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 larg...

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 sl...

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 fiv...

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 impo...

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 Ca...