Co-founder of Tuk In & executive director for Workplace and Community Programmes for Stonewall

Words Markus Bidaux

If Sanjay Sood-Smith looks familiar, it’s because in 2014 he appeared as a contestant on the BBC’s The Apprentice. Despite being “fired” by Lord Sugar right before the series finale, he has become a very successful business owner and leader. First, he harnessed his Indian roots by launching Tuk In, the ready-to-go curry-in-a-naan addition to the UK’s mammoth sandwich market. With that business running smoothly, he accepted a leadership role at the LGBTQ rights charity, Stonewall. Here, he discusses the lessons he learned from Lord Sugar’s tasks, making the workplace LGBTQ-inclusive and being Instafamous with his husband…

Why did you take a break from your successful senior management banking job in 2014 to go on The Apprentice?

Running a branch at quite a young age was a brilliant foundation, where I gained good experience in sales, service and managing people, but I just got an itch to go and try something different, something for myself. I had watched The Apprentice every year since it started, so I applied and got on. Being on season ten was quite transformative from the perspective that I got to meet all these amazing people who had started their own businesses and done something new and exciting. When I eventually got “fired” [from the show], I went back to work, from which I had taken a sabbatical, and I pretty much resigned three days afterwards with the plan to go and open a restaurant.

What did you learn from your Apprentice experience?

It was amazing to get to try my hand at a lot of different things and although it is a really condensed experience - one minute you’re making candles and the next you are taking a coach trip out to Hastings - it was a really good way to interact with lots of different business models. And you learn to handle yourself under pressure. But if you actually behaved like people do on The Apprentice in the real world you wouldn’t get very far in business.