And now, onto the show.
From Data Rails...
Welcome to FP&A Today.
I'm your host, Glenn Hopper.
Today I'm joined by Troy Anderson, Chief Financial Officer of Kelly Services, a global leader in staffing and workforce solutions.
Troy has spent his career driving transformation across some of the most complex business environments in technology, education and professional services.
Before joining Kelly, he served as CFO at Universal Technical Institute, where he helped double revenue over five years through a mix of organic growth and strategic acquisitions.
Earlier in his career, he held senior finance leadership roles at Conduent and Xerox, where he helped guide major business and finance transformations.
At Kelly Troy leads the financial strategy for a company that literally helps build the workforce of the future.
He brings a unique perspective on how finance and human capital strategy intersect and how CFOs can serve as catalysts for both business and workforce transformation.
Troy, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Glenn.
Really appreciate the opportunity to be part of your show.
Yeah.
So you're a business transformation guy, which means you're not one of those CFOs who sits at the desk and reads the whole Wall Street Journal, cover to cover, every day.
I just looking you know, as we talked before the show and looking at your background.
You've led finance organizations through major transformations at what Xerox Conduent UTI now Kelly.
So with that I mean looking back over your career and being that much of a part of a transformation.
It's one thing to just step in to a job and just keep doing that job, but to really change and move the finance function.
Were there pivotal moments that shaped your approach to the CFO role along the way?
Yeah, it's a great question.
Of course, over 35 years, there's a lot of experiences.
I didn't start out saying I want to be a transformation guy, but I went through some very large mergers and post-merger integration efforts earlier in my career telecom industry and then and of course went through about a dozen years in the business services space where we were standalone company and then acquired and spun back out again and so through all of that I just learned a lot about change and transformation and of course had finance transformation as part of that and I would point to probably a few examples.
So in the conduit life cycle, which is really about a dozen years, Affiliated Computer Services was a standalone business services company, not very well known but a 6 billion public company.
Great customers.
No name acquired by Xerox, great global brand, trying to move more into the service space.
And shortly after that transaction closed I had an opportunity to move into an investor relations role in the corporate Xerox business office.
And up to that point in my career I'd really been been really an internal FPA guy, corporate FPA, the business partner kind of roles.
And and that was just such a different perspective for me to really have that outside in lens be part of the C-suite conversations on a day-to-day basis.
Represent the C-suite out in the investment community.
Build those investment community relationships.
So that was a really pivotal moment that I think really changed my trajectory.
To where could this guy be a CFO to?
This guy's got the quals to be a CFO.
And of course it was a few years later before I had that opportunity.
And then the following that was the conduit spinoff from Xerox where now we I was essentially the deputy CFO and very closely working with the new CEO and new CFO and building a new organizational model.
We had an existing business.
We're rebuilding the plane as we were flying it and with the spin out and had to raise capital and then set up all the public company infrastructure and then go through again a major business transformation um uh as now a standalone public company and and then i would even just point to the uti role as a cfo which which was my first role a little bit later in my career i was i was at that point i was in my early 50s but i was able to bring all those experiences into that role but i stepped into that role and uh uh really went through again more transformation and change and uh rolled my sleeves up and and figured out a lot of things along the way and of course was able to leverage a lot of what i did but uh i would say i'm always Even now, I'm adapting to the circumstances around me.
There's no standing still.
You always have to learn.
You always have to adapt, be agile, react to the circumstances and bring value to whatever situation you're in.
It's got to be interesting being a transformation, a change guy in a field where you know, as finance and accounting people, we're risk averse by nature, maybe more so on the accounting side than the finance side even.
But change is very difficult.
And a lot of times when you're leading those transformations, The technology can be the greatest thing in the world.
It can all be very clear to you, but it can be difficult to bring people along with that change.
And especially if it's in an MA situation and I'm interested in both the merger part and then the spin out part and the change that that created.
How much, when you're doing transformations, How do you divide between the technology and processes and just getting the buy-in of the team?
Well, you have to have the buy-in of the team from the very beginning.
I mean when you start the transformation process.
