The people behind the group.

Founded Thornton FM Group on a simple idea: one accountable partner for every part of running a building.

Devante founded Thornton FM Group after learning the trade the slow way — on site, job by job, from the plant rooms and risers of live buildings where nothing can be handed back late and no excuse is ever accepted. That early grounding in day-to-day maintenance work still shapes how the business is run: the people who quote a job, programme it and complete it are expected to have stood in the building they are working in.

The company began as a small reactive repairs operation and grew because clients kept asking for more. A facilities contract would arrive with a utilities question attached to it, or a construction project would surface a fire safety concern, and each time the client was sent somewhere else. Devante built the group in reverse — adding the divisions clients kept being bounced to, until the answer to almost any building question could be given under one roof. Facilities management came first, followed by utilities, telecoms, construction and refurbishment, and the fire safety work now carried out by our sister company, Thornton Fire.

As CEO he sets the direction of the group and stays close to the work itself. He takes personal responsibility for the relationships that matter most — the long-running estate contracts, the clients who have moved sites and taken the group with them, and the occasions when something has gone wrong and needs putting right properly. His standing brief to the team is short and has not changed since the first contract: tell the client what is actually happening, in plain language, before they have to ask.

He leads the group's growth across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and is the person clients deal with when a contract needs to be rethought rather than simply renewed.

Brings an independent, outside view to how the group is governed, controlled and held to account.

Monique joined Thornton FM Group as a Non Executive Director to make sure the company is run as well as it is built. Her role sits deliberately apart from the day-to-day operation: she is not involved in winning work, pricing jobs or directing crews, and that distance is exactly the point. She asks the questions an executive team under pressure to deliver can find hardest to ask itself.

Her background spans governance, financial oversight and risk management across regulated, service-led organisations, where a control that quietly stops working becomes a client problem long before it becomes a board problem. She applies that discipline here to the areas where a facilities group is most exposed: contract compliance, insurance and liability, subcontractor and supply chain vetting, data handling, and the health and safety records that sit behind every site visit.

She leads the board's review of the group's written policies and of the standards the business asks of itself — health and safety, ESG, supply chain conduct and the way complaints and incidents are escalated and closed out. Where a policy exists on paper but not in practice, her job is to find the gap and see it closed.

She also represents the interests of clients, residents and staff who are not in the room when decisions are made. Much of the group's work takes place in occupied buildings — homes, practices, schools and managed estates — and Monique's standing test on any proposal is whether it would still look sensible to the person who lives or works there.

A long-standing voice on operations, supply chain and expansion, called on when a decision needs weighing.

Craig acts as a senior sounding board to the group rather than a director of it. He is not on the org chart, does not sign off contracts and does not appear in a client's quote — he is brought in when a decision carries consequences and is better tested against someone with nothing to defend.

He has spent the working life around the property and building services sector, on both sides of the table: delivering and managing estates, and later advising the businesses that serve them. That combination gives him an unusual read on this market. He knows how a contract is genuinely performed once the mobilisation meeting is over and the programme meets real weather, real access restrictions and real people, and he knows how suppliers behave when a client stops watching closely.

His advice concentrates on the things that decide whether growth helps or hurts a company: how far a service promise can be stretched before quality slips, which subcontractors are safe to build a reputation on, where a new division needs its own leadership before it can be added to a client's portfolio, and how a group of this size should approach new regions and new sectors without diluting what already works.

He also keeps the group honest about its own history — the mistakes that were made, the contracts that taught something expensive, and the reasons certain rules exist. Much of what he contributes is the memory of what happened last time, which in this industry is often the most useful evidence available.

Joined after a long standing career in painting and decorating, and now runs that work across the group's contracts.

Jamie joined the business after a long standing career in painting and decorating, and has spent most of his working life with a brush in his hand — up staircases and in lift lobbies, in tenanted homes, on new builds, and in buildings that had to stay open and occupied while the work was carried out around them.

He now runs the group's painting and decoration work, which sits across facilities and construction contracts rather than in a division of its own: redecoration after a repair or a leak, tannin staining and damp-related marks brought back through fresh paint, communal areas worn to bare edges by years of hands and trolleys, and full decorative schemes on refurbishment projects where colour and finish are specified room by room.

Most of that work happens in buildings people are still living and working in, so Jamie's judgement is as much about the ordering of a job as the applying of it — which stairwell can be closed and for how long, how a lobby can be taken out of use without stranding a resident, how dust and smell are managed in a block full of families and small children, and how a programme is reshuffled when access is refused at short notice. He sets the standard for the finish himself and expects edges, lines and clean-down to be checked before a client is told a stage is complete.

He also looks after the decorators the group relies on across its regions — matching the right trade to the right site, making sure surfaces are properly prepared rather than hurried over, and giving clients a straight answer on what a redecoration will and will not cover, including where underlying damp or movement needs putting right before any fresh paint is worth applying.