Force for Good 2026: How Eight Group Front-Loaded Leadership Alignment

Eight Group is a U.K.-based facilities management business built to scale through acquisition and operational excellence. Alpine Operation Group’s Talent and Portfolio Stand-Up teams at Atlas recruited and assembled the leadership team (including its CEO, CFO, CPO, and M&A leadership) before closing the platform’s first acquisition. To facilitate early alignment, Eight Group hosted a three-day PeopleFirst workshop that brought the leadership team together to focus on trust, team effectiveness, and long-term strategy.

The work included Hogan assessments, a suite of personality and cognitive tests designed to help individuals better understand their strengths and weaknesses in professional contexts, and the development of a five-year vision and One Page Plan to align the business.

Culture by Design

The team established a clear “First Team” mindset, which prioritized platform-wide success over functional silos. That cohesion was visible at the company’s first board meeting following the workshop. “The team showed up less as individual functional leaders and more as a cohesive unit,” says Jack Armstrong, Board Lead and Head of Capital Markets at Alpine. “There was real self-awareness in the room — clear articulation of strengths, gaps, and how they intend to operate together. It is not common to see that level of introspection at a first board meeting.”

Michelle Wall, Chief People Officer, underscores why timing mattered. “Having a CPO in the seat this early allowed us to shape strategy with people at the center from Day One,” she says. “Usually, culture is something you retrofit. Here, we built it in.”

Early executive alignment has created operating discipline. The leadership team runs a weekly “drumbeat” meeting to review goals, accountability, and forward momentum. Objectives are tracked through shared systems and dashboards, providing real-time visibility across the Eight Group platform and each partner business.

Designing a Thoughtful Rollout

As of early 2026, Eight Group has completed four acquisitions, with additional deals pending. The PeopleFirst Operating Rhythm allows the platform team to integrate acquisitions and align partner business leadership with platform-wide priorities. The team is also designing a partner business implementation approach. Regional and General Managers are actively involved in shaping this next phase — ensuring that vision-setting, operating cadence, and goal renewal rhythms resonate locally.

At the partner business level, for example, Eight Group is intentionally building a small, high-caliber group of U.K.-based executive coaches to support the partner business leaders and to ensure coaching at the local level reflects U.K. cultural norms and working styles.

Eight Group’s choices around PeopleFirst show that early leadership alignment can compound. By investing upfront in executive cohesion and clarity, the platform can create a foundation that enables acquisitions, integration, and growth to move faster.

Getting out of the day-to-day operations of the business to work ‘on’ the business gave us clarity on what we want to build and how we’re going to get there.” —Dan Guest, CEO, Eight Group

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Disclosures
Case studies presented contain the opinions of past and present Alpine portfolio company executives. Alpine makes no representation or warranty as to the accuracy or completeness of the information presented here. It should not be assumed that the portfolio companies discussed in these case studies were profitable or that future portfolio companies or experiences will be comparable. Past performance is not necessarily indicative, or a guarantee, of future results. Under no circumstances should these case studies be construed as an offer to sell, or a solicitation to buy, any security or as opinions regarding the provision of investment advisory services by Alpine. Please see Alpine’s Terms of Use on Alpine’s website for disclosures.