year than this year to make more money than this year. That's the only way it works.

• 56:27Mike Rowe?

  So...

• 56:29Speaker 02

  But I mean, there's a lot of high-margin businesses out there, but there's a ton of businesses just like ours that are low margins, lots of volume.

• 56:37Mike Rowe?

  Okay, I mean, I... We don't have to go through everything.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  It's the way you make money, right? You got two levers, more revenue or cut costs.

• 56:44Mike Rowe?

  Right, margin or volume.

• 56:47Mike Rowe?

  So when do you decide it's really going to be a volume game? And how do you, like, how did Shark Tank fit into this? And where does Damon John fit into this?

• 56:58Speaker 02

  Oh, great question. That actually came in way later. So size came in because, remember, I said a lot of the work that we got was recommended, recommendations from insurers because consumers just don't know where to go. And so I had just two accounts at the one shop that were insurance companies that referred work to me because there was those bigger company around that surrounded me that had already got, like, the referrals from all the other companies. So they didn't need me. And then Chicago was the most consolidated from what I would call national companies. And so they would also get the referrals from the insurers.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  And so I was just the one shop with two accounts and then grew to like eight shops with two accounts. And I was nervous that, for example, one of my accounts was GEICO. And I was nervous, literally, that one lunch or breakfast presentation to Warren Buffett from a big national company of how much better they could do for them than all the little guys across the country would take away like half of the business that I have. And so it was a little bit survival. It wasn't a little bit survival, it was pure survival. And then the other component was the vehicles were starting to transform. So for decades, like vehicles were the same.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  I mean, we added, you know, a third brake light and we added airbags. But now, like, the technology, when I started, I tell the story of the time, when I started, the technology was you had an AM FM radio with cassette. If you were really fancy, you had some digital dashboard, LED digital dashboard, right? Like, not LED, but like the alarm clock kind of LED dashboard. And you had, if you left a key in it, it would ding. And if you left the key in it and a light on, it would ding louder and faster. Like, that was the technology. Yeah. Today, you know, there's, to put it in perspective, there's like 14 million lines of code in a 777 airplane. Yep.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  There's 150 lines of code to power an automobile. That's how crazy complicated they've gotten. Now, this would have been, it was 2019 when I went and saw money to grow it. So, but I saw that coming. And I knew that as a small guy, like investing to keep up with the equipment, the technology to train it was going to be hard. And I was literally, again, worried about what happens if the big guy makes a better offer than I have. And then interestingly enough, I watched, at the same time while I'm debating this, I watched a mini-series on Netflix called Peaky Blinders.

• 59:49Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  I don't know if you've watched it.

• 59:51Mike Rowe?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  They were like gypsies, kinda gangsters, right? And they had, in the one season, they had run a gambling operation, and so they had a rigged fight going on upstairs, and a character named Alfie Solomons downstairs, talking to Tommy, the lead character.

• 1:00:07Mike Rowe?

  Cillian Murphy.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he's got cancer, right? And so he's sick, and he's telling Tommy he needs some time, he's gonna take some time. And he talks to him about how the world really works and what's going on upstairs. He says this sentence, and he says, you might have to beat this out, but this is what he says, he says, "Big, small." And then he says a few more sentences, and he says, "Big, small, always." Now, I don't know about you, but I don't like getting... So it's a little bit like, I felt it as necessary to survive. This is where the world is going, this is where my industry is headed.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  There's no way I wanna stay small, cuz it could be gone tomorrow.

• 1:00:56Mike Rowe?

  Well, the way my mentor put it, who happened to be a music teacher, Chuck and I both, we went to high school together back in the day. Yeah, that's Chuck. Yeah. Fred, Fred King used to say, here's the thing about size. A good big man will beat a good little man any day. It just simply doesn't matter.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:01:22Mike Rowe?

  If the basic talent is the same, then it does come down to size. You know, Goliath would've beat David.

• 1:01:34Mike Rowe?

  If everything else would have been equal. But it wasn't equal. It wasn't equal. But because your industry is so teachable, because it's so tactile. You know, there's no great mystery, right? In repairing an automobile. The mystery is in the willingness to do it consistently. Again, and again, and again, and again. Until technology. It's actually a mystery now. It's really hard. Well, that's what I want to get into now. So it's like, okay, the rules change. But now you're big enough. So, you know, do the rules impact you differently? When you're big? And don't forget about Damon John. He comes in here somewhere.

• 1:02:15Mike Rowe?

  Couple of weeks ago, on this very podcast, I talked with Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, about the incredibly complicated business of delivering affordable beef to our citizens without disadvantaging American ranchers. We also discussed the very controversial decision to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from various foreign countries and the maddening policy that allows meat packers to label imported meat as a product of the USA. Well, shortly after that conversation, one of my sponsors, Good Ranchers, reported an unusually high level of interest in their product. And this is not surprising. Given a choice, most people would prefer

• 1:02:59Mike Rowe?

  to buy their meat from American ranchers. And Good Ranchers is the number one company in America that delivers 100% American meat straight to your door. They partner with over 100 local farmers and ranchers to deliver pasture-raised meat with no antibiotics and no added hormones. They've got 25,000 five-star reviews on TrustPilot. 25,000, including my own. This month, when you visit GoodRanchers.com/row, you'll get a free Angus ground beef bundle with your first order. Again, that's GoodRanchers.com/row for four bonus pounds of ground beef raised right here in these United States. And that's guaranteed. Support your local ranchers

