Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for attending. The next presentation is Kelly Services. Kelly is a leading provider of specialty talent solutions. The stock trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol KELYA. The B shares trade under KELYB. With us for management are Troy Anderson, Chief Financial Officer, and Scott Thomas, Head of IR. Kelly is also an advisory client of Three Part Advisors, so if anybody would like to meet with them separately, get in touch with me afterwards, and we will make some arrangements. With that, I will turn it over to Scott.
Good afternoon. Appreciate everybody's interest. As John mentioned, I am Scott Thomas, Head of Investor Relations with Kelly Services. With me here is Troy Anderson, our Chief Financial Officer, and on behalf of both of us, really appreciate your interest in the company. Before we get started, just a couple housekeeping items. We will talk about some forward-looking statements. We have no obligation to update those statements after this presentation. We will also talk about non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations to those measures are all on our IR website at ir.kellyservices.com. With that out of the way, let us give an introduction to Kelly. Kelly invented the staffing industry in 1946, and we have been reinventing it ever since. We started as a local temp staffing agency with a focus on light industrial and clerical roles. Now in our 80th year, Kelly has grown into a leading global specialty talent solutions provider.
We meet employers' needs across a multitude of industries, from science, engineering, technology, and telecom, to, as I mentioned, light industrial and also education. We are the largest provider of substitute teachers in the United States. Our differentiated offerings and level of service we provide to clients and talent are unmatched, and that is why Forbes has named Kelly the number two staffing firm in the United States. Also unmatched here at Kelly is the value creation opportunity that we have. To talk a little bit more about that, I am going to kick it over to Troy Anderson. Troy, over to you.
Thank you, Scott, and I echo Scott's comments. Thank you all for joining us here today. I joined Kelly almost two years ago now, October 2024, and I was new to the industry, but I have been in and around the workforce solution space for most of my career. As Scott mentioned, I think we have a great value creation opportunity here with Kelly for all shareholders. We have done a significant amount of work on our operating model and our strength. We have been around for 80 years. William Russell Kelly started the company back in 1946, so our 80th anniversary is this year. We have this iconic brand. We really started the staffing industry, and of course, it has evolved, I think, quite a bit over the 80 years.
We have an iconic brand, and throughout our history, we've continued to evolve the business and most recently, through a number of different actions around acquisitions and divestitures, more recently with management change. We'll talk a little bit about all of that. As Scott mentioned, we have a differentiated portfolio of capabilities across the business, significant domain expertise in a number of different areas, science, engineering, technology, the light industrial space, managed services, a whole number of other areas. Again, we'll talk a little bit about that. We've done quite a bit of transformation on our core operations, reducing SG&A, driving more scalability and efficiency. We're in the middle of a major technology modernization initiative, which again, we'll touch base on. We've been balancing our capital allocation. We do have a dividend, $0.30 a share, that's been in place for a number of years.
We've done some share repurchase over the years. As I mentioned, we've done quite a bit of acquisitions. Most importantly, and more recently, we have a refreshed board. We have a refreshed management team. Chris Layden, our CEO, joined us last year. We had a board change earlier this year, including a few new members that joined in May. With all of that packaged together, we have, I think, a significant value creation proposition for our shareholders. Speaking of some of that change, that leadership change, Chris joined us in September of last year, so he's coming up on his one-year anniversary next week. He is an industry veteran, been in the industry over his entire career. He's been in all aspects of the industry.
Started as an intern in recruiting and has worked his way both through the Manpower organization, which is a large global generalist in our space, both from a sales, operations, acquisition, and integration, transformation perspectives. He was most recently, prior to joining Kelly, the COO of a healthcare-oriented, hypergrowth, single-segment company called Prolink. He joined, and he's made a number of changes since he joined. We have a new Chief Growth Officer, Pat McCall, who again brings significant industry experience and across the larger players as well as smaller players in the space. Joel Leege joined as our leader of our Science, Engineering, and Technology business. He joined in March. Again, deep industry experience across a number of players, both large and small.
