Accounting and Consulting
Guidance consultant
How to stay true to your principles
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Philadelphia | July 2008
Page 1 of 2
Lou Polisano
President and CEO, ISA Consulting Inc.
Lou Polisano says that the
peaks his company reaches may not be very high, but during down times, the
valleys are very shallow. That’s
because the president and
CEO of ISA Consulting Inc.
stresses consistency in his
company.
“To use a baseball analogy
that we throw around here,
we say every year we are
going to bat .300,” he says.
“We may not go to the All-Star game, but we’re certainly
not going to sit on the pine.
We are going to be playing,
and we’re going to be a contending team for the playoffs
year after year after year.”
Polisano especially wants
consistency in the guiding
principles of the company,
which posted approximately
$24 million in 2007 revenue.
Smart Business spoke with
Polisano about how expressing your guiding principles
out loud at every possible
opportunity can help move
your company forward.
Q. How do make sure you
aren’t losing sight of your
guiding principles?
Just recently, we just started to embark on some leadership stuff. I brought somebody in from the outside in
the contract capacity, and
we’re going off-site and having a lot of meetings with the
management team, and we
more clearly defined who we
are as a company.
And we actually say the
words. We say the words, ‘We
are a group of hardworking
overachievers who do the right
thing by our company, our
clients and our co-workers.’
So, we not only defined it,
but we constantly say it. We
say it in the interviews we
conduct, we say it in company meetings, we say it in ...
training sessions, in review
sessions with individual consultants.
I think in our world, if you
don’t stay consistent and
continue to do the right
thing, this is a very tight
employment market, and you
get punched in the nose in
the form of turnover if you
deviate from your guiding
principles. I do value
our employees tremendously, and we definitely do all that we
can to help them meet
their learning and
career requirements.
