The IDEX Story
Who We Are
IDEX is a different kind of company.
Because we are made up by decentralized businesses, IDEX (NYSE: IEX) is a company you may not yet be familiar with that has undoubtedly touched your life in some way. In fact, we make thousands of products that are mission critical components in everyday life.
- If your doctor ordered a DNA test to predict your risk of disease or determine a course of treatment, the lab may have used equipment containing components made by IDEX Health & Science team.
- If you enjoy chocolate, it quite possibly passed through a Viking® internal gear pump at the candy factory.
- And if you were ever in a car accident, emergency workers may have used the Hurst Jaws of Life® rescue tool to save your life.
With over 8,800 employees and manufacturing operations in more than 20 countries, IDEX is a high-performing, global enterprise committed to making trusted solutions that improve lives.
We are a large and growing company. Founded in 1988 with three small, entrepreneurial manufacturing companies, our first year sales were just $209 million. We’re proud to say that we now call more than 50 diverse businesses around the world part of the IDEX family. By growing our existing businesses and acquiring new ones, we now have total company sales of more than $3.1 billion.
While we were founded as IDEX 30 years ago, our story began more than a century ago at the feet of the founders who started many of the businesses that make up IDEX today. Being nimble, entrepreneurial, and customer-focused are the principles we were founded on then and continue to be our core strengths today.
Serving our customers is at the heart of what we do and is our number one priority. Our diverse family of businesses is innovative and inquisitive in its quest to solve our customers’ challenging applied technology problems. These businesses operate with a high degree of autonomy, yet we are all united and strengthened by a solid, stable foundation made up of our values, vision, and culture.
Unlike many publicly traded companies who focus on financials above all else, at IDEX, we focus equally on our customers, our employees, and our shareholders. We know that each of these key stakeholders is intrinsically linked and over-serving one at the expense of the others is not the way to win over the long-term.
We win because we focus on what matters — internally this is something we call embracing the principles of 8020. We know that great teams and talent are the keys to our success. We also know that we win when these talented teams are fanatically focused on solving our customers’ problems.
This concept — great teams who embrace 8020 while focused on serving our customers — is what we refer to as The IDEX Difference.
We care about the “how” as much as about the “what” as we lead and run our businesses. We are relentlessly committed to fostering a culture of integrity and performance across our operations, and are firmly rooted in our values of trust, team, and excellence.
Our Challenge
At IDEX, we know that our past —and the founders that built the companies who make up IDEX today — shapes our future.
As we grow, our challenge is to retain the speed, scrappiness, and entrepreneurial spirit of the small independent companies that form our roots, while leveraging the strength, scale, and global breadth of our multi-billion dollar enterprise to best serve our customers.
To do this, we have made a conscious and deliberate choice to turn right where most companies turn left.
At our size and scale, we could choose to go the traditional route, centralize our operations, and create a matrixed organization. But IDEX is a different kind of company. We believe this traditional route slows decision making and hinders performance. Our decentralized structure sets us apart and gives us the speed, autonomy, and flexibility to be the market leader in the niche markets we serve.
Our Opportunity
We win for our employees, our customers, and our shareholders by marrying the best of yesterday— the deep heritage, knowledge, and problem-solving expertise of our founding entrepreneurs— with the relentless focus, cultural, and value anchors that define our ways of working today. Our five-year total shareholder return (2016-2020) is more than 170 percent, putting us well above our peers.
Our Journey
We are a highly autonomous, inquisitive company with a culture where our businesses are empowered to design and build products and solutions that solve their customers’ most challenging problems. We intend to keep it that way. From leak detection within water infrastructure to enabling the push toward personalized medicine, IDEX is a leader in creating enabling technology.
We are the leader in many niche markets. We are committed, together with our employees, customers and shareholders, to making trusted solutions that improve lives.
Instead of operating with a traditional hierarchy where all actions and energies point upward to the CEO at the top, IDEX has turned this style of leadership and approach upside down. Our servant leadership mindset ensures that we put our customers, and the employees who serve them, as the central focus of everything we do. Across all of our businesses around the globe, our leaders are pulling their key team members together every single day and asking one simple question, “What do we need to do to win for our customers today?”
Our Destination
We are proud of the products we have built, and we hope that those we create in the future will help to improve even more lives. We are, and always will be, a company that is focused on what’s most important and puts the customer at the center of what we do. While we have phenomenal, highly engineered products, it is our teams and talent who fuel the IDEX difference.