Good afternoon. Last but definitely not least, we have Kelly Services. Kelly is one of the leading providers of staffing solutions operating across three segments: enterprise talent management, science, engineering, and technology, and education. The stock trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol KELYA. With us for management are Troy Anderson, Chief Financial Officer, and Scott Thomas, Head of IR. Scott?
Thanks, John. Good afternoon, everyone. Appreciate your interest in the company. As John said, I'm Scott Thomas, Head of Investor Relations. Kelly was founded 80 years ago, founded the staffing industry. We are, as you can imagine, a very different company than we were 80 years ago. In fact, we're a very different company than we were five years ago. We have monetized about $500 million in non-core assets, redeployed that capital, about $900 million of capital to achieve scale in specialties. We've undergone a significant SG&A takeout rationalization initiative, took out about $100 million, more than $100 million of structural costs out of the company. Very different company. That being said, we are significantly undervalued today. There is a big value creation opportunity that we have here. That's what Troy is going to talk to us about today.
Before we jump into that, just a couple of housekeeping items. We'll talk about some non-GAAP measures today for reconciliation. We'll see some forward-looking statements. We have no obligation to update those statements. With that, I will turn it over to Troy.
Okay. Thanks, everybody, for being here. Thanks, Scott and John. Does the clicker work? Yes, it does. Okay. Great. They gave you the background on Kelly. Some data points just to fill in a little bit around what Scott said. $4.4 billion is our trailing 12 revenue, 3% adjusted EBITDA margin. As a reference point, we're the number two temporary staffing provider in the United States. It's a very fragmented industry. We're only 2% market share, even with being the number two player. It's an interesting market. We place over 400,000 individuals in a given year in temporary positions. We also do a lot of project-based, what we call outcome-based solutions. We do consulting and other services as well. We'll talk a little bit about that as we move along. Scott touched on this a little bit.
Again, we have an industry-leading brand and businesses delivering differentiated solutions. We streamlined the operating model. That led to some of the SG&A takeout that Scott referenced. We have the three operating segments. That was a new model that was implemented in 2020. It was actually five segments at the time. Through divestiture and then through some consolidation, we operate now in the three segments that we'll talk about here in a minute. Significant transformation has occurred and is continuing to occur. By the way, I should have said I joined the company about a year ago in October of last year. My predecessor had been CFO for about 10 years and retired.
One of the mandates for me coming in was transforming the finance organization along with supporting transformation of the company overall and driving that shareholder value creation that Scott said, which I have some experience with in prior steps along the way. We do have a disciplined capital allocation approach. Again, we'll talk about that here a little bit. The new management team, not just with me, but also the new CEO. Chris Laden joined the company in September just two and a half months ago. He's an industry veteran. He spent 20 years at Manpower. Really grew up in the industry there. Started as an intern. Was a fast riser through the ranks there across operations, across sales, acquisitions, global delivery. All facets of the business.
He then spent the last few years prior to Kelly at ProLink, which is a fast-growing, hyper-growth single segment and focused in the healthcare space staffing business. Also has a significant technology component to it. He competed with Kelly. He knows Kelly very well. He sees the value opportunities there as well. He is the sixth CEO in Kelly's history and the first outside CEO. Peter Quigley, his predecessor, joined the company about 23 years ago. He was appointed CEO in 2019, growing up through the company. Chris is the first true outsider, which again is an indication of the board and their approach now to bring in a fresh perspective between Chris and myself. We also did just announce another leadership change last week. A leader of one of our divisions will be departing the company at the end of the month.
We'll be executing an external search for that new leader as well. We are again kind of going through some change and transformation there to really help drive the company forward. Let's spend a few minutes on the segments. Again, enterprise talent management. That's about half our business, as you can see there in the pie chart on the right. A little bit less than half our business. Has a gross margin at around 20% and EBITDA margin a little over 2%. Has a global footprint. Within enterprise talent management, we support large enterprise customers is the heavy emphasis. We do have local branch distribution as well where we can support smaller, more local and regional type companies.
We offer the full range of solutions there: temp staffing, perm staffing, what we call outcome-based solutions, so more of an outsourcing type of model, and then talent solutions. Talent solutions is about a quarter of that segment. That is where we're managing a company's enterprise talent on their behalf. We are a managed service provider. If they, let's say, have thousands of contingent workers spread across their manufacturing plants or their distribution facilities or whatever it may be, that is usually run through what is called a managed service provider. There is a technology component to that. There is a people component to that. There can be many, many suppliers, labor suppliers into that, Kelly being one of them, perhaps.
