Navigate Complexity and Harness Your Growth Potential
IFS partners with companies that leverage technology to augment the user experience and improve safety. We enact positive change with mid-market companies providing products and services to industrial and commercial market spaces.
70+
years experience
Our team has over 70 years of combined experience in business leadership and transformation.
30+
strategic advisors
We have the expertise to help our partners navigate through any business challenge.
58
countries served
With a global mindset, the IFS team has collectively served customers and facilitated operations in 58 countries.
Building Better Communities
A strong history of business and community involvement is at the heart of IFS. We partner with businesses that value their people, care about their customers, and are poised to take the next step. Developing the right culture creates the foundation of sustainability and longevity for organizations and the people around them.
Founder Respect
Starting a company and developing it into a success requires leaders with vision and commitment. IFS believes in preserving legacies. Honoring the history and foundation of our partner companies builds a community of leadership that sets IFS apart.
Firm Foundation
IFS partner businesses share the building blocks of innovative thought and a growth-minded culture. A strong foundation forms the basis of providing uncompromising products and services. And a strong foundation means if you want to scale your business faster, you can.
Mentorship
IFS is committed to leadership development. Our team provides individual mentorship by sharing intellectual capital and driving accountability. Mentorship provides leaders with strategic growth they then use to impact their organizations.
TEAMwork
Trust. Empathy. Accountability. Mission.
With trust comes the commitment to shared goals. Empathy fosters mutual respect. Accountability means driving success for both your people and customers. Your mission guides how you build your team, culture, and surrounding community.
Sustainability
Both employee wellbeing and environmental impact are intrinsic to sustainability. When you partner with IFS, you become part of a community committed to developing people-centric organizations, mindful of the environments where we do business, and dedicated to sustaining a trajectory of growth.
Family & Community
Loyalty to customers, employees, and their families defines a company. Thought leadership means being responsible to more than just profits. Corporate responsibility shows respect for the impact businesses have on communities now and down the road. Working together fosters success for everyone.
Aligned interests and partnering with a purpose. Discover IFS opportunities.
The Mindset for Transformation
Management Operation Systems
IFS works with the business leadership of partner companies to set up a management operating system (MOS) that will drive alignment and reduce redundancy. Your MOS provides a set of tools, meetings, and behaviors to guide management of both people and processes. Together we can establish a clear escalation path for your organization, resulting in enabling decision making through visual management tools. You will be able to see where attention is needed most. Critical KPIs for measuring and tracking initiatives offer a proven framework and facilitate smarter decision making. With a clear linkage to strategy, the MOS ensures relevance, accountability, and consistency, while simultaneously reducing waste. Including the correct stakeholders in the process maximizes engagement and accelerates decision making. Drive cross functional alignment top to bottom and across your entire organization.
Entrepreneurial Thinking Matched With Analytics
Leverage data to make business decisions while maintaining an entrepreneurial spirit and the ability to take strategic risks. With our leadership team’s guidance and expert insights, avoid the churn caused by too much information or the wrong information. We gather the right data and analytics you need to make business decisions. Our data-driven operational observations will help you better understand your market landscape and your capabilities to scale. Through collaborating on how your organization can invest and reallocate funding, IFS can help you better serve your customers.
Realize the Potential of An Aligned Team
Everyone across your organization should be aligned to your business strategies. Through common goals and objectives, you can maintain a strong focus on company culture. IFS works with you and your leadership team to establish core initiatives and ensure how they will translate into success is clearly understood. An emphasis on select critical priorities and metrics will maintain focus on important initiatives as well as measure progress. The MOS offers additional alignment for escalations, decision making, and implementing any required modifications to stay on track.