I mean, clearly you have to do the legwork to figure out where the challenges are, where the technology gaps are, where the process inefficiencies are.
But getting the buy-in from the team is engaging them even in that process, and this is something we just did at kelly in the.
About this time last year we kicked off our transformation effort and of course it's the leadership team initially, and then you start bringing in a broader group of people and engage them and give them an opportunity to express their views.
And a lot of times that's where the best ideas come from are the frontline team or the lower level supervisors and managers?
But bringing them along in the process is absolutely critical.
And it's not just saying it, I can't just send one email.
Or make one announcement in a meeting and say, everybody good.
We have to consistently reiterate that message and expand upon that message.
What's in it for them?
What can they expect?
When can they expect it?
How will they benefit?
What will their impact be?
Will they lose their jobs?
Will the person next to them lose their job? a lot of which you can't answer.
Either you don't know the answer at that time or there's sensitivity around how you would answer that.
But the more you can share and express and lay that out for the broader team, then the more engaged they'll be and the more participatory and accepting they'll be of the change.
And, of course, technology change.
Even if there was no people impacts the technology change in itself.
You're going to have the early adopters.
You're going to have the people that are, yeah, I'll come along with you as long as you convince me.
And you're going to have the people that are, no, I think it's a bad idea.
And frankly, some of those folks just won't make it because everybody has to come along.
And that's been part of what we've been emphasizing with our transformation, which is a multi-year transformation, which makes it even harder because it's just this series of changes over time in big waves versus hey, we're going to take a year, we're going to do this thing and it's all going to be done.
It's an interesting effort and the fortunate thing at Kelly is that we're implementing Workday.
We're implementing a whole set of technologies.
Everybody is being impacted, whether it's the operations side, the financial side, the HR side.
And so we're all changing together and we have an enterprise-wide focus and effort around it.
And then, of course, I have my more targeted communications and change management and, of course, my own work streams specific to finances.
Yeah.
And that's, of course, all that with the backdrop of the transformation that everybody's talking about right now with AI.
Of course.
And that's a critical part of it as well.
So you think about the sort of the old school, what the CFO role was, and then think about you with all the transformation work that you've done.
And when we were talking before the show, something you mentioned I think I had the same wake up call.
It was my first CFO role where I moved into a private equity backed company.
And prior to that, I thought really of finance just as that internal function.
But you said when you moved into investor relations at Xerox that really changed the way you thought about finance from that same inward facing to more thinking like an investor.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, because for me, it was fascinating.
You know, smaller companies, PE backed and all that.
But you, seeing that at that IR role at a big known public company, how did that perspective, you know, how did that hit you and how did that influence the way you think about finance since and today?
Yeah.
One of the first really interesting elements of it.
When I moved into that role, of course, I was working with a whole group of people I had not met before.
And actually, it was a rotational role based out of the Xerox headquarters in Norwalk, Connecticut.
And so I had to get an apartment and I was staying there during the week and commuting on the weekends.
And And of course, we stay up there for extended periods during earnings and periods like that.
But of course, I come in, guns a blazing, I'm Mr. Energy and let's take the hill.
And after a few meetings, the senior leader there pulls me aside and says Troy, your job for the next 90 days is to do nothing.
Your sole job is to watch and learn um.
And i'm like, oh okay well, that's interesting, i've never had a job like this before, and so so even that just was an aha moment for me like okay, all right, you know there's, there's an element of um.
You know, you don't want to move too quickly, you don't want to assume you know everything, and i've taken that forward in every role change i've been in, including again coming into kelly, where it was just i'm going to talk to people, i'm going to observe, i'm going to learn, And so that was one big learning moment out of it.
But but more specifically to your question and my approach to finance, again, I think it's there are things that matter more and less.
And so you. in the investment community is focused on just big picture rock items.
Some analysts will dig in really deep in certain areas.
They'll have a very detailed model and others are working at 80,000 feet and moving really fast.
But being able to discern what was important to each of them individually so that we could focus our time and attention appropriately.
Being able to learn the business.
So I had to learn the whole business versus just the services piece of the business that I came out of.
And then being able to articulate that in a meaningful way to the investment community, the analysts etc.
