Pros
Small consulting firm means you wear many hats so there are chances galore for newly minted entrants into the consulting field.
Cons
This firm is owned and managed by venture investors who's only mission in life is to cash-out and are doing whatever they believe is necessary to increase investor equity (they have spent about $350m-$400m buying the pieces that form ISG and have a current market cap of $135m as if December 2015). Their strategic direction is creating annuity recurring revenue streams - consulting revenue is considered too perishable to be sustainable and therefore less attractive to investors. Senior management has no prior experience running a consulting firm and have surrounded themselves with like-minded directors. Why is this important? Because if you're entering as a consultant (at any level), know you are a step-child. Also, ISGs stature in IT benchmarking (Compass) is almost zero these days - when ISG added Compass to the TPI portfolio many years ago, suppliers stopped agreeing to naming Compass as a benchmarker in outsourced contracts which turned off the data flow to Compass. Without market data, a benchmarker suffocates. For consulting, ISG management is single focused: how to increase billable rates while reducing their people-costs (my total compensation over 5-years declined 20% even with above average reviews) and seek to off-shore all work. This contrasts with a well managed consulting firm who seeks to increase client value and consultant productivity. ISGs CEO has publicly stated he considers consultants "fungible" and he's been quoted in interviews that he's proud ISG budgets no money for R&D because he can get employees to do it for free in their spare time. Nice guy I'm sure. Interview tip: ask about bonus payout history. For the 5-years I was there, bonuses were never fully funded (not that I didn't receive a bonus - I'm saying no one received their bonus except the C-suite). A couple years,!bonus was zero. Couple years, bonus was around 10% funded (meaning if your bonus was supposed to be 25%, you got 10% of 25% - 2.5%). My last year with ISG, I over-achieved all metrics including tripling my quota in revenue - I received 25% of my bonus which is why I left (and why many people leave). A close look at ISGs public financial statements reveals they don't even fund bonuses at a corporate level. The core issue is ISGs management wants to payout based on EBIDTA, and they set the EBIDTA bar for bonus payout significantly higher than what they report to Wall Street investor community (ask that in an interview - what is the bonus-payout EBIDTA threshold versus what is the investor forecast EBIDTA - in other words, C-Sute gets compensated for performance at a much lower performance threshold than you, as an employee, will be)
