Introduction
Mac Alonge spent ten years in a slow-moving industry watching a pattern repeat: colleagues from underrepresented backgrounds progressing more slowly than privately educated peers, no matter how strong their results were. He was one of them. Rather than accept the informal advice he kept receiving, play the game, network harder, learn to flatter the right people, he left to build something he felt didn't yet exist: a diversity, equity and inclusion firm with the data rigour and scale of a serious professional services practice.
The area that taught him what exclusion looks like
Mac was born in Liverpool to Nigerian immigrant parents and raised mostly in southeast London, in an area he describes candidly as having had a significant far-right presence at the time, close to where Stephen Lawrence was murdered. He attended a grammar school where racial tension sat alongside sharp socio-economic divides, and where he felt teachers actively signalled that he didn't belong. School itself didn't inspire his early interest in business. That came instead from basketball and a church youth group, alongside quiet, steady support from his parents that he's careful to distinguish from active encouragement.
Falling into a career, not choosing one
Mac is unusually honest that his ten-year career in the energy sector began with no real plan. He graduated during the 2008 financial crisis, watching daily news footage of people carrying boxes out of Canary Wharf, and his primary motivation was avoiding unemployment rather than pursuing a passion. He fabricated an answer on the spot when an interviewer asked what drew him to energy specifically, because nothing did yet.
The first eighteen months to two years were genuinely uncomfortable, not the instant sense of fit that career narratives often promise. He pushes back directly on the idea that a role has to feel right immediately to be worth staying in, arguing that sticking with early discomfort is sometimes exactly what allows a genuine interest to develop later, which is what eventually happened for him at National Grid and in regulatory consultancy work with UK and Scottish government bodies.
What made him leave, and it wasn't the work he minded
By the end of his energy career, Mac still enjoyed the work itself. What hadn't changed, across a decade, was the level of diversity in senior leadership, and the pace at which people from underrepresented backgrounds progressed compared with peers who were privately educated, white and middle class. He's specific that this wasn't an abstract statistic to him. Colleagues and managers could visibly see he was operating one, sometimes two levels below where he should have been, and nothing happened about it.
Seeking guidance from other underrepresented people who had progressed further, he was told, repeatedly, to play the game: network harder, socialise more with the right people, adopt behaviours that had nothing to do with his actual job description. He rejected that advice outright. If being excellent at the job itself wasn't sufficient for progression, and unwritten social performance was what actually determined outcomes, he didn't want to operate inside that system. That refusal became the turning point that led him to leave.
Building a DEI firm serious enough to match the room
Mac founded The Equal Group in 2018 with a specific frustration in mind: much of the diversity and inclusion sector he encountered was small in scale, often one to five people, and recycling the same unconscious bias training year after year with little evidence of real impact. He wanted to build something with the sophistication and seriousness of an established professional services practice, an accountancy firm or management consultancy, rather than a boutique operation offering one-off workshops.
Central to that approach was insisting on data from the start, both quantitative, the actual numbers on representation and progression, and qualitative, how people genuinely experience the workplace day to day. He's candid that quantitative metrics can get worse before they get better as an organisation makes real structural change, while qualitative experience, if the work is embedded properly, should improve much sooner. Distinguishing between those two timelines is, in his view, essential to keeping people motivated through work that takes years, not weeks.
Turning away work to keep the standard intact
In The Equal Group's first two years, Mac turned down every request that came in for a standalone workshop or training session, a stance that was financially difficult to hold. His reasoning was that a single unconscious bias session, treated as a box-ticking exercise, delivers close to no lasting impact regardless of how well it's delivered. Over time, he softened that position, not by lowering the bar, but by getting more curious about what clients were actually asking for underneath the initial request, sometimes a workshop is genuinely the right first step to build internal buy-in, but only once that's been properly understood rather than assumed.
Success as a daily practice, not a future destination
Asked how he measures success across running a company, being a husband and being a father, Mac rejects the idea that success is a future state to be reached. He argues explicitly against deferring happiness for a vision that may or may not materialise years from now, since the present moment is the only thing actually guaranteed. In practice, that means checking in with how he feels before team meetings, panels or client sessions, and treating his own state as directly connected to how effectively he can show up for other people.
What compassion has taught him
Mac names compassion as the biggest change fatherhood and marriage have produced in him: a willingness to experience the world through someone else's preferences and interests, even activities he wouldn't naturally choose for himself. He draws a direct line between that domestic practice and his professional work, arguing that the ability to see a situation through someone else's lived experience, rather than only your own, is the same muscle that makes meaningful diversity and inclusion work possible in the first place.
Asked to define leadership, Mac keeps it to two connected ideas: doing what needs to be done regardless of circumstances, and inspiring other people to do the same. In his words, leaders make leaders, and a leader whose actions inspire no one to act differently isn't really leading at all.