And then really the working with the C-suite.
So it was really my first big immersion into the C-suite and just how the C-suite operates, you know, not just at the CEO, CFO level, but with all of the leaders, and how people engage and what the how the communication flows.
There were just so many elements of it from a learning perspective that allowed me then, when I moved back into a business unit role which they actually moved me into a role, into a troubled business unit back to the transformation guy to help not just the business but also that business unit leader who was struggling a bit with with communications and engagement with the senior leadership team.
So to help him kind of turn the business around but also help him be more successful in engaging with Xerox corporate leadership.
And it worked and obviously, you know, led to the spin out with Conduent.
Yeah.
And I'm liking, I'm sort of seeing the pieces all fit together here.
And I guess if we go From Xerox, then back to UTI, where double revenue reshaped the business model.
I'm guessing there was a lot of M&A activity in there too.
There's probably a lot of learning experience, a lot of due diligence in that.
And I'm thinking, and transformation also.
So at UTI, then what was the transformation there?
And going through that doubling of the revenue, building the financial functions, you know, making something scalable, that's kind of built out for the future.
What were your takeaways there and your focus, and what did you pull from that that you're applying in your roles today?
A tremendous experience.
I just, I can't say enough.
In fact, I just the other night had dinner with some of my former colleagues there.
The mandate at UTI company had been seven straight years of revenue decline and profitability decline.
They had.
This was 2019.
When I took the role, a few years earlier, had received a lifeline from a private equity firm.
So they had a preferred shareholder in the private equity firm was their.
I had paper control of the company.
And shortly after I started they elevated the COO to the CEO role.
So they made a CEO change.
And uh, we had to go raise some capital.
So our whole mandate was develop a five-year plan that will double the company and completely change the trajectory the company had been on.
And for those that don't know, universal technical institute's career skills training it's a for-profit education institute, some public company.
So we developed that five-year plan.
We we went to market and raised capital with really a one-pager that just said here's what we're going to do with the money.
Can't tell you what the outcome is going to be, but we're going to go build some campuses, we're going to invest in some programs, we're going to go buy some some other schools, maybe expand into the healthcare, some other areas.
And uh, and we'll come back to you later and tell you how we did and uh, you know they bought it.
We went through.
Six months later i'm in covid and we're shutting all our buildings down.
And uh, we had just raised the money right before the market started tanking.
So that first year was a bit dicey but we came out of it guns ablaze and we acquired a smaller school that gave us a lot more programs that we were able to port across the existing UTI footprint.
And then we did acquire a healthcare school, but we also had a significant amount of organic growth.
And of course, career skills training and healthcare training are just booming.
The demand far outstrips the supply for those types of workers entry-level workers into those fields.
And so we were right place, right time making investments.
We did really well on the investments.
We looked at some much more expensive healthcare schools and we were able to acquire the one that we ultimately did for much less.
And it was a tremendous value and untapped It just wasn't really run that well.
And so we brought that execution to that and investment to move that business forward.
So ultimately took a 330 million revenue company to almost 800 million, when I left 150 to 200 million market cap.
They've been touching almost 2 billion here recently and announced a new five-year strategy which essentially replicated that prior one, but much heavier on the organic growth side, shortly before I left in September, October of 24.
And they're executing on that now.
So I can't say enough about that experience.
Of course, bringing all that into Kelly, along with my prior experiences, there's a lot of similarities.
We have a dual class stock capital structure.
We're undervalued.
Kelly has historically been undervalued from a EBITDA multiple perspective relative to the industry.
There's been some performance challenges of late.
Had been through some transformation prior to my start and a lot of acquisitions, but not a lot of integration.
So we're going through this integration, we're going through this technology change I referenced previously and going through the transformation with the finance organization which um, what was interesting about the uti transformation was that it was all about taking a very small team that did a little bit of everything and creating a team that could scale to write more than double the company and use new technologies.
We implemented one stream and some other tools and a conduit.
It was really all about reshaping the organization, putting in technology and shrinking the organization and I would say Kelly's more about upgrading the skills and the talent and the technology.
