Firm: Kurt Salmon Associates Headquarters: Atlanta Billable Consultants: 500 Who knew? KSA is more than 70 years old; for the first 50 years, KSA was only a consumer products consultancy.

Interested in working at Kurt Salmon Associates? Job hoppers need not apply. Bill Pace, CEO of the Atlanta-headquartered consumer products/retail and healthcare consultancy, estimates that the average tenure of his team is nearly a decade. Retention, for him, is a top priority. “If you don’t think you want a longer term career in consulting, there may be better places,” he says. “We tend to discourage those who are kind of shopping consulting or are using consulting as a post-graduate degree.”

And while no consulting firm wants to be a revolving door of employment, Pace says the firm especially takes a hit when consultants leave because of the start-to-finish nature of the projects they take on. “Most of the work we do focuses on the product itself,” Pace explains, adding that the firm in its consumer products/retail division works with most of major retailers in the United States, such as Macy’s, and abroad, such as Aeon in Japan. The work consultants in that division do can range from how to move people faster through lines to how to position products best. “The way we are distinguished from all those other firms out there is that our primary focus is around what happens to the product. We call it ‘from concept to consumer.’”

With so much investment required of consultants in individual companies’ needs, Pace says, KSA works hard to keep consultants happy. “Because we are a vertical specialist firm, we recognize, perhaps more than other firms, that retention—recruiting, retaining and developing the best people—is even more strategic for us than it is for the firms where they tend to focus on a lot of different areas and move people around,” Pace says.

Alison Jatlow, a New York-based KSA consultant on the consumer products side, says she’s thrilled with her choice of employer—and she’s even part of the firm’s recruiting team for her alma mater, Columbia Business School. “I think the culture is a big piece that comes through in the recruiting process,” she says. “People care about each other, they trust each other, and they respect each other.” She says the firm works hard to keep the culture intact with new hires, adding that at interviews, “Being smart is 50 percent of it, but 50 percent of it is personality.”

KSA, which was founded in 1935, has around 500 billable consultants, and while the firm has been in growth mode over the past five years, the number of consultants has not been rising. “We’ve reduced our consulting staff by about 20 percent as we’ve grown the firm over that same period by about 20 percent,” Pace says, saying that some IT-related positions were eliminated or outsourced.

“Because we are a vertical specialist firm, we recognize, perhaps more than the other firms, that retention—recruiting, retention and developing the best people—is even more strategic for us.” —Bill Pace CEO, Kurt Salmon Associates

Next for KSA? Pace says the firm is looking to expand geographically, particularly in Europe and Asia. While the firm has a presence in both, there’s more to be done, Pace says, explaining that the firm has 18 offices worldwide, with three of those in India run under the name Technopak.

Pace says the firm also is looking to continue expanding its healthcare practice as well, especially as it looks for ways to be a player in the health products space.
Pace says the firm is dedicated to fostering an environment of inclusion and entrepreneurship, and that often includes charity work through organizations such as Junior Achievement and the March of Dimes. The result, he says, is a better community—and a better firm. “Everybody,” he says, “has some role in making the firm a better firm every day.”     —Jacqueline Durett