• 1:03:44Mike Rowe?

  by insisting on American meat delivered at GoodRanchers.com/row.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, great. So, literally, though, that's why I went, I had just gotten rid of a partner, right? Even though we're great friends, I had just kind of got free from the partner, felt a little bit caged. Now I'm growing, but I had maxed out like the SBA and any other way to continue to grow my business. And so I looked for an investment banker. I had three shops I wanted to buy and looked at all the options. And because of all those things, private equity was the route for me because I figured like, this is gonna need capital. I need to grow. And so that's what really started it. And just to be clear, like, we didn't just grow a little. Like, we were 13 shops heading into, so January

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  1st, 2020, 13 locations. By the end of 2022, over 550. So I'm pretty proud of that. It's an industry record. It'll never be touched. And I'm pretty sure most industries. So you're talking maybe like a $60 million business to a $2.5 billion business in three years. It's pretty great, pretty great, like, business kind of high. To say. It's, now, we had to take a couple of years, and we ain't talking about that maybe more. Since then, we had to, like, slow down the growth a little bit and get better. And we've spent the last few years getting really, really good at being big. Right. And implementing processes, et cetera. Damon came in because of, again, can't

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  afford to advertise. When I recruited Danny, my CMO, my interview with him was... Wait, can you really not afford to advertise? Or are you just cheap in that way? No. So, okay, here. Single-digit profitability, and to be, our target is 10. So if you're at eight trying to get to 10, what kind of money would we have to spend in 38 states to get, like, household name recognition enough that the one in every 10-year event, the person comes our way? Hundred million a year. Yeah. There would be half of our profitability gone.

• 1:06:04Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  And by the way, it's not like the profitability is going in my pocket. Remember advancement in the vehicles and we're trying to make the body shop stereotype of old. Like we want our shops to be beautiful and inviting and well equipped.

• 1:06:19Mike Rowe?

  Surgical bays.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is a heavy capital intensive business. Like no money leaves the business. Everything that we make goes back in, everything we can borrow or raise goes back in. So yeah, there, there isn't money. It would be hard to justify and hard to like give it enough runway to show the return on investment to make it make sense.

• 1:06:41Mike Rowe?

  Were you nervous about taking that large of, what do you call it, a loan or that much of giving away that much equity or whatever you had to do? Did that feel like a, all right, this is a big step and

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  remember I came from nothing to me, it's go big or go home.

• 1:07:00Mike Rowe?

  Well, the big fat small. I remember.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:04Mike Rowe?

  But I'm thinking more in terms of the guy who borrows a hundred grand on those credit cards. Right? I don't think I could have done that. I take different risks. I look at the world a little different every now and then. You know, you gotta go all in, but I'm, I'm, I'm so debt adverse.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  I read that in your.

• 1:07:30Mike Rowe?

  I can't. That's number six. Yeah. I'd rather live in a tent than eat beans than pay for a lifestyle like I can't afford. Live in a tent and eat beans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I say. Then eat beans. I'd rather live in a tent than eat beans. Oh, well, you know what? To be honest, I didn't, I don't really like beans anymore. And the tent thing, it was great while it lasted, but the Boy Scouts are behind me.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  Okay, can I tell you how I think?

• 1:07:53Mike Rowe?

  I prefer to keep this on me for a bit if we could.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  All right, let's do it.

• 1:07:56Mike Rowe?

  No, man, tell me how you think.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  No, because.

• 1:07:58Mike Rowe?

  Tell me how you think about.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  I'm already in a tent eating beans.

• 1:08:02Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  So yes, could the debt, honestly, what's the worst that can happen? The debt's gonna lead me to not making it, going bankrupt and living in a tent eating beans. So honestly, my route just gets me to where you would rather be in the first place. That's how I view it. Now, I'm not saying that's the right way to view it, but I see it like in a tent eating beans because of this or in a tent eating beans because of that. Why don't I go for the reward?

• 1:08:28Mike Rowe?

  Why not? Okay. That's how my mind works. So you make the big deal, you grow like crazy. And today, as you sit here, you've got 650 of the, are you in every state? Yeah, but I thought you wanted to make about you for a minute. What were you gonna say? I was just kidding. Dude, I'm so sick of me, man. I wanted to hear what you were gonna say. Everywhere I go, there I am. No, no, no, look, I'm kind of an open book with all this stuff. But I'm very curious to know, like, once you commit to growth. Because, look, man, I, you look around, I struggle with the same thing. I've got a core group of half a dozen people. Yeah. And that keeps me up at night. I worry to death about that.

• 1:09:08Mike Rowe?

  And so I'm constantly given opportunities to, I mean, bigger must be better, right? I mean, if you're help, if you can help, you know, 2,000 kids last year, wouldn't it be great if you could do four, or eight, or 16? Or, I'm worried that the, you know, it's gotta be more than size. There's nothing inherently good or bad about big. But that's my world, that's my business. I think yours is different. I think you were right when you said, unless you want to be Ray, either Ray, you know? Well, the one did pretty good for himself, and the other one may have too. Sure, that's really the point. Like, you get to decide what success looks like. Yeah.

• 1:09:53Mike Rowe?