As we do the integration work and we streamline the technology, we can operate more efficiently, But it's not that we're inefficient in terms of how we're set up today.
It's just our operating structure creates significant inefficiencies for us.
So as the operating structure is streamlined and our technology infrastructure is streamlined, we'll be able to streamline the organizational model again, along with AI, and looking at high cost, low cost, leverage and things like that.
It's interesting hearing you talk about transformation, because if I look at the nature of the work that you've done, so I'm going back to the conduit bring in and then spin off.
And then, as you were talking about that I was thinking about in so much MA activity, the post-merger integration is the hardest part and how infrequently that happens and where That's where synergies just die, because the people never get things integrated like they want.
So on paper you look and you say, oh well, we're using this ERP, this EPM this, you know, whatever system, we're going to put them on the same.
We're going to have savings there.
We're going to be able to reduce headcount.
But then the actual hard work of transformation to to integrate those systems takes longer than planned or you don't get to the efficiencies that you thought you would.
And that's on the on the.
MA side, but then even on just transformation in general, when you're trying to change the direction and the focus and be able to get those efficiencies, it is a lot to manage.
And it's as a CFO you're very aware of the synergies that you're going for and the margins that you're looking for and what to get there.
But it's also Does it feel like competing priorities or you know you have to report on the numbers, but also when you're leading that transformation and part of it, you become much more of like an operational role because you have to make all that happen.
How do you balance that sort of the finance and the operations side and the you know again, I'm just thinking about the mergers and then spin outs, and when you can't succeed, the consequences are real.
So trying to divide that time and especially with public company requirements of all the reporting and everything that you have to do and audit and all that.
I don't know.
You must be a very busy man is what I'm getting to.
Well, and like I said, that's an area that I went through.
I'm almost ashamed to say it, but MCI and WorldCom back in the early 2000s, massive integration process.
And through each of the transactions as I've gone through my career, not only did I retain a role, I elevated from there.
So I'd been fortunate in that I was given opportunities, and then I was given bigger opportunities post the transactions, when a lot of people weren't.
But having gone through that, and then Sprint Nextel, another massive transaction then Xerox and ACS.
So I had a lot of exposure to both the deal side, which is the fun part, right?
The exciting part.
And then you got to your point.
You get to the hey, we signed the paper now that we're work the ends because we actually have to go do something about it, and so so bringing that in, a lot of what conduit was about was cleaning up legacy transactions that had never been integrated or only partially integrated to your point, And so really that three-year roadmap when we spun out from Xerox was all about collapsing systems and bringing organizations together.
I mean, we still had email domains and brands from 15 and 20 year ago acquisitions, for example.
UTI was interesting in that not totally organic, 100% organic company.
They had done one or two small acquisitions maybe 10 or 15 years prior, didn't work out.
So there was a complete aversion to that.
And in the for-profit education space, it's a highly regulated area.
So that was a bit more complicated anyway.
So we had to create the muscle in the organization to not just do the transaction but then the integration work.
But it was highly focused on the integration because that was the entire value stream for doing the acquisitions.
So when we bought the first smaller school, it was all about the value, was not the 25 million business we bought.
It was taking that 25 million business and replicating that 10 times over by expanding the same programs into all of the existing UTI campuses.
And then the same thing with healthcare.
We didn't merge the skilled trades and healthcare together.
They were two separate divisions.
We had to create a multi-divisional model, But at an integrated level, at a corporate level, in a common operating practices and those types of things.
So we were very disciplined with integration management office, et cetera.
The Kelly philosophy was we don't want to integrate.
And Kelly spent about 900 million on acquisitions between 2020 and 2024, the largest being in 2024, shortly before I joined, which was about a 450 million purchase price.
About half of that was one transaction.
But the philosophy was not to integrate, because they wanted the value, the standalone value of these staffing and solutions firms.
But Kelly was acquiring scale, for example in IT services.
But if you're going to market as three or four different entities, just because you add it up and you're a top 10 player in IT services, you're not going to market as a top 10 player.
And so we weren't getting the market value or recognition as that.
And really this last large acquisition was the turning point to where no, we really need to start integrating some of these things and operating inefficiencies.
