A company can outgrow its founder and still keep a place for him. Kevin C. Clark’s working life gives that proposition an unusually literal shape. He co-founded Cross Country in 1986, left in 1994, returned as chief executive in 2019, moved to the chairmanship in 2022, and returned to the CEO job again in December 2025. In July 2026, he retired from its leadership roles. The chronology has the rhythm of someone repeatedly remembering that he has left something at the office.
There were other offices, and other businesses, in between. Clark ran a digital marketing agency, led a content and software company through an initial public offering, and co-founded another staffing business. His career gives the word “return” some substance. The executive coming back in 2019 had spent a quarter-century doing work beyond the company he helped start.
Founders are often described through the moment of departure: the sale, the succession, the new venture. Clark’s story needs more verbs. Build, leave, watch, return, reorganize, hand over. It also needs other people. A co-founder has partners; a returning CEO inherits colleagues; a departing chairman leaves a company that must go on without him.
A quarter-century elsewhere
Clark earned his Bachelor of Business Administration at Florida Atlantic University in 1982. Four years later, he co-founded Cross Country. He served as chairman and CEO through 1994. Those dates establish the early connection to a business that would remain part of his public identity for forty years, even while he worked elsewhere.
By 1996, he was chairman and CEO of Poppe Tyson, a digital marketing agency. He then led ScreamingMedia, later known as Pinnacor, a business supplying content and software services. He led its IPO in 2000. The name alone suggests an era when an internet company could introduce itself as though it had just discovered the volume knob.
These were substantial changes of business setting. A staffing firm organizes the relationship between employers and workers. A digital agency helps organizations reach an audience. A content and software business delivers information through technology. As a way of reading Clark’s career, there is a connection here: each involves making a useful match, then building a business around the means of delivering it.
That connection is an interpretation of the work, rather than a secret master plan. The documented sequence is more interesting than a tidy origin myth. In 2002, Clark co-founded Onward Healthcare. He also led Medefis and Locum Leaders during the years before the three businesses were acquired in 2015. He subsequently served as chairman and CEO of Talivity from 2015 to 2018.
He had moved between operating businesses and technology businesses, public markets and private ownership. By the time Cross Country appointed him again in January 2019, his first CEO tenure was a distant chapter. The appointment brought back a founder with a much longer résumé, rather than simply reopening the file marked 1986.
CEO through 1994
Through March 2022
Retires in July 2026
A chronology of separate tenures, not continuous service.
Twenty-four names, one company
On his first earnings call after returning, Clark described a business with capable people and customers, alongside opportunities to improve. He said he was meeting teams and customers and examining processes. The language was operational. A founder’s affection might explain why he came back; it would do little by itself to improve the machinery.
There was affection. Asked why he had returned, Clark compared starting the company to parenthood. He recalled watching it grow and cheering its 2001 public offering with his former partners. He had been away from the chief executive’s chair, but he had continued to pay attention.
The practical changes were concrete. He eliminated the chief operating officer role. He promoted Karen Mote to lead the physician staffing business. His approach put him close to operations, an arrangement consistent with his own description of being closely involved in the business. The returning founder was prepared to change reporting lines, including the ones closest to himself.
By February 2020, Cross Country described consolidating twenty-four brands around the Cross Country identity and simplifying its organizational structure. Twenty-four names can make an organization sound like a directory. Bringing them together presents a less glamorous task than founding another company, but a potentially useful one: making an existing business easier to understand.
Clark also pressed for investment in technology. In May 2019, he discussed the need for proprietary software and a stronger technology platform. He linked acquisitions to a strategic plan, seeking capabilities the business needed. That emphasis fits the experience he had accumulated outside Cross Country, though the argument itself was forward-looking: build the systems the company would use next.
The return involved familiar territory and unfamiliar work. He knew the business’s origins. Its current structure still needed examination. History gave him a reason to care; the operating decisions gave that concern something to do. An old company name could remain on the door while the arrangements behind it changed.
“It is my nature to be intimately involved with the business.”
