Built by operators. Built to scale.
ITM Partners helps lower-middle-market industrial businesses build the scalable operating infrastructure required to unlock the next phase of accelerated growth.
The businesses we work with were built by strong operators, differentiated products, and years of disciplined execution. But the next phase of growth demands a different level of infrastructure, visibility, and execution speed. Modern value creation plans require accelerated growth, margin expansion, acquisitions, integrations, and faster decision-making cycles - all within a compressed timeline. Without a scalable operating infrastructure, growth can actually create friction and execution begins to slow. Using our framework of Value Creation Fundamentals, ITM Partners helps businesses build the operational foundation required to scale with confidence and deliver on the investment thesis.
Built side by side with your team - we capture what your best people know, install the rigor that drives daily performance, and deploy technology that creates real leverage.
Yours to keep when we step back - knowledge the company owns, decisions made on data the team trusts, and technology that scales execution without adding headcount.
Three focus areas that turn friction into momentum.
The expertise your best people carry, captured and built into how the business runs. Any qualified operator can execute to standard, the knowledge stays a company asset, and your experts get back to leading instead of being the only ones who can.
A monthly operating scorecard leadership runs the business on, fed by the daily management and processes beneath it. One trusted instrument the whole team reads the same way: clear to management, credible to sponsors, defensible in diligence.
The technology and AI wins that drive those numbers once you can see them clearly. A faster financial close, automated order entry, market intelligence: each tied to a real bottleneck, each with a case behind it.
ITM Partners compresses the timeline between where a great business operates today and where it can execute during rapid growth, directly impacting IRR, MOIC, EBITDA, and valuation across every context: post-close growth, pending transaction, or a founder building for the next stage.
We don't diagnose, recommend, and leave. We build the roadmap, execute alongside the team, install systems, create accountability, and transfer capability. The foundation you've built is the asset we build on. Every engagement is designed to strengthen it, not replace it.
Practical answers on scalable operating infrastructure, key person risk, operational excellence, and technology-enabled execution for lower-middle-market industrial businesses transitioning from founder-owned to private equity-backed growth.
The business may have a strong investment thesis, a capable management team, differentiated products, and real market opportunity. But after the first institutional investment, the pace and expectations change quickly. The company may now be expected to accelerate organic growth, improve margins, pursue acquisitions, integrate new capabilities, upgrade reporting, professionalize systems, and make faster decisions inside a compressed hold period. That is where friction appears. The issue is rarely effort or commitment. More often, the business is still operating on infrastructure built for founder-led, incremental growth. Critical knowledge sits with a few people. Data is delayed or debated. Management teams are pulled into firefighting. Sponsors want speed, but the operating system is not yet built for scale. ITM Partners helps turn that operational friction into momentum.
The biggest change is not just ownership. It is the required speed of execution. A founder-owned business may have grown successfully through judgment, relationships, practical experience, and informal processes. After a private equity investment, the company usually needs a different level of visibility, accountability, cadence, and operating leverage. The board needs clearer reporting. The sponsor needs confidence in the value creation plan. Management needs better tools to prioritize and execute. The business needs to make decisions faster without overloading the same few people who have always carried the organization. That transition can be difficult because the company is being asked to operate at a new level before the infrastructure has fully caught up. ITM Partners focuses on building the Value Creation Fundamentals required to support that next stage.
Value Creation Fundamentals are the operating foundations a lower-middle-market business needs to execute the investment thesis with speed and confidence. They are not a replacement for the value creation plan. They are what allow the plan to gain traction. For a newly PE-backed industrial business, these fundamentals usually fall into three areas: key person risk mitigation, operational excellence, and technology-enabled execution. Together, they improve visibility, accountability, decision-making, and operating leverage. Without these fundamentals, companies often try to build infrastructure reactively while also pursuing growth, integrations, pricing initiatives, and margin improvement. That creates distraction and slows execution. Building the fundamentals early helps the organization sharpen the axe before the hardest work begins.
