The Purpose-Driven Growth Architect

Entrepreneur Bili Sule once believed happiness came from relentless hustle. But when her business was at peak growth, God led her to a season of reflection and renewal in George Fox's DBA program

The afternoon her friend led her through the sinner’s prayer, Bili Sule’s dining table became an altar, and her view of business was changed forever.

“I learned we’re supposed to lay down our lives,” she says.

Years later, as founder and chief growth engineer of alGROWithm, Bili has discovered that surrender – not striving – is the secret to her success.

Hitting the Wall

Bili has always been ambitious, sometimes to a fault.

Growing up in Nigeria and partly in the UK, she was always moving – helping her father fix cars one day, walking London Fashion Week runways another. “My parents always encouraged me,” she says. “They encouraged me to try anything and everything.”

Bili was successful throughout her academic life, where her ambition only flourished. By her early 20s, she had started an e-commerce fashion company, ShugaKane. But Bili eventually learned that ambition without direction burns fast. ShugaKane was drowning in a saturated market. “I couldn’t get the visibility even if I tried,” she recalls.

While visiting Nigeria for the holidays, she took notice of an emerging Nigerian e-commerce platform: Jumia. It had everything she wanted – an unconventional "cash on delivery" payment system, a larger customer and supply base – and she moved from England back to Nigeria to seize the opportunity of a more promising market.

The Breaking Point

One afternoon, as her friend Vivian sat across from her at the dining table, the dam broke. Bili opened up about the pressure of doing everything right and still feeling empty. “I told her how I’d done all the right things, how I’d stayed out of trouble – but I still had little to show for it.”

Vivian listened, then shared about her relationship with God. Bili was awestruck. “I was filled with hope and curiosity,” she remembers. “I wanted to know this God Vivian was talking about.”

So Bili listened, and Vivian prayed with her. By the end of the conversation, Bili had surrendered her life to Christ. “I felt happy, like a weight I didn’t know I was carrying had been lifted.”

Bili jokes that “Bili Before Christ” (BBC) was ambitious and fiercely independent. “Previously, it was, ‘This is my idea, my vision,’” Bili says. “But I learned we’re supposed to lay down our lives for Christ. It became, ‘What was his purpose for creating me?’”

From that day on, Bili would replace her constant planning with prayer.

From Striving to Surrender

God didn’t grant Bili instant success. Instead, he gave her opportunities to strengthen her obedience, including a call to leave her own business and work for Jumia.

“I was like, ‘Never!’” Bili laughs. “Now it seems ridiculous, but my dream was to compete with Jumia, ultimately.”

The more Jumia pushed for her to join their team, the more Bili sought God’s will for her life through prayer. “Vivian reminded me that I was called to follow Jesus’ example: to say, ‘Yet not my will, but yours be done.’”

And God answered. “I had a clear revelation from God in a dream: I would journey with them for a season.”

Despite the reluctance Bili felt about leaving her business behind, she accepted the offer at Jumia. “That decision was one million percent God,” she says. “But at that moment, it was very confusing for me.”

“Marketing?!”

As confident as she was in God’s guidance, Bili hoped for the day she could leave Jumia to start another venture. The Jumia work was grueling, and it was taking a toll on her mental and physical health.

Then, just when she thought she couldn’t bear it any longer, her CEO promoted her to vice president of growth marketing. Bili was horrified.

“I was like, ‘Marketing?!’” she laughs. “That was the biggest weakness I had before coming to Jumia!”

But as every other door closed, she realized God was making her choice clear.

“He eliminated every other path. I knew I was in his will,” she says. “Scripture gave me comfort at the time, with the understanding that God qualifies the called.”

One such encouraging passage was 2 Corinthians 3:5: “It is not that we think we are qualified to do anything on our own. Our qualification comes from God" (NLT). Bili also found courage in 1 Corinthians 1:27: “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty” (KJV).

Bili had no marketing expertise, nor any education about the field – no qualifications whatsoever. “But I had conviction that He called me into the role, that He would make provisions for my success,” she says. “Even though I didn’t know how I was going to do it, I went.”

