Why Group 18
Built for stability.
The name. The approach. The people. Everything about Group 18 traces back to one idea: build something stable enough to last.
The noble gases
Group 18 on the periodic table is the noble gases — helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, radon. They're the most stable elements in chemistry. Non-reactive. Balanced. They don't chase bonds they don't need.
The name is also personal. Kevin Noble founded the firm, and the parallel isn't accidental. The work we do is about building stability into businesses that have outgrown their early-stage chaos — giving them the structure to scale without losing what made them work in the first place.
Kevin is a mechanical engineer by training. That shapes everything about how we operate. We're scientific. We're analytical. We're structured. But we're also experimental — we don't paste frameworks blindly. We diagnose your environment, design for your constraints, and build infrastructure that actually fits.
Our newsletter is called The Catalyst — another nod to chemistry. A catalyst accelerates a reaction without being consumed by it. That's the role we play: we accelerate your growth, build the systems, and hand them back. You own the outcome.
Founder
Kevin Noble
Kevin's career is a pattern: enter a new industry, learn fast, build systems, scale teams. He's done it four times across four sectors — and each time the scope got bigger.
He started as a mechanical engineer at Ford Motor Company, working in powertrain and AWD systems while earning a master's from Purdue. He left engineering for an electronics manufacturing startup, where he went from individual contributor to Director of Operations managing 22 people within six months. When that company didn't survive the financial crisis, he helped wind it down — then moved into warehouse management software as VP of Operations Engineering, running the full hardware lifecycle alongside controls engineering teams.
Then came Atlassian. Over more than a decade, Kevin grew a team from 2 to 135 people while the company scaled from a private startup to a publicly traded business generating $5B in annual revenue. His team — data engineers, software developers, business architects, program managers — was the transformation engine for Atlassian's Customer Support Services organization. In his final role as Strategic Advisor, he sat at the front end of the most complex, ambiguous problems facing the department.
He launched Group 18 because the businesses that need these lessons most — founder-led companies between $3M and $40M — can't access this kind of experience at the right price point. Group 18 changes that. Kevin architects the engagement, coaches the team, and makes sure the work lands.
Senior practitioners
The team
We don't staff junior associates and learn on your dime. Every person on a Group 18 engagement has operated at scale, led transformation, and shipped real outcomes. Here's who's doing the work.
Anna Appell
Consultant
Transformation at enterprise scale.
Anna brings over 12 years of experience translating strategy and financial goals into measurable outcomes. Before Group 18, she spent more than eight years at Atlassian — rising from Program Manager to Head of Enterprise Transformation for Customer Support Services — where she led large-scale programs that modernized operations, improved efficiency, and launched new capabilities across global teams. Before Atlassian, she spent nearly six years at Dimensional Fund Advisors across business analysis, project management, and IT strategy. She specializes in designing the systems, operating models, and rhythms that let teams execute without bottlenecks.
Nick Garcia
Consultant
Strategy meets analytical horsepower.
Nick combines a background in economics and quantitative analytics with nearly a decade of business architecture and strategy execution at Atlassian. He rose from Business Analytics Manager to Principal Business Objective Manager, owning enterprise OKRs end-to-end and driving large-scale transformation across Cloud growth, M&A integration, and go-to-market functions. Before Atlassian, he was a Senior Economic Consultant at Edgeworth Economics and a Business Consultant at The World Bank. He brings the rare combination of analytical rigor and operational instinct that turns data into decisions.
Let's talk.
A 20-minute conversation. No pitch. No proposal. Just a direct discussion about where your business is, what's not working, and whether we can help.