One on One with ACME's Scott Demorest

After pouring through more than 13,000 detailed responses to this year's Best Firms to Work For survey, it's easy to over complicate strategies for retaining talent. The best solutions are often the simplest, or so would argue Scott Demorest, co-founder of ACME Business Consulting. His firm has experienced tremendous growth throughout its almost 10-year history. But that's not how he measures success. To learn more, Consulting's One on One recently sat down with Demorest to better understand his firm's approach.

Consulting: How do you measure your firm's success?

Demorest: Unlike most firms, we don't measure ourselves based on how many people work at ACME. A lot of our competitors gauge success on how many people they added this year and their revenue per person. We don't. We look at two things: client satisfaction and employee satisfaction. We believe if you have happy clients and have staff that love what they do because they're working on important projects, then the rest will take care of itself. We're here to build something that our clients and employees love. That's a different construct than most of our competitors. They're preoccupied with driving headcount and revenue or worried about their exit strategy. We believe that if you focus on clients and your people, good things will happen.