StoriesHow PeopleFirst Leadership Powers Growth at Ascend
Ascend brings Alpine’s PeopleFirst leadership to life, showing how people-first private equity can drive growth while preserving integrity.
At Alpine Investors, we believe exceptional people are at the heart of exceptional investment outcomes. Atlas, our value-creation team within Alpine Operations Group, operationalizes this belief across our portfolio companies.
What Is Atlas?
Atlas is Alpine’s dedicated private equity value creation team within Alpine Operations Group. Atlas is comprised of functional experts across Executive Search, Leadership Development, Finance, Technology, Integration, and Go-To-Market that support the core pillars of the Alpine Playbook: Talent, Add-Ons, and Organic Growth. Guided by Alpine’s PeopleFirst philosophy, Atlas hires, develops, and supercharges leaders with the power of the Alpine Playbook.
Atlas aims to enable world-class operating leaders to achieve more at Alpine than they could anywhere else. We believe this results in stronger teams, durable operating foundations, and organic growth engines built to scale.
Our Work in Practice
Mosaic Service Partners, one of Alpine’s home services platforms, illustrates this approach in action. From inception of the new platform, Atlas worked across these three value creation levers: the Talent team placed Mosaic’s CEO, Josh Feinberg, and Lead Capital Allocator, Brian Willis, and then partnered with them to hire a CFO and Heads of Technology, People, and Growth in the platform’s first year; the Operations team stood up the financial and legal infrastructure; and the Go-to-Market team spent several months building the marketing/lead generation playbook and supporting the first three acquisitions. Mosaic operating companies have seen meaningful GTM gains since joining the platform, including a 47% jump in leads at one company and 18% growth in deals won at another. At the end of Atlas’s engagement, a long-term growth leader was in seat and the playbook was codified for future add-ons. Mosaic is one story. Atlas aims to run this same integrated motion across every platform Alpine acquires.
Below, we’ll explore what each of the Atlas teams do and how they help our portfolio companies excel.
Left: Bella Wentzel, Talent Associate at Atlas, pictured with Danny Sanner, Founding Partner at Alpine. Right: Katie Clabby, Principal, Talent at Atlas.
Talent: Alpine’s Core Value Creation Lever
At Alpine, we take a different approach to private equity value creation—one that starts with people. Talent is at the heart of everything we do at Alpine. By aiming to be the “Best Place to Work,” Alpine aims to attract high-achieving leaders and give them the opportunity to achieve asymmetric outcomes in their careers.
The Atlas Talent team is designed with the goal of hiring exceptional leaders and building high-performance leadership teams faster and more effectively than traditional private equity models, in close partnership with our portfolio company CEOs and boards.
The Talent function operates across two tightly connected areas: Executive Search and Talent Development. Together, these capabilities enable us to place high-attribute leaders in critical roles and support them with the structure, coaching, and operating rhythms required to perform at scale.
Recruiting the World’s Most Exceptional Leaders
Atlas maintains an in-house executive search capability that partners with portfolio companies to hire key senior leaders, including CEOs, CFOs, Chief People Officers, and Capital Allocators. The team is structured around role-specialized search pods, enabling repeat pattern recognition, proprietary talent pipelines, and faster execution capabilities.
This model reflects Alpine’s long-held belief that building high performance leadership teams—often early in the investment lifecycle—is central to performance. Unlike many private equity firms that outsource search, Alpine invests directly in this capability within Atlas as a core differentiator.
Unleashing Heroes
We believe a core driver of Alpine’s established track record is giving exceptional leaders the opportunity to play bigger at Alpine than they could anywhere else, with the right tools and support to be successful. We invest in people with the arc of their careers in mind, not a single investment horizon. That allows us to make long-term investments in individuals’ development that go beyond a traditional private equity model.
Talent Programs like the CEO-in-Training (CIT), CEO-in-Residence (CIR), and Investor-in-Residence (IIR) programs are one way we deliver on that commitment. These programs are designed to create long-term leadership development and to expand Alpine’s community of repeat operators.