  You've decided. Yeah, my partner definitely was a success. Right. He just decided he was done. So what does success look like for Crash Champions now? Do you get to 1,300? Great question. It's the only kind I ask. Mike, I really gotta pee. Really? Yeah. I don't want to do the potty dance. No, no, we don't edit, just go right around that corner, right there. No, no, look, man, we'll, hey Danny, come, Danny, come in here for a second while he pees.

• 1:10:22Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah, come in.

• 1:10:24Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, this is Danny. Danny is the, um, the CMO that was...

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  You've been replaced, Matt. Well, he... I'm a younger, uh...

• 1:10:33Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  And I got more here at Matt Ebert, uh, today, so...

• 1:10:36Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, um, he mentioned your name earlier. So, uh, so how long you been with him?

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  Uh, it's early 21.

• 1:10:43Mike Rowe?

  Early 21.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:44Mike Rowe?

  Where are we now, 26?

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  We're in 26, yeah.

• 1:10:48Mike Rowe?

  You come from, uh, a more traditional business background?

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  Uh, I actually started fixing cars, um, right out of high school.

• 1:10:55Mike Rowe?

  What? You're the same people?

• 1:10:57Speaker 03

  I am the same people, yeah.

• 1:10:58Mike Rowe?

  How did he find you?

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Um, so he found me... I worked for, at the time, it was like the second largest collision repair shop.

• 1:11:06Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  It was called Service King. Um, I left there, um, in 21, and I went off to go build my own agency. So, I was doing marketing, advertising. I left, and at the time, Matt had a COO and a, um, chief client officer that had worked with me at Service King that are now working at Crash Champions. And they're like, "Hey, Danny's a free agent. You should have a conversation with him." So, Matt's like, "I don't know this guy from Adam." He calls me up on a random day, uh, comes into Dallas, we have dinner. Um, it was supposed to be a 45-minute dinner.

• 1:11:38Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  And it turned into like a four-hour drink session, so, um...

• 1:11:41Mike Rowe?

  That is unbelievable.

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And at that point, I remember going home that night, well, during, during our, our dinner...

• 1:11:48Mike Rowe?

  Matt, take a load off, I'm gonna talk to him for a minute. Yeah.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  Uh, at that point, I remember, uh, Matt asking me, like, "Hey, like, I wanna grow my business." Again, he's, he's like 60 shops at this point.

• 1:11:58Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Speaker 03

  I'm coming from a collision repair company that has 350, right? 350 locations, they're $2 billion or whatever. And he's like, "Hey, I wanna, I wanna grow my brand, and I wanna do all these things." And, again, I'm trying to connect with him, much smaller, uh, collision repair shop to where I, I came from. And I gave him the pitch of like, if I was, you know, 60 locations, this is what I would do with your business. And I remember him stopping me in my tracks and says, "Danny, you're not thinking big enough." And I was like, "Matt, you're insane. Like, what do you mean I'm not thinking big enough? You're 60 shops. You're like fifth or sixth, you know, in the ranking of collision repair companies. There's no way you can grow as big as you're saying unless you're gonna grow at, you know, just massive scale."

• 1:12:41Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  So he's like, "Again, I need you to think bigger, 'cause I wanna do bigger things." Again... I walked away from that conversation. I remember going home that night and my wife asked me, well, how did it go? And yeah, my immediate words to her is this man's insane. He is literally insane. There's no way he's going to get from here to here.

• 1:13:00Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  So, um, yeah, two days later, Matt, you know, gives me a call, make sure, you know, the date went well or our, our interview went well. And I was super intrigued and he sold me on a bigger vision than I'd ever thought about or been part of.

• 1:13:12Mike Rowe?

  I get it now. The guy who can't afford advertising hires an ad man.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. A hundred percent. But his, his goal there was again, I was running advertising at a much larger scale. But he's like, Danny, I need you to take your skill set and flip it on its head. And what that meant is like, I need, because we're, when you're growing at the rate Matt was growing, you're acquiring legacy. You're acquiring, uh, cultures. You're acquiring all these different things from all these businesses. So he's like, I need you to take your skill set and not put it external to consumers. But I need you to advertise to our own people and build awareness. Talk to them about the vision, the mission, the why, the how, what we're trying to accomplish. So that's what I did. I took my external advertising skills and I placed them in.

• 1:13:57Mike Rowe?

  Turn them inward.

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 1:13:59Mike Rowe?

  Was it your idea to get the cameraman to follow him around?

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  Um, well, it was his idea originally. So, um, well, the, the idea was to grow, to do advertising a little different. So we do, we do well. Um, we, we tell a lot of stories from our, our team members, right? So we realize quickly we're a grudge purchase, right? Nobody plans for collision repair.

• 1:14:19Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. He used that expression before and I didn't want to sound ignorant by saying, what are you talking about? What is it? That means the transaction is rooted in some level of pre-existing resentment.

• 1:14:28Speaker 03

  Well, let me ask you this question. If you got in an accident tomorrow, you, would you know where to take your vehicle? If you've never been in one before?

• 1:14:36Mike Rowe?

  Oh, no, of course not.

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:14:38Mike Rowe?

  I don't even know where to get an MRI. My knee hurts and I gotta do research.

• 1:14:42Speaker 03

  Well, that means you're just, well, you've been healthy this long. So good for you.

• 1:14:46Mike Rowe?

  It's all falling apart.

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  So yeah, it's, nobody plans for collision repair. You only need us when you need us. And typically a consumer will call an insurance carrier.

