WISAG Brand Guidelines: Frankfurt 1965, One Umbrella Name & Three Holdings

One founder cleaning buildings.

WISAG began with building cleaning in Frankfurt am Main in 1965. German Wikipedia says Claus Wisser started cleaning buildings in the city that year and soon had customers across the Rhine-Main region. The group is still based in Frankfurt. Its parent company is Aveco Holding AG, written AVECO, German Wikipedia says, and the group writes its own name in capitals as WISAG.

The second step came a decade later. German Wikipedia says ideas from facility management in the United States led Wisser to found a second company in 1975 for security, surveillance and reception services, following an American practice in which doormen and guards worked for the same contractor as the cleaners. That wider offer let the Wisser companies keep growing, as many customers across Germany chose to buy several building services from one provider.

By 1990, German Wikipedia says, the Wisser companies covered the full set of infrastructural and technical services around a building: cleaning, security, building and operating technology, garden and landscape care, parking management and catering. Until 1993 the individual companies served their own customers separately. That year they were brought together in a WISAG Service Holding, the first step towards one group.

One umbrella brand since 2004.

The name became the brand in 2004. From the start of that year, German Wikipedia says, all subsidiaries traded under the umbrella brand WISAG, each named for its service: the former WDL became WISAG Gebäudereinigung, for building cleaning, and the former IHS became WISAG Sicherheitsdienste, for security services. The aim, the same article says, was to make the companies’ belonging together and their complete range clearer. It is a plain naming system: the group name, then a German service word.

In June 2010 the service holding was split into three holdings of equal standing. WISAG Facility Service Holding serves commercial and residential property with facility management, building technology, cleaning and catering. WISAG Industrie Service Holding looks after production and industrial plants, with maintenance, technical cleaning and industrial assembly. WISAG Aviation Service Holding provides most of the services needed on airport aprons, including aircraft cleaning. German Wikipedia also describes the group as the second-largest firm in Germany for infrastructural and technical building management, measured by domestic sales.

Aviation is the most visible part. The trade site airportzentrale.de reported in April 2023 that WISAG Aviation had started ground handling at Düsseldorf Airport on 1 April 2023 under a seven-year licence granted in December 2022, adding to its work at Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne/Bonn and Münster-Osnabrück, with about 2,600 staff in Germany. The company text in that report put the whole group at nearly 50,000 employees at more than 250 locations. In October 2026 the same site reported that WISAG Aviation had been chosen to handle TUIfly’s ramp work at Munich, where WISAG has worked through a partnership with Aviapartner since late 2024.

The Düsseldorf report also shows how the aviation arm presents itself. More than half of the staff working there for WISAG Aviation had been taken over from earlier providers, and a collective agreement made in December 2022 for its handling company at Cologne/Bonn was extended to the new site. The airline Condor and, shortly before the start, Norwegian had hired it for ramp handling, the company said. In the same text the WISAG Aviation Service Holding described itself as the largest private full-service partner for airport services in Germany, a claim made in its own words.

Design and documentation.

Facility-services companies sell work that happens inside other people’s buildings, and the two in this guide describe it in short lists. In a July 2022 release, Atalian grouped its work under five headings: cleaning, security, maintenance and energy management, reception, and catering. EMCOR, a contractor that also maintains buildings, summed up its work in late 2025 with four verbs, saying it would serve customers that “build, power, service and protect facilities and critical infrastructure.”

The people who do the work are the service itself, and staff numbers are among the figures given for both companies. Atalian gave more than 123,000 employees in 35 countries in 2022, and La Tribune de l’Hôtellerie put it at about 63,000 in 15 countries in 2024; English Wikipedia gives EMCOR 40,400 employees in 2024. The photographs of staff at work, the uniforms and the workplace scenes that such companies publish belong to them, and this guide reproduces none of them.

Names matter because a name can tie a company to one service. TFN, the French cleaning firm founded in 1944, renamed itself Atalian in 2009 because, its chief executive told Le Figaro, the old name was too closely associated with cleaning. When Atalian and the British firm Servest formed a joint venture in 2016, it took both names, and Servest’s chief executive told the European Cleaning Journal that a customer should find the same look and feel in an office in London or Frankfurt as in Madrid or Paris.

Ownership can change quickly, as both companies here show, which makes corporate pages on owners and countries, and the annual and sustainability reports that sit beside them, part of how these firms present themselves. EMCOR sold its British business to OCS in December 2025, BIC Magazine reported, and Atalian agreed a recapitalisation with its creditors in June 2026. This guide sets each company’s own account beside dated press and marks what rests on the company’s word.

A family firm in its second generation.

WISAG remains a family business. German Wikipedia says Bernd Jacke chaired the management from 2001 to 2008, and in 2009 the founder’s son Michael C. Wisser, until then the finance chief, took over. The group is run through WISAG Dienstleistungsholding, whose sole shareholder is Aveco Holding AG, although German Wikipedia says Aveco has had no power of instruction over it since 2016. airportzentrale.de described WISAG as family-led in its 2023 report.

The family also has a Nordic link. In a press release of 30 September 2026, Coor, the Stockholm-listed facility-services company, said Michael C. Wisser, appointed by Wisag Service Holding Europa, chairs the nomination committee for its 2027 annual general meeting.

The group also sells businesses. On 4 November 2026 the trade journal TGA+E Fachplaner reported that Caverion Deutschland was buying WISAG Automatisierungstechnik, a building-automation specialist working since 1988 with 168 staff at seven German sites. The deal was agreed in November 2026, subject to clearance by the Federal Cartel Office; not completed at the time of writing.

The head office tells a design story of its own. Der Facility Manager reported in July 2013 that WISAG had moved into a former IBM office building in Frankfurt’s Niederrad district, which it had fully revitalised and reworked on ecological lines, and that the building had been rated “Excellent” under BREEAM DE. The certificate came from DIFNI, the German private institute for sustainable real estate, and the audits and advice came from 2COM, the consulting company of WISAG Facility Service Holding. WISAG chose BREEAM DE, the journal reported, because the method can also rate how a building is run and how its users behave.

For a design guide, WISAG shows how a single capitalised name can carry a wide services group: one brand, a German service word after it, and three holdings behind it. Compare Dussmann, another German family-owned services group, and ISS, the Danish facility-services group. For this guide we use an ink blue, a signal orange, a cool grey and a pale paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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