We're really becoming glaring of having all these independent entities.
And so that's where the impetus really throughout all of 2025 and that continuing forward to get on the common technology stack and do the integration.
But you're right, it's a lot of operational.
There's so much linkage between the financial and the operational.
The integration management office concept is a really important concept.
Because you can't have finance off doing an integration work stream and sales doing an integration work stream and operations do it and not talking to each other, because they all converge at some point, or many points usually.
So I didn't realize you had roots in telecom and now all your transformation makes sense because I was.
I was in the sea, like space from the late 90s to the mid 2000s.
And that transformation we were.
I mean, there were so much MA activity, multiple acquisitions every year.
So you you're either going to become a transformation guy or you're going to become gone.
Yeah and, and that was nowhere near the scale of like, mci worldcom obviously, and that sprint nextel and all that too.
So yeah, so you uh, you came by this uh, the hard way, trial by fire, right coming through all that.
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Kelly sits at the intersection of finance, technology, human capital.
And so kind of all your learnings.
How do you see financial strategy, workforce strategy, kind of coming together, converging inside the organization today?
It's a great question, i mean so.
So kelly has a very diverse uh portfolio now through through the transformation that they did, that i talked about before, and so we serve many different industries.
We have what we call specialty offerings, so those that are really targeted to specific areas like life sciences and engineering and it services.
I mentioned education.
We're the largest provider of substitute teachers in the united states.
We have a dominant market share.
That's an outsource market where school districts outsource that whole management and talent development process to us.
We managed large scale contingent labor platforms for large multinational companies who have thousands or tens of thousands of contingent workers at any point in time and many, many suppliers all feeding through one platform.
So we have a very diverse mix of offerings.
We run in three business units, but there's a lot of commonality in terms of the delivery model.
And then of course there's a direct linkage between the payroll hours of the talent that's out on assignment with our clients and then that just flows through payroll and then flows into billing and AR etc.
It's a very continuous stream and so finance is really integrated uh in that um in uh as we we have payroll, uh for all the talent and and our internal employees hundreds and hundreds of thousands of of people in a year that we payroll and uh, even though we only have 5 500 employees as a company, but because of all the outsourced talent, we have a very large payroll function and, of course, ar and billing management and the like.
So it's critical that the operating side, the finance side, are really fully linked in everything we do.
And even within the business units there's uh we have onboarding practices and talent development and talent management practices, uh just to hold the whole interview life cycle, for example, to to evaluate somebody, and commonality there.
And and uh, even today, there's still a number of different ways that's done across the business, when there's probably two or three ways we could do it and not 15 or 20 different ways.
So um really looking at how do we manage the external facing aspects of our business, how do we manage the internal facing aspects of our business, and having finance really be a partner across all elements of the value chain and really partnering with the CHRO team, the People Services team, looking at really more of an integrated workforce planning type of model so we can really look across the whole enterprise and say know what labor do we need where and doing what tasks using what systems?
Um.
So there's a lot of opportunity to really bring all that together, both in terms of what we do for our clients as well as how we operate internally, and i think the partnership between myself and the technology leader, the people leader, uh the operating leaders is is critical uh to enable that.
Yeah, and i um i wanted to go down the road of um thinking about kelly's.
I didn't really.
I would have guessed Much higher number.
You said 5,500 employees?
Just employees, yeah.
But we have hundreds of thousands of talent on assignment, yeah.
Yeah, because what did you say before the show?
70% of Kelly's costs are people, right?
Correct.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're asset light, right?
I mean, we don't have a lot of, we have small branches.
We have a few core, you know, kind of regional centers, but we do a lot of outsourcing, by the way, in our back office.
We have outsource partners.
We do use outsource partners on the operating side, usually low cost geography, right?
Most of the stuff in the in the States we do ourselves, but typically we're using partners in some of the lower cost geographies, although we do have people in all around the world.
Yeah, it's super interesting, just not having worked in that industry, when I mean when so much of the balance sheet is tied to human capital, does that and I know you just mentioned geographies but does that kind of reshape how you think about efficiency and investment?
I mean the I just you know there's no ladder of capital investment that's required along.
