Top seekers find great work in industries such as accounting and finance, education, engineering, government, manufacturing, production, technology, and more. With us today from the company is Troy Anderson, CFO, and Scott Thomas, Head of Investor Relations. The floor is yours, gentlemen.
Great. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Joe, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Welcome, everyone, to the Kelly Services presentation. Kelly is a global talent solutions provider, and I'm Troy Anderson, Kelly's Chief Financial Officer, and with me today is Scott Thomas, our Head of Investor Relations. Our President and CEO is Peter Quigley, who's been at the helm since 2019. I joined the company about eight months ago, but I've been in the workforce solutions and business services arenas for nearly the last 20 years. On behalf of our team, we really appreciate your interest. Just a quick headline before we jump into the material: through a significant transformation effort over the last several years, Kelly is a very different company today than it was five years ago, and its financial performance has improved to the best place it's been in 25 years.
Yet our current valuation multiple is substantially discounted relative to our peers. Thus, we have a significant value creation opportunity in front of us, and we look forward to talking with you today about this opportunity and our progress towards unlocking it. Scott, you want to take us through the next few slides?
Perfect. Yeah. Before we begin, just a couple of housekeeping items. I'll remind you that the comments we make here today, they may include forward-looking statements about expectations for future performance. The actual results could differ materially from those suggested by our comments, but we don't assume any obligation to update the statements that we make on this call. In addition, we'll talk about our performance on a reported and on an adjusted basis. The items on an adjusted basis are used to provide certain insights into trends in our operations. For more information on non-GAAP measures, you can go to our Investor Relations website, ir.kellyservices.com. With that, I will hand it back over to you, Troy.
Sounds good. Kelly invented the staffing industry in 1946 and has been reinventing it ever since then. We have seventy to eighty years of industry leadership. We started as just that, a temporary staffing agency focused on placing people in office and clerical roles, and now we've grown into this leading global specialty talent solution provider and driving profitable growth. We have three specialized business units, and we place over 400,000 people in positions with our clients each year. We delivered $4.3 billion in revenue in fiscal 2024, and that included organic growth of approximately half a point in a declining market. We were taking share throughout the year and continued to do that in the first quarter of this year.
We delivered an adjusted EBITDA margin of 3.3%, which was 100 basis points higher than in 2023 and more than double what it was five years ago. As I mentioned, we're taking share through organic growth, and we continue to drive growth overall through both organic and inorganic means. Next slide. We have this opportunity to create long-term value for our shareholders. We have an industry-leading brand synonymous with the staffing industry, which is a competitive advantage for us in the market. It enables us to win and retain business from some of the world's largest, most respected employers. With our strong brand and our long history, we've also been working on streamlining our operating model over the last several years, sharpening our focus on higher-value specialties, delivering that higher margin, higher growth opportunities, and really focusing on markets where we can compete and win.
In addition to driving that focus and scale in our chosen specialties, we're transforming our operations to enhance our efficiency and effectiveness. We've achieved significant structural SG&A savings and therefore EBITDA margin expansion. We have a clear line of sight into additional efficiency and margin expansion opportunities as we proceed forward. By prioritizing both growth and efficiency, we've succeeded in consistently outperforming the market, and we're committed to delivering results that meet or exceed our expectations. Finally, with this disciplined approach to capital allocation, which is also focused on long-term shareholder value creation, we have clear balance priorities underpinned by a strong balance sheet. Let's dive a little bit deeper into the business. We operate in three segments today, which is a function of an operating model that Peter first implemented when he took the helm back in 2019. Three reportable segments today.
We have a breadth of offerings across these segments, just working from left to right across the page. Enterprise Talent Management. This week is the first quarter, the first year that we reported Enterprise Talent Management in this form. Last year, late in the year, we announced that we would be combining what was our professional and industrial business and our outsourcing consulting business into one combined unit. It's really a response to a shift in our customer demand toward more integrated workforce solutions, enables a more streamlined and efficient go-to-market approach, and also allows us to more effectively deliver services to those clients in a more efficient way from an SG&A perspective.
We have a breadth of offerings here across temporary staffing, permanent placement, outcome-based solutions, generally to large enterprise customers across North America, with a focus on industrial, contact center, office, and clerical specialties in the staffing and perm placement arena. We also have talent solutions for customers on a global basis, which includes our Managed Service Provider, or MSP, offering, Recruitment P rocess Outsourcing, or RPO, and Payroll Process Outsourcing, or PPO. Those three offerings are really the legacy OCG, or Outsourcing Consulting Group, part of the business. Our customer end markets range all industries: manufacturing, financial services, technology, healthcare, energy. We're a leading provider with MSP and RPO. We're one of the largest staffing firms in office and clerical, marketing and creative, and industrial. That sums up ETM.
