Avoiding the Comfort Zone: Moving from Challenge to Challenge, Kelly Caccetta Find the Pathway to Success

Kelly Caccetta ’88 has a clear memory of some great advice she got during her junior year at Radford, a recommendation she said has helped guide her ever since.

This was 1987. She was Kelly Tayloe back then, a Quest assistant taking part in student orientation, and one of her tasks involved appearing on stage in a sketch aimed at incoming freshmen, a comedic but instructional skit depicting the importance of early financial responsibility.

Her role? She played a check that bounces.

“I had this whole costume, like a check, and I’m bouncing up and down onstage in front of all these people and all my friends, and, you know, I was a little embarrassed,” Caccetta recently recalled.

“Get comfortable being uncomfortable,” Mike Dunn told her.

Dunn was director of New Student Programs at that time, and he’d worked with Caccetta during Quest and through her involvement in student government.

“He was pretty influential because he constantly taught us to challenge ourselves and put ourselves out there,” she said.

“He told me, ‘You will leave an impression,’ and he was right. During senior year, until I graduated, I still had people talking about that bouncing check. And that advice is something I’ve used throughout my life.”

Today, Caccetta – the mother of two adult sons and a resident of Wake, Virginia – is president and chief executive officer of CSSI, a Washington, D.C.-based company that provides safe and efficient transportation solutions to commercial and government clients, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense.

Tracing Caccetta’s career path from Radford to the present day reveals a profile of someone who has consistently avoided the shade of comfort zones.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in physical education, she completed her student-teaching through Radford City Schools, then taught at Walsingham Academy in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Caccetta’s larger interest in health, however, ultimately prompted her to study nursing, and she became a registered trauma nurse, spending more than a decade helping patients in the emergency room at Riverside Regional Medical Center and other hospitals in that area.

“The emergency room is fast paced and no two scenarios are the same,” she said.

After pivoting from the hospital front lines to work as an occupational health and safety nurse at the Gateway computer manufacturing plant in Hampton, in 1997, she leaped from medicine to business, managing that facility’s human resources.

Over the decade that followed, she worked at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia; the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Illinois; and then headed back to the Hampton Roads region for a position at ITA International.

With human resources, she recalled, “That was where my corporate career took off ... I had no idea what the future would bring.

“I started at Thomas Jefferson as director of HR and ended up leaving as the associate director of business administration,” Caccetta said. “I ran all of the business functions of the lab, finance, contracts, security.”

In 2011, her upward trajectory led her to CSSI, where she leapfrogged from human resources director to three vicepresidential positions within six years before being named the company’s president in the summer of 2017.

Last September, Caccetta added CEO to her title, a designation that brings her story full circle.

“I started in education, and I just never stopped,” she said. “I used the teaching skills I had in nursing, and then used my nursing skills – you know, triage and listening and communicating – in the corporate world. And I just kept building it that way.”

“It puts me in a world of being comfortable with the uncomfortable,” she explained of her current position at CSSI. “I do a lot of public speaking, and I love building high-performance teams, and I love strategic planning, and I get to do all of that.”

She points to her Radford education as part of her starting line.

“It kind of laid the foundation for who I am today because it gave me opportunities to create ‘me’ in college,” Caccetta said.

“We go to college, and we don’t really know what we want to do or who we are, but I think the university helped me learn more about who I was ... and I think a lot of things I use every day as a CEO, I built upon starting at Radford.”