Most recently, Alan Stukalsky joined as our Chief Product and Technology Officer, where we're now combining all of our go-to-market digital capabilities along with our internal IT and technology infrastructure, to really accelerate our AI enablement and our overall technology modernization, as well as our product capabilities with our clients and go-to-market. I mentioned the board. I jumped over that one just to hit the management, but we do have a controlling shareholder, so the A shares and B shares John mentioned. The B shares are 92% held by the Hunt Companies, who acquired those shares at the end of January of this year. With that, the board was reconstituted.
We have 11 board members currently, and four of those were appointed at the time of the transaction, and three more joined here in May. The other four board members are Chris, our CEO, along with three of the prior Kelly board members, the leader of our compensation committee, the chair of the audit committee, and then our cyber and digital expert, who is the Chief Digital Officer at Delta Air Lines. Jumping into the business a little bit, we do operate in three segments: Kelly Enterprise Talent Management, Science, Engineering, and Technology, and Education. You can see they have a bit of a different profile across them. In the pie chart off to the right, you can see the general mix, ETM being roughly half of the business, just a little bit under half the business, SET being about $1.2 billion, and then Education about $1 billion.
Our overall gross profit is just above 20%. These are 2025 numbers, and our EBITDA margin was 2.6% for last year. That was down a little bit relative to the prior year. We have guided to 10 to 20 basis points of margin expansion this year, and we do expect gross profit expansion this year as well. As you look at the three segments, you can see that ETM is right around that 20%, SET is at 25%, and then Education at 14.5%. But the conversion to EBITDA varies quite a bit underneath of them. ETM has been under some pressure more recently, at the end of last year, beginning of this year, but is strongly bouncing back here in more recent quarters. We do expect that EBITDA margin. All three of them will have EBITDA margin expansion this year.
The SET business at 5.5%, and again, Education at 4.6%. It is more of a scale business, so roughly a third of the Education converts to EBITDA, whereas only about 20% of the SET converts to EBITDA, and about 10% of ETM, but again, that is a little bit distorted in the near term. You can see also the footprint is a bit different across the three segments. ETM is more of a global, more so in our managed services offering. What we call talent solutions is really where we are providing managed service capability for large enterprises. We run their talent platform for them. There can be multiple suppliers into that platform, Kelly being one of them. Not always, but certainly that is our preference is to have Kelly have a prominent space in those platforms. RPO is recruitment process outsourcing, and PPO is payroll process outsourcing.
That is about a quarter of the ETM business. About half the ETM business is the industrial and office clerical staffing, and then business process outsourcing, where we run production lines or other parts of an enterprise's operations on their behalf on an outsource arrangement. We provide the management, the safety, the credentialing and requirements, and typically on a multi-year type of contract relationship. From a global perspective, we support clients in 80 to 100 countries, but we are not providing the staffing in those countries. We manage then other suppliers who are doing that. But we have footprint in about 15 countries overall. SET is largely North American based, although in the life sciences space, they do tend to have a little bit more of an international mix with the large pharma companies, and life sciences companies in particular typically have a global footprint.
But there we do have temp staffing, perm placement, outcome based, so about 40% of that business. Outcome based is sort of a broad category that we report in when we do our revenue disaggregation. But in the SET example, it is more project-based resources. So whether it is an IT solutions project, it is a clinical trial that we are supporting for a 12-month basis, and we are providing clinicians and remixing capabilities and providing different services in support of that. Telecom, it could be a new capital build of RF engineering support or other types of capabilities around that field testing type services.
So different project-based services across those, and that is growing. So that is a real industry shift, but then our solutions also are more oriented toward that more outcome-based model. And then on the Education side, we are the largest provider of substitute teacher outsourcing support for school districts. So this is public schools, K-12, where they will outsource the whole talent management, inbound, outbound, payrolling, the whole support model from a master vendor perspective. So we are an exclusive vendor when we are under contract to do that. That is 90-plus percent of that portfolio currently.