You can see the margin profile there, middle of the pack on a gross margin perspective and at the lower end on just the EBITDA perspective. Our Science, Engineering, Technology, and Telecom business, or SETT, provides highly specialized skills to its customers through temporary staffing, outcome-based, and permanent placement services. We're focused, just as it says, on science and clinical research, engineering solutions, technology solutions, and telecom specialties, again, predominantly in North America. Customer end markets are medical device, pharmaceuticals, insurance, chemicals, aerospace, defense. We're among the largest U.S. staffing firms in life sciences, number two there; engineering, number four; IT, number ten. We have accumulated significant scale in this business, largely through acquisitions along with legacy Kelly businesses that we started in these various spaces.
Last, we have our education vertical, which delivers high-quality education services through temp staffing and permanent placement, which is part of an executive search business that we have, a relatively small niche business. We're the number one education staffing firm and the largest provider of substitute teachers in the U.S. We serve over 8,700 schools across more than 40 states. We also supplement the substitute teaching with therapeutic services, which is a really great growth area for us, a high-margin growth opportunity. It's less than 10% of the current portfolio, but we think we have a measurable opportunity to grow it from there. Together, this is a winning combination that we have and that we think differentiates us in the market and has allowed us to outperform the market despite a rapidly evolving macroeconomic environment.
This slide really gives you a framing of where we were and where we are now, and we can talk about a little bit where we're going as well. Again, Peter launched the streamlined operating model, which we just walked through. Also, a number of initiatives to unlock capital and then redeploy that capital. When you look at the charts there, you can see a big gray slice in 2020 for international. That was our EMEA staffing business. We divested that business in the beginning of 2024. We also had assets in the Asia-Pac regions and largely through partnerships and joint ventures.
We divested those assets along with some other non-core assets, generating over $500 million of proceeds over the last several years, and then redeployed those assets along with taking on some debt, which we'll talk about our cap structure here in a moment, to really bolster our presence in a number of specialty areas, largely in the SETT arena, but also in education and inside of enterprise talent management. We also have focused on organic growth with our outcome-based solutions, think BPO, statement of work type opportunities, and also in the semiconductor and manufacturing and renewable spaces. We drove significant organizational efficiencies through SG&A reductions of more than $100 million, largely in the 2023 and 2024 timeframe. If you focus on the charts for a moment, you can see the shift in mix, again, international being divested. We had about $4.5 billion in revenue in 2020.
2024, we reported $4.3 billion for the fiscal year, and our trailing 12 months through the first quarter is about $4.5 billion. We divested $1 billion in revenue, and we've added back, excuse me, $1 billion in revenue, both organically and inorganically. We didn't just add revenue; we added profitability. The gross profit, again, that international goes away through the divestiture, and we're now generating—we generated $880 million in gross profit in 2024 compared to $830 million in 2020. About $130 million of that was international, so $700 million on a comparable basis. We expanded our gross profit margin by over 200 basis points. The combination of mixing up the specialties and acquiring higher-value businesses has led to a significant change in our financial and revenue mix profile. Next slide.
That gross profit improvement and that SG&A reduction I mentioned on the prior page translates directly down into what you see here, which is our EBITDA trend over that same time horizon, starting at just under $70 million in adjusted EBITDA and 1.5% adjusted EBITDA margin, both of those more than doubling to $143 million and 3.3% in fiscal 2024 and roughly the same on a trailing 12-month basis. You can see that step function change in the 2023-2024; we expanded 100 basis points on a year-over-year basis, which is where you saw the large impact of the SG&A reductions. We continue to focus on SG&A. We just had a significant effort there and an opportunity to really drive streamlined operations, especially with the international divestiture and some of the acquisition activity. We think, by the way, we're not done.
We have the opportunity to expand margin this year. We've guided to expanded adjusted EBITDA margins in the back half of the year and on a full-year basis. We think we have the opportunity to continue driving that margin expansion beyond 2025 through the creation of the ETM business unit and driving the efficiencies there, both from a go-to-market perspective as well as integrating our prior acquisitions. I failed to mention on a prior page, but our largest acquisition ever was completed last year with Motion Recruitment Partners. It was about a $500 million IT, largely IT staffing business, but also some RPO and MSP and $450 million purchase price. We're now integrating that asset. We had a whole earnout period that expired on 4/1 of this year, and we are actively working on the integration there.
