Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - $34M Freight Brokerage Deal Breakdown: Would You Buy This Business?

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

In this episode, the hosts break down a highly optimized, $34M freight brokerage specializing in weird, mission-critical loads—one of the best businesses they’ve seen, and totally out of reach for most buyers.Business Listing – https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ir1uPXvP33JxMYO-AkT5Qv3DsjmL2o_j/view?usp=sharingWelcome to Acquisitions Anonymous – the #1 podcast for small business M&A. Every week, we break down businesses for sale and talk about buying, operating, and growing them.Looking to build a professional website in minutes? Try Wix: https://wix.pxf.io/c/6898629/3115214/25616?trafcat=templateHubSpot is the backbone for how businesses scale without chaos. Try them out here: https://go.try-hubspot.com/OeG9Vr💰 Sponsored by:Acquisition Lab – Your fast-track to business ownership. Get hands-on support, world-class resources, and join a top-tier community of acquisition entrepreneurs. Schedule your free consultation at https://www.acquisitionlab.com and mention Acquisitions Anonymous!Capital Pad – A platform connecting accredited investors with vetted small business acquisition deals. Discover exclusive opportunities at https://capitalpad.comThis freight brokerage is one of the biggest—and cleanest—deals Acquisitions Anonymous has ever reviewed. Project Overland is a tech-enabled, non-asset-based logistics company specializing in high-complexity loads: think seafood, distilled spirits, disaster response, and massive equipment rental. With $34.3M in projected 2025 revenue and $5.5M in adjusted EBITDA, the business offers niche expertise in hard-to-serve freight segments.Key Highlights Section:- $34.3M revenue / $8.7M net revenue / $5.5M EBITDA (2025 projections)- Specializes in complex freight: alcohol, seafood, equipment, disaster relief- Non-asset-based with Colombia-based BPO support- Tech-enabled, AI-driven TMS platform- Likely to trade at 7–9x EBITDA to private equity buyersSubscribe to weekly our Newsletter and get curated deals in your inboxAdvertise with us by clicking here Do you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show! Follow us on Twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations. For inquiries or suggestions, email us at [e-mail]

Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous. Michael here. Today's deal was me, Bill, and Mills talking about one of the biggest deals we've looked at in a long time and one of the best businesses we've looked at in a long time. So stick around to the end and we'll explain to you why you'll never buy it. All right. Thanks for being here. Here's the episode.

Acquisition Anonymous. Hello, another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. We don't have 100% beers anymore. And thumbs downing on just the plus inventory. Are you ready to take a leap? to business ownership but you don't know where to start? Well, look no further than Acquisition Lab, the premier resource for entrepreneurs seeking to buy their dream business. Founded by Harvard MBA, and acquisition expert, Walker, Dybul, the Lab is your fast-tracked success in the search

diligence and acquisition process. With hands-on support, world-class resources, and a community of like-minded entrepreneurs, Acquisition Lab gives you the tools and confidence to navigate every step of the journey. And we're proud to call Walker and Chelsea, the lab's director, longtime friends of the podcast. They're passionate about helping entrepreneurs like you take the next big step. So don't wait to make your business ownership dream or reality. Visit AcquisitionLab.com today to learn more and schedule your free consultation. And when you do, be sure to tell them the Acquisitions Anonymous podcast sent you. All right.

So Mills has chatted this deal to our signal group like more than once. We have to do this deal. So I did not click the teaser. I'm coming in cold. I want to hear Mills describe this thing to us. Well, I read any more than the headline and looked at the revenue in EBITDA, and I was like, oh, heck yes. Well, hold on. Hold on.

Mills sent the deal twice and said he really wants to do it and then showed up late. Like, there's a disconnect here, Mill. Like, if you want us to do your deal, you got to show up to the recording. Yeah. Yeah. So we got stuck with the deal we didn't like. And here, well, I hope this one does not disappoint. All right.