Organization With Ownership Culture
IFS looks to partner with organizations where people take ownership and initiative to deliver results, regardless of the type and size of the task at hand. Our team works with your business leadership to build a culture where employees are empowered and enabled to take ownership of their assignments and drive execution. A clear scope, authority levels, timelines, and an escalation path are components of building accountability and need to be articulated from the top down. IFS leadership creates a balance of accountability and empowerment to support execution and speed up decision making within your business. We will work with you on coaching and recognition that will reinforce the right behaviors across your organization.
Enhanced Strategic Marketing
Building on Your Vision
Distinguish your organization from the competition. IFS works with you and your leadership to hone your existing organizational vision, expand your business strategies and then instill your strategic vision into all processes and levels. Driving alignment results in improved financial outcomes and market share gains. Our experienced leadership team and skilled advisors provide actionable advice to develop growth cultures and augment infrastructure in order to translate each company’s distinct commercial path into growth, profitability, and sustainability.
Evolving Products and Services
IFS champions a collaborative approach to expanding an organization’s product portfolio to encourage success both today and in the future. Products and services constantly face the evolving business needs of lifecycles, profitability, demand planning, plus the challenge of developing new offerings. The IFS team has the experience and tools to develop your organization’s competencies and keep up with the pace of growth. We provide clarity on pricing best practices in order to maximize volume and margin expansion while reducing cost to serve.
Right Pricing
Understanding how to best leverage pricing of products and services improves margins and revenues. The IFS leadership team has a proven track record of effectively and appropriately implementing customer segmentation to improve market competitiveness and create enterprise value. Increased insight into cost to serve and implementation of transactional pricing initiatives are some of the ways to better position organizations to move forward. Working together, we will develop a customized roadmap for maximizing pricing opportunities to support continued revenue growth and margin expansion.
Strengthening Brands
A strong identity distinguishes an organization in a crowded marketplace. Clearly articulating your overall vision and business strategies depends on execution and discipline. IFS highlights solutions and provides actionable tactics that can build your profile and deepen understanding of your competitive landscape. Whether your company is representing either a house of brands or a branded house strategy, you need a corporate image backed by branding guidelines. Our team offers detailed guidance on instilling your brand into your processes, products, and services to build your brand equity.
Unlocking Potential
Seamless Order-to-Cash
The IFS team plays a vital role in helping organizations unlock potential in the order processing system. Lean and continuous improvement principles streamline the order-to-cash process. Organizations can reduce waste and improve cycle times by assessing how to best add value and reduce non-value added processes. Together we will map out your current state and develop executable plans to reach your objectives. With robust processes aimed at promoting consistency and alignment across your business, you can effectively meet your customers’ needs.
Optimizing Cash Flow
Managing working capital enables businesses to continue operations and manage upcoming expenses. IFS offers support with implementing inventory management programs, focusing on inventory turns and efficiently managing inventory value levels. An effective inventory management program relies on robust processes to manage slow moving, inactive and obsolete inventory in addition to inventory classification. Leveraging relationships and purchasing power to negotiate payable terms while constantly focusing on reducing receivables are additional components IFS can help your organization with to manage your working capital efficiently.
Delivering Value to Customers
Delivering a world class end-to-end user experience consistently is critical for driving customer stickiness and increasing market share. By understanding the customer journey and every touch point along the way, together we can uncover ways your organization can be easier to do business with. By adding value to the customer at initial contact, order processing, delivery, installation through to warranty and support, IFS can support you in honing your customer-centric organization. Whether face-to-face, via phone or digitally, the customer should receive a consistent and seamless experience.
Objective Insights and Financial Acumen
Tap into the depth of knowledge the IFS leadership team can offer on financial management. Our focus on your finances can create opportunities for improved visibility into trends and enable more informed, relevant decision making. Working together, we can ensure rigor in all facets of your cash flow in order to create liquidity while still maximizing investment returns. IFS can help optimize your working capital and capital expense needs through improving your order to cash process. Our team also facilitates the development and improvement of operating systems to reduce cycle time.
