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KT Black Services

Posted on: March 31st, 2021

KT Black Services is a HUB-certified staffing company, is dedicated to providing quality staffing services, human resource solutions, and permanent placement to small and medium-sized businesses around the Texas Panhandle.  MLA has been a trusted advisor to KT Black since 2006.

With KT Black Services, both businesses and job seekers alike can experience the confidence and satisfaction of knowing they will receive personal attention and respect from our locally-owned and operated office headquartered in downtown Amarillo, Texas.

KT Black and MLA

KT Black services began as Skilled Trades Company (STC) in 2001 by 5 entrepreneurial friends in Dayton, Ohio, to provide flexible staffing of skilled tradespeople to the construction and building maintenance industries.  MLA Companies was engaged by STC in 2006, beginning a successful relationship that has developed along MLA’s 7 Step Business Redeemed Process.  (To download this case study, click here.)

“While we were expanding, we didn’t see the need to invest in our financials,” says Braden Black, one of the original STC founding partners.  “We were just focused on top-line growth and paid our bills with cash flow.  Then a major client went under and we couldn’t pay the bills anymore.”

Braden reached out to Seth Morgan, MLA Founder and CEO.  “MLA Companies was initially engaged by STC in 2006 to support the fractional CFO,” Seth says.  “But we eventually had to replace him.”  MLA’s role included outsourced accounting, providing strategic CFO support to the leadership of STC, and implementing industry-standard accounting practices that matched STC’s business model and needs.

With MLA’s help, STC was able to resolve its financial issues and was positioned to grow.  Now called KTBlack Services, began its second phase of expansion in the staffing industry.  General staffing was encroaching into the trades, and KTBlack needed to transform itself to grow in this new, more competitive market.

MLA provided effective EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) analysis.  This objective valuation allowed KTBlack Services to successfully negotiate away one merger offer,  completing its own acquisition of another staffing company in 2015. 

MLA provided the market and sales analysis that helped Black see the opportunity to make a move into general staffing.  “MLA encouraged me to make the moves to start growing again,” Black says.  “It was verified by the numbers.”  MLA continues to serve KT Black Services as a trusted advisor.