• 1:14:54Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  And at that point, the insurance carrier will make recommendations. You have A, B and C shop. Now to be on that A, B and C shop, you have to, uh, pretty, be pretty good with quality and, you know, metrics and taking care of customers and so on and so forth. But yeah, it's like, nobody really plans for it. So. And when you think about the auto body shop of old, like you're thinking of somebody who's, you know, busting knuckles, smoking a cigar, you know, fixing cars.

• 1:15:19Mike Rowe?

  Yep.

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  And so there's a, there's a big trust factor when it comes to doing, to doing business or choosing to do business.

• 1:15:25Mike Rowe?

  Plainly, you know, you're going to get ripped off. You're just not sure how bad. Because they got you. They got you over a barrel.

• 1:15:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:15:31Mike Rowe?

  And they're going to tell you, you can trust them, but you can't, not really.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Mike Rowe?

  So somehow or another, you've got to build a reputation.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. What do you trust more? Do you trust a brand or you, do you trust a person?

• 1:15:41Mike Rowe?

  You trust a person.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  Nielsen says that 88% of the time, a consumer is more likely to trust a person over a brand. So what we did is extend, you know, we talk about collision repair. We talk about what we're doing. We talk about our technicians. But ultimately, if we could put a human face in front of the brand, we're going to win. Nielsen also says that you're 44% more likely to engage with a human over a brand. So.

• 1:16:05Mike Rowe?

  So you're a data guy. You look to the data.

• 1:16:08Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Absolutely.

• 1:16:09Mike Rowe?

  Is Matt a data guy too?

• 1:16:11Speaker 03

  Oh, he's a hundred percent a data guy. Yeah. He's a numbers guy.

• 1:16:14Mike Rowe?

  Cause he's going like, he's hitting me with this all shucks kind of thing. I'm just a simple boy from a small town. But it can't be, it can't be that. It can't, it can't really be that.

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  He's very humble in his approach and he's always been like, he mentioned his superpower. His superpower is connecting with people. You, you think about a technician, a technician, I was a tech for, uh, shoot, 10 years. I worked on cars for 10 years. I don't know anything outside of my bay. I know a car's coming in. I know I'm going to fix a vehicle. And at the end of the day, I'm going to feed my family. That's it. The faster I fix the car, the more money I make. And so when you think about connecting with a CEO who's too big or too much, or doesn't think about, you know, the overall business, I can't connect with a person like that. If I'm a technician, again, all I know is my location and all I know is the next vehicle coming in.

• 1:17:05Mike Rowe?

  Last question, cause he's off the ball now and I don't want to get you fired. For you, you went home, your wife asked you, you said, look, I think this guy's crazy.

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  Insane. Yeah.

• 1:17:15Mike Rowe?

  Insane is what I said. Yeah. And yet you go to work for him. So like, did you surprise yourself when you made that call? Or was, what, what quality does Matt have that actually trumps his clear insanity?

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  So I would say he challenges you to think bigger every day. So whatever number you have in your head, he's going to challenge that by 10x. And he pushes you, uh, make sure that you, uh, that you complete that goal overall. So again, I've never saw myself where I currently am working for a $3 billion company. Again, 25 years ago, I was turning wrenches, Mike.

• 1:17:51Mike Rowe?

  It's three billion dollars.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  Billion dollars today. And today on the CMO of the third largest collision repair shop in the country.

• 1:17:58Mike Rowe?

  All right, get out of the chair.

• 1:17:59Speaker 03

  All right, thank you.

• 1:18:00Mike Rowe?

  Matt, come back here, will you?

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  All right, I'm going to use the restroom now.

• 1:18:03Mike Rowe?

  You know what, he warmed it up for you, so.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  I thought for sure you would.

• 1:18:07Mike Rowe?

  Do whatever you need to do.

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  I thought for sure you'd edit that out. I'm good with not, but.

• 1:18:10Mike Rowe?

  Let me tell you something.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  I didn't see any point in finishing the interview uncomfortable.

• 1:18:14Mike Rowe?

  No, no.

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  And see Chuck, that's how you get some camera time.

• 1:18:16Mike Rowe?

  That's exactly. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:18Speaker 02

  You just gotta feed Mike a lot of, you gotta feed Mike a lot of water.

• 1:18:21Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  Before I get heading into it.

• 1:18:23Mike Rowe?

  No, look, I mean, look, very few, okay, that's instructive. I mean, lots of people have sat here and talked and lots of people have had to go to the can who never say anything. They'll sit there with their bladder distended.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Mike Rowe?

  And, and they'll do the best they can, right? The minute you gotta go, you just say, I gotta go. You just get up and go. I mean, this is, so that's worth pointing out. If I could bring it back to me again for just a moment.

• 1:18:51Mike Rowe?

  You know, we did the same, like, the big construct on Dirty Jobs, and my listeners are probably sick of hearing about it, but we, you know, I insisted on a behind the scenes camera.

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:19:01Mike Rowe?

  I called it.

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  Was that unique at the time?

• 1:19:02Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Mike Rowe?

