‘I want to continue to open doors’: Suki Sandhu OBE, founder and CEO of INvolve, on the power of inclusivity (EXCLUSIVE)
The inclusivity powerhouse leads the 'Third Sector & Community' category of Attitude 101, empowered by Bentley
As a nine-year-old Suki Sandhu sits behind the cash register of his mum and dad’s mini supermarket in the East Midlands, a customer approaches with a single pint of milk and a pocketful of pennies before slamming both on the counter. Dutifully, Sandhu starts calculating.
“I was really good at maths,” he tells me via Zoom from his sun-dappled home in Jersey, “because I used to calculate how much change I had to give customers.” He describes his parents, who are both immigrants from India, as entrepreneurs and credits them for instilling him with the work ethic he has today. For the leader of the Third Sector and Community category of Attitude 101, empowered by Bentley, business is clearly in his blood.
It’s why he later studied a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in Economics at the University of Birmingham, before joining global recruitment agency Michael Page on a graduate scheme in 2003.
Reflecting on this time, he says: “It was quite a macho, salesy, very straight environment and I don’t actually remember if there was anyone else gay that I knew of at the time in the company.”
He wasn’t out as LGBTQ+ then but says that the lack of visibility and representation really impacted him. Despite this, he quickly became a top biller at the company and began earning trips abroad as a reward for his hard work.
It was on one of these international excursions to Berlin that he met his German partner, Manuel, in March 2006, and they started dating. Finally feeling settled both at work and at home, Sandhu felt ready to come out to his family and friends. First up was his younger sister, with whom he used to dance around their living room to Madonna’s Immaculate Collection on VHS. Sandhu says she was “terrific” about it, eventually helping him come out to his mother too. This was more challenging, as she took a little longer to get her head around the news, but she’s now one of Sandhu’s biggest supporters. He lovingly jokes that the rest of his friends and family were “so bloody supportive” that it was “actually really annoying because it’s a really boring story”.
Returning to his professional life, Sandhu, now 45, has an impressive CV. In 2011, he founded Audeliss, a recruitment agency for executive and board appointments that specifically represents ethnically diverse talent, LGBTQ+ communities, and women. They’ve helped organisations like Google, NatWest, Bank of England and Channel 4 to hire more inclusively. In fact, Audeliss was brought in to help recruit a majority LGBTQ+ board of directors for dating app Grindr, of which one industry commentator remarked it’s now “the queerest board in history (that we know of)”.
In 2013, Sandhu founded INvolve, a consultancy and global network that started out by producing a top-50 LGBTQ+ executive list in the Financial Times. Since then, it’s grown into an advisory consulting firm responsible for annual Role Model Lists for women (HERoes), ethnic minority groups (EMpower), LGBTQ+ people (OUTstanding), and the neurodiverse and disabled (ENable).
Diversity, equity and inclusion is at the heart of everything Sandhu stands for, and he’s not backing down amid the recent backlash in places like the US. “We’re not changing our philosophy,” he says. “We’re going to carry on as we are because the world needs more inclusion. It is not a zero-sum game. It supports everyone. When straight white men complain that diverse CEOs are taking their jobs, I tend to play my little violin. I have no time for rubbish like that.”
Speaking to this demographic is how Sandhu’s 2022 book, How to Get Your Act Together, co-written by Felicity Hassan, came about. It aims to engage straight white men in the conversation of diversity and inclusion in business, and features an impressive list of CEOs, including Virgin’s Richard Branson and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff.
Sandhu’s particularly proud of his third sector credentials, including being a Stonewall Ambassador and a patron of the youth homelessness charity, akt (formerly Albert Kennedy Trust). He’s also a board member of Outright International, which invests in partnerships with grassroots LGBTQ+ communities and allies internationally in order to produce cultural, social and legal change. Alongside this, there’s the Suki Sandhu LGBTQI Asia Fund — he’s quick to reassure me that he did not come up with the name. Managed by the charity GiveOut, the fund identifies LGBTQ+ organisations working across Asia and pools donations to make grants to effect on-the-ground change. It has helped fund organisations like India’s Solidarity and Action Against the HIV Infection in India (SAATHII) group, or Sri Lanka’s Equal Ground initiative, which helps produce local research and advocates to improve access to health, education, housing and legal protections for LGBTQ+ people.
As recognition for Sandhu’s services to diversity and business, he was thrilled in late 2018 to find out he’d been awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for the New Year Honours list 2019. While on a business trip to New York City, he was having breakfast with the CEO of the charity The Trevor Project, when a FaceTime call from his partner Manuel — who had flown back early to London the day before — flashed up on his phone. “You got a letter,” Manuel revealed, “By Her Majesty’s Service.”
Sandhu immediately assumed it was a “bloody tax bill”, before urging Manuel to open it. He says he was “stunned and speechless” to find out that he was being offered an OBE. Wearing a pinstripe Alexander McQueen suit and white Burberry cravat, Sandhu brought Manuel and his parents to the ceremony, and they excitedly drove through Buckingham Palace’s front gates in a black cab. He recalls being taught before meeting the then-Prince Charles that men bow and women curtsey — but he found himself doing the latter. “The whole day was just a fantastic experience,” he says, “and I’m really proud of having it.”
Throughout it all, Sandhu says the support of his partner has been crucial. The pair had a civil partnership ceremony with close friends and family on 16 July 2010 at Islington Town Hall, and held a big party in Germany exactly a year later. After marriage equality became a reality in the UK in 2014, they decided to convert their civil partnership into a marriage on — you guessed it — 16 July 2016. They then threw another huge celebration last year for their 15th wedding anniversary. In fact, they now work together, with Manuel joining the leadership team around five years ago. And Sandhu’s parents love his husband too. “They call Manuel their son,” Suki says. “They love him to bits. They see him as family and they’re huge allies.”
As for what’s next careerwise, Sandhu’s open to selling the business or making more acquisitions within the diversity, inclusion and talent space. But he says the ultimate goal is to continue to “drive more representation, make sure people feel they belong in business, and that the next generation of diverse talent can climb the ladder”.
Sandhu adds, “I don’t believe you have to harden yourself to succeed, and I don’t believe success should come at the expense of your values, your relationships, or your joy. For me, I feel like I’ve built my life and career by being myself, not despite it. I want to make sure that I continue to open doors. And I want to change who feels allowed to walk through them.”
Get more from Attitude
The full Attitude 101 list appears in issue 369 of Attitude magazine, available to buy now in print, on the Attitude app, or through Apple News+.