We also provide pediatric therapeutics services in school largely, but there is an opportunity that that can expand more out of school. We do have one market where we actually run an out of school facility. That gives us after-hours support. That gives us weekend. It is a little bit more flexibility in summer. So that gives us more flexibility with the students and the parents, and a more stable revenue model for the therapists. Those are licensed therapists that are on staff for us that are working to support students inside of the schools. That business has grown significantly over the last several years.
It is a growing market as well. Only about 30% of the market is outsourced currently. So that continues to be a growth opportunity for us as we proceed forward. So that is the portfolio. Just a quick flyby. So, we can say we are good and great all we want, but it is more important for other people to say that about us. So, across all of our Kelly overall and across all of our business units, we have a substantial amount of recognition, both in terms of our size and scale. So you can see at the Kelly level, the number two staffing firm in the U.S., number two professional recruiting firm, sixth largest staffing overall. Under ETM, we are the number one provider of total workforce solutions. So that is significant recognition for us in that space, along with a number of other significant recognition there.
The PEAK Matrix leader is a significant recognition. And then in science, engineering, technology, again, some Everest Group recognition there, as well as some large scale in the life sciences space, the engineering space, in the IT staffing space. And again, education, we are the dominant provider in that space. We have about 50% of the market share, staffing thousands of teachers a day and millions a year. So it is a very high-scale business. So I talked a little bit about acquisitions and some of the change over the years. So the prior CEO, Peter Quigley, took the reins in 2019, and he embarked upon a pretty significant transformation of the company from a portfolio perspective, and from an operating model perspective. And you could see a dramatic shift in the pies there. We did narrow down the focus.
We had about $1 billion of international staffing business that we were doing, but it was very, very low margin. One of the key focuses of that transformation was margin expansion. The thought was we were subscale internationally from a staffing support perspective, and therefore, it would make more sense to divest of that business, but maintain that global footprint I talked about earlier, just mainly in support of our managed services clients. Education, you can see, has grown dramatically from 6% of the portfolio to 24%. That was largely organic, although we did acquire that therapy business, which again, is less than 10% of the overall portfolio. Then you can see, we've combined what was called OCG or Outsourcing and Consulting Group and P&I, Kelly Professional & Industrial, into one segment. That reshaped us.
Through divestitures and acquisitions, we essentially replaced all that revenue, $4.5 billion to $4.3 billion. Meanwhile, over that time horizon, the industry was shrinking. There was a significant bounce back out of COVID in 2021. But 2022 through 2025, the industry was declining. Call it mid to upper single digits in 2023, more mid to low in 2024, and low in 2025. There was a lot of industry pressure over that time horizon. Yet we were able to essentially replace that revenue and keep that organic decline to somewhat of a minimum. But importantly, on the EBITDA and margin expansion, you can see down at the bottom that our gross margin went up 200 basis points from 18% to 20%. We shrank revenue, remixed the portfolio, but delivered more gross margin out of that portfolio.
In conjunction with that, we also had a substantial amount of SG&A reduction to drive EBITDA margin expansion. Over that time horizon, EBITDA margin expanded 100 to 150 basis points in conjunction with both the gross margin improvement and the cost improvement. This is the EBITDA expansion story. Sorry, I jumped ahead of the slide a little bit there, but you can see Kelly's historical average in that sort of 1.5% to 2% range, and really that margin expansion being driven over that time horizon. Now, again, a little bit of a pullback here from 2024 to 2025. We had a few discrete impacts with some of the macro environment last year that four of our top 10 customers had a material reduction in demand. Only one of them was actually a lost customer.