  What if, say, five years ago, some big oil company offered a promotion that gave you a chance to lock in the price of gasoline at $2.50 a gallon for the rest of your life? Would you have taken that deal? Or what if a nationwide grocery store had given you an opportunity to lock in the price of ground beef at, say, $2 a pound for as long as you live? Would you have taken that deal? Yeah, me too. Unfortunately, those deals were never on the table, but this one is. Today, as in right now, for a very, very limited time, Pure Talk is offering every American the opportunity to purchase unlimited talk, text and data, along with a 30 gig hotspot,

• 1:19:52Mike Rowe?

  for just $29.95 a month for life. Not your phone's life, your life. No contracts, no commitments, just a very rare opportunity to lock into a ridiculously low rate for unlimited talk, text and data for the rest of your life. It's the unlimited data plan from Pure Talk, and it will not be around for long. $29.95 a month for as long as you live. Taxes and fees not included. Some restrictions do apply. See puretalk.com for details. Offer ends 11/15/26, so chop, chop.

• 1:20:30Speaker 04

  Pure Talk.

• 1:20:35Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, well, some productions would have one, like HBO would always film the making of the show, so later, they could show you, after The Sopranos was a big hit, what it looked like when they were shooting it. Yeah, I watched the show. I just didn't remember if it was unique or whatever at the time. Well, what was unique was we cut that footage, like, we weren't getting footage from that camera to use in a later show. We were using that footage in that show. Yeah. And so what you got... Maybe the first reality TV, kinda. Honestly, yeah. Because the only reality shows that were on at the time were Survivor, which was a competition show, and Jesse James, who was building motorcycles,

• 1:21:20Mike Rowe?

  right, in his garage. Yeah, that's right. Monster Garage, that was it. So, I thought that, well, hell, I mean, if it's really reality, let's let the viewers see what it looks like to make the sausage. Because my crew was going headfirst into the same pits of despair I was. Yeah. I wanted people to see the truth of the thing, is my point. Do you do that as a CEO? And do you like welcome your customers in? How are you as transparent with your customers as you were with me just now when your lower GI tract demanded attention?

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  I'm very much a cards on the table guy. Maybe in an earlier life, I tried to outthink it or tried to do it different. But what's worked for me for a long time is just here's where I'm at. Let's talk about where you're at. How can I? And here, maybe it's because of the collision repair industry that helped me to get there. Because I'll be honest, like customers aren't honest. So like-

• 1:22:21Mike Rowe?

  Patients aren't honest with their doctors even.

• 1:22:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is crazy to me because that guy's going to help me get better. If I'm going to tell anybody what I'm not doing right health wise, I should tell him, right? And it's a secret between us, like why not tell them? But customers will be like, all this damage happened in the accident. And there's the golf, you know, there's the grocery cart that hit it and the curb they hit. And yeah, and my conversation started as simple there as telling them look like-

• 1:22:50Mike Rowe?

  The antlers in the grill. What happened here? I don't know. What deer?

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  Insurance companies are really smart. Like they're only, you know, maybe if you got a story, they're going to believe because they're going to ask you, like, how did this all? How did the back scratch on the bumper happen from the tap in the front, from the front left, you know? So I really had to have those conversations at early stages with customers about like, what are you trying to accomplish? I can probably do some work for free or discount some work while I'm at this. But like this whole scam you're trying to run probably isn't going to be successful.

• 1:23:27Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:23:27Speaker 02

  And it happens often, very, very often. Just to be clear, like, I don't think customers think anything of it because they think it's their insurance and they owe them.

• 1:23:37Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Okay. Okay. So just so people following, the cost of the work you do is often borne by the insurance company.

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:23:46Mike Rowe?

  Right?

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  Other than the deductible.

• 1:23:48Mike Rowe?

  Other than deductible. So an adjuster might need to come in and weigh and measure the value of the claim. They assign a value to it and you have to work within that parameter. And now the customer would maybe like some extra stuff as a result or this and this. And so- So here you are fixing cars with a unique perspective to the to the human condition.

• 1:24:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is like, hey, how about we talk about what I can do for you? Do that either throw it in or do it, you know, for a great price. But like the whole kind of racket you're trying to run here is not going to work. They're they're really, really smart at not paying more than they they need to.

• 1:24:33Mike Rowe?

  So let's.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  So I maybe that helped me with the whole transparency thing. Maybe I don't know. I don't know how you get to where you get sometimes.

• 1:24:41Mike Rowe?

  Well, you know, since he's not sitting here anymore, let's let's talk about Danny for a minute. Like, let's talk about your team. Let's talk like, how do you assemble? Because clearly, I mean, you couldn't have done this without some key people.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  Without the team, without my wife, without people around me for sure.

• 1:24:57Mike Rowe?

  Tell me about your wife first.

• 1:24:59Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:25:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, very supportive.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  Wishes I were home more, but for the most part is supportive. That's any natural thing, right? Like, you're married because you want to be together and your your husband's gone all the time. But beyond that, super supportive. So that's great. And then the team, I mean, my hack has been bringing people around me that have been where I haven't been or that are smarter than me. So my, you know, I recruited a COO when I needed one, coming from a few hundred shops. And I was only gonna I was gonna be 39 and recruited him to come in at 39 when he had already run a few hundred. Danny told the story about what he was running when I recruited him.

• 1:25:45Speaker 02

  So a little bit of like the cheat in how our success was recruiting people who had been there, done that seemed to be the smart thing to me.

• 1:25:54Mike Rowe?

  Sure. How many do you employ now?

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  Almost 11,000.

• 1:26:02Mike Rowe?

  How crazy that is. 11,000 souls.

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:07Mike Rowe?

  Danny said that part of the advertising plan was to turn it inward and.

