Kelly Services, Inc.
KELYAHIGH VELOCITYFILING INTENSITYKelly Services, Inc. reads as an High Velocity (composite 62/100); Consistent Strategic Buyer deploying $880M across 2 disclosed transactions, up 123% vs the prior cycle · primary market Industrial Services.
Lens
Disclosed M&A capital (2023–2025)
$880M
vs $395M in 2020–2022
Disclosed transactions
2
2/3 active fiscal years in window
Buyer archetype
Consistent Strategic Buyer
Meaningful spend appears across repeat years.
Composite score
62
High Velocity dominates · Filing Intensity
Behavioral posture, nine reads.
Each index scores the issuer 0–100 against an EDGAR-anchored definition. Scores ≥ threshold elevate the issuer into the index's constituent set; the dominant index drives the masthead label.
Active Acquirer
Companies actively deploying disclosed capital into M&A
- $1.5B disclosed buyer spend
Buyer Cadence
Buyer-side companies with recent filing activity
- 220 8-Ks
Target Probability
Issuers showing target-side patterns from filings
- 11 activism filings
Spin/Carve
Issuers showing spin-off, carve-out, or sum-of-parts posture
- 11 activism filings
Pressure Watch
Issuers facing activism, governance, or control pressure
- 11 activism filings
- Latest activism 7.7y ago; heavily discounted
Distress Watch
Issuers showing financial-distress filing patterns
- 11 activism filings
Restatement Risk
Issuers with accounting-integrity flags from filings
Capital Velocity
DominantIssuers with the highest filing-activity intensity
- 220 8-Ks
- 5 form types
Quiet Power
Large issuers with low signal volume and clean disclosure cadence
- Enterprise value $501M
- 10-Q 65d ago
- 2 active signals
Capital cadence.
Ten-year disclosed M&A activity. Bars show spend ($MM); ticks show recorded transaction count. Disclosure tier annotated where v6 audited corpus carries an entry.
Disclosed spend $MM Disclosed transactions (right axis)Peak spend year: $448M · Peak count: 2
| FY | Disclosed buys | Disclosed spend | Avg ticket | Audited tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 2 | $448M | $224M | N/A |
| 2024 | N/A | $432M | N/A | N/A |
| 2023 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 2022 | 2 | $143M | $72M | N/A |
| 2021 | 1 | $213M | $213M | N/A |
| 2020 | 2 | $39M | $20M | N/A |
Strategy posture.
The buyer's playbook in terms of strategic archetype: what each disclosed move says about how they're deploying capital.
Archetype mix
- Geographic Expansion25%
- Bolt On25%
- Platform25%
- Horizontal Consolidation25%
Strategy keywords
Terms recurring across recent 10-K acquisition disclosures.
- geographic_expansion
- bolt_on
- platform
- horizontal_consolidation
Filing language.
Direct excerpts from acquisition disclosures and strategy sections: the verbs the buyer chose, in the filings they signed.
“The acquisition of MRP enhanced the scale and capabilities of Kelly’s staffing and consulting solutions across technology, telecommunications, and government specialties in North America, and RPO solutions globally.”
“We made our largest-ever acquisition in April 2021 with the purchase of Softworld, a leader in the fast-growing technology staffing and solutions space.”
“To further expand our higher-margin, higher-growth specialties, we acquired Motion Recruitment Partners, LLC ("MRP") on May 31, 2024.”
“Acquisition of Motion Recruitment Partners expected to strengthen the scale and capabilities of Kelly's solutions portfolio”
“Kelly Services USA, LLC acquired Children's Therapy Center to expand growth opportunities in therapeutic services”
Market context.
Where this issuer sits inside its SE-Cluster rollup wedge, with disclosed-spend rank plus trading comparables against the public peer set.
Primary market
Industrial Services
- Market spend (2023–2025)
- $65.5B
- Market spend (2020–2022)
- $39.6B
- Recent vs prior
- +65%
- Issuer rank in market
- N/A
- Share of market capital
- 0.0%
Valuation positioning
KELYA trades at a -31.0-turn discount to the Industrial Services peer median of 11.4×.
- EV / Revenue
- 0.1×
- Net debt / EBITDA
- N/A
- Peer median EV / EBITDA
- 11.4×
Trading comparables
FMP market data · 2026-05-10
| Company | EV / EBITDA | EV / Rev | Net debt / EBITDA | Revenue | M&A 2023–2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15.1× | 1.0× | -0.4× | $24.2B | $444M | |
Paychex, Inc.PAYX | 13.1× | 5.8× | 1.1× | $6.3B | $3.2B |
| 11.4× | 0.9× | 7.8× | $2.5B | $3.9B | |
| 11.3× | 4.5× | 0.2× | $16.4B | $931M | |
AZZ Inc.AZZ | 8.7× | 3.0× | 0.8× | $1.7B | $1.3B |
Trading multiples from FMP market data; disclosed M&A spend from the SE-Cluster EDGAR 10-K corpus. Peer set = top disclosed buyers in Industrial Services. Bars scaled to the highest EV/EBITDA in the set.
Target landscape.
Public-issuer targets that fit this buyer's archetype and target categories from filing-derived signal. Scores reflect cross-signal fit; reasons cite the EDGAR-anchored facts that drove the match.
No qualifying public-issuer targets surfaced from the current signal mix.
Stated target categories
No target categories enumerated in the audited corpus for this issuer.
Filing activity & signal stream.
Filing cadence and event-driven signals visible on EDGAR. The signal stream below is curated from restatement / spin-carve / activism categories, providing context for any near-term call.
Filing cadence
- 10-K (annual)292026-02-12
- 10-Q (quarterly)972026-05-07
- 8-K (event)2202026-05-07
- Proxy / DEF 14A362026-04-13
- Activism (13D / DFAN / PREC)112018-10-19
Signals on file
- elevated
Activism on file
2018-10-1911 activist filings on file (13D, DFAN14A, PREC14A series).
- info
Signal
Serial acquisition history
- info
Signal
10-K strategy themes
Audited corpus.
No audited record on file for this CIK in the current v6 corpus.
This issuer has not been extracted into the v6 audited acquirer corpus yet. The brief above pulls from ranking-level aggregates and issuer-index signal only.