It's got to be a slight like a different mindset.
Yeah, it's all about operating efficiency, really.
Yeah, I mean, the investment, I mean, technology is a huge enabler, of course.
I mean we have to have and that's why we're making the investments we are in our current, with our current technology.
And of course, AI again is.
If you think about the recruiting lifecycle, there's ripe with use cases where automation and AI can play.
I mean, you've probably gotten texts and emails from AI recruiters asking you to do a.
You know hey, do you want to work from home 15 20 hours a week?
A former general counsel that I used to work with sent me a text earlier today.
Hey, I got this text from Kelly.
And it's one of those types of...
But anyway.
So yeah, it's definitely much more about efficiency in terms of process and then having technology enablers for that.
And then again, where are the people?
Where is the best place to do the work?
And it's the same logic pretty much anybody would use, right?
Is that high customer facing?
Is there high touch involved?
Is it...
Are there language requirements that are critical time of day requirements?
So what can we do in a low cost geography that's more back office support or not, as kind of critical from a customer facing perspective versus what do we need?
Or we can just do in a fully seamless way, a touchless way uh, versus you know where do we need touch.
So really designing our processes around efficiencies, and so there's investment.
To do that right, you may have to hire new capabilities, you may have to make that technology investment, you may have to kind of think about compensation structures, depending upon the type of work.
But generally speaking yeah, it's less about going and building large manufacturing plants and even just office facilities and more about how do we as efficiently as possible serve our clients and, for an organization like finance, serve our internal stakeholders and also support the talent and our clients through our building practices and AR management, cash management and things like that.
Yeah, and if I think about Kelly, I see kind of moving kind of up the value chain from staffing to now more of the BPO, like you said, like outsourcing.
But then, at the same time, a challenge around.
That is, I mean, I think BPO across the board is like many industries having maybe a bit of an existential crisis right now, where AI and the impact of that it's okay.
The model was, you know offshore, cheaper workforce.
Prove the value there.
And now there's pressure with AI to squeeze even more cost out of it.
I guess, I think I can see what drove the shift from just doing staffing to doing a full BPO model.
But how are you looking at AI and the impact of AI on business process solutions right now too?
Well, what's what's interesting?
So we, we have a broad category that we if, when we look, if you look at our pulled up, our thank you or k right now, you'd see we talk about staffing, we talk about outcome-based solutions, we talk about talent solutions and within outcome-based solutions, there's there's a number of different, So it could be BPO business process outsourcing.
It could be IT projects.
It could be telecom projects.
It could be life science, clinical trial support.
So things like that that are more project-oriented.
But a lot of what we do is people-based, and it will be hard to displace.
Now, AI supplements that, absolutely.
But fundamentally the work we're doing is people-based work that is not really displaceable by technology.
One of the big areas of growth for us is in the semiconductor space, for example.
You think about the fabrication plants.
I'm in Arizona.
We've got Intel, we've got TSMC, we've got Samsung, we've got all kinds of people, and the investment is crazy.
I actually was at the TSMC facility not too long ago and I had a small tour there um, but the actual production facility itself, it's massive, massive building, hundreds of thousands of square feet, barely any people inside of it.
It's almost all automated.
They can run it with no lights on for periods of time, but there's a whole you know they have a whole maintenance window and all that where the people go in, check the tools and all that, and so the work we do is actually outside of that, where we're providing support services the materials handling, the equipment handling, the check-in and out, just different things that we provide significant amount of support services that they don't want to spend time thinking about.
They want to focus on the operating the fabrication plant and hiring the skilled engineers that know how to build and monitor the semiconductor manufacturing process.
They don't want to worry about checking tools in and out or making sure that the silicon disks are coming in on the loading dock correctly and all that kind of stuff.
So just kind of deep dive a little bit on an example.
But again, life science trials, we support that.
We have a whole number of different ways.
Telecom is actually a pretty strong practice for its data center.
That's all physical. building and infrastructure support.
And those are all areas that we provide as well.
So it's interesting.
I mean, we're definitely proliferating AI in our client solutions, in any technology, customer facing technology solutions to provide them better analytics and data and drive efficiencies for them.
