Today is Kelly Services. Kelly is one of the larger providers of talent solutions operating across three segments: Enterprise Talent Management, Science, Engineering, and Technology, and Education. The company has been navigating a very dynamic employment environment, all while maintaining a large cash position, low debt to equity, and very healthy free cash flow generation. Stock trades on the Nasdaq, the A shares trade under the symbol KELYA. With us from management are Troy Anderson, Chief Financial Officer, and Scott Thomas, Head of IR, and Scott will lead us off. Thank you.
Thanks, John.
Thanks, John.
Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming today. Appreciate your interest in the company. As John mentioned, I'm Scott Thomas, Head of Investor Relations, and this is Troy Anderson, our Chief Financial Officer, and on behalf of the team, we appreciate you being here, and I look forward to telling you more about the significant value creation opportunity that exists here at Kelly. Before we begin, just a couple of housekeeping items. Our comments made during today's session, including forward-looking statements, or may include forward-looking statements about our expectations for future performance. Actual results could differ materially from those suggested by our comments, and we don't assume any obligation to update our statements made here today. In addition, we'll talk about some non-GAAP measures. You can find reconciliation back to GAAP measures on our investor relations website at ir.kellyservices.com. Let's get started. Who is Kelly Services?
Kelly invented the staffing industry in 1946, and we've been reinventing it ever since. We started as a local temporary staffing agency with a focus on placing people in office and clerical roles. But today, now we're in our 80th year. We've grown into a leading global specialty talent solutions provider. We meet employers' evolving workforce needs through a number of different solutions, temp staffing, permanent staffing, outcome-based solutions, managed service provider solutions, and recruitment process outsourcing. We have three specialized business units, SET, Education, and ETM, which Troy will talk more about, including the financial profile of each of those businesses. And they place talent across a range of roles from Ph.D. chemists to materials handlers, assembly line workers, and even substitute teachers, and Troy will talk a little bit more about how Kelly is actually the largest provider of substitute teachers in the U.S.
The differentiated offerings and level of service that we provide clients and talent, they're unmatched, and that's why Forbes named Kelly recently the number two staffing company in the U.S. Also unmatched is our ability to create long-term value for all of our shareholders, and to talk a little bit more about that, I'll turn it over to Troy, our Chief Financial Officer.
Thank you, Scott. Yeah, thanks again to everybody for your interest in the company. I joined in October of 2024, so new to the staffing space, but I've been in and around the business services and workforce solutions arena for about 20 years. I have a little bit more of an extended career beyond that, but we don't need to get into that here. But I'm pleased to share our value creation story and just the story about Kelly overall. We have a compelling investment thesis. We have an iconic brand. As Scott said, we invented the industry back in 1946, William Russell Kelly. We're in our 80th year. We intend to have some recognition of that as we get later in the year.
That's a competitive advantage for us, and we are working hard at really placing that brand at even a higher visibility level as we proceed forward. We work with the world's largest and most respected employers. And while our brand has remained consistent throughout our history, we've evolved the company over the year. We've been investing heavily in specialty areas. We'll talk a little bit about our specialty journey, but building out our global capabilities and really focusing more on specialization and higher value services that we can bring into the large enterprise space. We've been transforming our operations through significant focus on SG&A rationalization and building out more of a scalable and efficient delivery model, and we've significantly improved our EBITDA margin over the last several years as a result of that, and we have more opportunity ahead of us around that.
We have a balanced approach to capital allocation. We have returned capital to shareholders. We've invested heavily in the business. Again, we'll talk a little bit about that as we go forward to create this specialization and drive that margin expansion to give us better position for growth as we proceed forward. We have a refreshed board, refreshed management team, that I'll talk about here next, that brings significant experience to the company, and really, we're committed as a team to delivering results and meeting or exceeding expectations as we proceed forward. Let's talk about some of the changes. We recently, last September, finished a succession process with Chris Layden joining the company as CEO. He's the sixth CEO in the company's history, and the first directly hired from the outside of the company. He has extensive experience.