Designing Organizational Success
A View of the Bigger Picture
When you foster alignment to your business strategy, you uncover ways to expand your product and service offerings as well as how to improve customer service. The IFS team will work with you to explore your overall strategy. Next, together we will identify ways to facilitate innovation through enabling people from different parts of the organization to solve problems together. Our leadership development provides career opportunities for your top talent to flourish. Getting the right people in the right roles within an ideal structure for your business maximizes your ability to grow your organization the way you want.
Investing in People
Building a “people first” organization drives everything we do. IFS has experience with the proven path to success through creating organizations where leaders spend time cultivating relationships with employees. An organization focused on creating and maintaining a culture of caring, where every employee at every level is important, demonstrates authentic commitment. Our team can help your organization implement or improve a formal performance review processes and create professional development plans specific to each individual employee and manager.
Developing Leadership Excellence
Keeping sustainability and equitability at the heart of a business requires a broad range of leadership skills and attributes. The IFS team works to develop an understanding of the needs of each partner business. We then leverage internal and external networks to identify and recruit the right leaders. Key to IFS and our organizational design is to create an environment where leaders are encouraged to find ever-improving paths to success by embracing continuous learning. Benefit from exchanging knowledge and sharing best practices with the IFS partner community. Plus, our leadership team offers every leader coaching and mentoring as outlined in their individual professional development plans.
Building Bench Strength
Succession planning and ensuring a clear career path is critical to attracting and retaining top talent. IFS is dedicated to developing a people-focused strategy that includes a professional development plan for each leader. Our team will collaborate with you to identify critical roles in your organization and find potential candidates to backfill, should the need arise. The IFS leadership team is committed to sharing their vast experience, insights, and wisdom through individualized leadership development, on-the-job experience, progressive assignments, and one-on-one mentoring.
Delivering More to Customers
The Path to Improving Sales Coverage
Sales is often one of the largest investments for many companies. IFS works on your organization’s specific challenges in sales deployment to maximize the return on investment. Understand the opportunity landscape for your sales team through our in-depth analytics and the differentiated approach they present on factors like geography, industries, and customer density. Our team’s perspectives on the complexity of product and service offerings, book of business, length of the sales cycle, and the customer decision making process can better position companies to drive revenue growth. IFS helps evaluate where to leverage regional sellers, key account managers and business development teams. Our expertise in identifying the most effective combination of sales coverage strategies will provide the solution to transforming your approach to sales.
Harnessing the Power of Sales
Improving the rate at which sellers generate revenue is continually a major concern for businesses. Organizations look to maximize sales while reducing costs, and cycle times. Our expertise developing value-added processes will eliminate redundancies and create efficiencies for your organization. Managing your opportunity pipeline effectively, reducing reporting, and maximizing selling time in the face of administrative demands improves your organization’s productivity. The IFS leadership team will foster sustainable growth by working with you to define your goals, identify the KPIs most important to measuring your organization and then driving accountability.
Explore new routes to market
Understanding customer needs and creating authentic partnerships promote stickiness and retention. Reach even more customers through carefully selecting the right distribution partner. By leveraging distribution networks, your organization can gain market penetration, manage costs effectively, and extend selling capacity. The IFS team and our network of advisors will support you in aligning with your customers and finding the right fit for broadening your distribution. After we select the distribution network that offers the right opportunities for your business, your leadership team will adjust processes to streamline operations. Together we will identifying KPIs and growth based incentives to ensure you maximize key accounts and channel partners.
Leaning Into Demand Generation
Informed business decisions come out of what your analytics reveal. The IFS leadership team offers support in developing effective lead generation and conversion programs. Our data-driven operational insights can ensure your messaging is reaching target segments. A multi-point approach of integrating your website analytics, digital tools, and traditional methodology on how to increase traffic as well as generate and capture leads will result in winnable opportunities. IFS can help guide implementation of your demand generation approach, work with your sales team, and provide insights on your online ecommerce platforms to maximize your return on investment.