Introduction
She had the receipts. Years of exceptional work, records broken, a track record nobody could argue with. Then she made one small mistake on an account, was transparent about it in a room that included the CEO, and watched the goodwill disappear within days. Suddenly every piece of work she touched needed a second signature. The message was unmistakable: it doesn't matter how good you are, how quickly you can become disposable is always sitting closer than you think.
That moment sits at the centre of this episode of Everyday Leadership, but it's only one of several. Kimberly, a former banker turned entrepreneur who has built and sold two companies without ever finishing a university degree, talks through a life that has repeatedly asked her to prove she belonged: in a school system that tracked her below her own test results, in banking floors where she was the youngest person in the room, in a Dubai job that dissolved before her first day even started, and in a business sale where the buyer's real intention was never to build anything at all. What she offers isn't a highlight reel. It's a working theory of how you actually get through adversity when it shows up more than once.
The Weight of Being Different
Kimberly was born and raised in Amsterdam to a Surinamese mother and a Ghanaian father, in what she describes as a very white society. As a young child she was, by her own account, bold and mouthy, opinionated, full of things to say. That changed almost as soon as school started.
From around the age of four or five she became more reserved and more observant. School was the first place she became constantly aware of being different, and not in a way that made her feel special. Teachers and peers noticed it and treated her differently because of it. She didn't yet have language for what was happening. She just knew it didn't feel safe, and she adapted the only way she knew how: by pulling inward.
The irony, she says, is that her teachers still told her she was smart, still told her she was bright, and then told her she needed to speak up more, needed to show herself more. She internalised that as a lack, something she was missing, and decided the way to close that gap was to overdeliver on everything else.
**\[CHECK\]** The cold open of the episode includes a garbled reference to a school official overriding Kimberly's exam result and holding her back on the grounds that other students who "looked like her" would end up at that lower level. The audio quality around this specific line makes the exact wording and attribution unclear, and given the sensitivity of implying racial discrimination, this should be verified against the source recording before it appears in any published copy beyond this draft.
Turning Underestimation Into Leverage
At twelve, Dutch children sit a test that determines their secondary school track. Kimberly scored one of the highest marks the test allows, the kind of result that should have placed her firmly on the university path. The placement she actually received did not reflect that score. Some teachers pushed back. The decision stood anyway. For a twelve-year-old, she says, it was devastating, and it planted a seed of insecurity she carried into the next decade: maybe I'm not good enough to do great things.
She started working at fourteen, taking whatever jobs a fourteen-year-old is legally allowed to do: a bookshop, a paper round, a restaurant. At sixteen she talked her way into evening shifts at an insurance company, then into the certification that would let her become a fully qualified advisor, all without the university degree her family had always told her was her "first hospital," the thing that protects you when nothing else does.
That gap became the engine. If she was going to be taken seriously without the credential everyone else had, she decided she would out-prepare everyone in the room. If she was handed a book, she read it three times and looked up other sources besides. She didn't just do the job well, she executed it, in her own words, almost to perfection, because she needed the work itself to make the missing degree irrelevant. It did. She was promoted quickly, moved from financial advising into investment banking with a multinational bank, and found herself sitting among colleagues twenty and thirty years older who had spent decades reaching the level she'd arrived at in her early twenties.
A Leap to Dubai, and a Welcome She Didn't Expect
The move to Dubai looked impulsive from the outside. It mostly was. Kimberly went on holiday while working at her last bank in the Netherlands, was struck less by the glamour than by the sheer boldness of a country that decided to build the tallest building in the world and digitise an entire government, and made herself a private bet: if I can get a job here, I'm staying. She applied throughout the holiday and ended up staying for three years.
The welcome was not what was promised. She'd been offered a role that came with a house, a car, relocation, the full package, only to arrive and learn the position no longer existed. The woman she was meant to replace hadn't told the company she was also planning to leave, and when both resignations landed at once, the company decided it didn't need two people in the role after all. Kimberly had already given up her flat. Her mother had told the whole family she was moving to Dubai. She stepped out of the taxi on what was supposed to be her first working day and walked straight back in.
It took months to find another job. What got her there wasn't a fallback plan, it was learning to ask for help, something she says did not come naturally to someone who had always been the one with the answers. She built her LinkedIn presence, connected with other expats, and eventually landed a role through those connections. The lesson she draws from it now isn't about hustle. It's about how long she let pride keep her from admitting she was struggling, and what changed once she stopped.
The Cost of Being Honest
The new role went well, well enough that she was pulled onto a large accounts team faster than she expected, working alongside people who had, in her words, genuinely earned their stripes. Then she made a mistake on an account. Not a major one. She flagged it immediately, laid it on the table in a weekly meeting the CEO also attended, and asked the team to help her check for blind spots before proposing a fix to the client.
