Kevin Craven is Partnership Director at Serco UK & Europe and became CEO of ADS in April 2021. He has served as a member of the ADS Board for three years, including as ADS Vice-President, Defence.
Born in Zimbabwe, Kevin was educated at St George’s College, Salisbury. After completing National Service, he studied at the University of Witwatersrand for a BSc Electrical Engineering.
His part time job at university, training and supplying students for the South African hospitality industry, became a full‐time business in catering. This included a successful restaurant, food production company, and location catering division (mostly for television but including films such as Cry Freedom and Red Scorpion.)
In 1991 Kevin, who is British, moved to the UK and ran a large leisure centre before moving into contract catering with Gardner Merchant in 1994. By 1997 he was Divisional Managing Director for Citation South, running a large portfolio of blue‐chip corporates, before heading up Sodexho Travel.
Kevin moved to ARAMARK in 2002 to head up Specialist Markets, supporting mainly public sector areas of Healthcare, Education, Defence, and Criminal Justice. From 2006 he ran Balfour Beatty WorkPlace, the FM arm of the Group. After significant growth there, Kevin was promoted to CEO of the newly‐formed Support Services division in January 2011. The division turned over £1.5bn, had 20,000 employees and included utilities, integrated facilities management, highways, rail infrastructure and the UK Shared Services operations.
Since 2014 Kevin has been Chief Executive Serco UK & Europe comprising six business units: Citizen Services, Defence, Europe, Health, Justice & Immigration and Transport. The business has circa 180 contracts, £1.6bn revenues and over 24,000 employees. At the end of last year Kevin stepped down from that role to become the Group Strategic Partnership Director.