The managed service provider will manage all of that on their behalf, coordinate with the suppliers, coordinate with the employer, make sure all the job orders are getting filled and routed to the appropriate individuals or individual suppliers. We collect a fee on that spend. Maybe they're spending $100 million a year on contingent labor, and we could collect a percentage of that spend. That's about a quarter of that business. About a third of that business is more outcome-based solutions, where we're now providing outsourced type solutions. Maybe we started providing staffing, and we were staffing the majority of a logistics warehouse facility, or we were staffing a manufacturing line of particular skill sets to run the whole thing. You provide the management. You guarantee the service levels and the outcome.
We will package that up and put an outsource solution together and then be able to go market that to other companies. We have solutions in manufacturing and logistics, semiconductors. It has been a big growth area for us as the US footprint on semiconductor manufacturing has been growing rapidly here over the last number of years. That is a meaningful component of that business. The rest is more staffing type light industrial, office, F&A, different types of resources from a staffing perspective. Many of those are ongoing. Yes, there is churn in there. We regularly provide hundreds or even thousands of workers to employers on a fairly consistent basis. It is not just 1Z, 2Z type of staffing. Science, engineering, and technology is just like it says. Part of the strategy over the last five years was create specialization.
SET is really the specialty-focused business area along with education where we now are looking at higher value positions and solutions focused in those distinct verticals around life sciences, around engineering, around telecom, technology. There is a component of government in there as well. About a third of that business is more called solution-based. We are not just staffing positions. We are performing a statement of work type project. It could be a six-month project, a year-long project, two-year-long project. Some of those areas like telecom is almost entirely project-based where we are staffing or we are solutioning RF engineers for a particular project or fiber engineers. Or we are working on a data center build in support of a telecom company, those types of things, or a cable company.
We're in the life sciences space where we're staffing clinicians and lab techs and materials handlers, people like that, in a clinical trial. It's a year-long clinical trial. It's a lot of those types of different areas that we'll be supporting. We've done a number of acquisitions in SET. The $900 million that's come from us, a large percentage of that was in the SET business, the largest being an IT services company that we purchased in 2024, $500 million revenue business. We paid approximately $450 million for it and Motion Recruitment Partners. We're now going through an integration effort with those acquisitions to bring all those together so we can really yield the benefits of the scale that we've acquired. We had a few different IT services businesses. Now we run them as one business. Similarly, telecom was a number of acquisitions as well.
You can see the margin profile. That's, again, higher value positions, higher value solutions, so higher gross margin and a higher EBITDA margin, 26% and almost 6% respectively. In education, it is a much more straightforward business area. We are the largest provider of K-12 substitute teachers in the United States. This is where a school district will outsource the substitute teacher management process, the talent curation, the inbound and outbound communication, all of the activity around payrolling and billing, all of the substitute teachers. We have 8,000 school districts that we support. This is a growing market. About 30% of school districts have outsourced currently. There is a significant white space opportunity. This business has more than tripled over the last five years, mostly organically. We are the dominant player in that space.
A subcomponent of that, less than 10% of the business currently, and it's about $1 billion, so a little bit less than 25% of our portfolio overall, is therapy services. Similarly, in school, in the K-12 environment, schools are required to provide certain therapy services for students. We provide licensed therapists to support the needs of a given school district. That's a more competitive model. On the K-12 model, we're sole sourced. We win the RFP. They put it out to RFP. We win the business. We're now the only provider of the talent for that. On the therapy side, we could be one of several people providing licensed therapists into that school. You can see the margin profile is a bit different there. Lower gross margin, 14%-14.5%. It converts more efficiently down to EBITDA. That's more of a scale business.
With that K-12 business, we're basically just getting a markup on those substitutes. The school will dictate what they pay, $100 a day, $150 a day if it's a long-term assignment, whatever that may be. We just get a markup on that for the management of the process around that. Again, we were able to scale that very efficiently across multiple school districts or regions as we manage that for them. Overall, a gross margin in the mid-20s, 20.4%. EBITDA margin around 3% on over $4 billion in revenue. This slide, there's a lot on here. The gist of this slide is we're a top player in many of the spaces that I just talked about. Again, number two overall in temp staffing. We're the fifth largest firm in the US overall, staffing firm overall.
