Fela-Durotoye urges African entrepreneurs to build businesses with vision, structure, and legacy

Tara Fela-Durotoye, convener of the Building Beyond You conference and founder of House of Tara, has called on African entrepreneurs to embrace intentionality in building businesses that are sustainable, structured, and capable of outliving their founders.

Speaking at the conference, Fela-Durotoye emphasised that Africa’s economic transformation depends on enterprises that combine vision, strong values, and well-developed leadership pipelines.

“When God has a thought, He drops an idea in a man’s heart,” she said. “Many of those thoughts are solutions to the world’s problems. God saw that Africa had a problem, and He dropped the idea of House of Tara into my heart as part of the solution.”

Fela-Durotoye, who recently celebrated 27 years in business, said entrepreneurs must choose deliberately whether they are building to “flip” their companies for profit or to create lasting institutions. “If you want to flip, this conference is for you. If you want to hand over to your children, this conference is also for you,” she said.

She highlighted the importance of “vision casting,” the practice of consistently communicating a business’s future direction to staff. At House of Tara, she said, every employee recites the company’s vision daily: to become a globally respected beauty company of African origin.

“If you don’t say it, and people don’t say it, they forget what we’re trying to achieve,” she noted. “Being able to cast vision is a skill every founder must have. If you can’t communicate well, go and learn because it is essential for building businesses that last.”

Fela-Durotoye also encouraged founders to celebrate milestone achievements as a way of reinforcing organisational culture. “We had a bell in the House of Tara that we rang whenever we hit a legacy moment. It wasn’t a party; it was symbolic. It reminded everyone that we had accomplished something together.”

A major theme of her talk was the development of people within an organisation. She admitted to once fearing that training employees would lead to them leaving the company, but eventually learned that failing to train was more costly.

“We will still train people, even if they ‘japa’ (relocate),” she said. “Not all of us are leaving Nigeria. If we are building for the long term, we have to develop our people.”

She challenged entrepreneurs to identify who they are mentoring in their organisations and to create systems that ensure knowledge transfer. “Succession is not something you think about only when you want to exit,” she said. “It should be happening at all levels, even for the janitor who keeps the shop clean.”

Fela-Durotoye stressed that structure is not bureaucracy but orderliness. “People want to stay only in places that are organised,” she said. “Systems and structure are about how we get things done and who does them. Together, they create culture.”

She urged business leaders to balance sanctions and rewards, document key processes, and create environments where employees are inspired to stay and grow.

During a fireside chat with Morayo Afolabi-Brown, managing director at TVC, Fela-Durotoye opened up about the emotional journey of preparing to hand over her business after nearly three decades.

“I started detaching years ago,” she said. “My friends formed a WhatsApp group called Midwives to help me birth the process. They asked tough questions: What does House of Tara mean to you? What will you do next? Can you afford life outside the CEO’s office?”

She said this process gave her the strength to transition gracefully and create space for the next generation of leadership.

On the issue of whether children should inherit businesses, Fela-Durotoye was clear: “My children will benefit financially from House of Tara 100 years from now. That’s the plan. But they may not run it, because they have their own dreams. Our responsibility is to engage them early and build businesses that can benefit both our biological children and our ‘business children,’ the employees who grow with us.”