Belron and Autoglass: How Gary Lubner built a glass empire

“Windscreens are not a product that you wake up in the morning really excited about,” Gary Lubner joked to Sir Richard Harpin on the Business Leader podcast. “You don’t say, ‘I’m going to go out and buy a windscreen,’ after all.” It is a distress purchase, but it is one that Lubner used to build Belron, known in the UK as Autoglass, into one of the great scale-up stories in British business.

Lubner took over as group chief executive in 2000 and stood down 23 years later, by which point the company’s value had grown from around €200m to €24bn. Speaking to Harpin on the Business Leader podcast, Lubner explains the acquisitions, the marketing bets and the leadership calls that took a family business three generations deep into a 38-country empire.

In this interview, he shares:

• Why Belron only ever buys 100 per cent of a business, never a franchise or a partnership
• The three changes he made in his first year running Autoglass in the UK
• Why he backed a repair over a replacement when his own team told him it was madness
• Why he pushed to bring private equity into a business that didn’t need the cash

If you haven’t heard of the name Belron, that’s all part of the strategy. In the UK, it’s known as Autoglass, Safelite in the US, Carglass in Europe and Smith & Smith in New Zealand. The logos, the advertising campaigns and even the Autoglass jingle you’re likely humming as you read this are standardised internationally, but the original names of the businesses acquired by Belron remained. Lubner felt that it would be simply ego to rebrand every company he bought, losing powerful local brand recognition.

From a barrow of glass to a global boardroom

The company's story begins a century ago with Lubner’s grandfather, Morrie, pushing a barrow of glass around Johannesburg, South Africa. Lubner followed his father and grandfather into the family business in the 1980s, by which point it had begun to expand globally.

It was Lubner’s father, Ronnie, who had the courage to hire his replacement by bringing in a proven chief executive from outside of the family, John Mason. It was Mason who then charged a young Gary Lubner with leading expansion into Europe. For nearly half a decade, Lubner acquired family-run businesses that typically had seven to eight branches or depots.

Crucially, they were always local market leaders. He would make around 700 acquisitions during his tenure, paying a small multiple on profits for each. Once absorbed into the larger entity, there were efficiency gains through the economies of scale.

Buy the market leader, always with 100 per cent equity

Lubner spent months driving around Germany, France and Belgium, looking for businesses to buy or sites for new branches. His key piece of advice when it comes to acquisitions: always buy the smaller companies out with 100 per cent equity, rather than franchising or partnering. For one thing, it’s a surefire way to ensure your own culture and approach are followed. In fact, many original founders would typically leave the business after being bought out, because they’d be expected to do things the “Belron way”.

This included taking risks that seemed counterintuitive to the glass replacement business model. Belron was working with Glass Medic in the 1990s, a company it eventually bought. It developed a process to repair windscreens with small chips by injecting a resin.

“Most people in the industry saw it as a massive threat and people in my own company thought I was mad,” recalls Lubner. “I saw the opposite. Repair was about the third of the price of replacement. My thesis was that if we show that to insurance companies and they trust us, that we are on their side, they will give us more volume.”

Fix the basics before you fix anything else

Lubner’s first big leadership test came when he took over Autoglass, Belron’s UK business, in the mid-1990s. He made three changes. The first was people, replacing around five of his direct reports within a year.

The second was customer service. Autoglass had been asking customers to rate their experience on a hanger left in the car and the scores looked strong but a deeper review found the process around each job, from booking to insurance details, was letting customers down even when the technician did a good job.

The third was marketing, built around the recognition that Belron effectively serves two customers at once, the insurer paying the bill and the motorist experiencing the repair.

Turning a distress purchase into a marketing story

The “Autoglass repair, Autoglass replace” jingle became part of the public consciousness in the UK. Alongside this was a striking approach to advertising, in which regular workers became the front-of-house stars and spokespeople of the business.

The tune is now sung in around 40 countries and was developed in Belgium by a former Procter & Gamble marketer. When Lubner suggested rolling it out everywhere, he was met with the familiar resistance of “it won’t work here”. He pushed it through regardless.

Building philanthropy into the Belron model

Every competitor ranking in this space eventually gets to the same subject and it is one Lubner treats as central to his story rather than an afterthought. He traces the instinct to his grandparents, refugees who arrived in South Africa with nothing and later felt a strong obligation to give back once the family business succeeded. That instinct became embedded in Belron itself.

In 2001, Lubner and six colleagues founded the Spirit of Belron Challenge, a company sporting event that had grown to more than 12,000 participating employees by 2023, raising tens of millions of euros for the South African charity Afrika Tikkun.

In February 2020, he launched the Belron Ronnie Lubner Charitable Foundation, named after his father, which has since donated more than €6.7m to some 350 charities across six continents, including humanitarian relief following the war in Ukraine, the Pakistan floods, and the Turkey-Syria earthquakes.

The clearest expression of the philosophy came when Lubner stepped down in 2023. Senior leaders at Belron gave up close to €300m of their own shares so that around 26,000 employees worldwide could each receive a €10,000 “Belron Thank You” payment, split between cash and shares, with no conditions attached.

What can leaders learn?

Buy outright, or don’t buy at all. Across more than 700 deals, Belron never franchised or partnered on an acquisition. Full ownership meant new businesses adopted Belron’s standards immediately, rather than negotiating around them.

Fix people before you fix anything else. When Lubner took over Autoglass in the UK, five of his direct reports changed within a year. Every other improvement, he says, followed from getting that right first.

Back the calculation over the consensus. Lubner pushed Belron toward windscreen repair when his own colleagues warned it would cannibalise sales. The volume argument, that earning insurers’ trust brings more business than protecting price does, proved out over decades.

Know when your own numbers aren’t good enough. Belron had industry-leading service and engagement scores well before its margins matched them. Lubner brought in outside investors specifically to be told what he didn’t want to hear.

Listen to the full conversation with Gary Lubner on the Business Leader podcast.