Atlas also supports Alpine portfolio companies through PeopleFirst consulting and executive coaching. PeopleFirst consultants work with leadership teams to establish effective operating rhythms and performance systems, while executive coaches provide confidential, one-on-one development support to individual leaders.¹
Left: Erin Ruck, Principal, Organic Growth at Atlas. Right: Will Chance, CEO of Atlas.
Go-to-Market: Building Integrated Organic Growth Engines
At Alpine, we believe that building truly enduring businesses requires durable organic growth engines, with a goal of outperforming market growth.
The Atlas Go-to-Market (GTM) team exists to build the foundations of these organic growth engines. We partner with the investment team before a deal closes to identify the right growth opportunities, and then with company leadership to execute on them. From there, we partner with CEOs to hire the right growth leaders and codify repeatable playbooks to inflect organic growth at each subsequent add-on acquisition.
Underwriting to Execution
Building an organic growth engine begins in diligence. The Atlas GTM team partners with the deal team and CEO to build a bottoms-up revenue forecast with an operator’s lens. This approach ensures that revenue growth targets, commercial strategy, and operational priorities are in sync from the very beginning. Operational leading indicators are established and tied to the financial model prior to deal close and priorities are integrated into a 12-month roadmap that is then tracked on an ongoing basis.
Standing Up an Integrated Organic Growth Engine
The Atlas GTM team works directly with operating companies through four core pillars—Sales, Marketing, Pricing and Packaging, and Revenue Operations.
Building Repeatable, Scalable Playbooks
Once we’ve successfully implemented the underwritten value creation levers, the team aims to codify and scale bright spots through repeatable playbooks. The Atlas team then partners with hired leaders for the first few playbook deployments before handing over the reins to the operating team. Portfolio organic growth leaders have described this process as feeling like they’ve been endowed with “superpowers” as they get up to speed and gain traction in their roles.
Atlas’s GTM team is integral to how Alpine invests, hires leadership teams, and builds businesses.
Left: Adrianna King, Director of Talent Operations at Atlas. Right: Paul Disse, Principal at Atlas, pictured with Katie Keefe, Principal at Alpine.
Portfolio Operations: Laying the Foundation for Scale
Portfolio Operations aims to support every new Alpine platform company as they build financial infrastructure, scalable systems, and a clear operating backbone from the outset. By putting the right operations infrastructure in place early, Atlas aims to equip leadership teams with the clarity, controls, and decision-quality information required to scale with confidence.
Building a Strong Finance and Technology Backbone
The Portfolio Operations team focuses on installing the right people, processes, and systems to scale from the very beginning. It starts with leadership: Portfolio Operations partners with the Atlas Talent team and portfolio company CEOs to find, assess, and hire exceptional finance and technology leaders.
With the right leaders in place, the team moves into implementation of core financial controls and three-statement reporting, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and data infrastructure selection, and structured system rollouts governed by expert-led steering committees. While even the most experienced operating leaders may never stand up a full new finance and technology stack from scratch, our Portfolio Operations team does it multiple times a year. We believe providing this level of support in the critical early days of the build phase gives leaders an edge in execution.
Integration Strategies that Scale
The focus of the Atlas M&A Integration team in the early days is simple: get on the ground, build trust quickly, and align on a clear and mission-aligned change plan. Stability for employees and customers sets the foundation for the exciting growth that a platform company can unlock. The Atlas team partners with our operators to hire an integration team, document standard operating procedures, establish project management tools, and set in place a standardized integration operating rhythm.
Atlas: Building on Alpine’s Strategic Advantage
We believe Alpine’s successes are predicated on the power of its playbook. Atlas plays a key role in bringing that playbook to life.
The Atlas team is constantly innovating, learning from Alpine’s companies, and bringing those learnings back into our playbook to compound our strategic advantage. We believe this results in building businesses better and faster ultimately creating a lasting strategic advantage for the firm.
Ready to build with us?
If you’re an executive interested in learning more about how joining an Alpine portfolio company could supercharge your career, visit our careers page.
If you’re a founder interested in learning how partnering with Alpine and the Atlas team can preserve your legacy and drive growth for the future, email opportunities@alpineinvestors.com to get in touch.
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¹PeopleFirst coaches are independent third parties compensated solely by the applicable portfolio company. Such coaches are not employees, agents, or representatives of Alpine Investors.
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