From a childhood where being a girl felt like a disadvantage, to building a movement that is rewriting the rules for women and money, Abi Longe’s story is one every woman needs to hear.
There are women who carry their wounds quietly, and there are women who transform those wounds into a blueprint for others. Abi Longe is firmly in the second camp. As the founder and CEO of HCDC Limited, a financial coach, transformational consultant, and the driving force behind the Worthy Woman Club, Abi has spent over three decades helping people, especially women step into the fullness of who they are.
In a raw and deeply personal conversation for Gazmadu Studios’ She Rises documentary series, Abi opened up about the defining moments that shaped her, from a childhood that communicated she was unwanted, to a faith encounter that changed everything, to a fierce conviction that financial freedom is not a luxury for women but a necessity.
Born Into a World That Didn’t Want Her
Abi was the fifth of seven children, in a home where daughters were seemingly “surplus to requirements.” The arrival of her younger brother was met with dancing and singing in the house. Her own arrival? Barely marked.
“I always joke that my sister before me is called Desola, and my name is Bisola,” she laughs, though the humour barely masks what that kind of careless naming communicates to a child. “It was like they couldn’t even be bothered to think of an original name.”
That early experience planted the seed of a fierce, unapologetic feminism, not the performative kind, but the kind forged in lived experience. And it gave her a mission: to help women understand that their worth is not earned through achievement, good behaviour, or shrinking themselves to fit what the world expects.
The Long Road to Purpose
Abi’s path was never a straight line. She excelled academically, not because she loved learning, but because she had internalised the message that performance was the price of love and attention. It carried her all the way to the London School of Economics, one of the world’s most prestigious universities.
But success on paper didn’t translate to inner clarity. She trained as a chartered accountant, tried tax, tried auditing, and found none of it lit her up. Purpose arrived unexpectedly; the day she organised an informal seminar for junior colleagues on taking responsibility, and the room was electric.
“Everybody was like, ‘Wow, amazing.’ That’s how I fell into personal development,” she recalls. “But I never really recognised what I really was: I was a coach. I was a born coach.”
It is a reminder that sometimes the most profound callings do not announce themselves in dramatic fashion. Sometimes, purpose is hiding in plain sight, in the thing you do naturally, the moment when others come alive around you.
The Moment That Changed Everything
Abi shares something not everyone would be willing to say out loud: at around twenty years old, at the lowest point of a difficult and unhappy childhood, she attempted to take her own life.
“Things just became overwhelmingly depressing for me. I just couldn’t see any future,” she says quietly. “I couldn’t see myself going on with such a miserable life.”
What turned the tide was not a programme or a mentor or a book. It was faith. Finding Christ, she says, became the foundation on which everything else was built. From that encounter grew a resilience, a relationship with personal development, and an unstoppable drive to help others find their way back to themselves.
On Women, Power, and the Myths We’ve Been Fed
Ask Abi what frustrates her most about the world, and she answers without hesitation: women who do not realise how much power they hold.
She paints a vivid picture of the competence gap between how men and women apply for jobs, a man meeting two out of ten criteria will send his CV; a woman meeting eight will talk herself out of it. She points to nations led by women as quiet proof of what is possible when that potential is allowed to flourish.
But her sharpest critique is reserved for the cultural conditioning that begins at birth. Dolls and combs for girls, cars and machinery for boys. The message delivered quietly but consistently: your role is to be decorative, domestic, dependent.
“The best, highly paid cooks in the world? Men,” she points out. “Why is it that when cooking is about profit and independence, it belongs to men, but when it’s about subservience and being unpaid, it suddenly belongs to women?”
The Worthy Woman Club: Building Financial Freedom, Together
The Worthy Woman Club is Abi’s answer to the question of what becomes possible when women stop seeking permission and start building wealth, community, and power together.
She is direct about the habits she wants to disrupt: women investing in appearances over assets, spending on things that depreciate while neglecting the things that compound over time.
“Enough with spending all the money on things that are just not going to appreciate in value,” she says. “You’re beautiful enough. You don’t need that tenth weave, woman. You’re okay.”
The vision is global yet intimate, a close-knit community of women organised into pods, supporting one another to build assets, break limiting beliefs, and rewrite the narrative that women and financial power do not belong together.
What She Wishes She’d Known at Twenty
If she could go back, Abi would tell her younger self two things.
The first: every challenge is a stepping stone, not a stop sign. That reframe alone, looking for the lesson rather than being buried under the weight of the difficulty, changes everything about how you navigate hard seasons.
The second: stop asking for permission.
“Don’t take permission from anybody to do anything,” she says, with the particular conviction of someone who learned this the long way around. “Embrace that personal power. Be your full self. Be your wholesome self.”
She is equally clear about what a real partnership looks like: not a dynamic in which one person diminishes the other, but a mutual interdependence in which both people are fully themselves.
It Always Gets Better
Abi closes with the message she most wants women to carry with them. Not a strategy, not a framework, but a conviction rooted in her own story.
“It always gets better. It always, always, always gets better, no matter how bad it looks.”
She quotes one of her favourite lines: the power of the decision far outweighs the power of the damage.
No matter where you are starting from. No matter what has gone before. Once you make the decision, truly make it, and you keep walking toward the life you want, you will get there.
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Abi Longe is the founder of HCDC Limited and the Worthy Woman Club. This interview was conducted as part of Gazmadu Studios’ She Rises documentary series, celebrating the stories of extraordinary women. CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW