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  That was the the plan when I recruited him.

• 1:26:18Mike Rowe?

  So explain that a little bit. I think I know what you mean, but you're a consumer facing business and you depend on the consumers for your business, but most of your marketing is geared towards the people who work for you.

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you're only we're only as good as my team like I can build the most beautiful building and put a bunch of people in there that don't know how to fix cars and treat customers like crap and it's gonna it's gonna fail. So it's very much a people. It's a service business. It's all about the people. So we need our team. The differentiator for us is the team to be awesome. And so when I was one shop or even a handful of shops, I knew everybody. I could go in there and talk to them and tell them what we're up to and, you know, keep them engaged, let them know they're cared about, whatever interaction should exist to, you know, for the team to be happy and and excel.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  As it got bigger, I couldn't touch people personally and, you know, we were growing really fast. So sometimes people were getting promoted before they were ready. And so now you have a management team that's coming of age, so to speak, that's not so great at the things you need, communication, sense of urgency. You need a culture. Culture trumps a lot of things.

• 1:27:39Mike Rowe?

  It's upstream. Right.

• 1:27:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I can't go to all these locations on the daily and do it. So that was my pitch to Danny, like what I need to succeed is the team to be awesome. What I need is the team to be engaged. I need your help to help me get my thoughts and message to the team so that we can build this culture and get everybody engaged.

• 1:28:01Mike Rowe?

  So interesting. Make the case for the job itself. Talk to the 17, 18 year old today who really doesn't know what the future holds, but, you know, is open to the idea that working on cars might make sense. What's the business case for doing that? How many could you hire right now if they showed up ready for work? What's that job look like?

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, we could probably easily hire 400 people tomorrow. I'd say 600 probably in a short amount of time.

• 1:28:31Mike Rowe?

  Danny, is he serious? He's serious, yeah.

• 1:28:35Mike Rowe?

  Five, 600 people, right now, over 650 locations.

• 1:28:39Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, yeah. And the pitch, look, I use, I steal from you a lot in using the stereotype scenarios. So, we're not what we're stereotyped to be from a business from decades ago. The sophistication in the cars has demanded that we get more sophisticated. So, it's not the image of the auto body shop of old. It's, you're just as likely to be holding a tablet today as you are a paint gun or a welder. In your world, a dirty job, it's not easy, but it also pays way better than the world thinks. And so, the reputation for decades has been, you gotta go to college to get good jobs. People don't want those jobs of fixing cars.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  And maybe that's true, there is some physical effort in it. But it also pays a lot better than what I think people think.

• 1:29:30Mike Rowe?

  Six-figure job?

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  It's a six-figure job. And can be a six-figure job with a two in it if you're really good.

• 1:29:37Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:29:37Speaker 02

  And so, you can do that without any college debt, without four years in. So, actually, like, talking about numbers, there's some that get, where you think about a decade after school, after high school, compare a doctor to a collision repair tech, a doctor who's went to all this school, all this debt, had a few years of earning. The collision tech is ahead of a doctor 10 years in. Now, where they end up four decades later could be argued. But still in all, it's a decent living. It's way better than the average American salary across the US. And part of this initiative is just, and look,

• 1:30:21Speaker 02

  Collision repair is obviously self-serving, but all trades, which is what you've been saying for a long time, there's a, there's, they reward better than, than I think people think. People should know that because college isn't for everybody. AI threatens so many white collar jobs. The future's uncertain, but I know this, robots won't be fixing wrecked cars anytime soon.

• 1:30:41Mike Rowe?

  Do you feel like, in the near term anyway, what you've got here are AI-proof six-figure jobs?

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  For the foreseeable future. Now, whether robots can do it someday or not, anything is possible, right?

• 1:30:55Mike Rowe?

  You know what Elon said the other day? Yesterday? He said, he thinks, and I don't want to argue with Elon Musk, but he, he thinks in three to four, three to four years, there'll be more optimist robot surgeons.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  But he always overpromises. I mean, I, I got respect for all the disruption and the way his mind works and the amazing things he's accomplishing, but he always overpromises, so.

• 1:31:22Mike Rowe?

  Do you worry?

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  What else is he gonna say?

• 1:31:23Mike Rowe?

  Well, okay.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  And I'm not challenging the man. I'm just saying like, like he does put really, really ambitious deadlines on things. And look, I was at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and not his robots, but other robots were there and like, they're far from primetime. I mean, they can dance, but ask them to go get a shirt off of a rack and we literally did it.

• 1:31:49Mike Rowe?

  And they bring back rags.

• 1:31:50Speaker 02

  Twenty minutes later before you're still waiting for a shirt. So now I get it, like it's going faster and faster, but there's so many models of cars on the road, every accident is different. Robots can build cars today because it's the same thing over and over and over. Everything we do is unique to that one event. It's gonna be a while.

• 1:32:10Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  Does that make sense?

• 1:32:12Mike Rowe?

  It makes perfect sense. Yeah, absolutely, because the whole notion of an assembly line is built on a predictable series of events and plans, right? It's the ultimate, it's a love letter to imitation. I say this all the time, like, the innovators get all the credit. Whoever came up with the innovation behind the iPhone gets the credit, but like, the genius is in.

• 1:32:39Mike Rowe?

  Making this thing 10 billion times, the exact same way. That's what the automotive manufacturers, that's what Henry Ford really gave us.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:32:49Mike Rowe?

