#WomensMonth | Brave Collective’s Taryn Hunter Sharman: Inspiring African women to redefine success
The Brave Collective's Fortune Favours the Brave. Own It. takes place this week, Wednesday, 5 August. This gathering challenges South African women to redefine success – moving beyond titles and salaries to embrace confidence, financial freedom and success.
It brings together Rachel Kolisi, Khensani Nobanda, Carla Venter, Lihle Ngxokolo-Nqini, Taryn Hunter Sharman and Perri King to inspire and equip women to build greater.
"Before women can grow their net worth, they first need to recognise their self-worth. When women truly own their value, they make better financial decisions, lead with greater confidence and create stronger careers, businesses and futures," says Sharman.
What inspired you to pursue a career in your field?
Communications found me, I didn't go looking for it. I finished top three on The Apprentice South Africa and got headhunted straight off the show.
The rest, as they say, is history. What made me stay is realising how much of business is communication in disguise. Strategy, positioning, culture, sales, all of it is storytelling with different names on it.
Once you clock that, you can't unsee it, and it made every other career look small.
As a woman, what are some of the biggest challenges you have faced in your career, and how did you overcome them?
Imposter syndrome, honestly. I'd been in the industry a long time, and had been an MD for 10 years, before I decided to go out on my own with Perri. I still spent the first stretch of running Faith & Fear waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and tell me I was making it up. I wasn't.
But you don't always know that at the time. Then getting my pricing right, and charging what I'm actually worth. That took years longer than it should have. It's a systemic pattern more than a personal failing. Women in this industry consistently underprice themselves, and then the industry uses that as evidence that our work is worth less.
You have to break the loop consciously. And representation, which is not a soft point. We're still very few women around the boardroom tables.
When I look around a lot of the rooms I sit in, I'm often one of one, or one of two. That doesn't shift itself. You have to keep taking up space and pulling other women up as you go.
As a woman, how do you approach leadership? What do you believe are the key qualities of an effective leader, and how is being a woman an advantage and a disadvantage?
I lead in the open. People on my team know what I'm thinking, what I'm worried about, and what I need from them. I don't perform certainty I don't have. That's my version of strength, and it's taken me a long time to trust it.
The qualities that actually matter: clarity, follow-through, and the ability to hold a hard conversation without needing to be liked at the end of it. Vision is the entry ticket. Execution is where most leaders quietly fall over.
Advantage of being a woman: I read rooms well, I build teams that don't need me in every meeting, and I understand the consumer that most of our clients are trying to reach because I am her. Faith & Fear directs more than R10 million a year into women-led businesses, and that isn't charity, it's a competitive edge.
Disadvantage: the way we run things is still not widely accepted. It's a different model, and it takes getting used to. Faith & Fear operates on a distributed structure. I lead in the open. I don't do the traditional command-and-control performance that this industry defaults to. T
hat works, and the numbers back it up, but you spend a lot of time explaining a shape of leadership that doesn't match what people are used to. I've mostly stopped explaining. The results explain themselves.
What led you to establish the Brave Collective and why?
Perri King and I co-founded the Brave Collective because we kept meeting brilliant women in our industry, and everyone else's industry, who were doing extraordinary work and still could not tell you what they were worth in rands and cents.
There was a gap between how ambitious women were and how equipped they were to convert that ambition into money, ownership and influence.
The Collective runs on three pillars: self-worth, net worth, and network. Community, content, and events. We built the Brave Binder as a proprietary tool for women to actually track and grow their financial and personal position, because you cannot manage what you refuse to look at.
We're also developing a white-label version of the platform for corporates who want to do this work properly, not run a panel in August and call it done.
The short answer to why: Women's Month posts don't pay women. Skills, capital and networks do.
How does an event like the Brave Collective help women in the industry to combat but also deal with events such as the recent Cannes one?
The recent story out of Cannes is not an aberration. It's the industry pattern briefly surfacing where the rest of us could see it. Every senior woman in this industry can tell you a version of that story. Different garden, different hotel, different hour. The only difference this time was that two women had a camera and used it.
An event like the Brave Collective helps in two specific ways.
- The first is practical. We build rooms where women are the point, not the plus-one. Fortune Favours the Brave on 5 August is not a workaround for an unsafe industry, it's a room designed from the ground up on the assumption that women's ambition, money and voice are the reason we're all there. Nobody has to make herself smaller to fit in.
- The second is structural. When women have their own network, their own platform, their own stages, and their own commercial ecosystem, the cost of walking away from a bad room drops. The cost of speaking up drops. And when the cost of speaking up drops, more women speak up. That's how the culture actually changes. Not with statements after the fact, but with parallel infrastructure built by women, for women, before the fact.
What is the motivation behind this year’s Brave Collective and the speakers?
This year's includes Khensani Nobanda, Rachel Kolisi and Carla Venter - Three women who have owned their space in very different arenas, and who have all had to make the same decision more than once. Keep asking for permission, or take the room.
The motivation this year was to move the conversation from inspiration to ownership. Women in this industry have heard enough motivational speeches. What we haven't had enough of is honest, specific talk about equity, revenue, negotiation, and building assets that outlast a job title. That's what the day is for. You leave with things you can actually do on Monday morning, not a warm feeling that fades by the weekend.
What advice would you give to other women aspiring to succeed in your industry?
Learn the numbers side of your business. Read the P&L, understand the pricing, know what a good margin looks like. It is the single fastest way to be taken seriously.
Ask for the money. Then ask for more. If the answer is no, you have new information and you can act on it.
Find your people. Not your fans, your people. The two or three women who will tell you the truth when your idea is bad and back you when the idea is good.
Stop apologising for wanting more. Ambition in a woman is still treated as a character flaw in most rooms. It isn't. It's the point.
And read Fearocious, obviously. I wrote it for exactly this moment.
What does Women's Month mean to you?
Honestly? It depends on the year and the room. At its worst, it's a marketing calendar entry with a purple graphic and no follow-through. At its best, it's a genuine chance to open doors that stay open in September.
For me, it means the same thing it means every other month, which is to ask a hard question. Where is the money going, who is deciding, and are more women in the room this year than last year? If the answer to any of those is no, then whatever we did in August didn't work.
I'll be spending Women's Month doing the work. Putting on our event, moving budget into women-led businesses, and using the platform to say things that are still uncomfortable to say the rest of the year. That's my version of celebrating it.
More about the Brave Collective
Event Details - Fortune Favours the Brave. Own It.
Date: Wednesday, 5 August 2026
Time: 07:30 am – 2 pm
Venue: The Forum, Bryanston, JohannesburgMore information visit: bravecollective.co.za