The other three were just reductions in their business model that we were providing a substantial amount of staffing support. That put some pressure on margin last year. We've guided to 10 to 20 basis points of expansion this year, and we expect continued expansion beyond that. But you can see still well above the Kelly historical average and a lot of opportunity for more upside, as we continue to drive toward growth, which we do expect organic growth in the back half of the year this year and then continued into the next year and beyond. What will drive that growth? Is the question. There's a number of factors. One is just some of the changes that we're making in the business.
Again, I mentioned that there was an operating model change that Peter, the prior CEO, had embarked upon, where moved more toward a decentralized sort of BU centric model. That worked, I think, pretty well for a good bit of that time. But as we went through the acquisitions, then some of the industry pressure and the macro pressures built up that we lost some opportunities to drive growth through that model. As Chris Layden has come on board, we have revisited that and are now looking more at what we call the One Kelly model.
We are really bringing all of our, being more of a client-centric provider where we look at the total wallet share of each of our clients and say, "Well, we can bring IT solutions, engineering solution, manufacturing solutions, managed services to all of our clients, not just sell them individually as one." That creates an opportunity for us, but there is also broader macro opportunities around AI, around industrial reshoring. The education market, there continues to be a talent skills gap, and just total talent shortage there as fewer people are entering the education space. We are well-positioned around all of these. There was a period of time when shortly after ChatGPT came out and AI was really in the early boom phase, although it is still in very much a boom phase, but where it was, staffing will be really significantly impacted, negatively impacted.
All the jobs are going to go away, and nobody will need staffing firms because we can just do it all ourselves. That has proven maybe not to be the case. There is actually a lot more opportunity because it has created disruption, and it gives us an opportunity really to work with our clients, to manage their workforce in a more effective way. The data center investment itself, the semiconductors, we have a large presence in the semiconductor industry.
We touch the data center ecosystem through almost all of our offerings. Think of it as anything in and around the data center, not the physical building itself, be it the equipment manufacturers, be it the chips, as I mentioned, be it the telecom infrastructure, be it engineering support, certification, any number of ways that we can support that ecosystem and do support that ecosystem, just through our existing client relationships.
We also have an opportunity to now bring all that into a targeted offering to support the hyperscalers and some others. In fact, we highlighted a new opportunity that we had won with one of the hyperscalers in our earnings call just a few weeks ago by having a more focused go-to-market solution in support of them. Across these different areas, again, in industrial reshoring, a huge amount of activity that is driving in the U.S. We have relationships with many different manufacturers and credibility in the manufacturing and industrial space that allows us to be able to support those clients. Again, we are a dominant provider in the education space and continue to see growth opportunities there. From a capital allocation perspective, I touched on this a little bit before, but we have a disciplined approach. We have a strong balance sheet. We generate cash flow, free cash flow.
We did take on some debt with some of those acquisitions. That was $240 million at the time of the last major acquisition in the middle of 2024 that we've since paid down to about $100 million. It fluctuates a little bit based on working capital needs in any given quarter. We expect to continue to pay that down. We've done targeted buybacks. We did $50 million buyback in 2022 and 2023, and then we did $10 million each in 2024 and 2025. Again, we've done a significant amount of capital deployment toward acquisitions over the years. We did not do an acquisition in 2025. Between the leadership change and some of the other dynamics of the business, that was not really as much of a focus for us. We have not transacted so far in 2026.
It's a very fragmented industry, and there's a lot of opportunity to continue to look at acquisitions as a way to supplement organic growth. Certainly, we have organic growth opportunities that we want to make sure we're taking advantage of in the fullest sense, and supplementing that really in a targeted way with any acquisitions that we do. Then again, we have the dividend that has been fairly consistent the last several years. Our focus really is around growth, it's around efficiency, it's around culture. I've touched on these in a number of ways. Just to recap it, we have an opportunity to capture greater market share through the growth office that we've established, through really maximizing our wallet share across our enterprise account relationships, a more targeted retail presence.