Let's hear it, Mills. What do you got? All right. Project Overland from Peacstone. Project Overland from a M&A broker called Peekstone. It says it's a tech-enabled, rapidly scaling freight brokerage, supporting mission-critical rental and specialized logistics. Does $34.3 million in 2025 revenue, $8.7 million in net revenue, which we're going to dig into. And it says between 2003 and 2027, they're projecting net revenue compound annual growth rate of 47.

So did they really put the period for their Kager to include two full years of projections? Yeah. Come on. They're showing that revenue is going to get to $59 million. These charts are all beautiful if you're not on YouTube. They're all up into the right beautifully. But 2025 adjusted EBITDA is $5.5 million. We don't know the nature of the adjustments.

So it says it's a family owned. Well, hang on, Mel. Let's just recap the numbers. 34 million in 2025 revenue, 8.7 million of net revenue and 5.5 million of adjusted EBITDA. Yep. I'm going to have a lot of questions, but continue. I do too. And I hope we get some answers on this.

But like this is this is where it gets good. All right, it's family owned, technology-enabled, non-asset-based logistics platform, specializing in oversized heavy haul and overdimensional freight. The company is a trusted partner to a diverse set of premier customers across the equipment rental, distilled spirits, seafood distribution, and disaster response in markets.

So what does that, this company actually do? So it is a freight brokerage, which means they don't haul anything. And they own the assets. Correct. Which means if you need some sort of specialized haul in the equipment rental, distilled spirits, seafood distribution, and disaster response markets, you call them and they know the haulers who can do these types of loads and they broker it out and take a spread. I'm trying to think of like the common denominator, between those? Is it like, is it like a really large generator or some kind of specialty piece of equipment? So I think what it, here's a guess. Equipment rental, it's got to be like big flatbed or

something, right? So special equipment. Distilled spirits, if I had to bet, you got to hold special licenses for that. So like, you can't just throw that on any truck. It's, you're going to, it's explosive and flammable. And it's alcohol across straight line. You can't just put that on any hauler. So I think it's like a very small subset of haulers that can do that. Seafood distribution, I assume like this is, it's definitely got to be frozen. Or it's got to be like if it's like live lobsters, like maybe it's, you know, can ship live seafood, which is probably a different set of licensing and can haul water tanks and all that stuff.

I don't know. And then disaster response, that's also probably different. like do we got to airlift the stuff in via helicopter or, you know, via tractor trailer with big mud tires on or something. So to me, I think this company probably looks for specialized weird loads where you can't just broker it out to any hauler and they try to go after those markets. I'm asking AI, why would a freight brokerage specialize in these categories? These categories look random at first glance, but there's actually a strategic logic connecting them. They have shared operational complexity. Distilled spirits require TTP clients, bonded carriers, navigating state-by-state alcohol shipping laws.

Seafood demands cold chain expertise, tight-timing windows, and FSM compliance. Equipment rental means oversized loads, requiring permits, flatbeds or specialized trailers. Disaster response is rapid mobilization and carriers comfortable operating in chaotic conditions. So this means that customers will pay you a premium for reliability when mistakes are very, costly. All right. I think I did pretty good against GPT there. That was more or less what I pegged it for is Claude, but yeah, you're close. Why do you see? Otherwise, you would have beat the crap out of chat GPT because it's so bad now. So anyway. Why do you guys think that this company exists and people don't just go straight to the source? I mean, the same reason any freight brokerage exists, right? Because

the pricing is very different based on available capacity. Like, if you call five, haulers yourself, you're going to get five very different prices based on capacity. And so the value these guys provide is basically knowing everybody's price and getting you the best one and making a spread. Like they're a liquidity provider essentially. That is the difference between the revenue and net revenue. So, I mean, they're passing through the entire cost and then their markup. Yeah. So that means they booked 30, they charged customers 34 million. Their markup was 8.7 million. And so they paid out to carriers

26 million or something. So they had 8.7 million of spread and then they had 3 million of expenses and they took home 5.5 million because it's a very asset light business. And it's probably, I mean, we didn't read all these other things. There's a couple

things that stand out in these other bullet points. They say they have a best in class, AI-enabled technology platform built around turbo. TMS. Does anybody know what that is? Now Googling it. Yeah.