He spent his whole career in the industry, and has driven transformation. He's driven growth, profitable growth, go-to-market, sales, operations. He came directly from a firm named Prolink, which was more in the healthcare space, but where he oversaw a period of significant and rapid growth as chief operating officer, and he spent the majority of his career Excuse me, at ManpowerGroup. Almost two decades there, where he served in a number of different roles, globally, U.S.-focused, regional, corporate, again, sales, go-to-market, operations, et cetera. Since he's been named CEO, there have been a number of other changes at the company. We've named a chief growth officer, Pat McCall, who's also deep industry experience, and his charter is really bringing that One Kelly go-to-market to the large enterprise space.
He has done this multiple times throughout his career, where he's taken a somewhat of a fragmented or decentralized go-to-market approach and really brought that to more of an enterprise lens, as well as our large account management, or really best practices around interfacing with the enterprise market. A month later, we announced Joel Leege joining the company, who also has deep industry experience at a number of different firms in the space. He's the leader over our SET, Science, Engineering, and Technology division, which, as it says, has a range of specialties in those areas, and he has worked and shown leadership, demonstrated results across all those areas, along with acquisition integration experience, go-to-market experience, which is important for us because that's an area where we have invested heavily, and we have a lot of opportunity as we now bring those acquisitions together into one operating model.
We're also reevaluating our leadership within our ETM segment. That's about half of our business. SET is about a quarter of our business. That's core to our strategy and where we have the most opportunity in the near term for some quick improvements from an operating and go-to-market perspective. Chris will be directly involved with that business. We have some strong leaders within that business. In the near term, we're evaluating the overall leadership. More recently, we've seen also changes in our board. We had, as John mentioned, we do have a dual class stock, A shares and B shares. The controlling shareholder changed in January of this year. It was a long time held by the Terence E. Adderley Revocable Trust K, and they transacted the shares to The Hunt Companies. They're based in El Paso, Texas.
With that, the board was reconstituted initially with four new members at that time, and four retained members from the prior board. More recently at our shareholder meeting about a month ago, three additional members were added. We've been working very closely with them. They're highly sophisticated individuals, all with extensive business backgrounds. They're focused on driving, and we collectively are focused on driving shareholder value creation for all shareholders. With that, we're really well-positioned as we sit here today with new management, new board to drive growth and profitable growth as we go forward. Let's spend a few minutes on the segments. Scott gave a quick rundown on these, but you can see we operate in these three segments, Enterprise Talent Management, Science, Engineering, and Technology, and Education.
You can see that there's a different margin profile, both at the gross margin level and the adjusted EBITDA margin level. With all of them, we have opportunities to expand those margins in Kelly overall. You can see in the chart on the right the mix of the businesses. I referenced this just a moment ago. ETM, roughly half the business at $2 billion, and Education right at $1 billion, and SET at $1.2 billion, so just a little bit over a quarter. Our overall gross margin at just over 20%, our overall adjusted EBITDA margin at 2.6%. You can also see the footprint differentiation. Enterprise Talent Management, particularly in what we call Talent Solutions. There we offer temp staffing, we offer perm placement, we offer outcome-based solutions, and what we call Talent Solutions, which is more of a global offering.
Our staffing and perm placement and outcome-based tends to be more of a North America-focused offering. Our end markets are spread across a number of different industries, financial services, technology, life sciences, and other areas. Within Talent Solutions, we have our Managed Service Provider offering, that is where we run the platform, where enterprise has a large contingent workforce, we run that platform on their behalf and manage all the suppliers. RPO or Recruitment Process Outsourcing, where we're essentially outsourced part of the talent acquisition team. We may be fully outsourced, or we may be only providing surge or partial capacity. Payroll Process Outsourcing, we're essentially the employer of record for contingent workers on behalf of the employer. On the industrial and contact center in the outcome-based side, we work in all different environments.
