Kevin Kelly
Chairman and CEO, Arcfield
Last year, Kevin Kelly expressed confidence in the company’s potential for expansion into new mission areas and anticipated growth. Living up to his reputation, Kelly significantly achieved these goals.
Since the last time Kelly appeared on this list in 2023, he led Arcfield through two major acquisitions. The first, Strategic Technology Consulting, boosts Arcfield’s digital engineering capabilities, aiding the government’s transition to a fully digital model. The second acquisition, Orion Space Solutions, enhances the company’s space exploration abilities, adding expertise in sensor and payload design, integration and manufacturing of SmallSats and CubeSats, as well as space mission operations and data analysis.
These milestones added over 200 people to Arcfield’s workforce and expanded an already robust capability portfolio with differentiated and novel technologies that promise to deliver a technological advantage to the company’s mission partners. The company also recently announced its intel business booked more than $1 billion in classified systems engineering and integration and digital transformation work in the second half of fiscal year 2023.
But according to Kevin, the best is yet to come.
“With two years under our belt now as a standalone company, Arcfield has come a long way as an organization,” he said. “What is most impressive to me, is that regardless of what was going on in the back office—be it standing up corporate functions, building infrastructure or integrating new organizations and capabilities into the company—our team has remained steadfast and focused on our missions and delivering on our promise to challenge the status quo and propel our partners forward. I look forward to continued business growth and mission success over the next two years, and beyond.”
Fun Fact: When Kelly is not hard at work in the office, you may find him tending to his 104-acre cattle farm. Although he considers the farm a peaceful retreat away from the corporate world, he spends much of his time there splitting wood, clearing brush, moving fence posts, trying to outsmart the groundhogs, and looking after 50+ cattle, who roam the farm’s green pastures. Kelly’s time out on the farm has given him a deep appreciation for how labor-intensive agricultural work is. Recognizing that he has the luxury of farming for enjoyment, he has developed tremendous respect for families whose livelihoods depend on it.