A combination of those items, along with just continued operating efficiencies, better technology utilization, we can drive efficiencies across our SG&A profile, both in the businesses and on the corporate side while continuing to focus on outperforming the market and taking share. Next slide. From a capital allocation perspective, we touched on this a little bit, but just you can see again on the chart on the right there a significant focus on acquisitions over the last several years and deployment of capital there. We do also have a dividend. It is about $11 million a year, $0.30 a share. That is stable. We have executed some buyback activity in 2022 and 2023. We executed a $50 million buyback, which exhausted that authorization. We had a new authorization put in place in December of 2024 and executed $50 million.
It was a two-year authorization, and we executed $10 million against that authorization. We did not repurchase any shares in this most recent quarter. We continue—we're asset-light, so we don't have a heavy CapEx spend, largely in the technology and facilities arena. We do maintain a branch network, and we have a physical presence in a number of different markets along with our headquarters facility. Relatively asset-light from a CapEx perspective. Really, our focus—and again, I mentioned the debt—we took out $230 million in debt associated with the MRP acquisition. That was at $205 million as of the end of the first quarter, most recently reported. We have $400 million of capacity there along with some accordion capacity. As of the end of last quarter, we had $180 million of liquidity available between debt capacity and cash on hand.
Our near-term focus is likely biased toward debt repayment and continuing to look for growth opportunities, both organically and inorganically, given the macro setup. Certainly, share repurchase, we have the authorization available through next year, and we do not envision any changes in the dividend policy in the near term. Overall, strong balance sheet and healthy cash flow. As we focus really now on what we are doing now in 2025 and what we see for the foreseeable future, we are going to continue focusing on delivering at or above market growth, increasing our scale, sharpen our focus in our higher growth specialties, really cater to our blue-chip enterprise client base, make sure we are maximizing our relationships there while we continue looking and taking new logos. We have great momentum in the education business, which has grown at more than double digits for the last several years.
Continue growing our outcome-based solutions, which are really innovative and unique in the industry. We'll continue further optimizing our operating model. I mentioned the ETM consolidation of two business units into ETM and the opportunities to be more efficient there, both from a go-to-market and from an operating perspective, along with the integration not just of MRP, but of the prior acquisitions in SETT, which had been run on a standalone basis inside of SETT.
As we accumulated the scale in those various disciplines, be it IT, be it engineering, be it telecom, etc., we now have a focus on going to market in a singular fashion and in a more optimized fashion, which ultimately will yield an EBITDA benefit of about $10 million just from the MRP integration alone, both in terms of cost efficiencies as well as incremental gross margin opportunities from either new client opportunities or more optimized client opportunities as we expand, for example, outcome-based offerings into the MRP client base, which previously they were primarily focused more on the pure-play staffing, perm and temp staffing. Finally, continuing to drive the EBITDA margin expansion through our organizational efficiency and effectiveness, looking at our corporate cost structure, areas like finance, HR, IT, as we modernize our technology infrastructure, bringing in those integrations.
We have opportunities for efficiencies across all our functional areas and continue mixing even within our specialty businesses, looking at more higher-value positions and opportunities so that we drive our business mix organically toward higher-value solutions. We are optimistic about what we've done. We are optimistic about where we're positioned in the market and the opportunities ahead of us. Highly confident in our ability to execute against these priorities and realize the value creation opportunity we have before us and ultimately reward our shareholders. With that, I'll pause, maybe, Joe, and turn it back to you.
Thanks, Troy. Great presentation. Let's turn to some questions. You mentioned that MRP acquisition. Can you just give us a little more insight as to how that integration is going and are there cross-selling opportunities from this acquisition?
Absolutely. It's going well.
We spent a lot of time—I mentioned the earnout expiring as of April 1st. We had an opportunity to do a lot of planning going into that, and we really hit the ground running. As I mentioned, it's really not just MRP. It's really integrating all the prior acquisitions within the SETT business unit. We're also doing the same thing in education. There were smaller ones there, but we had not fully integrated those. We've been in the process of doing the same as we try and drive our scale across all of our business areas. I mentioned within MRP, they had really more of a pure-play staffing type of model. Perm was about 10% of their business, a much higher percentage than with Kelly's legacy business and then temp staffing, and really not a statement of work or outcome-based type of offering.
We're now retraining that workforce to think more solutions-oriented. We have access to some really marquee clients through their portfolio that we now have a better presence, say, in financial services and healthcare than we did as Kelly standalone. That gives us more opportunity to penetrate more deeply into those markets. As a top 10 now IT provider, we now have access to opportunities we wouldn't have had previously as a smaller provider or more fragmented provider as we were going to market previously. There's growth opportunities there. That synergy, that $10 million run rate synergy, which we expect to achieve exiting 2026, is a function of both, again, cost efficiencies as well as go-to-market opportunities that we wouldn't have had access to on a standalone basis.
