1143: Building a Transformation-Ready Finance Function | Troy Anderson, CFO, Kelly Services
Description
When Troy Anderson accepted the CFO seat at Kelly Services in 2024, he stepped into an organization that, as he tells us, “had done a number of acquisitions … and really invested in the business.” The legacy staffing firm had spent nearly $1 billion to expand its reach but had yet to fully integrate those pieces. Anderson’s mission: align a global operation that had grown faster than its systems.
It was a familiar challenge. Across three decades and multiple industries, Anderson has made a career of steering companies through transformation. At Universal Technical Institute, he led a finance overhaul that supported a business which, he tells us, “more than doubled the company.” Before that, as a senior finance leader at Xerox and its services spinoff Conduent, he helped raise $2 billion in debt and “build out the public company infrastructure … from scratch.” That experience, preceded by an investor-relations rotation where he worked directly with Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and CFO Kathy Mikells, became “the game changer” that propelled him toward the CFO office.
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Now, at Kelly, Anderson is guiding a transformation “on both sides of the ledger … organizational and technology.” He’s integrating recent acquisitions, modernizing finance systems, and preparing the company for the cyclical realities of a staffing industry he describes as “in decline for about two years now.”
His approach reflects a pattern consistent throughout his career: when others see complexity, Anderson sees structure waiting to be built—and an opportunity to apply every lesson learned from the transformations that came before.
CFOTL: It was 2024 when you were named CFO of Kelly Services, a company that’s been around since the 1940s but has clearly undergone major transformation in recent years. Tell us about Kelly Services today—what’s happening there?
Anderson: At my prior company, Universal Technical Institute, we went through a major transformation—we more than doubled the company, expanded offerings, and grew both organically and inorganically. After five years there, I began thinking about the next chapter of my career. I wanted something larger in scale, more global, and perhaps back in the services space—an organization that needed someone to help lead through transformation.
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That’s when the opportunity at Kelly came along. Over the past five years, Kelly had made several acquisitions and divestitures, really investing in the business. They’d also done a major SG&A reduction, doubling margins in the process. It felt like the right place to take everything I’d learned throughout my career and apply it all in one setting.
Kelly has a great legacy—almost 80 years, a strong brand, and a solid foundation. We recently had both a CFO and CEO transition, each part of a planned succession. Our new CEO started in September, and together we’re now focused on integrating roughly a billion dollars in acquisitions that, until now, hadn’t been fully combined.
So, we’re driving a significant integration effort—both customer-facing and back-office, including finance. The goal is to maximize returns on those acquired assets while staying agile in what has been a challenging labor environment. The staffing industry has been in decline for about two years, so building a model that can flex up or down with client demand is critical. That’s what we’re working toward—organizationally and technologically—so we can keep Kelly adaptive, efficient, and ready for the next phase of growth.
Kelly Services | www.kellyservices.com | Troy, Michigan
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