Delores Kesler Back from Retirement

Cynthia Barnett | 5/1/2009

» In Gear Throughout her career, Delores Kesler has served on the boards of various groups, including the Florida Council of 100, the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce and the Horatio Alger Association. Over the past 10 years, she has also volunteered for philanthropies, including Jacksonville’s Alliance for World Class Education. She has contributed millions to charitable organizations in northeast Florida, for example, creating the Kesler Endowment at the University of North Florida that grants scholarships to disadvantaged high school graduates. She is the founder of the Kesler Mentoring Connection, a mentor resource center in Jacksonville. [Photo: Kelly LaDuke]

Delores Kesler says she was “utterly failing” at retirement when her daughter, Deborah Pass Durham, asked her during a drive one day in 2007 to return to the $50-million staffing firm that Kesler had started three decades earlier.

Jacksonville-based ATS Services, run by Durham as president and Doug Anderson as CEO, recruits senior-level executives for other firms, offers consulting services and supplies temporary workers ranging from clerical workers to engineers and accountants. The company was expanding aggressively, growing from 14 offices to 32 and posting 35% revenue growth in 2007 alone.

Durham and Anderson wanted Kesler to help the firm grow even more, and had good reason to think she could help. Kesler had founded ATS in 1977 and led it to prosperity, eventually forming a parent company that merged with three other staffing firms to become AccuStaff. (The mergers that created AccuStaff, now MPS Group, didn’t include ATS.) Kesler took AccuStaff public in 1994, becoming the first woman in Florida, and one of the first in the nation, to lead an IPO.

Kesler, now 68, accepted her daughter’s invitation to chair ATS’ board and forge a new growth strategy. But the recession has altered that assignment: Instead of leading expansion, she’s trying to ensure that the company survives the economic downturn. Nationwide, temporary staffing employment dropped 22.7% last year — the largest decline since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking temp employment in 1990. The professional-employee side of the industry that Kesler helped pioneer saw revenue declines of about 8%, says Jon Osborne, director of research and analysis at California-based Staffing Industry Analysts.

» ATS Services Headquarters: Jacksonville Divisions: ATS Technology, ATS Staffing, ATS Tec, ATS Executive Search, ATS Financial Services, Nimbus Recruiting Locations: Florida, Georgia, New York, Louisiana Annual revenue: $50 million Leadership: CEO: Doug Anderson; President: Deborah Pass Durham; Chairman: Delores Kesler

ATS fared better than the industry as a whole in 2008, but its revenue still fell by about 2%. (The company Kesler took public, MPS Group, now a $2.2 billion staffing giant also headquartered in Jacksonville, saw revenue increase 2% in 2008. )

Now in her job for a year, Kesler has helped ATS shed divisions. She consolidated the company’s offices down to 24, trimmed the firm’s workforce by 15% and oriented ATS toward professions she believes will remain in demand during economic hard times, including professional, technical, engineering and financial. One division, ATS Tec, will be able to provide structural engineers to work on stimulus projects, for example. Another, ATS Executive Search, will provide managers to help companies downsize.

ATS, says Kesler, was “trying to be all things to all people. They really needed to focus.”

The recession, says Osborne, will continue to hammer temp professional services as it clobbers the businesses that hire them. He projects another 8% decline this fiscal year. Many firms will fail, he says. “It’s a tough time to be coming back into the industry. Competition is intensifying for a rapidly shrinking amount of business.”