Delivering real-time visibility and data-driven execution. TMS is probably trucking management system. Yes. Experience founder-led management team with deep domain expertise in specialized freight, exceptional performance highlighted by 25% net revenue margin profile, and 46% net revenue Kager over the past three years.

Columbia, this is interesting. Columbia-based, Columbia South America, I'm sure, not South Carolina. Columbia-based BPO platform providing 24-7 support across dispatch accounting and carrier relations to our site end market exposure, position for organic and inorganic growth. Very interesting. It is a fascinating thing that's happened in terms of all of transportation and logistics. like Columbia is a dominant player in all of that especially for BPO. I went into an office once in Medellin.

And we were walking around and it's just like row after row of Colombians doing back office for trucking companies. And in particular, this office, which was like 25,000 square feet, was basically the back office execution for every single regional fuel hauler in the United States. like all the small fuel haulers had all outsourced like all of the marketing, finance, admin, like customer service. It was all being done out of this office and it was crazy. And what's so, you know, they have going for them? Same time zone. Absolutely.

Which is just huge. Yeah. Well, and then also I think people, people, and it's been surprising to me, people really underestimate how well America understands. Latin American cultures. Like, it just feels so much more natural to deal with somebody coming from Mexico or Argentina or Colombia than it does try to deal with somebody from Eastern Europe or Philippines or Southeast Asia. Like, there's just, we're just so accustomed to Latin American culture here that, like,

it doesn't feel like as much of a gap. Well, I would take it one step further, Michael, not only are we more accustomed to their culture, their culture is more similar to ours. Their social norms are more similar. Their work style is more similar. their work norms are more similar. I mean, I've worked with a lot of people from Asia and a lot of people from South America.

And not just me, all of my Americans just work better with the South Americans naturally because there's just different, there's so many baked in assumptions about how people relate to each other culturally. They're very different in Asia. Yeah. Well, it reminds me, post-college,

I went and lived in San Francisco, and growing up in San Antonio, which is like 65% Mexican-American, basically, like, I developed a certain sense of humor. and it's very dry and kind of self-deprecating. And I went to California where, you know, the dominant minority is Asian Americans. And I would make kind of the same self-deprecating humor jokes.

And they would look at me like I was an alien, which, you know, I'm a 6'5, you know, guy from Texas. So they'll probably look at me like an alien anyway. But I was like, I kind of want to go back to Texas because I can't make any jokes here. Like they might have. Yeah. Nobody laughs with me.

They're laughing at me. Yeah. So, I mean, this is a very optimized, like, polished, not just the SIM, but like the business itself. This is being served up on a platter. Like, there obviously are issues with any business. And I think you would sign the NDA and you would figure out what these are. But this is a really strong business. It would probably trade my guess for like seven times or more.

If I had, like, it's tech enabled, like, it just checks so many boxes that the, there are so many institutional buyers who would just fall over themselves for this type of thing. I mean, this has to become either a PE platform or get tucked into a PE platform, right? There's, this checks all their buckets and they'll pay up for it. And, you know, I mean, there are tons of freight brokerage roll-ups, too. I mean, that already is that. I mean, this industry is getting rolled up hard already. Yeah, this is, this probably hit the associate inbox of basically like every market development specialist, business development specialist at every PE firm with any kind of smell of this thing. I bet, I bet there's there were 200 NDA signed on this thing. And this would add a lot of value, right? Like if you're doing a roll up, let's see your private equity firm, you're doing a roll up of relatively generic freight brokers, right? And what you're trying to do is get some size and multiple expansion. But you're still.