We may be running production lines, we may be running logistics lines, we may be involved in a semiconductor chip manufacturing process. That's an extension of what would be just our normal staffing. We would now actually run the management and actually be part of the operations for that client. A very diverse set of offerings and a very diverse set of clients, and spanning across all different industries within ETM. We're the largest, as I mentioned, the number one provider on RPO and MSP or Talent Solutions overall. We're a top provider in office clerical number four, marketing creative number 11, and industrial number 11. In North America overall, we're number six from a staffing, but it's a very fragmented industry. We're at about a 2% market share, and that's number six. Even the number one provider is only maybe 3% market share.
Science, engineering, technology, again, now more of a North America-focused business, although they do have some global offerings, particularly in the life sciences space. As the name suggests, focused in sciences, engineering, technology, as well as telecom. We have specialized talent focused in each of those areas and leaders across those businesses that have deep expertise in each of those areas. Within the sciences space, we're focused on clinical research, med devices, a number of different areas across life pharmaceuticals. We work across that whole ecosystem. Telecom, we work with all the major carriers. It's not officially tracked as a distinct vertical by the industry analysts, we do believe we're the top, if not top two provider, in that space.
Engineering, we provide a whole range of services for manufacturing companies, for life sciences technology companies, et cetera, whether that's product engineering or other engineering solutions there. We're number two in life sciences. We're number four in engineering. On the education side, Scott referenced this a bit there. We're the number one provider of K-12 substitute teachers in the U.S. That's an outsource model. A school district will outsource the management and the platform of their substitute teachers. Think about all, we have talent development, so there has to be a pool of teachers available on any given day to fill the open roles. You have to be in contact with those teachers every single day, make them aware of the opportunities, be able to fill roles that come open that morning, somebody calls in sick. It's a very dynamic and robust platform.
It's a scale-based business. We're the sole provider in those arrangements. It's a bit more of that contract and outsource model, which is a little bit different than some of our other areas. We also provide pediatric therapy, which schools are required to provide a certain level of therapeutic services to students in school. Think speech therapy, hearing, behavioral therapy, other therapy-type services. By extension, we have an opportunity to further expand in off-premise therapy-type services as well. We've grown this business significantly over the last five years. You'll see on the next chart, we've expanded. The market is expanding as well. Only about 30% of the school districts have pursued this outsource model. There's a significant amount of white space, and we've been growing share in a growing market.
Therapy is a higher margin offering, as we penetrate more deeply with the therapy services, which are a natural extension of our relationships in the K-12 space, which is over 90% of that $1 billion, we have the opportunity to drive that margin profile with that business. Let's talk about that specialty journey that we referenced here a little bit. Again, you can see in the charts, over the last five years, we were $4.5 billion in 2020. We were $4.3 billion last year. You think, "Okay, we've been treading water." Well, actually, no. There's been a substantial amount of change in that five-year period.
The most obvious thing that jumps off the chart is a big gray slice in 2020 of an international business, which was about $1 billion, $1.1 billion, which is not in there in 2025. We divested that business at the beginning of 2024. It was a very low-margin business. We didn't really have scale from a footprint perspective internationally. The decision was made to divest that business. You can also see the education growth from 6% of our portfolio to 24% of our portfolio. A few hundred million dollar business is now a $1 billion-dollar business, mostly through organic growth. You can see SET also a larger percentage of the total. Again, we've invested heavily there.
In addition to the international divestiture, we divested other non-core assets, some Asia-Pac joint ventures and some other holdings that we had, raised about $500 million in capital. We redeployed about $900 million in capital, acquiring seven different businesses, mostly focused in the SET arena. We also acquired portions of the therapy business and the education side and also in the talent solution space in ETM. That positioned us again now to basically replace all of that divested revenue, and importantly, also drive margin expansion. The bottom half of that chart, you can see that on that $4.5 billion of revenue, we generated about $830 million in gross profit at about 18%, and in 2025, on a slightly lower revenue number. About $100 million of that gross profit, by the way, was international.
