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OPINION
One firm, one bottom line
A one-profit-center approach encourages teamwork across offices and disciplines, minimizing silos and supporting sustainable, firm-wide growth.
A rchitecture and engineering firms typically operate within three key dimensions: geography (where the work is performed), services (what work is performed), and business units (to whom the work is sold).
In a field where segmenting profits by these dimensions often creates unintended silos, ISG has taken a different approach – one that has scaled with our growth, reinforced our culture, and advanced
architecture group outperforms their structural engineering team, or compare business units like education versus residential. While this data can be insightful, using it to guide compensation or decision- making can introduce risks. OUR STORY AS A ONE PROFIT CENTER FIRM. ISG has operated as a single profit center firm for more than 52 years. From a basement office to 16 locations and more than 580 employee-owners, that structure remained consistent even through rapid growth and acquisitions. When we opened our second office, we considered segmenting profits. But we decided against it. As we expanded, we realized we lacked the systems to fairly allocate company-wide overhead to each office,
Chad Surprenant
firm-wide success. PROFIT CENTERS.
A profit center is a business segment tracked for its costs, revenues, and profit. Many firms adopt multiple profit centers to determine how earnings should be distributed. Small firms rarely segment this way due to scale, but as companies grow, the temptation to analyze performance by segment becomes stronger, especially with a finance and accounting team that can slice data across any of the three dimensions.
Multi-office firms often track each location’s performance. Others assess whether their
See CHAD SURPRENANT, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER OCTOBER 20, 2025, ISSUE 1606
ELEVATE THE INDUSTRY®
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