Colin King Turned a $250K Midnight Parts Route Into a $28M Four-Business Holdco

The Setup Colin King and his partner Joe were not chasing a marquee SMB. They bought a midnight automotive parts route in the Indianapolis-Toledo corridor doing roughly $250,000 in revenue. The business existed to move parts overnight from warehouses to service centers and dealerships so mechanics had inventory waiting when bays opened. Unglamorous, physical, time-sensitive, and almost entirely dependent on a handful of drivers showing up at the right dock at the right hour. The appeal was not the asset. It was the price point, the cash conversion of a route business, and the fact that two operators could actually run it themselves if they had to. That optionality mattered more than it looked on paper. The Deal A sub-$300K revenue route distributor is effectively a job with equity. The valuation math at that scale rewards buyers who can tolerate operator risk and stomach the tribal knowledge problem (who calls which dispatcher, which dock code, which customer tolerates a late drop). King and Joe accepted that tradeoff. They bought imperfect and planned to figure it out. First 100 Days Night one previewed the next six years. Two drivers did not show. The new owners got in trucks and ran the routes themselves at 2 a.m. That is the unromantic version of owner-operator: the business does not care that you just signed papers, the dealerships open at 7, and parts have to be on the shelf. The lesson that compounded was not heroic. It was that the owners had to be capable of doing every job in the business before they could hire, systematize, or acquire anything else. Route density, driver reliability, and dispatcher discipline are the only three levers in a business like this, and you cannot fix what you have not done yourself. Operating Moves Rather than scale the parts route into a regional giant, King and Joe used the cash flow and the operating reps as a platform to acquire into adjacent and unrelated verticals. Six years in, Circle City Capital Group holds four businesses: - An apparel company - A décor distributor - A Montessori distributor - A financial training business Three of the four are distribution-flavored, which tracks. The muscle they built (inventory turns, route economics, fulfillment timing, small-team management) ports cleanly into any business where product has to move from A to B on a schedule. The financial training piece is the outlier, and likely reflects a seller-specific opportunity rather than a thesis buy. Aggregate revenue is approaching $30M. Operating Lessons - Buy the imperfect business if you can run it yourself on night one. Optionality to execute the work is underwriting. - A $250K revenue deal is not a small deal if it is the platform. Judge entry prices by what they unlock, not by their standalone multiple. - Route and distribution businesses teach transferable muscle: density, reliability, dispatch discipline, working capital. That muscle is the real acquisition. - Sequential acquisition beats organic scaling when the operator's edge is deal execution, not category expertise....