If her other roles were grueling, the marketing role was worse by a long shot. Bili spent long hours monitoring performance and studying marketing techniques, going to bed at 4 a.m. to wake up at 7 a.m. But she never missed a target.

On top of that, Bili spearheaded a systematic growth engineering effort for the fast-moving consumer goods category with staggering results: 2,000% revenue growth in two months, and a five-fold increase in conversion rate. The success later provided the playbook for an international rollout of her growth strategy across other Jumia markets.

“I relied too much on my own strength in the beginning,” she says. “But later, I learned to rely on the Holy Spirit to cope with the weight of my responsibilities. And till today, I’m still shocked at how I was able to thrive in that role.”

Even though the promotion initially felt like a detour, Bili now sees it as God’s preparation for her next season. “That role was the single most determining factor in what I do today.”

alGROWithm

After leaving Jumia, Bili was headhunted by Founders Factory Africa, a startup accelerator, where she worked as a growth consultant before she began freelancing. She got broader pan-African exposure and experience working with startups across the continent.

Clients came and kept bringing more clients. “It became so overwhelming,” she says. “I realized I had to structure business operations around it.”

As she prayed for a company name, “the Holy Spirit dropped the word alGROWithm in my mind,” Bili says. “I searched it on Google, and I’d never seen a Google search return zero results before. That just confirmed to me this was God.” In 2018, alGROWithm was born.

But as demand for growth as a service grew in Nigeria, so did Bili’s struggle to meet it. For a short stint while still running alGROWithm, she doubled up as the chief growth officer at Moniepoint – a recently minted African fintech startup valued at over $1 billion and making waves across the world.

She got back into striving, trying and retrying, until her first attempt at international expansion for alGROWithm “yielded tepid outcomes.” She had hit another wall.

The Sabbath Years

She prayed again, and God gave her an unexpected answer: Step back, not forward. “The Lord kept emphasizing the Sabbath year to me through Bible studies, fellowship and Scripture,” she says. “I thought, ‘Surely not! I’m so hands-on with my business!’ I could not envision taking a break.”

But when an unexpected spike in revenue came through, she realized God had cleared the way. “There was no excuse,” she says.

Ready to rest, she prayed about how to spend her sabbatical. “And God said, ‘You know that doctorate you’re always joking about? Why not do it now?’”

God’s call came while the business was thriving, and while Bili was deeply involved in operations. “That’s what made the decision more difficult,” she says. “I was confronted with the chance that, during my time of obedience to God's direction, the business could plateau or fail.”

But Bili chose to obey and applied to several Doctor of Business Administration programs. She ultimately chose to embark on her DBA journey at George Fox in January of 2025.

God’s Solution: George Fox

When asked what she loves most about George Fox, Bili’s immediate answer is the culture. “It’s authentic kindness,” she says. “It’s not forced.”

In addition, her classes keep her mind active. “I’ve always been quite good with academia and my business in general, but here, I’m being intellectually stretched,” she says. “I really appreciate it. It shows that I’m getting value.”

Perhaps most importantly, the program has helped her understand that answers often come in unusual ways. “The DBA gave me a framework to understand what elements were missing from my approach to expansion,” she says.

‘He Sees Everything’

Bili no longer defines success by how hard she tries, but by how willing she is to let go. “A lot of times when God sets us on a path, it doesn’t make sense,” she says. “But that’s where faith and obedience come in. His blessings surpassed everything I had achieved with my intellect, brute force, willpower and determination.”

Reflecting on her journey of trust and obedience, the outcomes Bili sees are far beyond the best she’d envisioned for herself. Now a two-time billion-dollar business growth leader, Bili stands as one of Africa's most successful startup executives, with a career defined by consistently driving transformative growth.

For Bili, surrender doesn’t mean slowing down. It means trusting that every challenge is part of God’s design. “He sees everything, so I’m going to trust him.”

To connect with Bili, check out her profiles on Linkedin and Medium.