  Your point is, a wreck is utterly unique.

• 1:32:54Speaker 02

  Random.

• 1:32:54Mike Rowe?

  And so the fix is equally unique.

• 1:32:58Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:32:58Mike Rowe?

  And that's interesting. Do you worry about, back to Elon, what if he's, never, never mind the robots, what if he's right about autonomous driving? What if, you know, what are the unintended consequences somewhere down the line? I don't know if it's three, five, 20 years, whatever it is. But when the fat part of the bat is autonomous vehicles on the road, it sure seems like accident rates go down.

• 1:33:27Speaker 02

  They do.

• 1:33:28Mike Rowe?

  What's that do to insurance companies? What's that do to your business? What's, you know?

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, the problem is, is the technology on the cars costs so much more to fix. So, you know, like, how big is the industry dollar perspective? We will be fixing less cars 10 years ago for more money because.

• 1:33:44Mike Rowe?

  10 years from now.

• 1:33:45Speaker 02

  There's gonna be, say, 30% less accidents, but it's gonna cost more than 30% more to fix each accident. So, we'll be fixing, it'd be a bigger dollar industry, fixing less accidents.

• 1:33:57Mike Rowe?

  So maybe less locations, maybe have to pivot.

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  The industry number of locations will definitely shrink because there's 30,000 of them today.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Another reason to be big.

• 1:34:10Mike Rowe?

  Big.

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  Because I feel like the industry will be served by two or three national companies. And then every industry that consolidates, consolidates out to about 65%. And we're less than halfway there, but another 10 years, it's probably there.

• 1:34:25Mike Rowe?

  Do you feel like you're in a race?

• 1:34:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, doesn't every business?

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  I suppose. I suppose so.

• 1:34:35Mike Rowe?

  I mean, you're a competitive person by, by nature.

• 1:34:39Speaker 02

  It's gonna be an evolution, not a revolution, but accidents are shrinking, like at a certain percent, you know, one percent a year or, or so, so like, go long enough out, like, that's not a good scenario, like, we will have to figure out other services to perform on, on vehicles as a company, but we'll do that in, in, in the appropriate time. So, I, I do feel that threat is there, long-term.

• 1:35:05Mike Rowe?

  How do you stay in front of it? I'm just really curious, like, when you and Danny are just out, two of you, just looking at the whole industry, having a couple of pops and trying to stay ahead of it. Like, what do you see that you can talk about that other people are missing?

• 1:35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, well, again, the number of accidents will shrink, but I do feel that one or two or three national companies will service the industry, other than, you know, the 35% remaining independent shops because of small towns or, or unique dealer relationships or, or whatever, the niche that they serve. So, I intend for us to be one of those last one, two, or three survivors. So, that's kind of centerfield, what we gotta do, which means we need to continue to grow and expand, because we, even at 650, we don't have the footprint today that we need. And then, in a few years, there's what other services can we perform? And there is a buffet of them. Like, I have a small towing company. Cars will always need towed.

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  There, and I'm starting to grow that now, too, but my main concentration is by far Crash Champions. But there's windshields, there's servicing the vehicle from a maintenance standpoint, there's the calibrations that we have to do to realign all the cameras and sensors and radars and stuff, to make sure the vehicle can, in effect, drive itself. Now, is that something that has to be done in a maintenance or routine basis going forward? Maybe, I mean, if I'm gonna trust it to drive me around, I'm gonna wanna get it checked out every, every now and then, because I sure know my, my phone and computer don't. Don't go without a reboot every now and then.

• 1:36:45Mike Rowe?

  Who's king of the hill in the windshield space? Is that?

• 1:36:48Speaker 02

  That's Safe Flight.

• 1:36:49Mike Rowe?

  Safe Flight Repair, Safe Flight Replace.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  Surely is, but.

• 1:36:52Mike Rowe?

  And advertising works, dude.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  But Safe Flight's a friend, so I'm not, and I have zero glass business, so like, I'm not a threat to them. But when you're on the top, there's only, business is a roller coaster, right?

• 1:37:04Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  Like, when you're at the top, there's only one place to go.

• 1:37:08Mike Rowe?

  Forgive me for this, we gotta start to land the plane, but I, I think we ought to kinda like.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  And by the way, that's not where I think we'll go. There's all ki-, there's upfitting, changing a regular car into a police car, an ambulance, a fire truck, a handicap service vehicle, there's so much vehicle services to enter.

• 1:37:26Mike Rowe?

  It's not going away. Look, you feel, I mean, basically, and I know this is silly.

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  The core of what we do today might dwindle, but there's plenty of vehicle services to do.

• 1:37:36Mike Rowe?

  And again, the advantage of, you know, be effing small is because you'll be able to pivot.

• 1:37:43Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:37:43Mike Rowe?

  If you have the footprint. Back to Skills USA, back to recruiting. Like, what is your strategy? Because you, I mean, at some point, like, if you, if you've got five, 600 openings now,

• 1:37:57Mike Rowe?

  I mean, does that keep you up at night?

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  Every night.

• 1:38:00Mike Rowe?

  Is there a bigger challenge for you right now than recruiting?

• 1:38:05Speaker 02

  Training. Because here's how the collision industry has survived up till now. You had, say, that in a shop of a handful of technicians, you had the one technician that fixed the hard stuff. He was the.

• 1:38:19Mike Rowe?

  He's your guy.

