Kelly Evans
Located in Illinois & Texas
Position: Director
Kelly Evans has a proven record of success, applying strategic leadership experience to accelerate company growth and deliver stakeholder value.
Widely known as a leader who is passionate about building transformative cultures within organizations, Kelly is a consummate professional who has successfully built high performance teams throughout his 30+ year career leading small and middle market industrial businesses. He has held top C-Suite positions as President, CEO and Director level appointments for privately held, family-owned and private equity owned platform companies.
Kelly attended Millikin University graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing from the Tabor School of Business. He furthered his education by earning a post graduate Professional Certificate of Industrial Distribution from Purdue University.
Along with responsibility for leading organizational growth & building high performance teams, Kelly has played an impactful role in successfully executing a variety of mergers and acquisitions while diversifying company assets among multiple industry segments, product categories and geographies. During his 25+years as CEO of his family’s firm, he successfully crafted and completed shareholder buyouts and transfer of ownership while orchestrating multiple acquisitions and strategic alliances catapulting the company into one of the most widely respected, privately held industrial distribution companies in the Greater Midwest.
In 2020 while continuing to scale his organization, he orchestrated the sale of his family’s 82-year-old, third generation company to launch a newly formed platform backed by a strategically identified private equity investment group. Appointed to lead this new platform as President and CEO, Kelly yet again assembled another high performing team and delivered substantial revenue and earnings growth to stakeholders and investors. In his capacity as the top executive, Kelly’s team successfully onboarded and integrated four additional company acquisitions while navigating global headwinds associated with the COVID pandemic, supply chain disruption, labor force contraction and hyper-inflation.
Kelly enjoys sharing his impressive journey with others as it relates to succession planning and building high performance cultures within privately held companies. His delivery is both colorful and insightful as he brings real world experience to those who are navigating the complexities and challenges that owners so often face when seeking to scale, transfer, exit, or sell their businesses.
After taking a welcomed pause in 2023, transitioning from a successful career as an owner and top-level executive, Kelly shifted his focus to sharing time with his family and mentoring next level leaders. He routinely shares his energy and expertise with local, regional, and national organizations through board appointments, speaking engagements, and executive coaching alignments.
Kelly remains passionate about giving back to meaningful causes, supporting a wide variety of charities and organizations which enrich the lives of those in education, health, military and first responder families.
Kelly, his wife Tina and their amazing tripod goldendoodle Brodie, frequently travel to Texas and North Carolina to share life with their three adult children, their spouses and of course a first grandchild.