Uh and, and our ability to actually, you know, bring some of that to the table gives us new revenue opportunities.
Uh, to sell them.
Uh, solutions and services that we didn't have the capability of previously.
Yeah, and i would bet that if years ago, you could just say turn over uh, you know, whatever task, whatever is not your core capability, you can have bpo do everything.
It's going to be more efficient, you don't need to spend your time, worry about this, we're just going to handle it.
But i think a lot of companies in this space could have just said you know what, whatever process you hand us, we're going to do the exact same thing, but we're just going to do it cheaper.
And it's not our role to innovate or become more efficient.
We're completing the task and who cares as long as we come within budget.
But I would imagine right now that the way you have to look at at BPO and at these outsourced tasks is there's going to be competition.
So it's not, it's that saying that, you know, you won't be replaced by AI.
You'll be replaced by someone using AI.
So I would imagine that you're the drive uh, Inside the company is yes, we're going to keep providing these people, but we're going to give the people who are doing the work access to the more powerful tools.
They're going to be using AI to get better at it and all that.
So there are efficiencies still to be gained.
Yeah.
And a lot of our clients are still trying to figure out their AI strategy.
So it's an opportunity for us to support them in that as well.
Yeah.
And on that, I mean, I know we talked a lot about the internal work at companies, but I feel like you've got to be in a unique position at Kelly to see the broader labor market and understand what's happening out there.
So what are you seeing now around that? automation, change in skill demands.
How is that impacting roles out there in the way?
And also with the labor market shifting, with unemployment creeping up a little bit.
What does all that look like?
What's your perspective and view on the broader market from where you sit?
Yeah, well, it's timely we're doing this today.
I mean, it was three big data points this week, right?
The JOLTS report, the job openings and labor turnover summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment survey for December, and then the ADP has their private jobs report.
And all of them continue to point to this sort of stagnant, low hire, low fire, stagnant but stable job market.
And An undertone to that is, to your point, AI.
I actually heard on CNBC just this morning they were talking about this.
A lot of this is speculation.
Nobody knows exactly.
They do surveys and they ask questions.
Of course there's some reticence to hiring just because people are still a little bit uncertain about what direction the economy's going.
Demand is is uh, in various uh industries is either pulling back a little bit or not really growing that strong, unless of course, you're in the ai, somewhere in the ai space.
Of course demand is off the charts, but so you know that's not inconsistent what we've been seeing.
We talked about it in our earnings report uh, back in november.
Uh, we have a few sort of big discrete items that we've been talking about in the marketplace, but other than that, we're seeing very stable trends.
We're not.
We have pockets of growth, we have some pockets of decline, but generally speaking we're seeing consistent performance throughout the year.
When you, when you sort of strip it back and just look at the core performance, we actually do a survey ourselves.
We call it the rework report and it's a 6000 executives and workers across 13 countries.
We did ask a lot about AI and there's some conflicting data points between what the executives say versus what the workers say.
Executives think it's moving along well and there's a lot of optimism and workers are saying well, I'm not sure I see what this does for me.
What ultimately the impact for me is from a career perspective, whether it's a threat to my job or not.
So there's a lot of interesting data points out there around just what AI in the marketplace is.
There's no doubt it has affected low-level programming, certain kind of other task type of work.
And I think there's no doubt that, including ourselves and people in finance and other areas are saying well, can we solve this with AI?
First, before we go back, fill a position.
Or at that same level can we get a?
Can we take two lower levels and get a mid-level and do AI with applications for some of the lower level transactional work?
So I think it's definitely out there across all employment categories.
It is interesting, and I've been doing a lot of research around this lately too, and I see AI as being a scapegoat for some layoffs.
Right now it's like that's not really necessarily what's happening, but it's easy to say well AI, we're going to get more efficient and all that.
And I do.
I have like a dozen other questions I want to ask you, but I guess we need to start bringing it home here in the interest of time.
I've loved this conversation because, as we've talked about your finance leadership roles and you as a CFO, I can tell you're a very hands on operational person kind of leader.
