Three of us. Fifty-seven years, six continents, thirty board seats.

Marc joined an international engineering group as a graduate engineer and was in the C-suite within nine years.

He took an environmental technology business from a concept to a global operation on four continents, creating products and markets that had not existed before. At its peak it turned over £13.6m, and it made more than £5m of profit along the way.

He was then asked, well outside his remit, to fix a third-of-a-million-square-foot manufacturing operation that was struggling. He scaled it: new equipment, new processes, and most of the team recruited. As Group CEO he led the group through the most profitable period in its history, doubling revenue to £132m, with a record year for revenue or profit in four of his five full years. The year before he took over, its three companies had barely broken even between them.

He also hired the people who ran it. Recruiting the general managers and regional presidents who led the group's businesses around the world was a core part of the job, and he spent months of every year in the United States doing a good deal of it. He has sat on the boards of eleven companies in six countries.

Outside work he has founded not-for-profit organisations and gives strategic advice to several charities.

The real story was never the numbers. It was learning to put people where they have the most impact, and to back them fully. Marc

Colin is a chartered accountant, Big Four trained at Ernst & Young, with fourteen years at Group CFO level across a family of international engineering businesses, including their North American and European companies. He carried the financial and commercial governance of eleven companies on five continents through a period of rapid growth, led their financial and digital transformation, and has sat on more than ten company boards.

He makes deals work where most finance teams would not try. He closed large contracts in the Middle East, India, Mongolia, Argentina and Brazil, where getting a project financed, and getting the money back out again, needed structures built for the purpose, including sovereign-guaranteed financing. He went on to raise nine figures of private equity for the business the three of us founded in the United States.

He is not the finance director who says no on principle. The useful thing about Colin in a deal is that he will price a risk rather than avoid it, then tell you plainly which parts of it are worth taking and which are not. He reads a set of accounts as an owner rather than an auditor.

Away from the day job he was one of the early pioneers of expected goals analytics in football, and for the past several seasons he has been head of analysis for one of the most successful teams in Gaelic football.

Truth over comfort. Direct, evidence-based clarity over short-term noise. Colin

Darren rose from placement student to Business Development Director and board member before the age of 40. Throughout, he has gone looking for the biggest problems nobody had solved and built the answer: recycling materials that had never been recycled in Australia, changing how the food sector deals with its waste, and some of the first plants for treating PFAS. He has solved problems for water utilities, mining, soil remediation, pharmaceuticals and food, and more than once he was the person who made the market exist.

He is a business builder rather than a salesman. He recruited senior people, built and structured teams, and spent more than two decades taking environmental technology businesses into export markets around the world, living in London, India, Qatar and the United States along the way. He closed multi-million deals in some of the hardest places in the world to finance and do business, across languages and cultures. He then led a North American business through its biggest period of growth, to eight figures.

Then he did it for himself. He identified the opportunity in the United States, led the raise of nine figures of private equity, and built a $40m business from scratch, starting with buying the site: sourcing, operations, sales and the team.

Outside work he has served for years on school boards of governors and has been heavily involved in Ulster rugby.

Good business is rarely the product first. It's finding the right person, in the right place, and putting them next to it. Darren