Four decades of excellence: how Atlas FM built a leading facilities management business through culture and care
Since its founding in 1986, Atlas FM (Atlas) has established itself as one of the UK’s leading facilities management providers, combining award-winning service with a people-first philosophy that sets it apart. Today, the employee-owned business is trusted by more than 5000 customers to deliver exceptional facilities services that create cleaner, safer, and happier workplaces.
Built on a culture of professionalism, reliability and genuine care, Atlas’ long-serving team takes pride in delivering every service with expertise, personality and a commitment to excellence, helping clients achieve workplaces that truly shine.
With nine specialist business units in its portfolio, the company provides a comprehensive range of integrated services, including facilities management, cleaning, engineering maintenance, security, pest control, grounds maintenance, window cleaning, and decarbonisation.
In July 2026, Atlas is proud to celebrate a very special milestone: its 40th anniversary. Symbolic of four decades of dedicated technical excellence and people-centric delivery, Construction & Civil Engineering sits down with Atlas’ Chief Executive Officer, Chris Wisely, to uncover what this milestone means to a business where culture is everything.
“Atlas started when our previous owners, Ray Empson and Nick Earley, bought a small cleaning business in Mayfair – just 20 cleaners operating in three or four contracts in the area,” Chris begins. “They moved into the business full time and, over the next 30 years, successfully grew it to around £35 million in turnover.
“I joined the business in 2017, and we pushed on significantly from there,” he recounts. “Today, we’re at £400 million turnover with 15,000 people employed across a range of services. The most important thing, however, is that we’ve been able to retain our culture throughout this growth period. We’ve got a network of 40 offices across the UK, so we’re a local business to many.”
While Atlas has grown rapidly in scale, its success has been rooted in a clear sense of purpose. “Many corporate mission statements lean into what they do and how they do it, but for us, it’s always been very much about the ‘why’,” Chris elaborates. “Facilities management is an interesting space. What’s exciting about being a big people business is the joy you get from creating a positive emotional impact on others. Our purpose of creating happiness, both internally and for our clients, is what really drives our performance.
“We’ve never chased growth for growth’s sake. Every decision we’ve made has been about building a stronger business rather than just a bigger one. We’ve had a good blend of organic growth and disciplined acquisitions. From an organic growth perspective, we follow a simple formula: if you look after your people and your customers, then the commercial results follow. It shows – we’ve got an average contract length of over ten years across our 50 largest contracts, so we’ve been able to create strong client partnerships through multiple re-tender scenarios.
“From an acquisition perspective, it’s the easiest thing in the world to write a cheque, but picking the right organisations is really important,” he adds. “We spend a lot of time with management teams, understanding the culture to see if it’s a good fit. Through this method, we’ve become very good at creating loyalty through our acquisitions. Our business would not be as it is today without the great people who have joined us through acquisition.”
This people-first approach to acquisitions has shaped some of Atlas’ most significant developments. The company’s most recent business, Atlas Retail, for instance, demonstrates how aligning expertise with culture can create new opportunities for growth and innovation.
“We purchased a company called Aston Services Group at the end of 2024, who specialised in the retail sector. We’ve since created our new Atlas Retail business to support the existing contracts that we already had in the retail space,” Chris says. “It’s been a great opportunity to bring together award-winning cleaning and security services into a bundle environment, such as retail, where they often work together. When you’ve got a team of people that own the space from both the security and the cleaning perspective, you can do something really special. It’s definitely a space where we want to continue to grow.”
Alongside expanding its specialist capabilities, Atlas is investing heavily in technology to strengthen the employee experience. By connecting its growing workforce and reinforcing its culture, digital innovation has become another key driver of the company’s continued success.
“We’re focusing a lot on technology. In the FM industry where almost all our staff work externally on client sites, communication can be a challenge. Because of this, we decided to invest in our own app called ‘My Atlas’. The app connects all our 15,000 people and allows us to strongly promote our culture, recognising the efforts of individuals and creating communities where we can talk about performance. We’ve also built in the ability for people to communicate with us directly, so if they want to talk to payroll or HR, they can instantly connect with the people that can fix their problems. It takes pressure off our frontline management and helps us fix issues quickly. We also have employee feedback surveys on the app, as well as our online training environment, Atlas Academy. We’ve made My Atlas multi-language so people can communicate in their preferred language.”
As Atlas celebrates 40 years in business, its focus remains firmly on the future. With continued investment in its people, technology and specialist services, the company is well-positioned to build on four decades of success while staying true to the culture that has defined it from the beginning.
“We’re evolving all the time. Right now, we’re very much focused on becoming a solutions-based business rather than product-based. We’re putting a great push on technology to help us improve our internal productivity and client outcomes, whilst coming together as ‘one Atlas’ as opposed to four separate business units as we are now.
“National infrastructure is an area where we see real strength and real opportunity, and it’s a clear focus for us under the One Atlas banner,” Chris adds. “As our divisions come together, we can offer infrastructure clients a genuinely joined-up service: cleaning, security, hard services and engineering maintenance, delivered by one team rather than four. It’s a sector where our scale and our culture give us a real advantage, and it’s somewhere we’re investing deliberately as we grow.
“We’ve also set ourselves challenges around social value, which I’m super excited about. We’re lucky to have some amazing clients who have the same attitude towards ESG that we have, and so we’re working on some great programmes with our largest clients. For example, we’re now at the back end of a significant programme with HMP Portland, where we’ve created a training environment so that people who are reaching the end of their sentence can learn specialist skills to improve their lives. We do a lot of work with Action For Children and have awarded a large number of full-time roles to people who have come through the charity. We also work with the British Red Cross and several homeless and refugee charities, so I’m very excited about the ambitious goals we’ve set ourselves this year.”
As Atlas enters a new era, Chris believes that creating happier workplaces – for employees and clients alike – will remain at the core of the company’s next chapter, guiding its continued growth and success for many more years to come.