And that's going to work. Your investment is going to work if you do that. You add this one. Now you become specialized, differentiated, and you might start to get some multiple expansion on the whole platform because you're in these weird or higher, more profitable niches. And it makes you look different. This is going to go for a big multiple, I think. Hey everyone, it's Bill, and I want to tell you about maybe the most exciting sponsor we've had in a long time on the pod. It's called CapitalPad, and it is the thing that I wish existed when I started my journey of operating and investing in small businesses. So CapitalPad is a marketplace for acquisition entrepreneurs that is people who want to buy a business and need capital to list their deals and solicit capital from other people who want to invest in acquisition. deals. So if you want to back somebody buying a small business, CapitalPad is a place to do it. And if you want to buy a business and need capital, you can go on CapitalPad to be introduced to investors. So the really great thing, too, from the investor side is that CapitalPad takes care of all of the details that can get hairy with small business acquisitions. They handle standardized terms, standardized governance, standardized distributions all up front in black and white. Basically, CapitalPad professionalizes investing in small businesses.

And the returns can be really, really good. I'm so stoked that they exist. It's founded by my friend Travis, who is a phenomenal entrepreneur in his own right. So if this sounds like something that's appealing to you, if you want to buy a small business and need capital, or if you want to invest in small businesses, go check out Capitalpad.com and tell them that Acquisitions Anonymous sent you. 2023, 16 million of gross, 2024, 23 million, 2025, 34 million.

There, Justinio, there goes from 0.8 and 23 to 2 million and 24, 5.5 million in 2025. We don't know how old this business is, but I wonder if this business recreated itself. Like, if it is old, it makes me wonder if it has recreated itself into what it is today. Or I was thinking mills if these guys left a different business. and started this business with all their industry contacts and expertise in

2023 and just came out of the gate like a rocket chip. Yeah, yeah. There are so many tailwinds for this business. Like, number one, reindustrializing of America, like, the government's trying to do all this stuff. Number two, you have under Trump, like, the Department of Transportation is going hog on reducing the number of drivers, English testing, all that kind of stuff. Like, it is just, it's going to, they're going to be even more demand for what these guys have,

which is deep knowledge and a network of people that can do the specialized hauling. Like, you got to, man, that's all just really positive, like, just so much in favor of it. The big comment about this to me is like we don't usually talk about businesses that are this size or, like, in this, we talk about lower middle market and kind of more main street size businesses. This is lower middle market for sure at $5.5 million in EBITDA. But the quality difference between this and the stuff that we just scratch up on biz by sell is so different. And I mean, that's why there has been such a drive to buy businesses that are more main street because you go, I could grow it from that into maybe something like this size wise, quality wise. It seems like it's a highly optimized business. I don't think that like your traditional kind of first time business buyer or post MBA student is going to come in and just add tons of value.

And it's just like low hanging fruit everywhere. No. There's no way competing with private equity on this deal. And the broker, the, the, these are investment bankers, Peekstone. Like, they're not even going to show you the deal unless you have committed capital. You're not even going to get to look at this. Like there's just as if you're an independent person or searcher would know, funding. Like, no way. They're not even going to, they're not even going to send you the SIM.

And this, this is why it's worth it to actually talk to high quality intermediaries and not just surf bizby cell because there's this whole other tier of deals that exists. The, the bizby cell is not the whole universe at all. And this never makes it on bizby cell. No. No. Definitely not. But it, it's interesting. The one, it's hard to differentiate with intermediaries like this because they're like, well, we know, you know, the top. top 200 private equity, you know, buyers who buy tech-enabled services like this. And you're not anywhere on the list. And you'll never make it on the list. But what I would do to differentiate with those folks is be like, give me your weird deals. Like, give me the one that is really odd,

doesn't check everybody's box, like has some hair on it. Maybe it's a really small tam or has like quirky customer concentration or something weird that you just can't kind of crack the code on. like send me those think about me for weird deals and that ends up being a service to them because like if every if all their buyers are kind of the same then you've got to differentiate somehow so there is a model where somebody without committed capital could go after this and that's if you were somebody who really understood this space incredibly well um you could go to and you were going to be the operator of it, you could go to a private equity firm or somebody who's committed capital family office and say, hey, like, let's partner together on this deal. Typically, they will

