How Sharon Ariyo-Adeoye helps African founders build high-trust brands in a low-trust economy

Sharon Ariyo-Adeoye has always been good at convincing people.

“As long as I can remember, I’ve always been somebody who is confident about persuading people to believe or be involved in things that I do or things that I believe in,” she says.

That natural gift led her into tech during the era when it “was the new rave.” She got certified in product management and started practising. But after landing her first internship opportunities on Twitter, she realized something important: product management wasn’t for her.

She pivoted to storytelling, PR, and then marketing. Today, she runs Lenora Career Hub, where she helps high-achieving professionals and founders build personal brands that convert. She’s worked with over 100 clients in just over two years.

But her path to building brands for others started with learning to build systems for herself. Her first major role at Junior Chamber International OAU, a student-led community, taught her lessons she still uses today as a founder.

Learning to sit with criticism

At JCI, Sharon served as Director of Publicity. The role came with intense scrutiny. Every two weeks, the entire community gathered for a General Assembly meeting to review progress. Before each GA, the board met to examine reports from every director.

“For every board meeting, you need to have a report for the team that you manage,” she explains. “If you are presenting your reports to board of directors, it’s going to be very scrutinized and you will have to take criticism.”

The experience taught her something crucial: how to sit with criticism without being consumed by it. “You pick up the lessons that you need to pick up and you just keep things moving instead of being all up in your feelings about, oh, I did this so well, why did they say this?”

Those skills helped her land her first role after university as a PR Assistant at Bendada (now Condia). But more importantly, they set the foundation for who she would become as an entrepreneur.

From employee to entrepreneur

The decision to become an entrepreneur wasn’t impulsive. Sharon used her National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) year as a testing period.

“I used my NYSC as a filter period to gauge: do I want to actually be an entrepreneur or do I want to be an employee?” she recalls. She realized the employee system had limits on the freedom to execute ideas. Managers often preferred playing it safe over exploring and learning from lessons.

She’s also the only daughter among three brothers, which meant fighting for what she wanted became second nature. “That means you have to fight, literally fight every day for things that you want. I’ve always been somebody who valued freedom, who valued autonomy.”

During her service year, she decided to use her primary place of assignment to learn how companies were built and what it felt like to be on the receiving end of leadership. The experience informed how she would lead her own company.

As she documented her career-building journey on LinkedIn, people kept asking for more. From optimizing LinkedIn pages to working on CVs, the requests grew. Progressively, she built what would become Lenora Career Hub.

But entrepreneurship revealed parts of herself that needed work. “As much as you are trying to be a leader, trying to drive business outcomes, trying to manage the team, there are going to be some inadequacies that you just know might be detrimental to the business that you need to fix.”

The journey is ongoing, and Sharon treats it as continuous learning. After working with many clients, she’s noticed patterns in what African founders get wrong about branding and what they can do to fix it.

Three key mistakes African founders are making

After working with over 100 clients, Sharon has identified patterns in what African founders get wrong about branding.

The first and biggest mistake is not building locally while positioning globally early enough. “If you are an African founder, we are already limited by a very low trust economy,” she explains. “But if you’re particularly about increasing the surface area of opportunities, then you are particularly about building a digital footprint.”

A digital footprint expands opportunities. Sometimes it’s not just what you know, it’s who knows you. Building visibility online brings people into your vision and connects you with those experiencing the problem you’re solving.

The second mistake is not defining why they’re building. It’s not enough to identify a problem and try to solve it. “Why should people care? Who are you? What was that pain that sat with you? What gave you sleepless nights that didn’t allow you to sit still?”

Too many founders skip this foundational work, leading to inconsistent positioning across platforms. Instagram might not sync with LinkedIn. There’s no documentation of the vision or the why. The messaging fragments because the core isn’t clear.

The third mistake is treating branding as a one-time project instead of an ongoing process. “A lot of people don’t understand that branding is literally a lifelong process of you sitting with the discomfort of a problem that your product isn’t solving properly, or sitting with the lessons that the success of your solution is showing to you.”

Branding requires constantly checking whether you’re still working in alignment with what made you start in the first place. It compounds over time, but only if you’re consistent and willing to sit with both failure and success.

