PodCrash with Matt Ebert

What does it take to go from answering roadside assistance calls as a college student to becoming CEO of a company handling more than 10 million service events annually?

In this episode, we sit down with Dave Ferrick, CEO of Agero, the company behind roadside assistance programs for some of the world’s largest insurance carriers and automotive manufacturers.

Dave shares his remarkable journey from working overnight shifts as a dispatcher while attending law school to leading one of the largest roadside assistance and accident management companies in the country.

Along the way, he reveals the leadership philosophies, career decisions, and defining moments that shaped his more than 30 years at Agero.

We discuss what makes great managers, why company culture is so difficult to build and easy to lose, and how leaders can empower their teams instead of standing in their way.

Dave also explains how Agero is using artificial intelligence to improve customer experiences, detect potential problems, and transform roadside assistance through its acquisition of Swoop.

Plus, he shares the story of a basketball coach who helped change his life growing up in Somerville, Massachusetts.

In this episode:

* How Dave went from college dispatcher to CEO
* Why he chose Agero over a career in law
* The leadership philosophy that shaped his career
* Why great managers put their teams first
* How Agero handles more than 10 million service events annually
* The role of AI in the future of roadside assistance
* Why Agero acquired Swoop and transformed its technology
* The challenges facing towing companies and roadside service providers
* Why Dave stayed with one company for more than three decades
* The mentor who helped change his life

From leadership and company culture to technology and the future of automotive services, this conversation offers a rare look inside the business of helping millions of drivers when they need it most.

Subscribe for more conversations with the leaders shaping the automotive and collision repair industries.

#Agero #Leadership #CEO #CrashChampions #RoadsideAssistance

Want more Matt in your life? Of course you do! 
(https://www.instagram.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.facebook.com/MattEbertCC)
(https://twitter.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.tiktok.com/@mattebertcc)
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-ebert-7169a5180/)

Get paid while you learn on the job at Crash Champions: https://step.crashchampions.com/

Shayda Frost was producing films in Los Angeles. Her father spent his career as one of the loudest voices in funeral pre-planning - and when he died suddenly at 68, he left no instructions for his own funeral, and no succession plan for the cemeteries he owned.

Shayda and her husband Timothy Amoui were given two options: sell, or run it. Every single person told them to sell. Instead they moved back to Atlanta and took over 50 employees, a business that still ran on fax machines and paper slips, and an operating account with less than $50,000 in it.

Three years later, not one employee has left, and Tim says something he never expected: he loves it.

In this one: what a cemetery is actually worth, why you can’t advertise one, the “dirt mafia” that cost them a fortune, the truck that exploded while they were overseas, and what owning this business taught them about dying.

Lincoln Cemetery - Atlanta, GA. Their CNBC feature linked below:
https://www.cnbc.com/make-it/2026/05/26/shayda-frost-timothy-amoui-quit-jobs-to-take-over-family-cemetery-business-lincoln-memorial-group-atlanta.html


Subscribe for new PodCrash episodes every week.

Want more Matt in your life? Of course you do! 
(https://www.instagram.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.facebook.com/MattEbertCC)
(https://twitter.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.tiktok.com/@mattebertcc)
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-ebert-7169a5180/)

Get paid while you learn on the job at Crash Champions: https://step.crashchampions.com/

00:00 "Death and taxes — we serve one of them"
00:46 Our first husband-and-wife guests
01:44 She was producing films in LA
03:28 The call that changed everything
04:19 Two choices: sell it or run it
05:09 The godfather of pre-need who left no plan
08:36 "Okay, Shada" — how it got decided
09:29 Everyone was shocked they took it
11:10 Three generations of the family business
13:45 "Are we just going to sell it like he was trying to?"
14:37 "I love it, and I never thought I'd say that"
16:20 What they actually walked into
17:12 Fax machines, paper slips, and no email
19:47 Why cemeteries resist change
20:38 Financials nobody could make sense of
22:21 Day one fear: we can't close for a single day
24:05 Under $50,000 in the operating account
25:49 "Please don't leave me"
27:31 Not one person left
28:21 Catching the cemetery bug
30:05 Would you go back to the old life?
30:56 The sharks circling after he died
34:24 How to kill a dinner party
36:06 "Cemeteries are for the living"
40:22 Why they don't own funeral homes
42:06 Easter egg hunts in the graveyard
42:57 The FedEx driver who refused to deliver
44:41 Running a business with your spouse
47:17 Expecting their first child
48:08 The truck that exploded while they were in England
52:26 The dirt mafia
54:57 "If something is free, maybe it shouldn't be"
55:49 Who's the boss at home
57:47 Growing a business you're not allowed to advertise
59:15 Heritage: what actually makes a cemetery valuable
60:58 Serving entire family trees
63:32 How this changed the way he drives
65:14 Living through her father's death
67:53 Mentors, not competitors
70:28 Where to find them

