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I told you the story of Pick Your Part — how it started in a California yard back in 1964, how LKQ bought it in 2008, and how it just got sold again in 2025.

But here's the thing. I kept thinking: who exactly was behind LKQ? I mean, this wasn't some random corporation that just happened to buy Pick Your Part. There was a guy. A real person with a vision. And once I started digging into his story, I realized this is where the whole thing gets interesting.

The Accountant Who Saw Something Bigger

Donald F. Flynn was born in 1939. Trained as an accountant. Nothing flashy, right?

But here's what I love about his story. In 1972, he joined a company called Waste Management. And he spent about fifteen years there, climbing all the way to CFO, senior vice president, and director. And what did he learn? He learned that you could take a fragmented, messy industry full of small players operating in their own little corners and you could consolidate it. Bring them together. Apply systems and standards. And suddenly, you've got something massive.

He did it with trash.

Then he did it with movies.

The Blockbuster Detour

In 1987, Flynn and two other ex-Waste Management executives took control of Blockbuster. And get this—they grew it from about nineteen stores to almost four thousand.

Then in 1994, they sold it to Viacom for $7.6 billion in stock.

That's the kind of scale Flynn was thinking about. He wasn't a small-time guy. He saw industries that were ripe for consolidation, and he went after them.

LKQ Is Born

So, on February 13, 1998, Flynn founded LKQ Corporation in Chicago.

And the name? It stands for “Like-Kind and Quality.” That's an industry term for comparable, quality-graded parts. Even the name told you what he was trying to do—bring consistency to a business that had never really had it.

His thesis was simple: do for auto salvage what he'd done for trash. Aggregate the little guys. Build scale. Drive efficiency through centralization and standardized processes.

His first deal: Triplett Automotive Recycling in Akron, Ohio. That was the seed. And then he just kept going.

The Roll-Up Machine

From 1998 onward, Flynn and his team started acquiring regional recyclers and aftermarket distributors, one after another. They integrated systems, expanded product lines—recycled OEM parts, aftermarket stuff, refurbished components—and started selling to collision shops, insurers, and retail customers.

By the time Flynn died in 2011, LKQ was already a powerhouse.

The Pick Your Part Connection

And that brings me back to the story I told you before.

LKQ entered the self-service salvage market in 2004. But the real game-changer came in 2008, when they acquired Pick-Your-Part Auto Wrecking, the California multi-location recycler that had been operating since 1964.

That acquisition gave LKQ an established West Coast footprint and a trusted brand name. And over the next decade and a half, they scaled it into a national network of about 61–63 locations across seventeen states.

Flynn didn't live to see all of it. He passed away in October 2011 at age seventy-two. But the machine he built kept going through Joseph Holsten and other leaders, through aggressive M&A, through international expansion into Europe, through acquisitions like Euro Car Parts, Sator, Keystone, Rhiag, Stahlgruber, and most recently Uni-Select in Canada.

What It All Means

So here's what I realized when I pieced this together.

The Pick Your Part story isn't just about a salvage yard chain. It's about how industries change. It's about how a guy who started as an accountant looked at trash, then movies, then car parts, and saw patterns that other people didn't see.

And in a weird way, it's also a story about continuity. Because even though Flynn built the company that bought Pick Your Part, even though LKQ grew it for seventeen years and then sold it off, the name is still there. The yards are still there. And when I walk into a Pick Your Part location today, I'm standing in a place that stretches all the way back to 1964—but also passes through the vision of a guy from Chicago who thought you could do for car parts what he'd done for everything else.

Pretty wild, right?