Sarah Ofonagoro spent two decades mastering the art of the sale. Now she runs Two Bears Bakery, one of the most sought-after luxury cake businesses in the country, and she is only getting started.
There is a particular kind of confidence that does not announce itself. It does not arrive with a loud entrance or a rehearsed line. It settles quietly into the room, comfortable in its own skin, and does not particularly mind whether you like it or not. That is the kind of confidence Sarah Ofonagoro has, and she is the first to tell you it was a long time coming.
She arrives as she shows up on social media: no fuss, no performance. The founder of Two Bears Bakery, a luxury cake and dessert business that counts some of the country’s most high-end events companies among its clients, is not what you might expect. She is warm and funny, with a faintly potty mouth and zero patience for pretence. She is also, it becomes clear very quickly, one of the sharpest commercial minds in the room.
A Childhood Built on Other People’s Ambition
Sarah grew up in a grammar school environment where the trajectory felt fixed from the start. Medicine, law, finance: the holy trinity of acceptable ambition. She did not fit neatly into any of those boxes.
“I’ll start by saying I’m a chronic oversharer,” she warns at the top of our conversation, grinning. “If anyone knows my parents, this conversation didn’t happen.”
Her father ran his own engineering business, working in steel manufacturing. Her mother worked for BP before stepping back to raise the children. On paper, a solid, industrious upbringing. In practice, it was more complicated. Her parents divorced when she was around eight, and the effect on her was profound.
“That had a significant impact on all three of the children,” she says. “I would say it was fundamental in the outlook I then had on my life moving forward. I never wanted work to be the thing that consumed me. Family first, always.”
Looking back, she can trace that single value through every decision she has made since. It is the thread that runs through twenty years in corporate sales, through voluntary redundancy, through the creation of a bakery, and into whatever comes next. The divorce did not break her family’s work ethic, but it did shape what she was willing to trade for it.
(Photo: Maggie Derry)
The Shy Girl in the Pool
Ask anyone who follows her on social media and they will tell you the same thing: Sarah Ofonagoro does not look like someone who was once crippled by shyness. The videos are easy, direct, funny. She holds eye contact with the camera the way most people cannot manage face to face.
But the bio she shared before today’s event does not let her off the hook. She describes her younger self as “painfully shy, with debilitating insecurities and a relatively narrow perspective on the world.” It reads like a different person entirely.
“Anybody who was shy as a child will know how unbelievably painful it is,” she says. “A physical pain, to feel shy.”
The sport helped, and did not help. From a young age she was competitive swimmer training twelve times a week. Before school, after school, staring at a line at the bottom of a pool for hours at a time. She is grateful for the discipline it gave her, but clear-eyed about its limits.
“When you’ve got something going on emotionally and it’s not a team sport, you’ve got two hours staring at a line in a pool. If you’re going to have mental health issues, that’s going to exacerbate it big time.”
What she took from swimming was a work ethic that has never left her. And when she quit competitive swimming at sixteen, she did not slow down. She bought a horse.
“My family jokes every time we were in the car and we drove past a field. I always wanted one.” Her father was less enthusiastic, particularly when she fell off the horse the first time she tried him out. But Sarah was not deterred. Since her parents were not in a position to fund it, she got a National Insurance number and went to work at a local restaurant, covering every shift she could. The horse cost her one thousand pounds. Keeping him ran, another five hundred pounds a month.
“One commitment, straight into another,” she says, and laughs.
The Equine Scientist Who Became a Pharma Exec
When university came around, Sarah had no interest in the standard routes. She wanted to take her horse with her, which neatly narrowed the options. She enrolled in an Equine Science and Management degree at an agricultural college, and cried solidly for the first three weeks.
“I was crippled with insecurity. It was horrendous. But it fundamentally changed me. It was do or die.”
She stuck it out, and the experience cracked something open. By the time she left university she was a different person, or at least the beginnings of one. Her original plan, in keeping with the horse theme, was the Mounted Police. That application ended at interview when they told her she was not confident enough.
A friend’s phone call changed everything. There was a job going at a pharmaceutical company in London. Sarah applied. She got it. And so began a twenty-year career that would take her from account manager to key account manager to, eventually, Head of Sales for a global pharmaceutical business.
“Serious job. Managing multi-million pound portfolios. Always target-driven. My whole career was about targets.”
It was face-to-face, on the road, cold-calling, relationship-building sales. No social media. No warm inbound leads. You showed up at a practice or a clinic with a brochure and forty generic veterinary products, and you made something happen. For someone who described herself only a few years earlier as painfully shy, it is a striking arc.
“Incredibly difficult at first,” she admits. “When you’re raw and you’ve not been taught how. But when you’ve had twenty years with big blue-chip companies, they teach you everything you need.”
She also, quietly, did a great deal of work on herself. For five years, she attended weekly psychotherapy sessions. “I knew who I wanted to become. I could see it, but I couldn’t get there.” The therapy gave her a language for what she was carrying, and slowly, the gap between who she was and who she wanted to be began to close.
The Kept Woman Who Got Bored
The decision to take voluntary redundancy came when the family business she had been working for was acquired by a large corporate, and the culture shifted. She did not want to go back into that world.
“My husband told me I could be a kept woman,” she says, grinning. “That was the plan. Stay at home with the kids. Be present. Do what my mum did.”
It lasted approximately five minutes.
“I got bored really quick. I knew I was going to need something intellectually stimulating. I wanted both.”
She had been baking for years, for the love of it. The question of what to do with that love took shape gradually. She decided to go into business, but not just any kind of business. This would be luxury, high-end, bespoke. Wedding cakes for people who cared. Dessert tables for events where money was not a constraint.