Scalable operating infrastructure is the set of people, processes, systems, data, and management routines that allows a business to grow without creating unnecessary friction. In a founder-owned company, many things may have worked because experienced people knew what to do. They knew the customers, the exceptions, the vendors, the pricing logic, the production constraints, and the unwritten rules. That knowledge is valuable, but it does not always scale. Once the company becomes private equity-backed, the organization usually needs more repeatable systems. Leaders need reliable data. Teams need clearer accountability. Decisions need to move faster. Growth initiatives need to be managed without overwhelming the business. Scalable operating infrastructure gives the company the foundation to execute the investment thesis instead of constantly reacting to bottlenecks.
Execution often slows because the business is being asked to move faster than its operating infrastructure can support. The investment thesis may be right. The opportunity may be real. The management team may be working hard. But if reporting is delayed, roles are unclear, systems are manual, knowledge is concentrated, and operating routines are informal, every growth initiative becomes harder to execute. This is especially common in lower-middle-market industrial businesses after the first transition from founder ownership to institutional capital. The company is suddenly balancing board expectations, sponsor reporting, management development, operational improvement, and strategic growth at the same time. ITM Partners helps identify the friction points that slow execution and build the practical operating foundation needed to create momentum.
Key person risk becomes more visible after the first private equity investment because the business is now expected to scale beyond the informal systems that previously worked. In many founder-led companies, critical knowledge lives with the founder, a senior operator, a plant leader, a sales leader, or a small group of long-tenured employees. They understand the customer history, production workarounds, pricing exceptions, supplier issues, and operational tradeoffs that keep the business moving. That works until the business needs to move faster, integrate acquisitions, expand the team, or make decisions without waiting on the same few people. Key person risk then becomes a constraint on value creation. ITM Partners helps convert tribal knowledge into repeatable processes, clearer roles, better reporting, management routines, and technology-enabled tools the broader organization can use.
Data visibility matters because faster execution depends on trust. When sponsors, boards, and management teams are working from different versions of the truth, momentum slows. Too much time is spent debating the accuracy of the data instead of deciding what to do next. In a newly PE-backed industrial business, leadership needs timely visibility into the drivers of performance: sales pipeline, pricing, margin, capacity, inventory, working capital, labor, quality, customer concentration, and operational bottlenecks. Historical reporting is not enough if the value creation plan requires faster action. ITM Partners helps companies move from rearview-mirror reporting to more actionable operating intelligence. The goal is not just better dashboards. The goal is faster, more confident decision-making.
Operational excellence means building the discipline and repeatable execution required to support accelerated growth. For a lower-middle-market industrial business, that can include production flow, quality, scheduling, pricing discipline, quoting accuracy, supplier performance, inventory management, sales handoffs, management cadence, and accountability. It is not just a manufacturing initiative, and it is not just cost reduction. After a private equity investment, operational excellence should connect directly to the investment thesis. If the plan depends on margin improvement, organic growth, acquisitions, or faster integration, the business needs operating discipline that can support those goals. ITM Partners focuses on practical operational excellence that reduces friction, improves visibility, and helps management teams execute with more speed and confidence.
Technology-enabled execution helps when it gives the business more operating leverage. Many lower-middle-market companies do not need a massive technology transformation on day one. They need practical tools that make the business easier to manage. That can include reporting automation, KPI dashboards, workflow tracking, knowledge management, quoting support, customer and margin analysis, integration planning, and AI-enabled process improvement. The goal is not to add complexity. The goal is to reduce manual work, improve visibility, capture institutional knowledge, and help teams make better decisions faster. ITM Partners uses technology as a value creation tool. It works best when it is tied to specific execution bottlenecks inside the business.
AI fits best where it improves execution, speed, and decision intelligence. In newly PE-backed industrial businesses, teams often spend too much time collecting information, cleaning data, preparing reports, searching for knowledge, or repeating manual tasks. AI can help reduce that friction when it is applied to specific operating problems. Useful applications can include document automation, reporting support, customer analysis, margin insights, workflow prioritization, knowledge capture, and faster access to operating context. The point is not to chase AI as a trend. The point is to help management teams move faster with better information. ITM Partners approaches AI as part of technology-enabled execution: practical, focused, and tied to the value creation plan.