Building high-trust brands in a low-trust economy

One challenge African founders face repeatedly is the low trust economy. In Africa, particularly Nigeria, people struggle with verifying that products or solutions aren’t fake or subpar. Founders have to consistently overpromise and deliver just to get attention.

Sharon’s solution focuses on relationships. “One of the fastest ways to build trust is through people.” She advises the founders she works with to block time in their calendars for actually meeting people and sharing their vision. Conversation is one of the SI units of building trust, and conversation builds community. In the grand scheme of innovation, there’s no innovation without influence, and community is how you build influence.

But building trust through relationships only works if founders can articulate their story clearly. Sharon has noticed that many African founders struggle to own their narratives, and she attributes this to three main issues.

First, many founders are building in survival mode. “It’s okay to be in survival mode in the first one to two years,” she says. “But it’s very important to create a system in the long run that allows you to build from a flow state.”

Second, founders need to stop being modest. Sharon had someone tell her she talks too much about her work and should be more careful about sharing numbers. “You will not walk up to a man to tell him that he should pipe down a little so that more people can help him,” she counters.

“Take up space unapologetically. Tell your story to literally anybody. Tell it badly. Tell it wrong.” There’s almost no bad story, just bad translation. And you get better by doing it. “In the process, you are also trying to get feedback from people and then you are just growing.”

Third, founders must build themselves alongside their products. “Outside building a product, actually make room to build yourself,” Sharon advises. She’s had to sit with uncomfortable truths about her own inadequacies. But she read something that stuck: the fact that you don’t know how to do something doesn’t mean you cannot do it. The only difference between you and somebody who can is the information, and the internet has reduced the barrier to access.

One more thing Sharon recommends: have a life and community outside what you’re building. On days when everything looks crazy, you need a community that can hold you steady while you figure things out.

For Africans already playing in global markets, the responsibility extends beyond personal success. “It’s very important to maintain the quality and execute the responsibilities that being a local talent playing for a global market comes with,” she says. “And it’s also important to advocate for the people that are coming behind us.”

Do great work. Then advocate for reframing the biases that global companies have. The paradigm shift requires everyone playing their part.

Building spaces where women don’t shrink

The idea for HERcelerate came to Sharon in a jalopy bus on her way back from the Global Entrepreneurship Festival in Akure, Ondo State, in 2025. She was watching a YouTube video from a channel called Magnify, which focused on empowering women to take up space.

“I was like, we need something like this in Nigeria. I need something like this in my direct vicinity,” she recalls. Then she asked herself: if she identified the need, why couldn’t she be the one to take it on?

She tweeted about building a community for ambitious women where they could support each other. The vision was specific: a bottomless and topless ladder where women are strategically positioned at different steps. The woman at the top lends a hand to bring the woman below her forward. The woman below does the same. Everyone walks to the top together.

The community has since launched projects that embody this vision. The most significant is the A Better Life Project. Sharon met a young woman in her direct environment who had dropped out of school and was working as a security guard while facing attempts of sexual assault. The woman had tried to learn fashion designing but couldn’t finish because she couldn’t pay.

HERcelerate trained her in hairdressing. She completed her session in mid-December. While empowering her to learn the skill, they realized she couldn’t read or write, so they’re now enrolling her in an adult education school.

Beyond individual stories, Accelerate collaborates with organizations offering mentorship to young girls with albinism on confidence building and taking up space. The goal is empowering the next generation to go after their ambitions without waiting for anyone to hand them anything.

“We genuinely still have a long way to go, but with the progress so far, I’m very, very optimistic,” Sharon says.

Making career feel like home

Sharon‘s vision extends beyond helping founders build brands. She wants to make the journey of building, whether as a founder or creator, feel safe and psychologically powerful.

“We want you, by default, to feel psychologically powerful to tell your stories without shrinking, to build based on your own blueprint and understanding of your vision,” she explains.

In the next three to five years, Sharon wants Lenora to be positioned as people’s career best friend. Whether someone is an entrepreneur wanting more or simply needs better systems to be their best selves, Lenora should be the place they turn to.