Kurt Salmon Associates

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.