Edith Kelly-Green’s story is inspirational. She grew up materially poor but lived with a grandmother who wanted her to get an education. This grandmother, with only a sixth-grade education, worked as a maid at the University of Mississippi and would take the very young Edith with her to work.
“She wanted me to be a teacher,” Kelly-Green says, “which was the only thing that an African-American woman could do that she knew of.” Maybe teaching math, since the girl had an affinity for numbers.
But it would go well beyond that. She would go to Ole Miss and really get into numbers, despite the fact that, as she puts it, “I knew nothing about being a CPA. I knew nothing about accounting. I could not spell CPA.”
But for Kelly-Green, her entrepreneurial journey was already underway. College was the way to the degree, but the fundamentals of work were already in place. “I grew up in an environment where working hard was always what was expected,” she says. “That’s a key to success whether you’re working for someone else or working for yourself. I was a hard worker. I was there early. I was there late.”
That persistence, and the status of being one of the first in her family to have gotten a college degree, propelled her to excel in mastering accounting and to become a CPA.
With her new degree, she landed a prized position in Deloitte, one of the big-eight accounting firms of the day. Fellow Mississippian Rex Deloach was a partner at the Deloitte Memphis office and brought her on board. “He was the first African American on the professional staff in the Memphis office and took a chance on hiring me,” she says.
Kelly-Green would rise to become a senior auditor. But in the mid-1970s, an opportunity arose. “Someone told me about this little company that shipped boxes out at the airport. I went for an interview.”
It was the beginning of a 25-year career with FedEx that had the feel of being entrepreneurial. “We got exposed to a lot of different things that were new and we were receptive to doing things that had never been done before for the betterment of the company, the community, the city, the world.” FedEx was good at moving boxes, but she found she could be especially effective in making sure the numbers and ledgers were correct, which eventually led to her being named vice president for internal audit.
During her tenure at FedEx, she got breast cancer and is today a breast cancer survivor. “That makes you start thinking about life in a different way. I started thinking about not working all my life in corporate America.” She’s also been good about holding on to what she was making. “Whatever assets I obtained from FedEx, I saved and used for the future. I’ve always believed that I’m just a moment away from being back in Oxford, growing up in a house that I could tell you the weather because I could see through the thin walls.”
She took a buyout from FedEx after 25 years at age 50 and with no thought of going into business. “I really planned to sit at Starbucks and watch other people go to work.”
It was not to be.
Her daughter Jayna Kelly was going to Rhodes College at the time and enjoyed eating at Lenny’s Sub Shop near campus. “It’s a great sandwich,” she told her mother, talking about more than the food. “We ought to get involved.”
Kelly-Green may not have wanted to go into business, but she was also driven by wanting to have a legacy for her family, “so that no one in my family would ever have to worry about not getting an education because they didn’t have the money to do so.”
Meanwhile, her son James Kelly was getting his master’s degree and wanted to be an entrepreneur. He was brought into the business and now runs The KGR Group.
Kelly-Green has bought and sold several of the franchises and seen revenues increase over tenfold annually for several years. She has an entrepreneur’s sense of who makes a good employee.
“We hire people that aren’t necessarily the cream of the crop in terms of setting goals,” she says. “I don’t think people have given a lot of thought to it. And a lot of them are young people who don’t get encouragement at home, so we try to provide that to them and make it possible for them to move into management.”
She says that hiring someone who has been turned down elsewhere can be risky. “Sometimes we’ve been bitten by that. And other times it’s worked out fantastically — you’ve found a jewel in someone who just needed a chance.”
Her own upbringing and business experience have all played into who she is, determined to give people a chance. And it’s why Kelly-Green has also moved purposefully into philanthropy as one of the organizers of Philanthropic Black Women of Memphis. She’s also endowed scholarships at Ole Miss for African-American females in accounting, and has been honored by, among others, the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis.
