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,” says Gary Lubner, “and say, ‘I’m going to go out and buy a windscreen!’ It’s a distress purchase.”

By building strong relationships with both insurers and customers (what he calls “the push and the pull”), Lubner has scaled a huge global business around these ‘distress purchases’.

Lubner stepped down as CEO of Belron in 2023. His family business specialises in vehicle glass replacement and, under his watch, repair too. The value of the company rose from around €200m to €24bn during his 23 years in charge. It employes around 35,000 people globally.

Belron is known by different names in different countries. In the UK it is known as Autoglass, in the US as Safe Light and in Europe as Carglass. It’s called Smith & Smith in New Zealand.

In our latest Business Leader Podcast, Lubner explains his scaling strategy to Sir Richard Harpin.

On the one hand, it’s a story of patient acquisition, buying out smaller specialist glass firms in whole and absorbing them into the Belron operation, to become the market leader in different countries. Lubner estimates he made around 700 acquisitions during his tenure.

But another key part of this scaling story was the application of technology.

A turning point for Belron was working with Glass Medic, a company it eventually bought. It developed technology that lets you repair windscreens which had only had superficial damage (“dinks”), rather than replacing the whole windscreen.

“Repair was about the third of the price of replacement,” explains Lubner, “and 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.”

Belron also cracked marketing in the trades service space. The ‘Autoglass repair, Autoglass replace’ jingle became part of the public consciousness and was backed up by a striking approach to advertising, in which regular workers became the front-of-house stars and spokespeople.

Indeed, Lubner says a key part of his leadership philosophy is to focus on his own people.

“People used to say, ‘Well, obviously your job is to hit the EBITDA numbers or hit the sales figures,” says Lubner, “but I never saw my job as that at all. I saw my job as making sure that we're listening to our customers, that we're listening to our people, that we're engaging our people, that we're motivating our people.”

One of his last actions as CEO, which he is most proud of, is that he enacted the ‘Belron Thank You’ scheme. It gave 26,000 employees €10,000 each to reward them for their hard work.