Introduction
Leonard Fom was known for doing good work. Everyone around him would have said so. What he wasn't known for, year after year, was getting the promotions or bonuses that work should have earned him, while colleagues doing less of it moved ahead. It took him years to have language for what he was watching, and even longer to build something that didn't require him to keep performing a version of himself that fit somebody else's structure. This is a story about a father of five who turned two decades of quiet corporate friction into two businesses built entirely on his own terms.
The Middle Child Who Wanted to Beat Everyone
Fom grew up the second of four brothers in a household where his parents, having come from Nigeria, worked multiple jobs to make ends meet. He describes an all-boy world of sport and competing computer games, anchored by a burning, mostly internal drive to beat his eldest brother at anything, certain that if he could beat him, he could beat anyone. Being the middle child, sandwiched between an older brother and two younger ones, meant constantly fighting to find his own footing within the family, a dynamic he now credits with forging the quiet, competitive resolve that shaped everything that followed.
His father, an accountant who ran a mobile phone shop in the 1990s and later did business in Nigeria, was Fom's first model of entrepreneurship, though a distant one. His father operated in his own lane and rarely explained his steps, leaving Fom aspirational but without a map, which pushed him toward the more visible, structured route his parents encouraged: strong exam results, a degree, and a career in finance.
Ambition Before Its Time: Applying for CFO Roles as a Student
Fom's ambition showed up early and, by his own account, a little absurdly. In his final year of university he applied for CFO roles he knew he had no chance of landing, purely to see what kind of feedback he'd get back. He wanted, even then, to be at the top of whatever organisation he joined, not simply employed by one.
Reality intervened quickly. He became a father at twenty or twenty one, still in his final year, which meant the ambition had to coexist with an immediate responsibility to earn. He started in a call centre while studying, then worked his way through the NHS in Derby, into publishing in London, and into his accounting qualifications, taking the traditional route because, as he puts it, there was no other visible way in.
A Young Family, a Withdrawn Support System, and Learning to Endure
Having a child so young cost Fom and his wife more than sleep. Extended family, frightened for the couple's prospects, largely withdrew rather than stepped in, leaving the two of them to build a family, three children within six years, on their own with no real support network. Fom describes the friction this created between him and his wife honestly: disagreements born from two people barely out of their teens trying to understand themselves, let alone each other, while carrying a level of responsibility neither had time to grow into gradually.
Faith and a local church community became the structure that held them together where family hadn't. Even so, Fom is candid that he had almost no men to talk to who understood what he was navigating, no older brother further down the same road, no peer group facing the same pressures. It would be years before he found anything resembling a community of people who understood.
Recognising the Pattern: Doing the Work, Watching Others Get Promoted
As Fom rose through senior finance business partner roles at major banks, he noticed something he didn't initially have language for. He'd build automated budgeting processes, streamline reporting, and go directly to internal clients to understand what they actually needed rather than what finance assumed they needed, work that was, by every internal measure, excellent. It didn't translate into promotions or bonuses at the rate it did for peers doing visibly less.
He started asking Black colleagues elsewhere how long they'd been at their grade. Fifteen years. Twenty years, never moved to vice president in Europe. The pattern, once he started looking for it, became impossible to unsee, though he's clear that for a long time he didn't frame it as racism, simply as an indifference or bias he couldn't quite name. It was enough to push him out of permanent roles and into freelancing, a decision he made specifically to step around whatever politics were operating beneath the surface.
The Car Accident That Broke Something Open
The turning point Fom returns to most is a tragic car accident in which the other person involved lost their life. He spiralled into depression, out of contracted work for eleven months while he processed the trauma through therapy, a brutal stretch for a family of seven to weather. His church community showed up with food parcels, but what he actually needed, work, income, structural support, wasn't something goodwill alone could provide.
Something in him broke open during that recovery, not in a purely negative sense. He describes realising, mid-therapy, that depending entirely on one employer or one contract had left him and his family dangerously exposed, and that he needed to think bigger than a single role, however senior. That realisation didn't become concrete action immediately, but it planted the idea that would eventually become his own businesses.
Speaking Up at MasterCard and Paying the Price
Fom returned to corporate life at MasterCard in 2018 in a senior director role. There, the pattern he'd half noticed elsewhere became stark: colleagues he managed daily held vice president and senior vice president titles across Europe that no Black employee in his circle, some with fifteen or twenty years at the company, had ever reached. Around the same time, in the wake of Colin Kaepernick's protest and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, Fom organised internal talks, including one from speaker Gavin Lewis, to give the issue visibility inside the organisation.
His career, by his own account, became noticeably less stable from that point. He eventually raised a specific discrimination concern with HR as a contractor and was dismissed shortly after, in what he describes as a disciplinary process that left him on bad terms with the company. He's unequivocal that he could have stayed quiet and didn't regret speaking up, insisting that his identity was never something he was willing to fake for the sake of a job.
Rebuilding Identity Beyond the Paycheque
The period that followed, job applications in financial services that inexplicably went nowhere, followed almost immediately by the pandemic lockdown, forced Fom into a different kind of work: an online coaching qualification he originally took to help other people, which ended up forcing him into deep self-reflection about his own identity, childhood and sense of purpose. Pro bono coaching work with small businesses during the pandemic gave him something he hadn't felt doing paid corporate work for years: confidence built from service rather than from chasing a paycheque.
He returned to contracting once more, deliberately accepting a lower-level transformation role than his experience justified simply for financial stability, while privately deciding it was temporary. When the market turned, he had already resolved not to keep letting other people's decisions dictate his career narrative.
Building Fino Squad and TIC Services on His Own Terms
Fom now runs two businesses rather than one, deliberately. TIC Services, standing for Transformation, Innovation and Change, keeps his corporate relationships and leadership and strategy consulting work alive, including engagements with government agencies in Nigeria. Fino Squad, his current primary focus, offers fractional CFO and finance support to small and medium businesses that need senior finance guidance without a full-time hire, built with intentional branding around sport, streetwear and culture to make finance feel less clinical and more human.
His stated ambition for both businesses is captured in a simple internal phrase: work smart, have fun, make an impact. Beyond the businesses themselves, he talks about wanting his five children to go further than he has, and about a broader hope for what he calls Africa Rising, using the back-office operation he has set up in Nigeria as one small contribution to a continent he believes is approaching a genuine turning point in global influence.
