Søren Hilligsøe graduated from the Aarhus School of Business in 1978 and started working as a lecturer at a business college, at the same time using his language skills as an official translator and interpreter. In the 1980s he worked in export sales in Denmark and the UK, during which time he carried out negotiations with customers in approximately 20 different countries. After his return to Denmark in the 1990s, he started teaching negotiation skills to students, which led to the development of a workshop for businesspeople, which he runs regularly in both English and Danish. Today he is involved in teaching, lecturing, speaking, writing and training of negotiation skills to students and businesspeople in most of Europe as well as advising and coaching negotiators. For the past eight years he has worked as an Associate Trainer for Canning.

Richard Pooley graduated from the University of Exeter in 1974 and worked for the UK's Ministry of Overseas Development in London and, for a short time, at the United Nations in New York. In 1978, he joined Canning, a UK-based language and management training company. During his time at Canning he coached and trained senior managers from major international companies in more than thirty countries on five continents. At various stages since 1986 he has been responsible for Canning's sales in the UK, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Turkey, Latvia and Estonia. Richard became a partner of Canning in 1995 and Managing Director in 2005 and retired from the company in 2012. He continues to do specialist training and coaching – e.g. for the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, Schneider Electric in France, Singapore and the USA, and the University of Exeter in the UK.