Kevin C. Clark, February 2019
An instruction pinned to a desk
For a more personal glimpse of Clark’s management style, there is John Martins’s desk. Martins, who worked with Clark at Onward before later succeeding him at Cross Country, recalled being told to write down a reminder to “have a sense of urgency.” He kept the instruction pinned there for years.
A desk reminder is an economical form of management. It requires no conference room, subscription or annual retreat. It also puts an expectation where ordinary work happens. Martins remembered Clark emphasizing people and doing the right thing alongside speed. In that account, urgency was one part of the instruction, rather than the whole philosophy.
The working relationship eventually became a succession story. In January 2022, Cross Country announced that Martins would become president and CEO and that Clark would move to chairman at the end of March. Martins had previously served as president of Onward and reported to Clark. The handoff therefore involved an executive whose connection to Clark predated their latest Cross Country roles.
At the time, Cross Country reported that revenue had more than doubled organically during Clark’s three-year return and that the company had completed two acquisitions. That is a company-level measure of the period, rather than a claim that one executive produced every result. It provides a concrete scale for a tenure that began with an agenda of organizational and technology changes.
Cross Country reported consolidating 24 brands around its name after Clark’s 2019 return.
Recognition followed as well. By March 2022, Clark had appeared on the Staffing Industry Analysts Staffing 100 list for three consecutive years. Earlier career recognition included Fortune’s Forty Under Forty in 1994 and Junior Achievement’s National Distinguished Graduate Award that same year. The awards punctuate the chronology; the desk anecdote makes the working relationship easier to picture.
A different chapter, the same face. An earlier public portrait of Clark, whose career moved between staffing, marketing and software.
Public portrait reproduced from his me.sh profile.One more return
Clark’s move to chairman in 2022 did not end his association with Cross Country. In December 2025, after a planned transaction with Aya Healthcare was terminated, the board appointed him president and CEO again. Martins had departed. Clark retained the chairmanship and began his third period in the chief executive role.
The distinction matters. This was a new appointment, after years serving as chairman. It was also a return to operating responsibility at a company whose next direction needed to be settled. The founder was once again responsible for the business he had first led decades earlier, with a different company around him and a different set of decisions ahead.
His 2026 shareholder letter emphasized commercial expansion, operational discipline and technology. In April, Cross Country appointed Darrick Sogabe chief product officer. Clark highlighted Sogabe’s contribution to its technology direction. Software had remained part of the business agenda through the years between the second and third CEO tenures.
Read together with his earlier work at Poppe Tyson and ScreamingMedia, those priorities give the long career a recognizable continuity. The names of the businesses changed. The interest in how technology helps an organization reach customers and conduct its work kept appearing in his public professional record.
There was also a separate business connection beyond Cross Country. Kevin and Ken Clark co-founded Clark Group Holdings, an investment firm focused on human capital, HR technology and workforce businesses. Its published portfolio spans recruitment marketing and specialized talent services. The firm places Clark’s staffing and technology interests within the same investment practice.
July, and the next name on the door
On July 21, 2026, Knox Lane completed its acquisition of Cross Country. Joel Tremblay became CEO. Clark retired from his leadership roles and agreed to support the transition. After three separate CEO tenures, his latest period running the company ended with a change in ownership and a new executive taking responsibility.
The handoff belongs in the story alongside the founding. Building a company creates an organization that other people will eventually run. Returning can postpone that separation; serving as chairman can change its form. Neither arrangement abolishes the need for the business to continue under somebody else.
In his public departure message, Clark credited colleagues and employees with strengthening the business. His explanation put the work across a team, rather than reserving the whole account for the person leaving. That is a useful perspective on a career so easily compressed into a sequence of his own titles.
Forty years after the founding, Cross Country had a new owner and a new CEO. Clark had a history with the company that no appointment could give his successor, and his successor had a job that history alone could never perform. The next chapter would be written through decisions made after the handoff.
Clark’s career leaves a particularly human picture of business ownership: a person can sell, leave, succeed elsewhere, and still watch the original company with interest. In his case, watching twice became running it again. Eventually, the work became helping the next executive take over. Even a career with a return address has room for a final handoff.