Sailor's Society chief executive Stuart Rivers acknowledges that he took a “massive hit on salary” when he left the world of business to work for charitable organisations.

“Part of the reason was that I reached a point in my life where there was nothing more I necessarily wanted to achieve in the corporate world, and at the same time I had just dealt with a very tricky project,” he says, a reference to being tasked with cutting many thousands of jobs at Sweden’s Ericsson.