Brandon Adams Bought a 1975 Dry Ice Distributor and Spent Six Months Driving the Truck

The Setup Brandon Adams (military plus finance) and Don Ware formed K4 Partnership in 2015 with a stated goal: assemble a portfolio of 5 to 10 established businesses in the Philadelphia area. Both came from entrepreneurial families with manufacturing and financial services backgrounds. Rather than chase broker-listed deals from day one, they built a proprietary list of 2,000 local businesses and ran outreach themselves. The side benefit was a filter for brokers. While working the list they met dozens of intermediaries and learned which ones actually shared information versus which ones slow-played buyers. Philadelphia Dry Ice landed in their lap through one of those vetted broker relationships. The business was founded in 1975, had already passed once from founder to a second owner, and was now coming to market under a third transition. Core service: dry ice distribution plus truck management and delivery logistics, with roughly 65 to 70 percent of revenue from the ice itself. The Deal The financials told two stories. 2020 EBITDA was $2.8M, inflated by pandemic-era food delivery demand with zero marketing spend. 2019 peak was $850K. To his credit, the seller flagged 2020 as an anomaly rather than trying to sell off the spike. Adams and Ware underwrote to the $850K number. Capital stack: 80% SBA (10-year amort), 10% seller note, 10% equity. Clean, standard Main Street structure. First 100 Days Here is where the real story starts. What the model did not capture was that the outgoing owner personally fielded after-hours calls, personally drove routes in a pinch, and personally held a 24/7 service posture together. Adams found himself driving a truck nearly 12 hours a day and taking emergency delivery calls during family dinners. Weeks of this made the trade-off obvious. They made two structural changes fast: - Killed the 24/7 delivery promise. Published set hours. - Introduced order minimums to cut unprofitable micro-runs. The hands-on period had an unexpected upside. Inherited staff watched the new owners pick up routes at 4 a.m. instead of sitting in the office cutting policies. That bought credibility the partnership could spend later. Operating Lessons - Diligence the owner's calendar, not just the P&L. Ask what happens between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. and on weekends. A business that runs because one person never sleeps is not the same asset as a business with systems. - Test seller transparency by how they treat an obvious anomaly. Flagging the 2020 COVID spike (instead of packaging it into the ask) was a trust signal worth weighting. - Proprietary outreach doubles as broker due diligence. Running a 2,000-name list in parallel with broker conversations tells you which intermediaries actually add value. - A 24/7 service promise without a rotating on-call system is a cost center pretending to be a differentiator. Price it or kill it. - Driving the truck yourself for a stretch is not failure. It buys operational knowledge and credibility with a skeptical crew. But it has to have an exit date or you bought yourself a job....