Not in the retail industry, but retail being local branch offices really targeted to individual markets. We have an opportunity with, again, with education, and our positioning there, and really continuing to drive upscale in the SET business with our outcome-based solutions. We continue to have cost opportunities. I mentioned our technology modernization. That will allow us, which we've already done several migrations to date. We just moved to an enterprise CRM platform in June. We consolidated all of our acquisitions on the platform in December of last year. We have a major cutover, so we'll have all of our employees on a common human capital platform here in October. Then we'll continue bringing more and more waves of the business on the platform over the next two years.
That will allow us to continue to drive operating efficiencies, more standardization of our back office, and operational support processes allow us to leverage more low-cost geographies in how we do some of our work. We continue to see opportunities from a cost scalability and efficiency perspective. The integrations are largely done, I would say, from an organizational perspective, but there's still some of that opportunity from a technology perspective. Then AI, we're enabling AI all over the organization in support of our clients, in support of how we do work internally, and there's significant opportunity to continue driving that.
Really the culture thing I'd say is really significant as well with Chris Layden on board, his client centricity, driving accountability across the organization, being highly visible both with employees and with clients, and really driving that same mindset across the leadership team, myself included, being out in markets and visiting with clients, visiting with teams, and really getting people energized around driving Kelly to success, not just individual teams or business unit performance.
We've made significant strides there and have more opportunity to continue improving from there. That's, I think, a recap on the prepared remarks. I'd be happy to answer any questions, but we're excited about where we are. We had a really nice quarter here this last quarter, and we have strong expectations for the back half of the year and the momentum that will allow us to carry into next year. We're excited to meet and talk to all of you, and all of your friends too. But I'm happy to take any questions. Yeah, Bill.
Troy, would you please discuss the dynamics behind the one large customer that you lost? Was it last year that took place?
Yeah. Just unrelated, we had a few of these customer dynamics, as I mentioned earlier. The one loss, it was a relationship we had for a number of years, a very large, if not the largest consumer electronics provider, global. We had a single offering relationship with them, in a contact center offering. It was 100% onshore, 100% remote. As they were revisiting some of their supply chain, and reshoring type of requirements that they were needing to meet with some of the policy changes that were going on last year. That was an easy way to move some work from high-cost geography to low cost. That ramped down very quickly. It was over $100 million a year run rate business that was fully ramped off as of August of last year.
Given that Chris Layden is now there, since that happened before he joined, given the current structure of the organization and the way you all are thinking, if that scenario were to replay, is there something different that you'd be able to do or would do when that client said, "Hey," if they gave you enough lead time, "Here's what we're thinking. Here are our concerns." Would you be able to play in their sandbox?
I think we would. That specific relationship, could we have saved it or not? Again, it was an outsize type of model there. It was certainly a wake-up call, if you will, for the leadership team about that client centricity and the relationship building. All of our large clients now, we have a very direct C-suite interaction with on a recurring basis, a much deeper understanding of how we're performing, what we're doing, what's working, what's not working
. I think Chris Layden's very first client call was a little bit of a, "Hey, we're in trouble here. We need some help." We're now looked at as one of their top suppliers, which in a relationship that has grown now to, I think, our fifth or sixth largest client in the span of just a few years. So we're taking a much, much different approach with our clients and being recognized for it.
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for the question. Anyone else have? Yeah.
The points about AI, you talk about using it enabling in the business, and data center temp opportunities. You kind of dismissed the threat to the core business of providing, if weather companies continue to need the service. Can you unpack that a little bit? Why are AI agents either not an opportunity for you to pivot and provide the service as opposed to providing this? Or why is it not a threat as opposed to not a threat yet? You know.