And you talked before the show about wanting to be seen not just as the CFO, but as a leader who happens to be the CFO.
And I'm wondering what that looks like in practice.
What does that mean about your approach to your role and your interactions with the rest of the C-suite and with the rest of, you know, with your teams and across the company?
Yeah, look, I try to be a leader in the company and first and foremost, right?
It's company first, it's how do we operate as effectively as we can?
How do we go to market as effectively as we can?
How do we deliver any of our services?
And, of course, I have to be accountable for the financial arena.
And how can I best deliver the financial services to the company?
Make sure we're compliant.
Make sure we have timely and relevant data.
Make sure we're providing value-added insights.
But it's interesting.
We're having a leadership meeting in a few months and we've been talking about how we want to position some of the content and who's going to present what.
And we were even talking about well, have Troy present some content on this and have the general counsel presents some content on that, or the CHRO, and so mixing people's roles up a bit for that very reason, because you want the leadership team to be looked at as the leadership, not well, Troy's just the CFO or Amy's just the CHRO.
No, we're all company leaders.
We can represent the company.
But the cfo is in a bit of a unique seat in terms of being really that business partner to the ceo, many times looked at as as the a stand-in.
And you see a lot of cfo to ceo uh, progressions from a succession, right from a career perspective and uh, so really yeah, that for me is trying to be that, that blend of of all things um, so that i understand the business, i understand the drivers, i understand the culture, the people, all the things that are going on.
But ultimately it makes me better as a cfo because i can anticipate things that are happening, what might impact the numbers where we might need to make an investment back to the earlier conversation.
You know we might be under invested here we might the workforce strategy and where we might be able to be more optimized.
The more breadth I have in terms of my visibility and understanding of the business, then the more effective I can be as a CFO.
Yeah, well said.
And I do like I said, I probably have a dozen more questions I could ask you, but I do want to be cognizant of time here.
And I do have just two questions we ask every guest.
So I'm going to go ahead and quickly and awkwardly sort of transition into the first of the two questions is what is something most people don't know about you, something they couldn't find by looking at your online, you know, your LinkedIn profile or whatever? yeah well you'd have to look really really hard to find this but i did play a little bit of college football in just a few years figured out very quickly i probably wasn't gonna go to the pros so i pivoted back to well i should probably study finance and accounting and and figure that thing out but i have one career uh interception uh to my name uh in a game official game college football game uh so it didn't didn't go very far i think i had to jump up and grab it and got knocked down pretty quickly but uh So that's great.
That's a data point for you.
Awesome.
And you avoided CTE.
I'm not sure about that yet.
Fair enough.
OK, the last question, and I love asking CFOs this because I myself I was, and I was a guest on the show before I was the host.
And when I was asked this question, I thought.
Man, I used to have really good answers, but how much am I even doing in Excel these days?
But we ask everyone, so I'm going to throw it out to you.
What is your favorite Excel function and why?
Yeah, I saw that question.
You know, I don't have a great answer to it.
I mean, you know, I use pivot tables.
I do a lot of filtering and conditional rules and those types of things.
But, you know...
It's funny.
Well, I try not to do it, and I try to do it in AI now, right?
Any of my analytical work, I'm forcing myself to leverage.
We're spending a lot of time with Claude.
We've developed an internal model that has links to Gemini Claude Chad GPT, and then we have direct Claude licenses, and we found that to be very effective in finance.
So I'm actually spending a lot more time over there these days than than uh, than xl.
But you know, i i was never the guy that uh, that knew every single shortcut key and could just whip my way through uh, some amazing model in the split second.
But you know, i'm i would say i'm definitely above average but um, not a great answer.
But no, it is a great answer because then i was actually just reading um, i think it was I don't know if it was secret CFOs somebody's sub stack recently and it was giving advice to FPA professionals.
And it said, being the best person in your company at Excel is not the path to the CFO's office.
The buggy whip salesman.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, Troy, this has been great.
I really appreciate your insights.
And like I said, I didn't know before the show that we both came up through telecom.
So additional respect for you there going through that minefield.
But I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Yeah, thanks, Glenn.
My pleasure entirely.
