Introduction
Rohan Inneh grew up in Peckham looking at the Canary Wharf towers without knowing what they were, chasing an image more than a job: a black man in a good suit who looked like he had made it. That image got him into the Big Four. It did not prepare him for what it would take to survive there, or for the harder decision years later to walk away from a well paid, established role and build his own consultancy from nothing. In this conversation with Sope Agbelusi, Rohan traces that whole arc: the corporate bullying that taught him why sponsorship matters, the network that got him unstuck when the door closed on him once already, and the deliberate unlearning it took to go from Big Four frameworks to the brute, fast-moving reality of working with founders. It is a conversation about ambition without illusion, about what leadership actually costs, and about building a life where success does not mean absence from your own family.
Growing up unbothered in Peckham
Rohan describes his upbringing in Peckham, at an all-boys school, as a place that let him be fully himself without the pressure to perform for anyone. There was no need to code-switch or flex, so by the time opportunities in the corporate world started appearing, he did not feel the pull to suddenly change how he spoke or acted. That groundedness became an asset rather than a liability: rather than trying to imitate the people around him in the Big Four, he stayed recognisably himself, which is what let him build genuine connections with people who sounded like him and came from where he came from.
The 2:2, the masters, and learning what excellence costs
Rohan is candid that his 2:2 at university came from a lack of accountability, not a lack of ability. It took the pressure of finishing university with a serious relationship and no clear next step to force a change. He went back to do a masters, learned what studying properly actually meant, and landed a role as a productivity specialist at a boutique healthcare consultancy, a world he knew nothing about. His summary of that period has stayed with him since: excuses are not reasons, and reasons are not excuses. You still have to do the work.
Getting into the Big Four, and what it actually took
Rohan's route into EY was not smooth. He was rejected the first time, convinced he had interviewed well, and only got back in after emailing a recruiter directly and asking to be resubmitted for a role that came up again. A black senior manager, Desmond, later told him what had happened behind the scenes and pushed for him to be let through. Once inside, Rohan learned quickly that in consulting, excellence is only the entry price. What actually moves people is the story you can tell about yourself and how well you can get others to see you the way you want to be seen.
Corporate bullying and the cost of not having a sponsor
The most pointed lesson of Rohan's corporate years came from a period he calls corporate bullying: being undermined by a supervisor with no one senior enough above him to intervene, and a breach of confidentiality that nobody took seriously until a senior manager stepped in on his behalf. That intervention changed the outcome overnight. It taught him plainly that if you are not in control of your own narrative, someone else will write it for you, and that walking into that world naively, without sponsors who will speak for you when you are not there, is genuinely dangerous to a career.
Building the relationships that build careers
Asked how he built relationships with the senior leaders who became his sponsors, Rohan points to networks he genuinely connected with rather than networking for its own sake. He was part of the EY Black Network and the EY Christian Network, and found that showing up around a shared interest built a far more organic foundation than trying to book fifteen minutes with twenty partners he had never met. He also credits constantly talking about what he was trying to achieve: there are more people willing to help than most people assume, and saying it out loud is often what connects you to them.
Unlearning 85 to 90 percent of what consulting taught him
When Rohan moved from consulting into the startup world, he had to unlearn most of what the Big Four had trained into him. Consulting frameworks are built for organisations with abundant resources and layers of people to execute a plan. A startup, even a seven or eight figure one, might be a team of five or seven people with none of that infrastructure. He had to trade structured, framework-first thinking for speed, improvisation and comfort with far less than the bare minimum, while keeping the underlying appreciation for what good process looks like so he could still see the gaps others could not.
Learning to speak the founder's language
Part of that unlearning was linguistic. Rohan had always understood operations in technical terms: operating models, value chains, capabilities. Founders do not need to hear any of that. What they need to hear is that he will remove them from the day to day, or build the infrastructure that lets them scale. The moment he changed his language, the real turning points in his business started to happen, because founders are not interested in being impressed. They are stretched, busy, and looking for results.
What leaving the corporate world actually took
Rohan is clear that the leap from full time consulting to founder life looked seamless from the outside but was not accidental. The groundwork started years earlier during the Covid period: free work for startups, mentoring in accelerators, consistently asking people what they thought his value actually was rather than assuming he knew. He and his wife built a financial plan before he made the jump, which is why the transition had no dip in income and no scramble. He is blunt that fear, more than responsibility, is usually what keeps capable people stuck, and that the same drive people use to justify staying can just as easily be redirected into building something of their own.
Leadership as service, family as the real scoreboard
Rohan defines leadership as servant leadership: staying aware of your own skill and journey without needing to exalt yourself, and constantly asking how you can make the people around you better, even if that growth eventually takes them elsewhere. He is equally direct about what he has seen at the top of the corporate ladder, including partners who could never say their family life was in good shape. His own definition of being financially free is not about wealth for its own sake, but having enough freedom to be as present with his wife and children as he wants to be, learning his daughter's hair, playing games with his kids, and treating that presence as the real profit line.