“I always knew I didn’t want to be a volume business. I could either set up a bakery churning out tray bakes, or I could go high-end. And I just knew, because of who I am and what I value, which route I wanted to take.”
Saying no, it turned out, was as important as saying yes.
For the Few, Not the Many
From the start, Sarah turned down anything that did not fit the vision. No children’s birthday cakes. No semi-naked wedding cakes in the style that was everywhere on Pinterest at the time. She wanted the intricate, bespoke, highly considered work, and she was prepared to wait for it.
It took longer. She is honest about that. But it was always a deliberate trade.
“If I fill my diary with cakes I don’t want to do, when an opportunity comes in for the kind of work I really do, I won’t have space for it.”
The business turned on a moment she could not have engineered. A young woman rang and asked whether Sarah could make a mini cake for her grandfather’s birthday. She had less than a day to turn it around. It was a small order.
“You just never know who that person is.”
The woman rang back the next day. The cake was the best they’d ever had. Her parents, it turned out, owned one of the most high-end events companies in the country, handling international work for clients with serious money. Sarah has been making their cakes and desserts ever since.
A mini cake. Seventy-five pounds. No hesitation. That, she explains, is the other side of the equation: charging what you are worth, because the price point signals the value, and the value attracts the right client.
Turning Up Without Makeup
One of the recurring tensions in Sarah’s business life has been the gap between the person she is and the brand she is building. Two Bears Bakery is genuinely luxurious. The cakes are genuinely extraordinary. The aesthetic is polished and beautiful. And Sarah, by her own admission, rarely gets dressed before noon, swears freely, and does not own a blow-dry routine to speak of.
“My biggest struggle with social media was the thing that held me back most,” she says. “I like high-end things. That is who I am. But I’ve also got a foul mouth. I do not take life seriously. And sometimes those two don’t match.”
For a long time she could not see a way through. If she put herself on camera, she worried it would undermine the brand. If she only showed perfectly curated cake shots, she disappeared behind the product.
The shift came from a deliberate decision to stop performing. She started posting herself as she actually was: in gym clothes, without makeup, speaking directly to her phone.
“I was going to have to turn up as my worst self in order to be able to turn up every day.”
The results were immediate. There is, she says, a direct correlation between posting herself authentically and the volume of inquiries she receives.
“As soon as I stop, the orders dry up. It’s really weird.” She pauses. “But it isn’t weird at all, is it. People buy from people.”
The Sales Brain Behind the Icing
None of this, it is worth saying, is accidental. The instinct to find her people, to say no to the wrong fit, to understand that a relationship is worth more than a transaction: all of it comes from twenty years of structured commercial training.
Quiet periods are when the strategy becomes most visible. When orders slow, Sarah does what sales people do. She maintains relationships. She follows up with leads. She reaches out to former brides, checks in, stays warm. Not because it feels like work, she is quick to say. But because she genuinely likes people, and the quiet periods are when she has time to show it.
“When I’m busy and baking and designing, I don’t always have time for that. So I try and fill the gaps. It is intentional, but it’s also part of the job I really enjoy.”
Her view on marketing is equally grounded. She quotes a line she loves: marketing without sales is like a dog that barks but has no bite. You can make all the noise you want, but if you cannot convert the lead, the noise is for nothing. The two must work together, and most businesses, in her experience, are only good at one of them.
Balance, and Why She Does Not Pretend It Is Easy
Husband. Two children. A growing business. A second business on the horizon. The question of balance comes up, and Sarah does not dress it up.
“It’s really hard. There is no easy way to do it.”
What she has is a core value that makes the hard choices easier. While her children are young, being present for them is, without question, her priority. She does not pretend the business does not encroach. Late inquiries get answered after bedtime. Orders get baked during school hours. But the line is drawn, and she holds it.
“There’s a strong boundary in place when it’s kids time.”
Her husband’s financial support gives her the freedom to hold that boundary without catastrophizing every quiet week. She knows it is a privilege, and she does not take it lightly.
The Female Formula
There is a new project on the horizon, and it is not a networking group or a community platform. Sarah is pointed about that distinction.
“It’s definitely not a networking event or a community. It’s none of those.”
What it is, is intensive, one-to-one sales coaching for female founders, senior professionals and entrepreneurs who have never been taught how to sell. Not another online course with a slide deck and a workbook. Real, specific, tailored coaching that follows someone through their actual leads, their actual conversations, their actual conversion gaps.
The idea grew directly from her client base. Over the years, she built relationships with extraordinary women. Founders. Partners. Senior professionals. And she kept noticing the same thing: they were brilliant at what they did and had almost no structured understanding of how to sell it.
The results from the early work speak for themselves. An aesthetics clinic in the Lake District. Three talented practitioners. Zero sales training. One month following training, they were hitting their monthly target in week one.
“The empowerment when you know how to do it well, when you realise it’s just a structured conversation. I love it.”
She is careful to explain why women, in particular. Not sentiment, but strategy. Women, she argues, are already natural communicators. The structural elements of a sales process sit more easily on top of that foundation than most people expect.
The Female Formula is coming. Sarah Ofonagoro has spent twenty-five years learning exactly what it takes to close a room. She is ready to teach it.
Follow Two Bears Bakery and connect here
https://www.twobearsbakery.co.uk/
https://www.instagram.com/two.bears.bakery
https://www.facebook.com/TwoBearsBakery/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-ofonagoro-a06423123/
With over 80 attendees, Alex & His Sisters continues to be a standout networking event in Altrincham, bringing together inspiring speakers like Sarah who share their real-world insights and practical advice. A big thank you to Sarah for here engaging talk, and to all the attendees who make these events so impactful!
Follow On Eventbrite here
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/alex-mccann-18007752018
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