The room didn't receive it as diligence. The CEO ended the meeting abruptly and coldly. Afterwards, her manager put her under a form of administrative review where every account she touched needed to be checked by a colleague, a process she describes as humiliating. The message that landed hardest wasn't about the mistake itself. It was how quickly years of exceptional, verifiable work could be discounted the moment one thing went wrong. She resigned a few months later, not because the mistake broke her, but because she finally recognised she'd been working somewhere that wasn't healthy long before that meeting happened.
Coming Home to Herself
To understand what came next, Kimberly goes back further, to being sixteen and travelling to Ghana alone for the first time to meet her father's family. She'd grown up steeped in Surinamese and Dutch culture, with far less connection to the Ghanaian side of her identity. What she remembers most vividly isn't a single conversation. It's a physical sensation.
For the first time in her life, she was surrounded by people who looked like her: the police officer, the doctor, the driver, the pharmacist. She hadn't realised, until that trip, how much weight she'd been carrying just from constantly being aware of her own difference. Her shoulders dropped, she says, and she only noticed they'd been up the entire time once they weren't anymore. Nobody there knew who she was, and nobody needed her to prove it. That release stayed with her for years, and it's what she returned to mentally when she eventually left the corporate track for good: the recognition that she'd built a life where she was constantly switched on, constantly proving something, without ever asking who she was proving it to.
Building, Failing, Building Again
The route into entrepreneurship wasn't a plan either. After leaving the bank, Kimberly moved to a small town in Spain, drawn more by sunshine and proximity to family than by any strategy. She quickly realised her investment banking background didn't translate to job opportunities in a village with a bakery and a corner shop, so she started networking with other expats instead. One conversation surfaced a gap: there wasn't an easy way for people with her kind of professional background to find work that matched their skills.
She built a platform to solve it. She had no technical background, so she taught herself the basics through YouTube tutorials, Google searches and Codecademy, then hired people who could build the algorithm she'd designed. The platform grew, caught the attention of larger recruitment agencies, and was eventually acquired.
She's careful not to let that sale sound like the achievement people assume it is. Selling a company, she says plainly, is not an accomplishment in itself. Some founders sell at a loss. Some walk away with nothing because of how their equity was structured. She sold that first company without fully understanding its value, because she was new to the process and, in her words, incredibly naive. What she's actually proud of from that period is learning to translate an idea into something people would pay for. That skill sent her straight into building more platforms, most of which failed. Each failure taught her something specific: how to validate an assumption before building around it, how to find a problem worth solving, how to look for product-market fit rather than just shipping something clever.
The Deal That Wasn't What It Seemed
The platform that followed was more ambitious: a digital space for African entrepreneurs to connect, with a companion portal for investors looking at opportunities across the continent. It grew in users and in relevance, but Kimberly was running the strategic side of it largely alone, without the senior operational support she'd later realise she needed. Personal circumstances made that harder to sustain. When an investor approached her offering capacity, resources and experience, she took the conversation seriously, believing she was bringing in a partner who wanted to help her scale.
She later learned the investor had been sent by a competitor, an American company, with a different objective entirely: acquire the platform, extract whatever was useful, and shut it down. She sold under the belief they'd build the business together, taking some cash upfront and keeping shares for when the company grew further. The company had no intention of growing it further. By the time the deal was done, those shares were worthless.
Her reflection on it is precise rather than bitter. There's only so much due diligence you can do on paper, she says. The real question is always what the buyer actually wants, whether you understand your own company's value well enough to know the question behind the question, and whether you've protected the parts of your intellectual property that make the business worth anything without you in it. She's also honest about her own state of mind at the time: she was under time pressure and felt genuinely desperate for support, and that pressure shaped which questions she thought to ask. A partner in the deal, she notes, would likely have asked different ones.
Leadership as an Act of Intention
Kimberly doesn't offer a tidy definition of leadership. What she does offer is a working principle: personal leadership means moving with conviction, standing for something and acting on it. At scale, inside an organisation, that same principle changes weight, because your choices start shaping outcomes for people who didn't choose you.
The word she keeps returning to, one she says has become something of her own trademark, is intentional. Not as a mood, but as a discipline: asking why before building anything, understanding what impact a decision will actually have, and refusing to hide behind "that's just how it's done" when the results aren't the ones you wanted. If the culture in your organisation isn't what you intended it to be, she argues, that's still something you built and still something you can change. The excuse that it's out of your hands rarely holds up to scrutiny.
Looking ahead, she talks about wanting a hand in shaping the businesses the next generation will inherit, about getting more people with genuinely different perspectives, including more women, into rooms where decisions get made, and about rethinking what education actually prepares children for. She points to circularity, a concept currently trending in Dutch policy circles, as something parts of Africa have practised for generations without needing to name it. The thread through all of it is the same one that runs through her own story: adversity doesn't ask permission, but how deliberately you respond to it is still yours to decide.