Linda McMahon built WWE from a desk in her basement into a global company, became a self-made billionaire, and is now the 13th U.S. Secretary of Education. She sits down with Matt to talk about the investment that forced her into bankruptcy, why she tells every entrepreneur to stick to what they know, and the moment she realized a manager had hit their ceiling and no amount of coaching would fix it.

She also lays out the number that should worry every business owner in America: for every five skilled workers retiring, only two are coming in - a 2.1 million gap by 2030 and up to a trillion dollars of damage to the economy. And she explains what she’d consider a job well done at the end of her term, which is not what most cabinet secretaries would say.

Want more Matt in your life? Of course you do!
(  / mattebertcc  )
(  / mattebertcc  )
(  / mattebertcc  )
(  / mattebertcc  )
(  / matt-ebert-7169a5180  )

Get paid while you learn on the job at Crash Champions: https://step.crashchampions.com/

Leif Babin spent four years at the Naval Academy chasing one goal — and didn’t get selected for the SEAL program. He calls it the best thing that ever happened to him.

In this conversation he walks through being handed 28 people and millions of dollars of equipment at 22 years old with no idea what he was doing, the day in Ramadi that cost him Marc Lee and Ryan Job, and why he was awarded a Silver Star he never wanted and still doesn’t display. He explains why humility is the single most important quality in a leader, why the loudest veterans in the room have usually never been tested, and the one thing Jocko told him about briefing a team that he’d never heard in his entire career.

He also reveals that Echelon Front — the leadership company he co-founded, built on a book that’s now eleven years old — was never actually his idea.

Leif Babin: echelonfront.com | @LeifBabin
 Books: Extreme Ownership, The Dichotomy of Leadership
 Podcast: Lead. Win.

Shadi Bakour had negative $400 in the bank and 15,000 unsold bottles of water collecting dust in an investor's warehouse. Eleven years later PATHWATER is in every Chanel in the US, in all 50 states, and has kept more than 750 million single-use plastic bottles out of landfills and oceans.

In this episode he breaks down the parts most founders never talk about: the year he made zero dollars driving Uber and waiting tables, the morning he and his co-founder mapped every 7-Eleven in Northern California at 4am, the free-case shelf-space deal that worked every single time, and how the team got into San Francisco International by booking flights on Expedia and cancelling them — every day, for months — just to get past security and pitch the retailers inside.

He also explains why being "super naive" was the advantage, why he'd rather get a fast no, why Coca-Cola and Pepsi left them alone for years, and the one metric he runs the company by instead of revenue.

Want more Matt in your life? Of course you do! 
(https://www.instagram.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.facebook.com/MattEbertCC)
(https://twitter.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.tiktok.com/@mattebertcc)
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-ebert-7169a5180/)

Get paid while you learn on the job at Crash Champions: https://step.crashchampions.com/

0:00 Cold open
1:07 Intro
1:51 Growing up, immigrant parents, hating consulting
3:15 The CVS parking lot idea
5:31 "We were super naive" and why it helped
8:25 The 10-year-old calculating a doctor's revenue
11:03 Zero dollars, driving Uber, waiting tables
14:38 Negative $400 and 15,000 bottles in a warehouse
16:57 The 7-Eleven pivot: every store in NorCal
18:49 The free-case shelf-space play
20:38 Why Whole Foods failed and 7-Eleven worked
21:50 The JP Morgan moment he almost took
24:19 90 employees and dividing the roles
25:32 The SFO takeover and the Expedia hack
29:48 Why a fast no is better than a slow maybe
33:23 Kevin Hart, Guy Fieri and the first celebrity yes
36:48 What stops Coca-Cola from copying this
39:02 Salesforce, Chanel and 1,200 co-brand partners
42:54 Learning to be extroverted on purpose
46:04 Brainwashing himself on the commute
46:44 $27K year one and taking seven people to Tony Robbins
50:03 "You are the bottleneck for your business"
51:12 What he would take back
52:47 Paul Polman and the 10-billion-bottle goal
56:27 Would he ever run a public company
58:35 Fatherhood, swim lessons and the phone lockbox
1:02:24 Who he would champion

