The CFO behind 2025’s biggest IPO

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Though Illinois-based Medline says it's the largest private manufacturer of medical supplies in the US, outside healthcare, it’s hardly a household name.

That may have changed in December 2025, when it went public at a valuation of over $50 billion and raised $6.26 billion, making it the largest IPO of the year. Five members of Medline’s founding Mills family became billionaires.

The IPO followed on a leveraged buyout in 2021, in which Medline, then family-owned, was acquired by PE funds Blackstone, Carlyle, and Hellman & Friedman for about $34 billion.

CFO Mike Drazin, who joined Medline from Fortune 300 company Illinois Tool Works in 2018, helped the company navigate the entire journey. He spoke with CFO Brew about what he learned during the process and what CFOs should focus on when preparing to go public.

The power of narrative. Leadership recognized that the company was ready to go public about two years before the IPO, Drazin said. The IPO process took around 18 months, longer than anticipated, due in part to factors like tariffs and the government shutdown, he said. But having a long runway turned out to be a positive thing, Drazin said, noting, “We needed to spend time with investors, spend time internally preparing the organization to be public company-ready.”

Getting Medline’s story across to investors was perhaps the most challenging aspect of the IPO process, Drazin said. “We were not a very high profile company. I think in many cases people didn’t know who we were, and definitely the investor community did not know who we were.”

Medline offers a vast array of some 335,000 products ranging from wheelchairs and examination tables to gauze, gloves, catheters, and even the signature blue-and-pink striped blankets familiar to the parents of newborns. About half of those products are Medline-branded, and the company manufactures about a third of them itself. It contracts the rest of the manufacturing to a network of about 600 suppliers, Drazin said. The other half are external brands that it distributes.

“Our model is very simply to provide the lowest-cost product in the industry,” Drazin said, something attractive to healthcare organizations facing increasingly strapped budgets. It’s able to offer cost savings through a combination of scale and supply chain flexibility.

Drazin and other team members met with investors multiple times leading up to the IPO, which, he said, “was really critical to helping them understand we were not just a distributor. We are a manufacturer…The combination of those two is our unique business model.”

Drazin advises CFOs planning potential public entries to be clear on their company’s narrative and to keep it consistent. “We made a key decision early on in the journey to not try to tell a different story than who we were,” he said. “We want to tell the same story to our customers as we tell to our employees as we tell to our investors.”

To that point, he recommends that CFOs in companies planning an IPO “hire a really great investor relations person as early as possible.” Having the right person in that role, he said, can “make the interaction with the investor so much more effective, and create that trust and credibility.”

Supply chain versatility. Having so many suppliers allows Medline to shift production around when price shocks like tariffs occur. (Medline incurred a $290 million tariff hit in 2025, and expects that to increase to $490 million this year, Drazin said during the Q4 earnings call in February.)

“It’s really about, number one, supplier diversification, finding the lowest-cost producer, wherever that might be in the world,” Drazin said. Strategies like supply chain optimization and exemptions allowed the company to absorb “the vast majority of the tariff burden,” he said. When the company did need to raise prices in August 2025, its scale allowed it to offer customers price breaks in the form of prime vendor agreements.

Despite all the change Medline has experienced, some things have remained constant, Drazin said. One is the business’s focus on the long term. The company only gives annual guidance, and not quarterly. “Why? We don’t run the business for the quarters,” Drazin said. “We run the business for the year and many years to come.”