On September 2, 2026, Reuters reported, citing sources, that KKR had agreed to buy A1 Garage Door Service, a Phoenix-based repair company operating in about 20 states, for roughly $2 billion. KKR, A1 and Cortec, an earlier backer, declined to comment. [1] PitchBook reported, citing a person familiar with the deal, a price of about 20 times EBITDA, and, citing two people, EBITDA that grew from $27 million in 2022 to about $100 million this year through add-on acquisitions. [2] PE Hub reported that Cortec had made at least 17 of them. [3]
The shops A1 buys are mostly small, family-run companies under $10 million in revenue, which market participants say sell for 2 to 6 times EBITDA. [2] PitchBook counts 21 private-equity-backed garage door acquisitions this year, worth $4.2 billion, more than any first nine months of the decade except 2021. [2]
The claim of this piece is that the multiple is the product. A dollar of profit is worth two to six dollars in a neighbor's hands and about twenty inside a platform that owns dozens of shops, and the garage doors are the same ones. Aggregation is what is being sold.
That raises a question the reports do not answer: where does the difference come from? A buyer paying 20 times has to earn it somewhere, and there are three places. Operations, price, or the next buyer, who pays more still.
Operations is the one with a mechanism you can see from a shop floor. A company buying springs, openers and panels for 100 shops can negotiate a better price from a vendor than one buying for 10; PitchBook's account of the roll-up thesis names purchasing power and procurement savings. [2] A larger company can also stock parts in a regional warehouse, so a technician arrives with what the job needs instead of ordering it and coming back. That matters because, as one investor told PitchBook, a provider that cannot send someone quickly loses the call to the next name on the list. [2] That second point is my reasoning about how the business works; no source I read describes A1's logistics. A neighbor with ten trucks cannot match either advantage.
Price is the second place: the power that comes from owning more of a local market. I did not find a study of what garage door prices did after roll-ups, so I cannot say how much of the premium rests there.
One piece of evidence bears on the people. A study of US buyouts from 1980 to 2013 found employment at privately held targets rose 15 percent in two years, while it fell 12 percent after buyouts of public companies. [4] That is an all-industry average, not garage doors.
For an investor, the diligence question is which of the three is paying for 20 times. If the answer is mostly the next buyer, the price depends on that buyer's willingness to pay even more. If it is operations, there should be a measurable advantage over the shop down the road: lower parts cost, parts on the truck, faster dispatch.
Sources
- KKR to acquire A1 Garage Door Service for around $2 billion, sources say, Reuters, September 2, 2026
- KKR's A1 Garage deal raises the valuation bar, PitchBook, as excerpted in its Daily Pitch newsletter, October 5, 2026
- Exclusive: Cortec to launch sale process for A1 Garage Door Service, sources say, PE Hub, August 2026
- The (Heterogenous) Economic Effects of Private Equity Buyouts, Davis, Haltiwanger, Handley, Lerner, Lipsius and Miranda, NBER Working Paper 26371, revised April 2024
The multiples and EBITDA figures come from anonymous sources and were not confirmed by KKR, A1 or Cortec. The reading that the multiple is the product, the three places a premium can come from, and the point about regional warehousing are the author's interpretation; PitchBook cites purchasing power and procurement savings in general, not A1's, and no source says how much of the price rests on each. The employment finding is an all-industry average, not a measurement of garage door businesses. This is not investment advice.