Early. Ideally, right after the first institutional investment or during the initial value creation planning process. If the business waits until the value creation plan is already under pressure, the team may be forced to build infrastructure reactively while also trying to deliver growth, margin improvement, acquisitions, and integrations. That creates distraction and pulls leadership into operational firefighting. Value Creation Fundamentals are about sharpening the axe before the hardest work begins. By building scalable operating infrastructure early, the business can improve visibility, reduce key person risk, strengthen accountability, and create the operating leverage needed to execute faster. For sponsors and management teams, this foundation can be the difference between a compelling thesis and a business that can actually execute it.
ITM Partners is best suited for lower-middle-market industrial, manufacturing, and business services companies that have recently transitioned from founder-owned to private equity-backed ownership for the first time. These companies often have strong products, customer relationships, technical capabilities, and a compelling investment thesis. But they may also have concentrated knowledge, limited data visibility, informal processes, manual systems, or operating bottlenecks that make accelerated growth harder than expected. ITM is especially relevant when sponsors and management teams need to create more execution speed, visibility, accountability, and operating leverage early in the hold period. In simple terms: ITM helps newly PE-backed companies build the operating infrastructure required to turn the value creation plan into measurable momentum.
Recently transitioned from founder-owned to private equity-backed growth? ITM Partners helps lower-middle-market industrial businesses build the Value Creation Fundamentals required to execute the investment thesis with speed and confidence.
Contact ITM PartnersWhere operational friction becomes momentum.
Whether you’re a sponsor working to unlock the investment thesis and accelerate the value-creation plan, or a founder preparing for your first transaction, the next phase of growth demands a different level of infrastructure, visibility, and execution speed than the one that got you here.
Three results that compound across the hold period.
We start by understanding how the work actually gets done, then combine hands-on experience with AI-driven analysis to capture it in days, not months. The expertise stays in the business, and the people who built it scale it.
An operating scorecard the business can trust, backed by the processes, tools, training, and daily rigor that make the numbers real. Teams act on insight instead of hunting for data.
Practical, ROI-driven technology that earns its place by starting small and scaling what works. A force multiplier for the next stage of growth, not technology theater.
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Build the foundation early, and the thesis becomes executable instead of aspirational.
We start where the work is done - with the people accountable for the results. Time on the floor, combined with technology and AI, lets us capture how the business actually runs faster and more precisely than either could alone.
That's the baseline: a focused, time-boxed read that gives us a clear, shared picture of the business and the fastest path to results. It's what lets us target the three areas above with precision instead of guesswork. And it's where trust begins - the team we learn from here is the same team we build with next.
See an example baseline →The baseline tells us where to build. From there, we install the operating infrastructure for your next phase of growth - built side by side with your team and transferred so it keeps running when we're not in the room.
By the time we step back, the work is real and yours: Key person risk is identified, the plan to address it is complete, and the top exposures are already handled. The Smart Operating Scorecard framework is in place, driving target metrics off real data from the processes and tools installed with your team. And technology-accelerated growth is underway - your finance team is already running an AI-enabled monthly close.
These are wins you can measure. The roadmap shows your team how to build on them - because the best businesses never stop compounding their advantage, and yours is now positioned to do exactly that.
See an example roadmap →
Our perspective is grounded in firsthand experience. We grew up working construction, roofing, and farming: summers spent framing houses and long days on job sites and in fields. Those experiences instilled a deep respect for hard work, accountability, and the discipline required to see something through.
That perspective defines how we partner. We've stood on factory floors with lifers who have given decades to building something remarkable, people who know every quirk of every process, every customer relationship that matters, every unwritten rule that makes the place run. What they've built deserves to grow rapidly. Our job is to make sure the infrastructure is there when it does.
"We partner with founders, operators, and their investors, combining a shared work ethic with practical execution capability to build the infrastructure that turns great businesses into fast-growing ones."
We don't diagnose, recommend, and leave. We parachute in, earn trust fast, find the real leverage, and install things that work without us. The institutional knowledge already in the business is the asset we build on, not the problem we solve for.