In December 2008, James D. White took over a public company that had almost no cash left. The previous management team had burned through $100 million, made a string of bad real estate deals, and left the market cap heading one direction. He walked into the Great Recession with a smoothie chain that didn't sell anything hot, in cities where it was winter.

He told the board he needed six months to figure it out. Inside 45 days he'd moved on two executives. Inside seven years the market cap was up 500%.

In this conversation he goes through all of it: how he raised money for a company with none, the anonymous index-card exercise he ran in his first week, the pitch he made to get the job in the first place — "you can give me any 10 people and I'll get more out of them than nine out of ten people on the planet" — and the executives he admits he kept far too long because he's loyal to a fault.

Before Jamba: Coca-Cola, Ralston Purina, SVP at Gillette, and an $8 billion business at Safeway. Since: twenty-plus years in boardrooms, including Cava, and two books written with his daughter Christa.

🎧 Subscribe for new long-form interviews every week.

Want more Matt in your life? Of course you do! 
(https://www.instagram.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.facebook.com/MattEbertCC)
(https://twitter.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.tiktok.com/@mattebertcc)
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-ebert-7169a5180/)

Get paid while you learn on the job at Crash Champions: https://step.crashchampions.com/

00:00 "You can give me any 10 people"
01:30 The résumé: Coke, Purina, Gillette, Safeway, CEO
05:00 The fifth-grade class that almost decided his life
08:00 Why he hunts for the superpower, not the flaw
09:30 Running a team 15 years older than him at 24
12:00 Being the boss vs. actually being followed
15:00 The pitch that got him the CEO job
17:30 How he reads a company in his first week
20:00 120 anonymous index cards and four questions
23:30 Taking over a company with no cash in December 2008
25:00 The $100 million his predecessors burned
27:00 Selling oatmeal in a blizzard to stay alive
29:30 The executives gone inside 45 days
32:00 "Loyal to a fault" — the call he should have made
35:00 When your management team outgrows the company
37:30 Human capital is financial capital
40:00 The bathroom test
41:30 Picking up the trash in the parking lot
43:00 Culture when you're not in the room
46:00 "Good intentions don't drive outcomes"
48:30 Coaching CEOs who don't know what their people think
51:00 Bad boards, useless directors, and "shadow government"
54:00 What he tells people who want the chair
56:30 The books he's handed out by the thousand
59:00 His father worked as a skycap until 89
62:30 The sister he'd put up against anyone

John Paul DeJoria started John Paul Mitchell Systems with $700 while living in his car with his two-year-old son. Thirty-eight years later he sold Patrón to Bacardi in a deal valued at $5.1 billion.

He tells Matt what actually happened in between: foster care at nine, on his own at eleven, homeless twice, selling encyclopedias door to door for $150 a week, and the string of jobs he says made the whole thing possible — "I couldn't have started John Paul Mitchell Systems in 1980 with $10 million, let alone $700, if I hadn't learned what I learned first."

Also: why the first check he wrote after the Patrón sale was for $50 million and went straight to charity, why he locked Paul Mitchell into a 360-year trust so that nobody — including his own family — can ever sell it, the number he threw out that made the buyers laugh at him, and how a guy who rode with the Hells Angels ended up building a $5 billion tequila brand.

▶️ Subscribe for more PodCrash
🎧 Apple Podcasts · Spotify · wherever you listen

Want more Matt in your life? Of course you do! 
(https://www.instagram.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.facebook.com/MattEbertCC)
(https://twitter.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.tiktok.com/@mattebertcc)
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-ebert-7169a5180/)

Get paid while you learn on the job at Crash Champions: https://step.crashchampions.com/

Steven Galanis had the idea for Cameo at his grandmother's funeral. Four years later the company had gone from roughly $300,000 to $100 million in revenue with no marketing spend, was the fastest-growing consumer marketplace in the world, and hit a $1 billion valuation. Then the vaccines came out, demand dropped 60% almost overnight, and a banker sat him down in Miami with a binder he called "the sea of red."