On a like-for-like basis, that was $730 million, and that now is $853 million in 2025 at a little bit over a 20% gross margins. We've significantly improved our profitability profile through our portfolio actions. Again, positioned ourselves better for growth and continued margin expansion as we proceed forward. The last point is over that time horizon, and we'll talk about EBITDA on the next slide, we undertook a significant SG&A rationalization, both focused on structural savings and demand-driven savings opportunities, which yielded more than $100 million in savings, which contributed to the EBITDA line. With EBITDA, you can see the trend here again over that same time horizon. Kelly's historical average for many years, really in that 2020 and prior timeframe was really around that 1.5%, 1.7% EBITDA margin. That's just where the company operated.
Under the prior leadership with the portfolio rationalization, there was also this focus on EBITDA margin expansion. You can see the significant step change that really started occurring in the 2022 through 2024 time horizon. That's where the initial wave of the SG&A rationalization occurred. We actually had organic growth in a declining industry. The staffing industry overall has been under pressure. There was a strong bounce back post-COVID. Really from 2022 through 2025, the industry overall was declining. All the players for the most part were declining. Kelly actually had organic growth, about a half a point of organic growth in 2024, along with that significant margin expansion. We had a bit of a pullback last year, 2025.
With the macro environment being a bit more dynamic last year, we also had a few large customer discrete items that occurred that will be anniversarying here this year that we had a slight pullback there. We are guiding to organic growth and measurable margin expansion in the back half of 2026, again, as we anniversary some of those discrete impacts. We continue to focus on this. We have opportunity across a number of areas. The acquisition integration I mentioned, along with continued driving toward more scale and technology modernization across our operating model will give us more margin expansion opportunity as we go forward. From a capital allocation perspective, I've touched on this a bit now in a few of my prior comments. You can see again over the last five years, a substantial amount of capital deployed toward reshaping the portfolio.
We also have embarked upon share repurchases, $70 million over that time horizon. We have a current open authorization of $30 million that expires in December of this year. Will always be up for review. We have a recurring dividend, $0.30 a share to all shares, both A and B equally, that has been in place and been a dividend payer for a while. The $0.30 per share has been here the last few years. Have continued that as we proceed forward, as we drive additional EBITDA growth and margin expansion. We have a strong balance sheet. We have $400 million of debt capacity, about $135 million outstanding as of the end of the last quarter. We took out debt as part of that capital deployment in 2024 for our largest acquisition, Motion Recruitment Partners, which again, was in the SET space.
We paid down about $137 of that in 2025. We focused on debt paydown, the dividend, selectively share repurchases. We did not acquire any businesses last year. Frankly, with the management changes and digesting the prior acquisitions, that was really the focus last year. We'll continue to look at both organic and inorganic growth drivers as we go forward and continue to expect to drive strong cash flow as we go forward. Where we're focused, again, touched on a little bit of this, growth. Again, we've created this growth office under Pat McCall. That's a significant emphasis. We have great opportunity. Historically, under the prior model that Kelly was operating under, we had a bit more of a decentralized BU-driven model, and now we're looking more at a One Kelly client-centric model.
We have large enterprise clients that have needs that span Kelly's portfolio of offerings. In many cases, we only have one or two offerings that we're currently providing to those enterprises. We have a great opportunity with the growth office under Pat's leadership, to drive growth. We have the education market, as I mentioned, there's substantial white space opportunity there. We're the dominant player. The therapy offering also has continued growth opportunities as we penetrate deeper into our existing relationships along with that white space opportunity across both of those. We have opportunities across SET and ETM with our specialty offerings, our outcome-based offerings, which is really where the market is going more, the talent solutions offerings, all of which show growth, by the way, in the first quarter on the talent solutions side.
We're seeing good progress there and we see a lot of opportunity there, and really, we're positioned well with where the market is going and what clients are telling us they're looking for from a solutions perspective. We're driving efficiency. We're looking at our cost base, structural, durable savings, how we operate, where we operate, integrating the acquisitions. There was a conscious decision not to integrate the acquisitions under the prior leadership, but that became not scalable and very inefficient. We've had a significant focus there, and we've made substantial progress on that. All the teams have been integrated. We're still working through some of the technology modernization, which we've gone through an initial phase at the end of last year.
