We have been on every side of this transaction

David spent the first nineteen years of his career in management accounting and financial control at Fiat Auto, then eighteen years at Honeywell in supply-chain planning — finishing as Global Director of their Supply Chain Academy, responsible for planning standards and compliance across six business units, having built the European function out of Paris.

That pairing is the point. He knows what a set of management accounts is supposed to prove, and he knows what actually happens on the plant that produces them. Most people who can do one cannot do the other.

He has also been the buyer. David acquired GFCO, a coatings manufacturer, and went through the process from the other side of the table — which questions get asked, which get missed, and which he would ask differently now. That experience is a large part of why Clarity exists.

MSc Logistics & Supply Chain Management, Cranfield School of Management. BSc Management & IT, University of York.

Deon began at I&J, South Africa's FMCG market leader, and worked up. Factory Manager at Mosselbay running 280 people, where he put Lean and SAP into the plant. Then Senior Processing Manager over an 800-strong shift producing 100 tonnes on a 24-hour cycle — a loss-making operation he helped return to profit in three years, in a business where one percent of lost yield cost a million rand a day.

As Operations Director at Hangana Seafoods he took a ZAR-32m loss to ZAR+18m profit across 1,200 employees, and commissioned the plant investment that opened up US export at more than double the previous commodity price. He was called back in 2022 after a $360m factory build failed to perform: he redesigned the process flow and lifted capacity from 17 to 40 tonnes per shift without adding a single head.

He has built and sold businesses of his own, too — a third-party logistics operation running twelve refrigerated vehicles and 180 tonnes a month, and the consultancy alongside it, both sold in 2019. He then founded Munditia, a specialist site sanitation company now working with Vistry, Bellway and Countryside.

Today he is Managing Director of GFCO in Thetford, manufacturing coatings that replace single-use plastic in packaging. He is not recalling factories from memory.

Dustine did not start in HR. She started running retail stores and distribution teams — store manager at Woolworths, then personnel and distribution roles through Asda and Tesco — where commercial performance and leadership mattered every day. That grounding has shaped everything since.

Twenty-five years on, much of it in food manufacturing: Bakkavor, Adelie Food Holdings, New England Seafood, Natures Way Foods. Also three separate engagements with Condé Nast, plus Centrica, Three, and most recently passenger transport with the Go-Ahead Group. Her specialisms are TUPE, organisational change and union relations.

Most relevant here: as HR Director at GFCO she ran the people side of acquisition end to end — due diligence on employment terms, contracts, benefits and transferring liabilities, then the consultations, harmonisation and cultural integration afterwards. She has seen what surfaces in a diligence room, because she was the one finding it.

“I don't claim to have all the answers. I just know which questions need asking.”

Louis is a commercially focused business operator with experience spanning sales leadership, business development, contract and tender negotiation, marketing, technology and business ownership. He has helped lead multi-million-pound businesses and managed complex commercial relationships with major public and private-sector clients.

He began in capital projects — construction schemes from £10k to £3m at Kent County Council, then project management at Mott MacDonald on a London Borough housing programme. Eleven years at Angel Recruitment took him to Sales Director of a £20m-a-year, eight-location workforce business, with board accountability for supply across construction, industrial, hospitality and education, servicing the Houses of Parliament, the NHS, Compass Group, Greencore and Axalta. He then acquired Angel Human Resources through an asset purchase — so he has bought a business, integrated it, and kept its clients.

As CEO of Easy T Group he works as a Fractional People Director to construction and manufacturing firms, and designed and led the build of Easy Technology — an end-to-end workforce platform integrating CRM, ATS, payroll, compliance and executive reporting, with dashboards linking capacity, utilisation, cost-to-serve and margin. When the assessment asks whether your pipeline exists anywhere other than your own head, that question comes from someone who built the system that fixes it.

As a founder and operator, Louis brings a practical understanding of customer concentration, pipeline quality, pricing, recurring revenue, contract dependency, sales process and owner-led relationships — the areas that often determine whether the commercial story presented in a transaction is genuinely sustainable and transferable to a new owner.

Also a director of Purple Penguin Hospitality, which owns and operates pubs in Kent.