In this conversation he walks through all of it without spin: the launch night where nobody bought anything and his only investor quit, the board member who told him to cut half the company and was right when he only cut 25%, what $165 million of preferred stock does to your employees' equity when the valuation collapses, and what it actually takes to recapitalize and get profitable again.

Plus why the internet created a generation of people more famous than rich, why 15 minutes of fame now lasts 15 years, and the line from a board member that changed how he ran the company: "You've been Michael Jordan. It's time to be Phil Jackson."

Want more Matt in your life? Of course you do! 
(https://www.instagram.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.facebook.com/MattEbertCC)
(https://twitter.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.tiktok.com/@mattebertcc)
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-ebert-7169a5180/)

Get paid while you learn on the job at Crash Champions: https://step.crashchampions.com/

Jay Abraham has consulted in over 1,000 industries and 7,124 niches, almost all of it on the front lines rather than from a stage. He got married at 18, had two kids at 20, had no education, and nobody in his family had ever made more than $25,000 a year — so the only people who'd hire him were entrepreneurs who paid on results. That's where he found the thing that made him: nobody in any industry has a clue how any other industry actually works.

In this conversation he walks through how that one realization grew Icy Hot 21,000% in a year, pulled $9 million out of Entrepreneur magazine's dead archive, and quintupled a PVC pipe company's sales by giving salespeople 100% of the first sale. He explains the 30 leverage points hiding in a business you already own, why a bottom-line 10X should always come before a top-line one, and why he thinks almost every company is using zero of the 125 referral systems that exist.

Then at 68:49 the interview flips, and Jay spends the second half interviewing Matt — the wrecked car at seventeen, the $100,000 in credit card cash advances that went into four Subway franchises, and what actually happened in the room when he stopped looking for debt and started talking to private equity.

Dr. Doug Brackmann is a psychologist who works with Navy SEALs, PGA pros and founders — and he teaches meditation by putting a rifle in your hands and asking you to hit a target a mile away.

He was a high school dropout living in a car. Now he's the guy those people call when the money arrives and the emptiness doesn't go away. In this conversation he explains the genetics behind the entrepreneurial brain, why 87% of lottery winners are bankrupt within five years, why hunting organizations physically cannot scale, and what happens to a founder's identity the day the phone stops ringing after an exit.

Matt gets into his own version of it — what he's watched happen to sellers through the Crash Champions acquisitions, and why the check was never the hard part.

Find Dr. Brackmann and take the driven assessment at iamdriven.com. Books: Driven and Sheep and Wolves.

Want more Matt in your life? Of course you do! 
(https://www.instagram.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.facebook.com/MattEbertCC)
(https://twitter.com/mattebertcc/)
(https://www.tiktok.com/@mattebertcc)
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-ebert-7169a5180/)

Get paid while you learn on the job at Crash Champions: https://step.crashchampions.com/

00:00 INTRO
01:50 Why entrepreneurs are unemployable
04:43 High school dropout who lived in a car
07:48 The alcoholism gene and the genetics of "driven"
11:05 Inside the driven brain: 9 to 13 thoughts at once
15:12 Hunters vs. farmers, and why school was built for farmers
18:54 The boredom gene and reward deficiency
21:46 What happens when you ask a driven person who they are
24:51 Why you can only scale a farm, never a hunt
28:21 Hiring farmers around you, and talking to your CFO
31:38 The wolf pack, the herd, and why drivens end up alone
35:32 Self-sabotage: 87% of lottery winners go bankrupt
38:37 Losing your identity after you sell the company
41:30 Trauma, somatic healing, and what the body records
45:36 Boredom is a lie
48:04 Sleep, willpower, and what meditation actually is
51:09 Energy, intuition, and the spidey sense
54:02 The shadow, Carl Jung, and the midlife turn inward
56:42 Where to find Dr. Brackmann and the driven assessment
58:33 Closing: the person he'd champion