- Matt Ebert, founder and CEO of Crash Champions, grew up with modest means and no expectation of attending college, but his passion for cars and entrepreneurial spirit led him into the collision-repair industry after fixing his own wrecked car as a teenager. Starting with a single shop in 1999, Ebert expanded Crash Champions into a national powerhouse with more than 650 locations and $2.75 billion in revenue, largely employing workers without college degrees.
When Matt Ebert speaks about his car-collision repair shop empire, he does so in a humble way, like his beginnings.
The CEO of Crash Champions, which reported $2.75 billion in revenue last year, came from a small town in Illinois, where earning a college degree was neither a given nor an expectation.
“We didn’t have much from a financial standpoint,” he told Fortune. “College and big career planning weren’t ever a discussion in my family.”
Ebert had an entrepreneurial spirit and started mowing lawns for people at age 10 or 11. His real interest, though, was cars, and he couldn’t wait to open the hood on his first car, change its oil, and take its wheels off.
“For me, a car meant freedom,” he recalled. “I still remember the first time I was in a car by myself, thinking about how I could go anywhere I want right now.”
But at age 16, he wrecked his first car: a two-seater Ford EXP. Not wanting to make an insurance claim or get his insurance canceled, he visited a local car repairman and asked him if he could show Ebert how to fix his car. The repairman did, and that launched Ebert into a career of repairing cars.
Six-figure jobs without a degree
Ebert took a job with the repairman after high school, therefore coming “literally, by accident” into the industry. Now he oversees a company that’s seen 130x revenue growth since 2019 and employs more than 10,000 people.
And like Ebert, 83% of his workforce doesn’t have a college degree.
“I’ve done really, really well in life not having gone to college,” he said. “And I’m not anti-college. I think there’s definitely things that college is great for. But I also know that it’s not an opportunity for everyone.”
Ebert’s company is ahead of the curve when it comes to employing people without a four-year degree. College has historically been viewed as a one-way ticket to a lucrative career, but younger generations are starting to catch on it’s not the only path to success. Many Gen Zers are taking trade jobs and aren’t burdened by student loan debt. Plus, some make more than six figures doing so.
At Crash Champions, technicians make more than $100,000 a year, Ebert said. In the first quarter of 2025, the U.S. Census Bureau reported the median weekly earnings of the nation’s 120.9 million full-time wage and salary workers was $1,194, which equates to roughly $62,000 annually. That means Crash Champions workers make about 1.6 times that of the average U.S. worker.
“We view college as a bonus, not a requirement,” Ebert said. Of course, there are certain positions that require a specific degree, he added, like how their controller and chief legal officer needed degrees.
Despite not requiring college degrees for most of its jobs, Crash Champions focuses on continued learning. It created a leadership development program focused on topics like culture and retention, financial and operational leadership, strategic leadership, communication and recognition, continuous learning, as well as delegation mastery and team employment. Thousands of employees have participated in these programs.
“We can recruit the best technicians. We can train the best technicians, [but] if they’re working for bad managers, they’ll leave and go elsewhere,” Ebert said.
Crash Champions also offers an apprenticeship program where the company can “start technicians from scratch,” he said. They’re placed with a team member whom they work with for a couple of years then are off on their own.
Crash Champions’ growth story
Ebert credits his employees with many of the company’s accomplishments.
“A key to my success has been surrounding myself with better people, smarter people than me, people that have done things that I haven’t done,” he said.
Still, Ebert was the mastermind behind the company. After high school he moved up to the suburbs of Chicago and stayed with his grandparents for a couple of years and got a job at a body shop. At the time, he still wanted to start his own business, but “being a young kid who didn’t know anybody,” he knew that would be a challenge, and said starting his own body shop would be “a little over [his] head.”
With an entrepreneurial spirit, though, Ebert researched different businesses and eventually opened his own Subway franchise by cash-advancing $100,000 on credit cards. Although that first location didn’t make any money, he decided to open a second “thinking that was going to be the path to making money.”
But he was wrong. That one didn’t make money either. So with that, he went back to his car-repair roots and approached a local car repairman, and they opened a body shop together in 1999, when Ebert was 26. His business partner, who was 20 years older than he was, retired in 2014 and sold the business to Ebert.
That became the start of Crash Champions, which was first named New Lenox Auto Body after a town in Illinois. Ebert changed the name of his business to Crash Champions, which originates from the idea that the body shop is a hero in a customer’s time of need after an accident.
“I wanted to make the shops nice, tear down some of those stereotypes, make it a place that people would want to come, a place that people would want to work,” he explained.
After taking over the business, Ebert knew he wanted to expand, and he acquired a struggling body shop—which quickly snowballed into buying the business’s third and fourth locations, all within about a year.
At the time, Ebert was still using Small Business Administration financing, and “basically grew it as far as” he could in the Chicago area. He wanted to acquire more shops, but couldn’t with SBA financing, so he worked with an investment banker who suggested private equity as an alternative to debt. Ebert was initially hesitant to do that, but he recognized industry trends like tech advancements in vehicle repair would require more capital. The COVID-19 pandemic forced a shift in strategy, but Ebert also saw a need for his business model on a national scale.
Crash Champions’ major growth came in 2021. Service King Collision, another large auto body repair company, had grown too quickly and made poor business decisions, leading it to financial trouble. Debt was coming due in 2022 and the company wasn’t going to be able to pay. The bondholders, mainly Clearlake Capital, would likely take it over, so Ebert proactively contacted Clearlake to merge Service King’s business with Crash Champions to expand his business.
Those turned into 330 of Crash Champions’ current 650 locations, and the company saw its revenue skyrocket from $327.1 million in revenue in 2021 to $2.1 billion in 2022. For this year, it’s projecting around $3 billion and plans to “ramp [up] growth next year,” Ebert said.
“I don’t want to stop until we’re number one. We’re the third largest in the country today,” Ebert said, referencing Caliber Collision and Gerber Collision & Glass. “There’s a ton of growth ahead for the company. We slowed a little bit here in the last year or two, because we grew so fast, and we wanted to get more sophisticated and more ready to be even bigger.”