One of the things you mentioned along with that is capturing additional share of wallet with large enterprise customers. Kind of what's the strategy here? How are you going about that? How is it unfolding? What's the most recent examples from there? Yeah. Within Enterprise Talent Management, we have a heavy focus on large enterprises. Our prior go-to-market approach was more solution-oriented. We could be the MSP provider, the multi-managed service provider for a large enterprise. Kelly could be a supplier into that MSP. We had different account teams talking to different people inside of the enterprise managing that client relationship. By bringing those teams together, we've now consolidated all of the go-to-market and all the account management across any client where we had duplication.
Now we have that one singular focus for our existing client base, but also now we go-to-market with our full suite of solutions. We were doing that more selectively. You may have heard in the past the company talked about back in early 2024, Office of the Presidents or other terminology that we used where we had a large account focus on a discrete group of accounts. Now we are applying that same focus across all of our large enterprise accounts. We are having great success there. Another benefit of the MRP acquisition to your prior question, they had an RPO, Recruitment Process Outsourcing business that was moved in and consolidated with the legacy Kelly RPO business along with their MSP business. We are now the number one RPO provider in the world because of that.
It gives us just much more breadth and scale to be engaging in the large enterprise market. We have several new logo wins in the managed service provider space. We've had a big push there. Even though staffing volumes have been down the last two years, by building those relationships and being the platform provider there and then focusing on making sure we're getting more than our fair share of business out of those MSP platforms, that really positions us well for success in the large enterprise space. Great. Now, can you give us an example of an outcome-based or statement of work engagement? And are there certain industry verticals where you're capturing demand for these solutions? Yeah, sure. It's a little bit different depending upon which part of the business.
Over in the ETM side of the business and within what, again, we call our legacy professional and industrial component, really we've taken what maybe one client asked us, "Hey, we need some help running this part of our process. We don't want to worry about having to staff this part of our process. It's a lower-end labor pool than we would like to manage. We want to manage the higher-value labor, the engineers, the technicians, etc. Why don't you manage this production line aspect? Why don't you do all the movement of equipment and material through our production process, and we'll focus on the production workers?" What starts as a one-client sort of one-off solution becomes a packaged opportunity to now go sell into multiple clients. The greatest example of that and very relevant to current trends is in the semiconductor space.
Of course, there's a significant amount of investment going on in the semiconductor space globally, but in the U.S. in particular, I'm in Arizona. TSMC is right up the road here with a multi-billion dollar investment as they try and onshore chip production into the U.S.. And we are in the clean environment with all the major chip manufacturers performing certain functions inside of their environment. Again, they want to focus on the engineers, the technicians, the higher-value folks, and they just basically outsource certain elements of that production to us. That's been a great growth area for us. Similarly, in some of the renewable energy arenas, we do things in logistics and manufacturing. So a number of different areas. There is a little bit of cannibalization, maybe of staffing there.
Similarly, and I'll talk in a second here on the SETT side, but still, it's largely new opportunity, more outsourcing opportunity where we're taking work out of clients' hands and doing it on their behalf in their site. We're not building delivery centers. Again, we're asset-light. We're doing it in their premise, but we're managing a whole end-to-end process or production line. On the SETT side, telecom is a very project outcome-based area. For example, it's a few hundred million dollar business for us. Think major capital investment areas, 5G rollout a number of years back, have to go swap out radios across towers, tens of thousands of towers across the country. They need to supplement their workforce. We have project teams that we're able to do that with. Other capital-type projects or maintenance-type projects that are surging in demand.
Data centers is the newer thing where we have an opportunity to package up IT capabilities, telecom capabilities, engineering capabilities, all of which are needed when you think about building out a data center. Partnering with some of the major players in that ecosystem is an area we're focused on. In your traditional sort of IT, you can staff a position or you can say, "Hey, well, what problem are you trying to solve here? Let's put a solution together for you." It's actually you need a team of people to do this project, or you just need this team of people to supplement your resources, but they can operate somewhat independently. They don't need—we'll provide a manager and a team of people associated with that, or there's just a discrete project. We're not doing major ERP projects.
We're not all the way up into the consulting side of the value chain, but moving more up into a hybrid sort of in-between staffing and consulting. And again, really trying to help clients solve problems, not just fill job orders.
Great. That is amazing. Such a fascinating story. I can't believe we've come to the end of our allotted time already. Troy and Scott, we covered a lot of ground today. Got significant insight into what Kelly does and its markets and opportunities. We appreciate you taking the time to participate in our conference, and we wish you and the company the best in the future. Thanks again.
Thank you, Joe. And thank you, everybody, for your interest.
Thank you. Bye.