We have another phase that we're implementing this year, we'll bring more and more of the business onto our new modernized tech stack, along with AI enablement across the enterprise, both internally and client-facing, as we progress forward. Culture, important, right? The pace we operate, really putting the client at the center of everything we do, driving visibility. Chris is out in the markets, I'm out in the markets, all of our leadership team. We want to hear from clients, we want to hear from our talent, we want to hear from our employees, there's a significant focus on rebuilding the culture and really putting that growth mindset and profitability mindset first and forward. Accountability. Setting expectations and meeting those expectations.
There has been some challenges with that with Kelly in the past, and we need to move past that, and we need to deliver on our commitments, both externally to the street as well as internally and to all of our stakeholders. I'm confident that the path that we're heading down here will yield the intended results. This is, as I said, this is a different Kelly, where we are today versus where we've operated in the past. New leadership, both at the board level, the management level, a refreshed and modernized portfolio, well-positioned within the enterprise space. Well-positioned across a number of different specialty areas. Leading positions in critical market areas. Now with this growth mindset and the margin expansion focus, we have a great opportunity to create value for our stakeholders as we drive forward.
With that, I'm happy to answer any questions from the group. Thank you again for your interest. Yeah, sure. Go ahead.
Pretty much every earnings call in the last quarter or two, the CEO is telling us about how AI is incredibly beneficial to the company, and how they need fewer employees. How does that affect you guys?
Well, we're no different in that regard. We are leveraging AI, the finance organization. We're driving it through this technology modernization. We're implementing Workday. It's a front office, middle office, back office platform. HubSpot on the front end, Bullhorn in the middle, which is a common staffing platform for all the talent management and payroll and billing, and then Workday on the back end. Getting all of our business onto a modernized tech stack also rationalizes our data architecture and allows us to really penetrate AI deeply throughout all of our work processes. We're doing that. On the business-facing side, our clients are asking us to help them deploy AI solutions, particularly in the technology and engineering arenas, Telecom arenas, some of those specialty areas.
Throughout all of our client-facing applications, we're enabling AI, whether it's better analytics, whether it's better workflows, and particularly in the talent solution space where we're managing those platforms on behalf of those clients, bringing all their workforce data into one holistic view, which is not something many companies do, and it's a differentiator for us in the market. As far as our employees, yeah, we'll drive efficiencies anywhere and everywhere we can. We have delivery model efficiencies. We're not as penetrated as we should be from a high-cost, low-cost perspective, so we have opportunities there. We have opportunities, as I mentioned, we were running in a more of a decentralized model previously, so as we look at more of an enterprise focus, we have opportunities to drive efficiencies in terms of some of those core processes that run across BUs that right now are a bit more BU-centric.
As we do all of that re-engineering, if you will, of how we operate, we're able to proliferate AI solutions and just drive efficiencies overall.
Sure. I appreciate that you're using it and that your clients are using it, but what does that mean in terms of how many people you're replacing?
I'm sorry. Apologies if I misunderstood. Yeah. No, in fact, we are seeing. It's an interesting dynamic, right? We've been in this low hire, low fire environment. There's all the noise in the market around AI, et cetera. The staffing industry's been declining. We're now starting to turn. The data is, both you've seen some of the players already announce that they had pivoted to growth. We're not far behind that. Our metrics are improving. As far as our rate of decline, we're at a 3.3% underlying decline in the first quarter, which was improved 60 basis points versus Q4. Again, we're calling for growth in the back half of the year.
I would say that some of the pressure that we've seen over the last years has been people not hiring or trying to figure out what their AI strategy was going to be, and therefore what it means for their workforce, or some of the changes they're already making in their workforce. We're now at a point where employers need more resources. They're looking for more flexible resources, project-based resources, contingent workers. We're actually well-positioned now to support employers on their AI journeys because that's historically where the value add from a contingent workforce comes into play, right? In periods of growth or in periods of uncertainty or complexity in the market that you don't want to necessarily be hiring.
You don't know exactly what your hiring needs are, but you know you have work that you need to get done today, and you know very clearly what that work is. Bring in some contingent workforce or someone to do that specific work, while you're evaluating your longer term needs. Yeah.
