The Confidence to Figure It Out

In today’s episode, I sit down with Matt Ebert, founder and CEO of Crash Champions, to talk about the realities of scaling a multibillion dollar company and finding renewed energy when business gets difficult. Matt shares why his greatest strength is knowing he can figure things out, how strategy and the right people have shaped his success, and why Crash Champions focuses on helping people in a time of need rather than simply fixing cars. We also discuss leadership, communication, building trust, and how stepping outside his comfort zone through podcasting and content creation has helped Matt grow as both an executive and entrepreneur. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Entrepreneur Showcase. This is Two Minute Drill. I'm David Meltzer. We're live at the Sirius XM Studios here in Las Vegas at the Wynn. And we have an extraordinary entrepreneur. This man has taken everything in the blue collar world. And now is the king of the white collar world because he is running a $3 billion company. Crash Champions CEO and founder, the incredible Matt Ebert. Welcome to Two Minute Drill.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Thanks for that great intro.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  I'm getting good because I get to see you so many different times. And you know what's so interesting is a lot of people don't know that when we're very successful, that sometimes we may not, number one, feel successful or as happy as we were when we weren't so successful. Have you had periods of time as you have now run a multi-billion dollar company, feeling as if I'm not quite as successful as I was? Or I'm not as happy as I was?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it ebbs and flows for sure. I, I get, especially when things are kind of stuck. The bigger it gets, the harder it is to move the needle. And so it can seem like it's like watching paint dry. It can seem like it's taking forever. And I'm used to being nimble. In fact, I was the founder owner, you know, we could come up and be really nimble and get things done quickly. Now it's much more of a process and we can only concentrate on a few things at a time and do them well as a big organization. So there's times when I feel

• 1:37Speaker 01

  stuck in that, I don't want to say depresses me, but it, it, it then gets to like, what am I doing this for? Why, why? But it doesn't last long. There's always, you know, I describe business world as a roller coaster. It's never straight up. It's a lot of ups and downs. And actually, you know where I feel the most comfortable? Is coming off of the bottom and now we've got the plan and know where we're headed. And then it's that, that, that climb back up in any given period. Cause when you're at the top, what you're worried about is when's the shoe gonna fall?

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  What's gonna go wrong? What am I, you know, what new thing is gonna happen that I didn't see coming? And so you're just waiting for something to maybe catch up with you and go wrong. Whereas if you're coming off the bottom, you're super confident that you've seen the worst of it. You've got a plan, you're executing it. So that's when I get the most excited. I feel like we're kind of in that time period for my company right now. So I've got a renewed energy around it because of exactly that. Coming off of a, a year of a few, few years of industry headwinds where the industry's been down. It's hard to excel when the whole industry is down. And so now we've got a game plan, got it figured out. Industry isn't declining as bad as it was. So now I feel that new renewed energy.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  It's interesting. I, I study executives like yourself and I'm less to work with executives like yourselves. And it's interesting because you're very humble, but self admittedly, you always say like, I really wasn't that good at anything. But in order to get to where you are today, you, you have to be very good at something. And so if I was going to ask you what your biggest superpower was when it comes to running a business and scaling a business, which you have successfully done. What would be the, the one thing that you are confident today that you're very good at?

• 3:33Speaker 01

  The, well, the superpower was, is as a result of not being naturally gifted too many things. Is that confidence that I can figure it out because I've learned time and time again. You know, you start with a bad one, then you get the good one, then you get the great one, or you start bad at something, you get better and then you, then you can get great. I've learned that with time and effort and attention, I can figure something out. So that, that's the, the superpower. I think a couple of things that have been super key to me is I feel pretty good about my ability to strategize, to see things develop. To, to know where, where the business needs to be to meet the, the customer, you know, a certain time out from now.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  And always it's the support around you. The team around you matters so much. And that includes home. So my wife is super supportive. I would say that affects my happiness too. In times when she's upset with me for being gone too much, then that's tough for me to be excited. And then, so then I gotta pay a little more attention to home, get solid there again, and then feel her support again. That makes a difference. So people around you matter.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  One of the things that I thought was most powerful as I've learned to understand you as a leader, is that you've been in the same industry for a really long time. So you're an expert at the industry. But when somebody asked me what Crash Champions does, I said, they fix cars.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  And you corrected me and you changed my entire perspective of why people work with Crash Champions. Because you actually understand the actual business and culture more than the functionality that could change with technology as well. So do you remember what you said when I said, oh yeah, these guys fix cars? You said, no, we don't. We, we help people in a time of need. We help people in a time of need. So think, think about the power of that as an organization. How many employees do you have now?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Almost 11,000.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  11,000 employees. Do you want to spend the majority of your days with a company that fixes cars? Or helps people when they're in need? And this is a powerful nuance that a leader has to somehow convey. How important was the paradigm shift from, as you grew, getting your entire teams, vendors, associates and customers to buy into the fact that fixing cars isn't what we do. We help people when they're in need.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, it changes the focus, I feel. And also of course, the way you treat people and the way you go about it. So it's the struggle for us is we see accidents every day. And we have to remember that the customer coming in, on average, they're going to have an accident once every 10 years, hopefully, right? Or, or, or maybe even more. And so it's a pretty dramatic event. It's going to disrupt their life from their ability to get around, to get to work or get kids to events, you name it. And so that puts it in perspective for us. It's not just another transaction. It's not just another routine thing.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Every accident and, and human situation is unique. And if we come to come at it from a place of being helpful, it, it's so key. And that's been really important in, in building the culture for us. That, and we talk about the difference being trust because the reality is nobody wants to know a collision company. They don't care about us till they need us. But the reality is, is someday someone you love or yourself is gonna have an accident. And you're wanting, gonna want to go to someone that you can trust and you can be confident that they're going to be taken care of. And we want that to be us. And so all of our interactions with people, with each other as a team, with vendors, with customers