Temp staffing versus total staffing, there's a bit of a different definition around that. We were the fastest growing staffing firm in 2023 and 2024. We're a top player as recognized by Everest and some of the other industry analyst groups across managed services, across recruitment process outsourcing. We're a top IT staffing provider. We're a top life sciences and engineering provider. Again, we're the largest in education. We've now, again, acquired scale and grown and accumulated scale across most of the areas that we play in. This really depicts this transformation really over the last five years and what that means to the company and the revenue and the margin profile. Again, moving more toward a specialization focus. We had five divisions previously. We sold off Amiya International and some of the other assets that Scott referenced, Asia Pac.
We had some joint venture relationships and assets there. We had some other non-core assets. Divested all of those areas to really focus on North America. From a staffing perspective, our managed service business is we usually were supporting multinational global companies. We can do that with, again, international suppliers really into the platform. You can see we've narrowed the focus down to these three divisions: education, SET, and ETM, as I walked through previously. What's interesting is that in a declining market, the market overall has been, of course, was impacted significantly with COVID and then a strong bounce back in 2021 and 2022, but then has been declining since then at an industry level. We have basically been flat.
We've divested $1 billion in revenue with the Amiya division, but have been able to stay flat through acquisition and through organic growth during a declining market cycle. With that, we've expanded our gross margins by 200 basis points. Again, mixing the portfolio up to that higher value type of specialization and focus both on organic and the inorganic growth. Significant success story in terms of that portfolio remix and where we sit today from a go-to-market perspective. Another element of the specialization and driving higher value is some of what I've talked about around outcome-based solutions and other solutions. What this shows you is that, again, in that same 2020 time period, 70% of our revenue came from staffing. That included that international staffing. When you fast forward now to 2024, the equivalent number is only 44% of our revenue.
Part of that was a divestiture. Part of that was moving more toward outcome-based solutions and away from just pure staffing. That is a stickier solution, again, a higher value solution that we can generate more margin from. Also look at that growth in education. I mentioned it more than tripled over the last five years. It went from 6% of the portfolio to 22%. You can see the outcome-based moved from 15% to 21%. The talent solutions also moved up as well. This is, again, other evidence of the significant portfolio remix and how we've generated that incremental margin profile, 200 basis points of margin expansion across the different offerings. Also, through that time horizon, good news that gross profit expansion has also flowed down into EBITDA along with the SG&A, structural SG&A reductions that, again, Scott referenced in his opening comments.
You can see a historical margin profile, the 1.5% range, really kind of fluctuating between 1.5% and 2%, more than doubled to 3.3% last year. We have a little bit of a pullback this year. We do have some margin pressure, some incremental runoff on some large clients given some of the macro environment around us, which has put a little bit of pressure on us from a margin perspective, but still hanging around that 3%, more than double that historical average, around double that historical average, and a significant growth in EBITDA over time.
We expect to be in that 3% range probably into next year while we go through some of the near-term headwinds and then continue looking at margin expansion opportunities, which we have direct line of sight to opportunities to do that through the integration efforts, through technology modernization efforts, and through things like transforming the finance organization, which historically had not been run in as optimized a manner as it can. IT, as we modernize our technology, we can standardize on fewer platforms, drive out IT costs, etc. From a capital allocation perspective, deployed over $1 billion, again, largely skewed toward acquisitions. We have also, over that time horizon, deployed about $100 million in return to shareholder between share repurchases and dividends. We do have a dividend currently at $0.30 a share on an annual basis. It is about $10-$11 million in absolute cost.
We did a $50 million share repurchase over 2022 and 2023. We put another repurchase authorization at $50 million in place in Q4 of last year and executed $10 million against that in December of last year. We did not execute anything against that in the first three quarters of this year, but we signaled, we stated on our call a few weeks ago that we intended to be active against the authorization here in the quarter. We did take out about $240 million in debt with the MRP acquisition last summer. We did have a focus on debt paydown here in the first part of the year. That was at $118 million as of the end of the quarter. Our trailing 12 months free cash flow is approximately $100 million through the third quarter.
I expect that'll be roughly what we see on a four-year basis this year. We are a working capital company. Right now, we're, again, on a revenue decline. We're getting a benefit from that. When we flip to growth, there is working capital investment. We have to payroll the employees. We, of course, bill that and then collect that over 30, 60, or 90 days depending upon the customer. Right now, we're getting a bit of a working capital tailwind, but still net-net, a strong free cash flow generation business, all things being equal. We have ample capital allocation flexibility. We also have debt capacity. Our total debt capacity is $400 million. We have a $150 million revolver and a $250 million securitization facility secured by our accounts receivable.