take the majority of the upside, but because you source the deal, because you're bringing kind of a uniqueness in terms of your ability to operate it, you can get an equity stake in the whole thing, a cut in really well. And there's whole kinds of kind of the co-dealing stuff. Like, that's very common for PE firms to do that. It's a pretty standard model. stuff like that. So I'm not saying somebody without committed capital couldn't do this deal, but you have to have committed capital to talk to the folks. You're going to have to figure how to get committed capital before you can actually look at it. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, you can't BS these guys. Even when I was doing buy side work with committed capital,

like they are going to drill you with questions. They want to know exactly how much money do you have how much have you called how much has been deployed like they're they're going to drill you on it for sure and if you don't have committed capital like the you you go to the bottom of the pile and have got to find some way to like call yourself back in because what they're used to hearing is oh no like i have some loose like i have investors you know i have some like loosely committed capital and they're like no they want to hear we're on fund nine yeah uh we've in funds six through seven. We did deals like this. I'm an expert, you know, principal and I'm under this partner that's done this deal, this number of times. And the founder of the firm is aware of our strategic

effort here. We have a thesis. And yeah, and we're going to do some expert calls this week on this particular company. Can we sign the NDA? That's what they want to hear. Yeah. These guys also won't BS. Like if you called one of these folks at the bottom, they won't BS and they'll just straight up tell you, we're getting indications that this is going to trade for like nine, nine turns or more. So like just like are you prepared for that before we send you the NBA? Yeah, yeah. Well, they're going to look at your, you know, whatever one man capital website and there

go. Yeah. Be prepared. Can you bid nine times all cash? Yeah. But this is a, this is a good one, Mills. I mean, this is going to trade for a big number. Can you, I mean, I would be a little nervous because it says,

founder-led management team with deep domain expertise and specialized freight. If they want to bail out and go to the beach after this, I'm a little nervous. So like, if I'm private equity, I'm probably tying these guys up. You know, I'm going to make them roll equity. I'm wanting to stay on as the management team, et cetera. If you just buy this and you're a searcher, which we just discussed probably wouldn't happen, and you let these guys walk, you're suddenly a fish out of water in a quasi-complicated industry. Yeah. That runs on a lot of relationships and, you know, hey, I'm willing. to I'm willing to work with you because you've sent me good lows in the past and you're good for it and all that stuff versus hey, who are you? I don't know you. There's also, it's also, you know, reminds me of the thing that Brent B. Schoror has said a lot, which is that a lot of times small businesses

are small for a reason. And a lot of this, this is just a better business to be in that these guys are in, right? That's why, you know, that's why they've gotten bigger and they've executed really well. But some of these other businesses we look at,

no matter how well you execute, there's no way you're showing this kind of growth. and this kind of size. It's just so important what business you're in. Which is why private equity firm would love this, because it's not asset intensive. It's tech enabled. It can scale incredibly fast without costing that much money.

Yeah. And especially if it's a new platform for them, like they can just go roll up other specialty freight brokerages. Because there's got to be, for everyone that's this big, there's got to be dozens that are a third to size or a quarter of the size. Yeah, this is a good one. All right. like it. So let me point the maybe obvious thing because none of us have been in this industry.

There may be something that we're entirely blindsided on that makes this just a non-starter or a reason this person's selling. So I want to put that caveat out there. I've seen, I've seen myself be so excited about a space like this. And then like somebody calls in, they're like, well, let me tell you actually, there's this one thing happening that's totally going to screw this whole business up. And you should know about it. So one of our listeners made you that I'm willing to show that level of humility that I'm willing to show that level of humility that I'm, I know nothing about freight brokerage. But I like it. All right. If you guys like this one, we have done, how many episodes are we on? Who knows?

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