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A Military Inspired Approach To Business Teamwork

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This story appears in the February 7, 2016 issue of Forbes. Subscribe

This year Forbes is introducing its first list of 25 privately-held companies we’re calling “Small Giants.” Rather than trying to grow as big as possible as quickly as possible, they’ve focused on becoming standouts in their industries, with at least a 10-year record of strong balance sheets. They all offer appealing places to work, provide excellent service to customers and contribute to their communities. Click here for all 25 Best Small Companies.

Afterburner

Atlanta

Founder and CEO: Jim Murphy

Revenue: $8.5 million

Employees: 21 full-time, 50 contractors

Military imagery runs through everything at Afterburner, from the presentations its employees do in flight suits to the nicknames they sport: Bandit, Gunner, Thor. It's all a pretty clear indication of the small club of people the consulting firm hires. First, if you are going to face clients, you have to be former U.S. military. You also have to have been a member of an elite combat unit: Army Special Operations, Navy SEALs, fighter pilot, etc. And you have to have either an M.B.A. or a significant postmilitary career in business.

Afterburner was founded 20 years ago by Jim Murphy, a former Air Force instructor pilot, who says he's interested only in people with "the warrior ethos." The company's specialty is teaching clients how to define and execute a business strategy with a military-inspired approach to teamwork. Although the firm works primarily with large public companies, Afterburner remains small by design. Murphy says that, where large consulting firms often throw teams of people at clients, he prefers to use a "force multiplier" strategy by deploying just two to four consultants. He'd like Afterburner to be a $50 million company one day. For now he's keeping head count low, partly as a matter of strategy and partly as a matter of preserving the firm's culture.

When he does hire, the first step in the interviewing process is to take the candidate out for a fancy restaurant dinner, the kind a client CEO might host. The interviewee is escorted to the bar to swap military stories with the interviewers. While the Afterburner people are limited to two drinks, the candidate can have as many as he or she wants. At dinner the interviewers watch how the candidate behaves, which fork he or she uses. Murphy says he wants people with the business poise to sit with C-suite clients.

If the dinner goes well, the candidate is subjected to a round of interviews and then required to give two short presentations to Afterburner staff, some of whom give as many as 250 presentations to clients every year. The first presentation topic is always military, Murphy says, "like teaching an F-16 pilot how to drop a 2,000-pound bomb." The second is on business. The candidate has 20 minutes to prepare, and each presentation must be precisely three minutes long. If he or she is accepted, there's still a three-month probation period after that.

See full coverage of America's Best Small Companies here.