That's where the $118 million is drawn against that currently. We have ample capacity and flexibility across capital allocation. We have an active M&A pipeline development and review process. We haven't completed any acquisitions this year, but we continue to explore opportunities, particularly in the education and SET areas, science, engineering, technology areas, again, looking at whereas before we were more focused on acquiring scale across specific specialties. Now we've achieved that scale. Now we have the opportunity to be a little bit more selective around either adjacencies or broader solution sets, more consultative or higher value solutions within certain specialties. We continue to look at opportunities there as well. The walk-off slide, what are we focused on? Again, we really want to optimize and accelerate our SET business. We have a significant integration effort there, go-to-market streamlining.
Again, none of those acquisitions have been integrated. We now have a go-to-market alignment there. The ETM segment also was two segments two years ago, and now it's combined into one segment to focus really on that enterprise market. We have a lot of optimization that we're doing there and accelerating the efforts there. We're really focused on expanding wallet share with existing clients. Again, we have a few top clients where we have demand reductions based on their business needs. We have significant opportunity across our full client portfolio to continue expanding wallet share and make sure we're servicing those customers with the full suite of Kelly offerings. Education has been a growth area, a little bit of a pullback this year. We'll do more low to mid-single digits on a four-year basis this year.
We still have, as I mentioned, a significant white space opportunity there and continuing to grow the therapy business. We have significant growth opportunities still there and continuing to move up scale overall from a solutions base. I mentioned the go-to-market and integration focuses. We have other optimization opportunities. I mentioned finance, HR, technology. We have opportunities there both in terms of how we do work, where we do work, what technology we use to do work to continue driving optimization across all of those, and also some additional centralization where before there was a bit of a decentralization push, but we realize that's driven some inefficiencies in how we operate. We have an opportunity to bring some of that back more centrally. Those are the big focus areas for us now.
Again, with Chris now on board, 75 days, two and a half months in, really bringing his fresh lens along with some other new leadership and really going into 2026 with some great momentum. That is my prepare to mark. I am happy to answer any questions.
Yeah. Two, actually. Is it harder for you to find a data center builder that will hire you with a turnkey or engineers and highly skilled people from you or for you to convince highly skilled people to just work for you instead of being temp employees?
Yeah. We have very good strength in developing talent and having pools of talent available to work on projects. There are just people out there that want to be project-based, right? They do not want to be a full-time employee with a particular firm. They are highly skilled.
Across engineering, across telecom, we have pretty stable workforces that we're able to deploy. We're growing in telecom and engineering, by the way. Those are two areas, double-digit in telecom, in fact, this last quarter. That's definitely a function of some of the data center activity that's out there. We typically aren't struggling to find talent. It's really part of the value opportunity that we bring to a client is our ability to find talent. It extends into light industrial or the substitute teacher pool, right? The first thing we do when we win an outsource deal with a school district is we go in and we curate talent. We take a 60-70% fill rate, and we take it up to we averaged 90% across our portfolio in the third quarter.
Some of our biggest clients are close to 100% fill rates when they run, like I said, 60 to 70. That is really part of the value that we bring and we're able to find the talent.
On that, my second question was the teacher sits through teachers. Just how does the reliability and with therapy students, just how does the vetting process work with the schools? Do they do their vetting or, I mean, just how does that? They set the criteria.
Yeah, they set the criteria. I mean, there's background checks, things like that. It is a bit of an area where it does give some of our insurance carriers a little bit of nervousness. It also tends to be a little bit of a higher workers' comp area.
We do tend to have an elevated mix of people who are later stage career or maybe transitioning career. They trip on kids. They trip on backpacks. Kid bites them or throws something at them. I mean, it's a bit you wouldn't believe some of the stuff that goes on. They set criteria. We run through a whole process. We vet people. We're evaluating people constantly and meet the standards. We have a whole skills development program as well for people that want to move up scale, right? If you're just there's like a basic set of skills to just be a day-to-day substitute teacher. If you want to be on a longer-term assignment or you want to teach other types of specialties within the school, you can go through certification process, and we curate that capability as well.
Yeah.
Is your earnings per share positive on a GAAP basis? Right now, we're showing negative positive.
