Yoadan Tilahun: Founder & CEO, Flawless Events – When Passion Meets Opportunity, Turning a Side Hustle into a Business

African Business Stories

Yoadan Tilahun is the founder & CEO of Flawless Events. A corporate events company based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Yoadan went to the United States for college and for 15 years did not visit her home country. On a family trip to Addis in 2007, she felt so at home she never went back. A friend knowing she did events as a side business in the United States, asked her to help organize a conference and Flawless Addis Ababa was born!

Starting the company with no clear strategy or a business plan, she was successful in organizing events but soon realized that knowing how to run an event does not mean you know how to run a company, or build a legacy brand. Coming to this realization helped her elevate her game and set the company on a path to actual growth.

Flawless Events organizes corporate events and conferences throughout the African continent. Her team has hosted events in Ethiopia, Cote D’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Gabon, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Mauritius. In 2015, Flawless won the “Event Planner Africa” award at Meetings Magazine’s Women in MICE celebration.

Yoadan serves as the president of the Ethiopian Events & Exhibition Organizers Association. She is an enthusiastic advocate for professionalizing the MICE industry in East Africa. She is the recipient of the 2017 MeetingsNet Changemaker award for her trailblazing role in the Ethiopia events industry and the UNDP Seasoned Entrepreneur of the Year 2018 award. She has also been featured on Forbes Afrique and on How We Made It in Africa. She holds an MBA in International Business and is fluent in Amharic, English and French. Along with her husband, they are raising three growing boys.

Yoadan’s African Business Story is one dedicated to providing quality service and elevating the corporate event space in Africa by building a brand that can compete on the global stage.