Before we touch anything, we aim the work with the people who run the business, then bring our own process and judgment on top. Most of the time we confirm what leadership already suspected; sometimes we surface what was missed. You're getting an expert read, not a mirror.
Then we build with the team, not for it. Every system has a named owner before we start, because the work isn't done until the team owns what was built, runs it without us, and can measure that it's working.
"We say plainly what we don't do. The value-creation plan, the comp design, the M&A pipeline: that's the work of the CEO and the partners who back them. Naming the boundary is a feature, not a hedge. Our foundation is what makes their plays executable."
The organizations that realize the greatest value from technology are the ones that invested in the foundation first: trusted data, reliable reporting, and documented process infrastructure that creates the conditions for consistent, measurable results. You can't drive a number you can't see, so the foundation comes first, and it is what determines whether the technology delivers instead of becoming shelfware.
We enter through finance deliberately. A compressed close cycle, measurable, repeatable, and owned by the team, is the first trust-building win. Once that foundation is trusted, the technology and AI levers it unlocks are where the next gains come from. That's the work the foundation makes possible, mapped on the roadmap we leave behind.
"No skunk works. No pilot projects without a case study behind them. The business isn't buying technology. It's buying execution infrastructure that technology makes faster."
Some of the most valuable time in an engagement never shows up on a project plan. The twenty minutes spent listening to why a product line is built the way it is. The two-hour tool that fixes something one person has complained about for years. Those aren't distractions from the work. They're how trust gets built, and trust is what earns the next ten conversations.
The supervisor who felt heard becomes the one who makes the new daily cadence stick. The analyst we actually helped opens doors with colleagues who'd otherwise stay guarded. We're generous with attention and disciplined with days, and that combination is why what we install keeps running after we're gone.
Practical perspectives for founders, entrepreneurs, private equity firms, and operating teams navigating growth, transformation, and value creation.
We focus on the operating realities behind post-close execution: scalable infrastructure, key person risk, operational visibility, and the management cadence required to turn strategy into measurable progress.
Every engagement is built around clear milestones, hands-on execution, and sustained value creation. These case studies reflect the outcomes of ITM’s operator-led approach across businesses, functions, and time horizons.
Full case study PDFs available upon request. Click any card to view a summary and request access.
ITM brings hands-on experience across manufacturing, finance, analytics, engineering, and PE-backed execution, helping leadership teams translate the investment thesis into operating cadence, visibility, and measurable progress.
David Parfitt is an Operating Partner focused on lower middle market manufacturing and industrial businesses. He drives EBITDA expansion by pairing Lean operating discipline with AI-enabled data infrastructure and performance visibility systems. David has supported multiple buy and sell-side transactions and led value creation initiatives across operations, commercial execution, and leadership development. A former PE-backed Executive GM, he bridges operator reality with external capital rigor.
MBA, Villanova | B.S. Finance, Pennsylvania State University
Wharton, Strategic Operations | Lean Six Sigma | PMP
Thomas Keenan is an engineering and operations executive who brings the standards of large, multinational industrial organizations into lower middle-market environments. He combines deep shop-floor leadership with hands-on execution, driving direct operational improvements that translate into measurable performance gains. Thomas has supported multiple private equity-backed value creation plans and pairs engineering rigor with strong data analytics and Power BI expertise to build scalable systems, improve visibility, and accelerate sustainable EBITDA growth.
B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University
View LinkedIn ProfileEvan Lunak is a data-driven specialist who bridges the gap between raw operational data and executive decision-making. He excels in building robust financial models and modern sales infrastructure that provide clarity to portfolio leadership. With a deep focus on commercial analytics, Evan identifies growth opportunities and inefficiencies through Information Analysis and Modeling. His technical toolkit enables ITM to deploy high-fidelity visibility systems that secure durable financial performance and support rigorous project management across industrial transitions.
B.S. Information Analysis & Modeling, Pennsylvania State University
View LinkedIn ProfileWhether you're a PE sponsor evaluating an operating partner, a founder considering a transition, or an LP evaluating the opportunity; we welcome direct conversations.
