Today we’d like to introduce you to Tim Price and Matt Littlefield.
Tim founded ICS in 2006 which offers a very simple service. It offers businesses a risk-free opportunity to hire an expert in the waste industry to help them identify inefficiencies and costs savings opportunities related to their waste removal costs.
ICS only gets paid if they save their clients’ money and when they do save their clients’ money, they simply get paid by sharing in the savings that they produce.
A couple of years after starting the company Tim realized that he needed more manpower to increase revenue so he convinced his college friend, Matt, to come on board as the company’s first full time Salesperson (for 100% commission!!!).
The move quickly paid off and ICS began to grow at a much faster pace and within 5 years, ICS was helping approximately 125 companies manage and reduce their waste costs. Today ICS has 9 employees and it has helped over 600 clients across the country manage their waste costs with an average savings of 35%! ICS was recently recognized by the Boston Business Journal as the 37th Fastest Growing Private Company in MA with a 3 year revenue growth rate of 138%.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Starting a business is easy but finding ways to constantly grow a business year in and year out is hard. There are always highs and lows but if you work hard and surround yourself with good people then good things should follow and that’s been the case for ICS.
Sometimes you end up focusing on too many things. For example, in the early days we also offered a Freight Auditing Service that helped businesses recoup refunds for late deliveries with FedEx and UPS but we realized after a couple of years that our time was best spent on providing our Waste Consulting Service so we eliminated the Freight Auditing Service and focused solely on our Waste Consulting Service. As a result, we’ve grown every year and we’re fortunate to be able to say that but we still continue to face plenty of challenges. One of the benefits of being a smaller company is that we can make adjustments very quickly and that’s been one of the keys to our success. Another key to our success has been getting referrals and introductions from our existing clients. We discovered that a referral or introduction from one of our clients was one of the most powerful sales tools in our tool box!
Please tell us about Innovative Cost Solutions.
ICS is a waste management consulting firm. We help businesses save money on their waste removal costs which includes their Trash, Recycling, Medical Waste, and Shredding services. We have a fairly heavy focus on the healthcare industry but we can work with any business that generates waste (property management, restaurants, manufacturers, hotels, car dealerships, etc.).
There is a fair amount of waste management consulting firms across the country but most of them focus on large companies but we’ll work with companies of all size. We have clients that spend a few thousand dollars per year and some that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. The other thing that we pride ourselves on is that we always continue to keep our clients’ costs as low as possible.
We’re always looking for ways to further reduce our clients’ costs and I think our clients really appreciate how much we’re looking out for their bottom line.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
There’s not too much that I would change if I had to start things over again. I would certainly target the industries that I know we can really help out. I would also try to listen to our customers and the challenges they’re facing and do everything in our power to help them overcome their challenges. In the early days, we would say no to clients that expressed challenges outside of our comfort zone but once we saw the loyalty that comes with helping them overcome their biggest challenges, it’s been one of the keys to helping us grow our business more quickly.
One other lesson we’ve learned is that you should never take your clients for granted. We view ourselves as an extension of clients’ business and even the smallest account we have has led to introductions to larger clients by going above and beyond for them.
Contact Info:
- Address: Innovative Cost Solutions, Inc.
863 Turnpike Street, Unit 224
North Andover, MA 01845 - Website: www.innovativecs.com
- Phone: 781-799-7400
- Email: info@innovativecs.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/innovativecostsolutions/
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