Impact Ventures International has its sights set on global expansion, targeting mid-sized businesses and high-net-worth entrepreneurs across Europe, Latin America, and emerging markets as its next phase of growth. For most consulting firms, that kind of announcement would mark the beginning of a story. For Joshua Kirshbaum, it is closer to the middle of one that started long before IVI existed.
Kirshbaum spent 15 years working across humanitarian aid, nonprofit leadership, media production, and private sector consulting before co-founding IVI with Kelly Grandmaison. The firm, in his own framing, is the point where every previous chapter converged. Understanding what IVI does and why it operates the way it does requires understanding the career that preceded it.
The Years Before The Business
Kirshbaum was in his early twenties when he became the youngest Executive Director in the history of Nonviolence International, a Washington-based organization working on disarmament and social justice initiatives across multiple regions. The role placed him at the center of international negotiations and program development at an age when most of his peers were still in entry-level positions. It also gave him his first serious education in what organizational failure actually looks like up close.
From there, his career moved through the United Nations, where he oversaw more than 100 civil society contracts and led diplomatic initiatives on economic development and conflict resolution. He raised over $20 million for humanitarian causes during that period, developed 33 educational programs that reached communities across the globe, and chaired the LifeLong Learning Foundation, which built 30 community centers throughout Latin America. The scale of that work required him to build systems that functioned without constant oversight, programs that trained local leaders, distributed resources, and sustained themselves after international staff moved on.
That operational discipline translated directly when he moved into the private sector. By 22, Kirshbaum had already built and exited two multimillion-dollar companies. He went on to consult for FIFA, Coca-Cola, and TEDx, while simultaneously producing over 500 films, media campaigns, and large-scale marketing initiatives for businesses and social movements.
“Every environment I worked in, whether it was a UN field program or a Fortune 500 brand, came down to the same question,” Kirshbaum shares. “Is this thing built to run without me? Because if it isn’t, it’s fragile.”
The Pattern He Kept Seeing
Across all of those engagements, one problem surfaced repeatedly. Business owners were building companies that depended entirely on their own daily involvement. The businesses grew, but they never became independent of the person who started them. When life intervened, and it always eventually did, those owners found themselves either unable to step away or forced into rushed exits at prices well below what their companies were actually worth.
Kirshbaum watched that dynamic play out in small businesses, in family offices, and in organizations generating millions in annual revenue. The size of the company changed. The underlying structural problem did not.
“Eighty percent of business exits are forced,” Kirshbaum adds. “Death, divorce, disability, distress, disagreement. Most owners never get to choose their moment. We built IVI specifically to change that ratio for the people we work with.”
The firm he and Grandmaison built is a direct response to that pattern. IVI’s three core programs, CEPA, VentureMax360, and the IVSS Digital Office, each address a different dimension of owner dependency, from financial structuring and exit planning to operational automation and CRM infrastructure. Together, they are designed to produce businesses that run, grow, and transition successfully regardless of what happens to the person who built them.
Building Something That Outlasts The Builder
The same principle that Kirshbaum applied to UN field programs and humanitarian initiatives now runs through everything IVI produces for its clients. A business, like any system designed to serve people over time, has to be built to outlast the individual at its center. That conviction shapes not only IVI’s client work but its own organizational commitments.
The firm has pledged to donate over $1 million annually to nonprofit causes within three years of its founding. Its foundation has already housed nearly 60 people displaced by the Los Angeles wildfires, supported more than two dozen nonprofits in building sustainable operating models, and helped over 40,000 individuals access resources to launch their own businesses.
“The measure of whether we’ve done this right isn’t the revenue number at the end of the year,” Kirshbaum mentions. “It’s whether the businesses we touched are still standing and still growing after we’ve stepped back.”
IVI currently operates across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Latin America, with expansion into additional international markets underway. The firm’s CEPA and VM360 programs are available to business owners at various stages of growth, from companies preparing for a first major transition to established enterprises restructuring for long-term sustainability.
