Josh Wilson

Josh Wilson joined ILLING as Chief Financial Officer in 2013, bringing a career built entirely in financial rigor. He started in public accounting, spending more than seven years in audit and tax at Clifton Gunderson and Baker Tilly Virchow Krause, specializing in construction, real estate, financial institutions, and employee benefit plan audits. From there he moved to Quad/Graphics as a Senior Financial Analyst, preparing supporting schedules for SEC 10-Q and 10-K filings and serving as the business-unit liaison for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, before a controller role at LF George and then ILLING.

In his 13+ years at ILLING, a 100-year-old company, Josh has helped steer the business through both rapid growth and deliberate recalibration. After a stretch of rapid growth, Josh and leadership made the deliberate decision to walk away from ILLING’s largest revenue customer, whose purchasing had become unstable while rising inbound freight costs from China put inventory exposure and margin out of balance. Josh was central to assessing that exposure and modeling the impact, and he built a global sourcing tracking tool that gave leadership visibility into profitability, shipment scheduling, and tariff and freight impacts in one place, visibility the business had not had before. He has since helped guide ILLING back to steady, sustainable footing.

He has also been part of ILLING’s physical growth: three new locations, the 2021 relocation of the second-largest location in Atlanta, and the construction of a new corporate headquarters in Richfield, WI, occupied in 2020. In 2016, only two years into his tenure, Josh led the implementation of ILLING’s company-wide ERP system, personally making the core design decisions for how it would interpret and report the company’s financials while he was still learning the business himself.

Josh grew up in Waukesha, WI and now lives in Hartland with his wife and their two children, Riley and Brody. Outside of work he spends time with family, plays golf, and travels when time allows, and he sees a lot of finance in the game: slow down, analyze, make calculated decisions, and know when to act quickly. No two shots are alike.

Walking away from the biggest customer. When ILLING’s largest revenue customer became financially unsustainable, unstable purchasing paired with rising China freight costs ILLING was absorbing, Josh was central to assessing the exposure and modeling the dollar impact of inventory and margin fade. The deliberate decision to walk away protected the business and set ILLING back on steadier, more sustainable footing.

The global sourcing tracking tool. Out of that work, Josh built a tool that put profitability, shipment scheduling, and tariff and freight impacts in one place, visibility ILLING’s leadership had never had in a single view. It turned a reactive scramble into something the business could actually see coming.

Leading the ERP implementation. In 2016, just two years in, Josh led the rollout of ILLING’s company-wide ERP system, personally making the core design decisions for how it would interpret and report the company’s financials, all while still learning the business. It remains the backbone of how ILLING reports today.

Financing the relationship, not just the invoice. Because ILLING is family-owned and not PE-backed, Josh can structure deals with unusual flexibility. When one customer hit a cash crunch during an employee-turnover bottleneck, he built a six-month payment plan spreading the past-due balance rather than halting shipments, keeping their production, and the relationship, moving.