No. This quarter, we took a $100 million impairment on some of the acquisitions that we had done. Because of the impairment, we also had to go through, we have $300 million in deferred tax assets. We triggered a three-year cumulative loss on the deferred tax asset analysis. We had to put a $70 million valuation allowance. Our loss per share in the quarter was $4.28 or $4.26 a share. On an adjusted basis, it was positive. We do have an adjusted, in addition to that, we have, I think this quarter we had $6 million of transformation and restructuring charges. We have kind of a run rate of things like that, severance and IT investment costs, things like that that are non-recurring in nature.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Do you go on the almost like completely outside competing with the DHLs or so on the distribution side where it sounds like you run the entire building from a staff perspective? Can you speak to that a little bit and then maybe touch on automation? A lot of areas get automated. Is that something where you guys have been in the forefront of that where labor is replaced with automation? Are you guys trying to play into playing that space, essentially, or? Yeah.
What was the first part of your question? I didn't hear the first part.
Competing head-on with DHL, Unanegal, and the distribution center side?
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, DHL is a client of ours in certain markets. Yeah. We will in the light industrial, manufacturing, logistics, I mean, we both do staffing, and we do these BPO-type solutions.
Yes, if somebody's competing in that space, we could be competing with them. Usually, like I said, they may put an RFP out and say, "Hey, we want somebody to come in and do this for us," or we may already be staffing a large number of people in there. We just, some combination of them and us, may say, "Hey, why don't we just take this whole thing over and just run the whole thing for you? We think we can do it more efficiently." Those opportunities happen in an expanded area. We're now more actively looking to do that. "Hey, we noticed you're asking us to staff a lot of positions. What problem can we help you solve, right?
What problem are you trying to solve that we can help you do that better? That's becoming more and more a way of approaching opportunities there. The second part of your question was automation. Yeah, automation.
There's a lot of automation happening in utilities displacing your services. I'm wondering how you guys—
so people still run the automation, to your point, right? In fact, I was just reading an article about this the other day where it's a different work, right? They're not necessarily the picker, right? The robot's doing the pick, but they still have to monitor that. They may still have to walk the floor. They may still be at the control panel. We were just in Los Angeles earlier this week, and Chris, the CEO, visited a client of ours.
I mean, the fairly low-end workers, $25 an hour type workers, are doing—they're running automation machines and consumer electronics manufacturing small operations. The work has changed, but it's still on the lower end of the labor scale, and it just requires different skills for people. We also offer reskilling programs to some degree. If we know we're going to have demand in a particular area, we may work with the client to say, "Let's develop a training program, bless you. Let's develop a training program so that we can curate more talent to solve that need." Yeah.
Yeah. Within the SET segment, one of the challenges for you is trying to get the SOW-ish product.
Correct.
How is it going to be printed compared to the other competitors? What's the value of this?
Yeah. It's really an industry movement.
It's not unique to Kelly per se. More and more in those higher value technology and other areas like that, they're moving more and more to just that type of approach because there tend to be more project-based. I mean, there's still an element of staffing there, but more and more they're looking for a solution, whether it's a project team on some duration of basis. In some cases, it could just be it's an SOW wrapper around a team of people. It's glorified staffing in some ways. There could be truly a, "Hey, no, you deliver these five milestones on this multifaceted project," or we could ultimately be deploying the whole solution on their behalf. We bump into, and we can offer a much better value proposition than some of the big consulting firms.
Now, we're not necessarily going all the way upscale into consulting, but when they come downscale a little bit and we're moving upscale a little bit, we can bump into each other. We're helping customers with AI, implementing AI capabilities in their environments. The industry is moving more in that direction, and that's really how we're going to market at this point. In fact, we lead more with solution than we do with staffing. If they ultimately just want staffing, then we go there. We start with more of the solution orientation. Is this all A and B share or is that their user? Yep. We are a dual class. That was, I guess, one thing we don't really have specified, or maybe I glossed over it. We do have A and B shares.
It's Kelly A and Kelly B are the tickers. The B shares are the voting shares. The A shares do not have votes. 93% of the B shares are held in a trust, which is a remnant of the family. William Russell Kelly started Kelly. The last family member that was part of management was Terry Adderley. The trust is part of extension of Terry Adderley upon his passing. There are three trustees that run the trust. They're not involved in management. They're not on the board. There is a board monitor. At the end of the day, their interests are aligned with shareholders in terms of creating value for the beneficiary or beneficiaries of the trust. We don't believe it's family that's the direct beneficiary at this point. It's more just passing through to other entities. Other questions? Got 12 seconds.
All right. Thank you all for your interest. Appreciate it. I know it's been a long day or two days for you. Feel free to reach out to Scott or John through Three Part Advisors. They're now working with us as well. We'd be happy to provide you any more information or meet with you further. Thank you.