There have been multiple points in Missy Kelley’s career where she knew she needed to make a substantial change. She’s moved between stints in the corporate and civic world.
But Kelley is now staring down a much different career transition—retirement from the locally based CPA and advisory firm Anders, where she’s been chief growth officer for the past three years, and looking to make a difference for hospice patients as a volunteer.
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She adds she’s “been crying for days,” thinking about the connections she’s forged at the firm and her October 2 retirement. But Kelley says she’s feeling called to volunteer, harking back to the time she spent studying at WashU’s Brown School of Social Work after she had earned her bachelor’s from Truman State University.
“Not that I want to be a social worker, but that I’m ready to use my skills, my heart, my passion to help people and to help this community from a volunteer perspective,” she says. “One of the things I’ve wanted to do for a long time is be a hospice volunteer. That’s tugging at my social work roots and the passion that I have for people and helping them.”
Kelley ascended the corporate ladder first at Energizer and then Express Scripts, all while managing as a single mother. “I was running hard, working at pretty big jobs,” she says. “At every turn, I was always really lucky to get noticed and to learn from so many people everywhere I went.”
Kelley describes what came next as “a left turn” into the civic world, taking on a marketing and public relations role at Downtown St. Louis Inc., before ascending to lead the organization for six years. (She stepped down not long after it merged with four other civic and economic development organizations, becoming Greater St. Louis Inc. in 2021.)
“I had just left this big job at Express Scripts where I was working on big projects, long hours, and I just didn’t want to do the same thing in a different building,” she explains. “It’s about driving the bottom line, delivering value for our shareholders. And here there were these restaurateurs and small businesses and even big businesses making these choices to give it a go in downtown, knowing that there’s a lot of opportunity for it to continue to grow.”
That made Kelley recognizable to many St. Louisans, as she became the face of efforts to promote downtown.
“In many ways, I saw the best of humanity in that role,” she says. “There were some really hard things, but I always felt supported and inspired by the humanity that I got to work with.”
Kelley notes that interfacing with people who were afraid their businesses may not survive or “some of the bigger social problems that surface in a downtown” weighed on her. And it wasn’t trivial to be in such a public facing role while also raising two children by herself.
“They would go to school, and their teachers would say that they saw their mama on television, or, what’s their mom doing to help with this?” Kelley remembers. “There were times that in that role, I felt like it was difficult to make an impact, or the needle would move a little bit, and then something would happen, and it would just jump way back.” She quickly adds that many people worked to drive progress downtown, even if it came slowly.
Asked if she would change anything about her career, Kelley says she wishes she’d paused more and remembered the range of people who shared her goals, particularly when facing people who were frustrated with her organization or situations that were outside her control.
“I wish honestly that I just had a little bit sturdier constitution emotionally when it comes to that,” she says. “But I do think that [my] sensitivity is also what makes me really good at what I do. So it’s just a tradeoff that I’ve had to accept.”
For Kelley, Anders offered her a way to recharge and regain the feeling of making an impact. She describes her role with the firm as the culmination of a career that spanned marking, product development, management, and developing strategy.
“The culture of Anders was really what I was looking for for the last stretch of my career,” Kelley says. “I wanted to go to a place where there were good people that I could learn from, and where I would be in a position to make a difference, and Anders offered me that.”
Anders CEO Robert Minkler Jr. says he never thought he’d get to hire Kelley, but he says she’s been integral to growing the company’s touchpoints beyond the region. “Not with buying other firms, but thinking about how we might reach potential clients in other geographies,” he says.
He also says that Kelley has been essential to shaping Anders’ growth and marketing groups and is “someone that’s going to be tough to replace.” Even so, he’s excited to support Kelley’s latest career move.
“We want people to be successful in whatever success looks like to them, and sometimes that means not being here, and that’s okay,” he says. “We’re long past thinking that this is the only place you can be happy.”
It’s something Kelley says she’s deeply appreciative of. Once retirement officially begins on October 3, Kelley says she’s looking forward to sleeping a lot more, reading novels, enjoying her dogs and husband, whom she recently married. And she is ready to spend time with her children, both of whom are still in St. Louis, and at the beginning of their working careers.
“Being able to support them from a place of being a less stressed out mom, which is something that they really haven’t experienced, is something that I’m really looking forward to,” she says.
