Josh Zolin was a Hollywood stunt man before he became a CEO. He walked away from the film business, started at the bottom of his father's restaurant equipment company as a field technician on minimum wage, and now runs it as President and CEO of Windy City Equipment.

In this conversation with Bart Berkey, Josh explains the thing that made all of it possible. Every level of success he reached required a different version of him to show up, and confronting the old version was the hardest work he has ever done.

He talks about why he left the stunt world, and it was not about credit or money. It was that he did not like the person he was becoming in order to succeed. He talks about the ten years he spent in the field, getting up at 4:30 in the morning and working a second job because his father refused to pay him more than minimum wage, and about the line that explains why he stayed: he did not like the work, but he liked who he was when he was working.

Then he gets practical. Josh handwrites three notebooks every single day. A wins notebook built on four filters, freedom, presence, impact and love. A universal questions notebook that teaches him how to think. And an excavation notebook, where he writes the hard question, the unfiltered answer, the sentence that starts with "the lie I'm telling myself is," and finally "I am the man who." His claim is simple. Do that for a year and you will not be the same person.

He also answers the question the show is named for. Why don't most people do this work? Because they mistake uncertainty for something they need to know, and anxiety comes from two things: what we are uncertain about, and what we feel powerless against.

Josh is the author of Blue Is The New White, a case for purpose and real earning in the skilled trades, and the host of Everything They Don't Tell You. Find everything at joshzolin.com.

In this episode:

The one thing Josh does that Most People Don't

Why he left the stunt business, and the moment in the mirror

Starting as a technician with no silver spoons and no handouts

Why fair and the same are not the same thing in a company culture

What it means to give someone your present instead of your attention

The three notebooks, and the four parts of every excavation entry

Why uncertainty and powerlessness are the recipe for intrusive thoughts

Blue Is The New White, and the case for the skilled trades

Most People Don't... But YOU Do! is hosted by Bart Berkey, who spent 16 years as a global executive with The Ritz-Carlton and now builds HUMANALITY™, a system for making people feel cared for rather than processed.

Listen, subscribe and share: https://www.bartaberkey.com/podcast

SEASON 4, EP. 248
Guest: Ryan Bartlett | Co-Founder & Chairman, True Classic | Los Angeles, California
Web: trueclassictees.com
LinkedIn: Ryan Bartlett (30,000+ follow

EPISODE SUMMARY AND KEY TAKEAWAYS

Ryan Bartlett flunked out of Michigan State, went broke trying to make it as a poker pro in Vegas, worked nightclub VIP rooms in Orlando and LA, and then spent a year quietly researching the most saturated, commoditized category in fashion before deciding to shoot his shot. That company is True Classic, now one of the fastest-growing D2C apparel brands in the world.

But this episode is not really about T-shirts. It is about what happens when a founder with a service heart builds a company around the belief that the customer experience matters more than the money. Ryan and Bart connect over Ritz Carlton-level service, the Humanality framework, and a story that started with two canceled orders, a TikTok live comment, and ended with five brand new True Classic shirts showing up at Bart's door unannounced.

Ryan talks about the parents who believed in him through every pivot, the stepbrother who reminded him of a promise he made at 19 in the Bahamas, the co-founder who ran with the culture from day one, and why he tells his customer service team to throw the 30-day return window out the window. Every time. No exceptions. At all costs.

What You Will Walk Away With

At all costs means exactly that. Ryan's customer service mantra is simple: the customer needs to have a good experience, period. Even if True Classic loses money on the transaction. The word of mouth from one bad experience costs far more than the refund. His team knows this without being told twice.

Ritz Carlton service is not a hospitality concept. It is a business model. Ryan built True Classic's culture around the same standard Bart learned at the Ritz. Surprise and delight. Notice, anticipate, over-deliver. CSAT score of 4.97 at all times. These were not aspirational goals. They were the baseline.

Parents who believe in you change everything. Ryan credits his parents more than any business school, course, or mentor. They backed every instrument, every idea, every pivot. That unconditional belief became the confidence that let him walk into the most saturated category in fashion and know he was going to crush it.

Most people get into businesses they do not love. Ryan's fill-in-the-blank answer is the throughline of his entire story: most people start businesses for the opportunity, not the passion. And when year two or three gets brutal, the opportunity is not enough to keep you going. The love is what keeps you going.

It was never about the T-shirt. It was about giving 6 million guys the confidence to leave the house feeling good about themselves. That was always the North Star. The revenue followed the mission, not the other way around.

Optimization never stops. Ryan lives in what he calls optimization mode — constantly scanning for things that are a 7 out of 10 and figuring out how to make them a 10. His next chapter is not another product. It is teaching the next generation of D2C founders how to build and scale a brand using what he actually learned from doing it, not from repackaging other people's advice.

At 16, Matt Ebert wrecked his car twice. The first one was totaled. The second time, he was too afraid to file an insurance claim, certain it would cost him his coverage and with it his newfound freedom to drive. So he found a man in town who worked a day job and fixed cars at night in his garage, and asked to be taught.

He has been in collision repair ever since. Today he is the founder and CEO of Crash Champions, with more than 650 locations, 11,000 employees, 60,000 cars repaired every month, and $3 billion in revenue. He calls that 5 percent of his market and says it is nowhere near enough.

In this episode, recorded at PodCrash Studios in Chicago, Bart Berkey asks Matt the question this show is built on: what do you do that most people don't? What follows is the conversation most CEO interviews never reach. Kmart clothes and split kids' meals. A paper route that taught him to collect, hold, pay, and keep the difference. One hundred thousand dollars cash advanced on credit cards for four Subway franchises that never made money, and a return to the body shop floor to cover the bills. A mind that has never once treated quitting as an option.

Matt is candid about the parts that do not fit on a highlight reel. Why he is most comfortable at the bottom of the rollercoaster and most nervous at the top. Why he still cannot sleep. What the drive has cost his wife and his kids, and why he measures the quality of his time with them rather than the quantity. And why, at Crash Champions, repairing the car is only the ante. The real work is trust, delivered to people on the worst day of their week, across 650 locations he cannot personally stand in.

His answer to the closing question is one word longer than you expect, and it reframes everything before it: most people don't get curious enough.

Most people fix what is broken and move on. Matt Ebert built a company around leaving things better than he found them.

Key takeaways

• Think bigger than the room you are in. Matt's answer to "what do you do that most people don't" was immediate: he thinks bigger, and he pushes the people around him to do the same. It was not there at 16. It got built.

• The wreck was the doorway. Two crashes at 16 and a fear of losing his driving freedom sent him into a neighbor's garage to learn collision repair. The problem he was trying to avoid became the career.

• He is not naturally good at anything, and that is the advantage. "I can't sing, I can't dance, I don't have athletic ability." What he learned instead was that he can figure almost anything out if he reads about it, asks about it, and practices it.

• Better is the whole business. Landscaping, construction, collision repair, all of it is transformation. "I want people to think their life has been better for having me involved in it." Bart's frame for it: easy to be, but better to become.

Learn more at mattebert.com and crashchampion.com

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