Mercy Abel unlocks another character
The spin instructor, gymnast, ‘multi-award-winning marketing girlie’, and podcaster has yet another title: founder
Sometime toward the end of 2025, Americans discovered Black Scottish people on TikTok in the same way Christopher Columbus discovered America. The Americans had found a video made by a Sterling K. Brown-looking Black-Scottish man, and could not believe their ears. “Baby, we did not know about y’all. Let me tell you something, I am learning so much right now”, one user said. Soon, my feed morphed into the inevitable lambasting of the American education system. If you looked away from the pitifulness, it made for hilarious viewing. I think about this now, as I write, recalling the first time I heard Mercy Abel speak—she was...Scottish? In my defence, I saw her at London networking events so frequently that I simply assumed she was based here. While speaking with Mercy on a Teams call in March, I learned that this wasn’t purely a coincidence.
“If you know me, you’re like, oh, great, Mercy’s here again. But if you don’t know me, they’re like, “Who is this girl? Why is she everywhere? Like, I feel like I must know her.” And it was a very strategic step for me, especially, I would say at year two to four of my career, I literally was like, if I don’t speak about myself, who’s going to know me? I live in Scotland”.
“A Glaswegian at heart,” Mercy has lived in Scotland since she was one year old, when her family relocated from Tanzania. So while she frequents other parts of the UK for work, she’s never truly left home. Her first graduate role was amidst the 2020 pandemic chaos, like many ‘COVID graduates’. It was a job she’d secured through the power of connection (Take a drink every time you read ‘connect’ or ‘connection’). She connected with a New York-based British entrepreneur, Hugh Thomas—“a white man, bless his heart”—at a time when the protests for Black lives were a matter of global concern; when Western countries were trying to reconcile the death of George Floyd with their need to do more for Black people. He then connected her with his university mate, Asad Dhunna, founder of The Unmistakables, a diversity and inclusion consultancy, who turned out to be her first boss. Asad would also be her first guest when she launched her Gen-Z careers podcast, ‘audacity of we’ in September 2022.
Mercy has never applied for a role. For her second job at PR agency, John Doe, she was headhunted following the launch and publicity for her podcast. “This isn’t a brag, it’s proof that life rewards you when you put yourself out there & grow a network,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “People have a lot of fear around being visible, right? They have a lot of fear around posting online or showing up in spaces, showing more of their personality. And I understand why. However, it’s like exposure therapy”, she said during our call, gesticulating. “The more you’re exposed to something, the easier it becomes. And the first time that that happens, it’s really scary, and it can shake you to your core. But the more you trust the process and go for it: the art of visibility, the art of, you know, being seen…And I think this is why my networks have grown so much, and the reasons why people might think I live in London, because of all the connections that I have.”
At this point, one could assume that Mercy is a bit of a ‘dive in head first’ type of fearless—that’s hardly the case. I read aloud a LinkedIn comment under one of her posts from Kamiqua Lake, founder of communications agency Coldr and UK Black Comms Network (UK BCN): “You are the definition of feeling the fear and doing it anyway.” Mercy, who has been the Chair of the UK BCN Middle Leaders group since July 2023, was immediately overcome with emotion; she raised her hand to her mouth as if to mask her mild blush and thanked me for pointing this out. “When she says feeling the fear and doing it anyway, it’s very apt. Like that is probably the basis of everything I’ve done. I feel like everything I’ve done has been quite unconventional, and it’s always been in unprecedented times. So it makes me feel good. It makes me feel aligned…I’m entering that chapter of founder life, entrepreneurship, it’s new. But something that I heard that I’ve really, you know, kept to my core and keeping me moving is that ‘it’s not hard, it’s just new’”.
Yes, Mercy, who, up until now, had been a spin instructor, gymnast, internship programme director, communities manager, inclusion consultant, award-winning communications professional, and podcaster, has added yet another feather to her cap: founder. She captioned her jack-of-all-trades-ness in a recent Instagram post as “the feminine urge to do it all.” Announcing her new venture on LinkedIn, she said: “…I have built something…Introducing Who You Know (WYK) - an early careers and intergenerational teams consultancy offering workplace insights, intergenerational teams support, access programmes, network building and recruitment opportunities across the UK.” Her company is aptly named; she believes that “it’s a very who-you-know industry. So why don’t we play in its face and just be like, okay, fine, if it’s a who-you-know industry, let’s not see it as a barrier”. It is often said that naming the problem is the crucial first step in problem-solving. Well, Mercy Abel loves to name the problem. The other initiative she co-founded while she was at John Doe was called UNLOCKED. Why? You guessed it: she wanted to “unlock the door”. “We give you the opportunity to come through. It’s up to the interns to then take the opportunity with both hands and start building that career for themselves. And a lot of them have, and that’s what I’m really proud of”.
Of her legacy so far, she spoke of wanting to give people the opportunity to choose, to back themselves, to further themselves, and to create the life they want. “So whenever people feel like I’ve made such an impact on their life or their career, that they want to relay that feedback back to me, it’s just the reassurance that I need that, yeah, what I’m doing is not only fulfilling, but it’s making an impact. And I just want to do more of that. I want to do more of it!”
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