Just to follow up, when you read the headlines from, for example, large investment banks about how they're rapidly cutting the size of the new analyst classes, presumably across the vast landscape of businesses into which you place employees, there are some where you're seeing some drops and maybe in some other areas you're seeing more demand.
Give us a bit of context and color on where you see the pullback?
See the acceleration?
Yeah, we've definitely seen some pullback, I'd say, in some of our financial services clients. We have others, we've signed new logos, and we're expanding services. They may be shrinking their workforce, but we're providing a new service for them, and so therefore it's growth for us. It's a bit of kind of hard to read. Certainly, some of the technology companies we support, data center. If you think about just that whole data center ecosystem, we play in many different facets of that. A number of the companies that we work with that are part of that, be it the telecom carriers, be it some of the equipment manufacturers, the power generation, the hyperscalers themselves, we're seeing certainly growth there. The semiconductor space has been a growth area for us.
We've commented that telecom has been an area we've been growing consistently each quarter on a year-over-year basis. Some of the areas where we've seen pullback or we saw a big pullback in a legacy chemical plastics manufacturing company. That was one of our top customers, and they basically cut their demand in half as they've gone through a restructuring, and their industry is under significant pressure. Really, we have a very diverse portfolio and a diverse set of offerings. There's no really one clear answer to that. It's a little bit client by client, but is how I'd answer the question.
Thank you. Can I do one more maybe?
Yeah, sure.
You had the slide up with the three different segments.
of the margins. The gross margin on the enterprise, if I'm reading that right, is 19.6%.
Correct.
Versus education, where it's 14.5%, the ETM margin is much lower.
Yes.
What's coming out there in terms of?
Education is very much a scale business, right? We get in there. It's a bit of a different model. It's a contract outsource model. We develop a large talent pool. We're filling these positions every day. The Enterprise Talent Management. We have some clients where we have dedicated on-site teams. We have other clients. We're sort of a preferred vendor. There's other clients where we're just one of many. We're just fighting for every single job order that comes through and trying to fill those reqs. We have the outsourcing in there. We have the talent solutions in there. There's a broader variety of services. By the way, there's margin opportunity there. That should not be a 1.4% business, nor should it be a 19.6% gross margin business. They both should be higher.
You have more SG&A to deliver the ETM services than you do for the education service because you get this scale play on the education side. You had a question?
Yeah. This is kind of a related two-part question. As growing education, you said it went from, what, a few hundred million to a billion?
In five years, and between organic and M&A. Do you plan to grow that more? Just as M&A in general, are you going to grow the divisions equally? Is it opportunistic, or what's the kind of plan going forward for that?
Yeah. No, it's a good question. The therapy business was the primary acquisition within education during that time horizon, which was less than a $100 million business. It's, call it 78% of the portfolio, in total as we sit here today. That was largely organic growth as education clients were coming out of COVID and trying to figure out how do we manage this going forward, what's the best opportunity. We were building the market, by the way. We were a leader in the market. We still have our first client. It's one of our largest clients from over 20 years ago. It's a very sticky model as well.
As that value proposition is proven more and more, over and over again in a fairly risk-averse buyer community, think school supervisors and the like, it becomes more and more the accepted way as we go forward. There's still significant white space there to grow into organically. Inorganically, I would say it's more opportunistic across the portfolio. As we look at now the landscape going forward, what are the right adjacencies, what specialty areas can we double down on? We acquired scale previously. We bought a large IT services business. We bought the telecom business. We bought the therapy business. We were buying scale in specific areas, and now we have that scale, and now it's how can we expand upon that or what adjacencies can we expand into?
No thought to add a fourth?
We don't have anything announced that would suggest that we're looking at a fourth division, you never say never. I know we're out of time, again, thank you everybody for your interest. We're happy to meet as part of the conference here today or offline. Scott Thomas, again, is our head of IR, and I think our contact information is available. We work with Three Part as well. John's a point of contact as well. Thank you again, everybody.