• 1:38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was the guy. Like, if you wanted your car fixed, or if it was really hard, he's the one. And the others were good too, but like, the really tricky stuff? The problem today is, everything is getting tricky. In a five-year period, the car park is completely transformed, so now. You know, what I described as 20% could do the really hard stuff. You've got the other 80% of the industry that's to some degree got to catch up on training. And so you've got all the new people we're trying to attract to it and train, and the existing workforce that needs to learn more. Like, so, training the people. Because I want to make sure the car is fixed right. I don't want anybody to get hurt. Like, it's a major initiative. And it's not a Crash Champions thing. It's an industry thing.

• 1:39:05Mike Rowe?

  That's my, well, so, do, to what extent do trade schools train for this work? Or at least pre-train or pre-apprentice?

• 1:39:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, they do a great job at pre-training is exactly what I would call it. Because you learn a little about a lot. And now you've got to learn the details about a lot. And so that takes some time. We have our own apprentice program, which trains people from scratch.

• 1:39:28Mike Rowe?

  What's that called?

• 1:39:29Speaker 02

  It's called a STEP program. We'll take a technician from beginning to where he can stand on his own. And then he still needs a couple of years to learn more. But same thing a trade school would do, but they actually get the experience of working in a shop. And the trade schools are great. The issue is, in our industry alone, there's a prediction of 100,000 needed in the next seven to 10 years. And that's because we're already 30,000 short, hence the reason why I need 600 people. And then a lot of the techs are of baby boomer age, ready to retire. So, the numbers are about 100,000, and the trade schools are graduating about 3,500 a year.

• 1:40:06Mike Rowe?

  It's just math.

• 1:40:08Speaker 02

  The bigger companies like ourselves have to build our own programs and train, which we'll gladly do. But that introduces a whole nother problem, which is the mentor part. Because we've got so many guys great at fixing cars that aren't great teachers, don't want to be bothered, just want to be, now they're grumpy old men, want to be left alone and do what they do. Like, so the mentor problem, as much as like us trying to draw attention to the industry, at the same time, we're trying to solve the mentorship and how to really convince people to take a look at it, train them to be good mentors as well. It's a big problem.

• 1:40:43Mike Rowe?

  You know, I'm convinced the solution, because as you know, I mean, the skills gap is a thing. It's not a myth. People talk about it like it is sometimes, like, oh, all you have to do is pay these more and they'll come. It's like, no, man. Five retire, two come in. Five out, two in, year after year after year, in virtually every industry in the trades. Jim Farley, over at Ford. Told me last month they had 6,000 empty bays. Not for lack of cars that needed working on.

• 1:41:15Speaker 02

  Lack of people want that know how to do it.

• 1:41:17Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, I think, I don't think he'd mind me saying this because he's, I've heard him say it publicly recently. I think they're going to open trade schools within Ford, like Henry Ford used to do.

• 1:41:30Speaker 02

  I think that's awesome.

• 1:41:31Mike Rowe?

  Alex Karp over at Palantir, you know what that guy's up to? He's taking kids right out of high school, smart kids. And within Palantir, he's teaching them like Western Civ. He's giving them a liberal arts background while he's putting them on big engineering projects. These kids are coming out of a two-year, broad-based educational slash apprentice program, making $250,300 with no debt. And so, you know, I think you're on the right track. I think it's going to fall to every serious company that's run by ambitious people to create something internal.

• 1:42:15Mike Rowe?

  That's why you should probably keep that Danny guy. I think he's right about marketing to your own people first. I think companies mess that up. Caterpillar has, it's called Think Big, internal program, you know? And, you know, they're at Skills USA and Kamatsu is there. And I mean, it's, standing on that competition floor and looking around at the companies who come to that, that event to celebrate skill. That's hopeful. And that's why it was, it was really great to meet you there of all places. You didn't have to buy me and my friends dinner. I'm glad you did. Well, I didn't want to be rude and barge in the room.

• 1:42:59Mike Rowe?

  No, no, no, but for the record, this settles the score. We're even. All good. Okay, all right, good. Danny, you actually owe me a little bit on this. I didn't even know there was a score. It was, I'm glad to do it. No, man, look, I, I think this is, uh, I love this country and I love it because it still affords people, you know, who wrecked two cars, two cars, and shake their head at college, but who are ambitious and curious, you know, it's still a place you can build a $3 billion company from the ground up. It's frickin' awesome, dude. Yeah, land of opportunity, for sure. Where are you going now? Like, right now, where's, where do you? I'm gonna jump on a plane and go to Dallas for a meeting in the morning. All right, well, that's Matt Ebert. He's got a meeting in the morning.

• 1:43:44Mike Rowe?

  Danny, it sounds like his job is safe for at least another year. You're gonna? Oh, it's safe for a long time. Does he have a contract with you or how's that work? Oh, he's a free agent. He's a free agent? We try to chain people to radiators, but that's frowned, that's frowned upon. Do they still have radiators in cars? I don't even know anymore. I open up the hood. I don't even have radiators, but I'm at the old radiator in the building. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, I get it, I get it. Well, the image of- Even the electric cars need to cool, cool stuff down. Yeah. Pleasure getting to know you. Thank you for making the time and coming by. Thanks for having me, Mike. This is great. All right, adios. And if you need the bathroom again, you know, me casa, su casa. Appreciate it.

• 1:44:54Speaker 05

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