Building Back from Zero: When Your Reputation Becomes Your Next Opportunity

What happens when you step away from a company and a title that have defined a significant part of your career?

For our next After Office Hours, we’re sitting down with Pauline Warui, Founder & CEO of East Africa Customer Care Centre, to talk about exactly that.

Pauline’s career has taken her through major organisations including Chevron Oil Kenya, Celtel and Safaricom, where she served as Director of Customer Care. She helped build large-scale customer service operations, including support services for M-Pesa, and managed large teams through a period of significant growth.

But this conversation is about what came next.

Building back from zero

After leaving Safaricom, Pauline entered a very different chapter. Without the familiar corporate title behind her, she had to lean on personal networks, rebuild relationships and establish her own reputation in the market.

Today, she consults widely on customer experience and corporate culture transformation, and has built a personal brand that means major organisations know who to call when they need her expertise.

So how do you get there?

At Building Back from Zero, we want to explore the parts of that journey we don’t often talk about.

How much does a company name contribute to your professional identity? What happens to your network when you leave? How do you rebuild relationships without making them feel transactional? And how do you become known for your expertise when there is no longer a big corporate title introducing you?

We’ll also talk about what personal brand actually means beyond LinkedIn profiles and visibility. Is it something you deliberately build, or is it simply the reputation created by years of doing good work?

And perhaps the biggest question of the evening:

If the company name disappeared from your CV tomorrow, what would people know you for?

Join the conversation

Building Back from Zero
How Reputation & Personal Brand Built the Customer Care Guru

Speaker: Pauline Warui, Founder & CEO, East Africa Customer Care Centre
Date: 8 October 2026
Time: 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Venue: Nairobi Garage Kilimani, 7th Floor, Pinetree Plaza

Come for Pauline’s story, but bring your own questions and experiences too. After Office Hours is as much about the conversation in the room as the person leading it.

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