Yeah, no, it's a good point. Certainly wasn't intending to be dismissive. I mean, we're all learning more every day about how it works and where it works, and how companies are adapting to that. We saw some companies react very quickly and make some substantial changes in their businesses. Now we're seeing some companies maybe pull some people back in-house or maybe need more support. Maybe they didn't get quite where they thought they could from an AI capability perspective as quickly as they thought. Now they need to bring back. They don't want to hire the full-time people back, but they need temporary support. There's, I would say, some short-term opportunities that have arisen. How short that is, don't know. Is it months? Is it six months? Is it a year or two years?
But if you look at a lot of the work that we do, I think one of the big also learnings that we've all experienced here is that AI will certainly change work. It changes how we do work. It changes the way we do work. It also is a productivity enhancer. Maybe in some cases, yeah, you can reduce people. In other cases, you just don't need to hire people. Again, there's these transition periods with different customers. Customers also need help implementing AI in their companies, and that's where we can bring solutions, and we are bringing solutions to them. In some cases, we've brought solutions now that are driving much faster throughput, for recruiting type support, for talent management support.
There's certain things we have to be careful about from a compliance and regulatory perspective in terms of working with people and meeting labor laws, et cetera. But there's opportunities in a number of different ways of how we support our clients. But if you look at substitute teachers, for example, that's largely going to be a people-based business. Now, will AI continue to evolve how it affects the work that they do, how we manage the work that they do? Absolutely. But it will still continue to be largely a people-based business. Manufacturing, certainly robotics and other automations have been expanding in manufacturing for many, many years, and AI will just continue enhancing some of those things. The semiconductor relationships we have, for example, the plant itself, the manufacturing of the chips is almost entirely automated.
The tool servicing, the moving of material from one place to another, the moving of wafers from one place to another, some of that is automated and some of that needs to be people based. The managing of the inflow and outflow from the loading dock to the front end of the actual fab itself, the tool desk managing. Some of that's lower-end labor. It's not computer science engineers, but still, it's work that needs to be done to enable the automation and support. So those are just examples of some of the ways that as we look across the business, I think as different, whether it's buy side, sell side, or other people look at the industry, they realize that, hey, there's a lot of work here that's going to continue to be needed.
How it gets done will change, and then I think how we position ourselves relative to other companies in terms of supporting our clients through their AI journey, and continuing to be at least keeping up with competition, if not ahead of the competition in terms of how we're enabling AI in our organization is really what our focus is. Yeah.
Why is that side of the business a higher margin compared to the rest?
On the SET side, you are talking about? Yeah. Those are higher value specialty positions. We are talking about engineering, we are talking about computer science or cyber people. We are talking about telecom engineers. We have PhD scientists in some cases working on some of the life science clients. In terms of just the pure staffing perspective, you have higher bill rates and therefore higher markups and higher margin that we make on those positions. But we also have a lot more of that solutions orientation. We are able to package together, whether it is a team of people or truly an end-to-end project that we are able to manage just ensuring we deliver the outcome. What problem are we solving for you, and what is the best way to solve it, and what outcome are you looking for specifically?
Then we can engineer the most optimal way to do that, and that gives us an opportunity for a little bit more of a value-based approach. We also are able to move a little bit more upscale in terms of the type of work we do. If a Deloitte or somebody like that is, we are not going to be an SI, and we do not carry a bench and those types of things, but we have virtual teams that we are able to pull together very quickly through our talent management processes and core group of people that we do have on our teams. We are able to package together teams very quickly with specific skill sets that we can deliver capabilities and move upstream in those capabilities. What would be too low price for them is very good margin for us. Yes.
Do you have any workforce with specialized skill set, like nursing staff and physicians? Do you place them?
Specifically in healthcare or just more broadly?
In the healthcare.
We do not really support healthcare directly as a staffing or solutions provider. It is more life sciences, so it is more the pharma, med device, those types of companies where we are supporting the work that they do.
Okay.
I think we are right at time here. Thank you again all very much. Hope the conference has been good for you, and hope to see you at the next one or as a follow-up. Please, as John said, reach out to him or to Scott directly. Thank you all very much.