• 7:33Speaker 01

  is a chance to, to build that trust and confidence. Now, of course, we got to fix cars, right?

• 7:38Speaker 00

  But it's part of that.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  That's the way we go about it.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  But it's part of helping them, right? If you don't fix the car right, then you're not helping people in a time of need.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Just like if somebody's kitchen was flooding and they didn't fix the pipe right, they wouldn't be helping someone in a time of need.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Good news for anyone who's bad at waiting. Black Friday deals at Lowe's are already on. Get up to three free select wall craftsmen or Cobalt power tools with the purchase of a select battery kit. Three for free? You better believe it. Plus, select ladders are up to 50% off. So go ahead, get in there early. Shop Black Friday deals in store or online now at Lowe's. Valid through 11/18 while supplies last. Free tools vary based on battery kit purchased and location.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  We met through your extraordinary podcast. And one of the things that we have in common is that when we reached the top of our game, somebody convinced us that it'd be a good idea to do a podcast. You started a lot later than me. My initial reaction to Gary Vaynerchuk, who told me, stop doing your radio show. I syndicated radio show across the country called Sports Blender. You need to do a podcast. I told him, there's too many podcasts and I'm almost 50 years old. Why would I do a podcast? And he said, let me teach you why. And I have had nothing but great surprises and great value out of doing podcasts. Number one, who suggested that you do a podcast and what was your initial reaction?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  That came from my CMO.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  And my reaction was warm to it because it came from a bigger strategy. So nobody wants to follow Crash Champions, a collision company. So we can't afford, because it's a once every 10 year event, to be top of mind awareness across the US to consumers. So that amount of advertising to be Coca-Cola or McDonald's would be unaffordable, undoable. So you want to do it through social media, through organic content if you can. And what we know is people will follow people. They're not gonna follow the company. And so leveraging me as a founder and CEO of the company, getting on

• 9:54Speaker 01

  social media, talking through entrepreneurial stuff, business stuff, is something that we felt we could maybe attract an audience around. And the podcast came then from, okay, how do you get, rather than having cameras follow me all day, every day and all that, what else could we do to generate some content? And so the podcast came from that. And I very much am a work in progress when it comes to this stuff. I started out as a disaster. I tell everybody the, the first video we made, we probably did a hundred takes and they ended up not using the video part and making a cartoon out of it. Just using the voice.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Audio.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  That's how terrible I was. So any, anything to get me now in front of a mic and a camera is, it's not quite a disaster anymore. Certainly not a master, but somewhere in between. And it's great for me for personal growth because at the size of the company and where the company's at now, my ability to communicate is directly reflective of how good I can do my job. And so any, any form of doing something like this is just

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Building my ability to communicate even better, which definitely is super important to my role, to articulating to the team, the vision and where we're trying to go and what we're trying to do and why. And to any investors, consumers, you name it. So I embrace the idea, even though I knew I would not be great at it at first. I embrace it because it was a chance for growth.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  I love that. And I've seen that growth as well. And very impressive. Last question from all the content being, and I hope I don't offend you by calling you this because I'm one. We're middle aged mutant turtles when it comes to content, right? So, but if you stay consistent, which you are, and you invest in this growth, which I did as well. And you're doing currently, what's been the biggest surprise, the greatest thing that you didn't realize would come from this?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  The great thing about the guests that we've been able to get is those become friends, associates, contacts, whatever. And so the variety of people that I've been able to meet, including yourself, has been awesome. You just never know how they change your life. And you know, that's happened for me, not just from an entrepreneurial perspective, but a health perspective to to have fun perspective, you name it. So it's the people that you welcome in and get to know.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, as I advise people, and the reason we do this show is to provide an amazing experience in that growth, to provide business development. But also to understand it's not just this interview, it's the post-production content that's perpetual. So a legacy of wisdom, which is becoming more and more valuable as AI is made knowledge of commodity where that system can answer questions.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Isn't that crazy?

• 12:47Speaker 00

  But our wisdom, our dummy tax, and both of us have shared in that wonderful experience of paying the dummy tax. So other people don't have to. If you're looking for someone who will help you when you're in need, there's no need to look further. Matt Ebert's been doing it for years as CEO and founder of Crash Champions. What a great thing, a great business, and what a great friend you are. What an honor it's been to have you as our entrepreneur showcase here on Two Minute Drill.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Thank you, Dave. And you've been a great mentor for me since I met you. So really appreciate that.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  So marriage made in heaven here on the entrepreneur showcase. I'm David Meltzer with Two Minute Drill.