Solo Nnanna believes that African talent, delivered globally, is one of the most underleveraged assets in the modern economy. 

The Nigerian entrepreneur is the founder of REACH Support, a talent outsourcing company that connects African professionals with small, Black-owned businesses across the U.S. The benefits are twofold: creating employment opportunities across the continent by opening access to the U.S. market, while helping Black startups scale with affordable talent.

Alongside REACH Support, the serial entrepreneur is also at the helm of  Reach Group, a 360° marketing agency, and Sahara Jets, a private air charter broker. Nnanna is also a co-founder and investor in hospitality company Vitality Leisure Group. 

His portfolio demonstrates how Black economic mobility on both sides of the Atlantic is one large, interconnected project. 

Becoming an Entrepreneur

Like many other African teenagers growing up, Nnanna heard his parents say that he had to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. He moved from Nigeria at age 14 to finish high school in the U.S. After graduating, he pursued a pre-med track at Rutgers University before realizing medicine wasn’t the field he wanted to pursue. He pivoted from medicine into finance, landing roles at MetLife and J.P. Morgan in private wealth and investment banking. 

While working in those jobs, Nnanna had one foot in the African music scene. In 2008, before Afrobeat became mainstream, there were few, if any, venues in America playing African music. Out of necessity more than anything, he started hosting Afrobeat parties in New York. “What started out with small, 50, 100 people, 200 people parties, grew to at one point a 2,000-person party for Nigeria Independence Day in New York,” Nnanna told UrbanGeekz in an exclusive interview. That was his first taste of entrepreneurship. 

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Connecting Brands to the African Diaspora

Without realizing it, hosting these Afrobeat parties meant that Nnanna was building a strong community within the African Diaspora that would become highly sought after. At one of the events, the vice president of a new African airline, Arik Air, wanted to reach Nnanna’s audience. While building that brand, they wanted to target members of the African diaspora who would frequently fly home. But they could not find marketing agencies focused on connecting brands to the African diaspora. This is when the idea for RLGw (Reach Local, Grow Worldwide) was born. 

Brands were slowly realizing the vast spending power of Africans living in America. In 2008, roughly 1.6 million Africans were residents, and they were sending billions of dollars back home. “If they’re sending that much back, if you step back and holistically look at their disposable income, it will be multiples of that, right?” Nnanna asks. African-born American residents were making up a new demographic, and companies were eager to reach them.

Nnanna built RLGw to fill this gap. RLGw evolved into Reach Group, moving from an events agency to a 360° marketing agency that handles strategy, digital marketing, activations, and more across the continent. They worked with massive brands like Heineken, Pepsi, Union Bank, and Nickelodeon, helping them connect with African audiences. 

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Discovering the Power of Remote Work 

Over 12 years, Reach Group scaled to around 150 people on its team right before COVID hit in 2020. Determined not to lay off people at an economically precarious time, Nnanna needed another solution. That is when he stumbled into the concept of outsourcing. Remote work became normalized as much of the population was forced to stay home, so Reach Group outsourced its entire team. Very quickly, they needed to hire even more people to meet the demand. 

This experience revealed the idea for his next business. An outsourcing company with a scalable, dual-impact model. He intended to tackle unemployment in Africa while strengthening under-resourced businesses in the U.S. 

REACH Support

In 2024, Nnanna formalized the outsourcing model into a dedicated subsidiary: REACH Support. The company offers affordable back-office services to small, particularly Black-owned startups in America by connecting them with African talent. Their core verticals are admin, operations, AI, marketing, sales, design, finance, and software development. 

While big tech companies are notorious for outsourcing in Africa to cut costs, REACH primarily focuses on serving Black-owned startups. Often Black-owned businesses in the U.S. get stuck at the startup phase because they don’t receive the capital or operational support they need to scale. By offering operational support at a fraction of the cost, REACH wants to unlock that next stage of growth. 

Their ambitions are certainly not small. Over the next 10 years, REACH aims to create one million jobs for Africans on the continent. At the same time, they aim to support 100,000 Black businesses from start to scale in that same decade. As a result, REACH acts as a bridge. They are funneling “more money into the continent while still helping those businesses in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and Charlotte grow,” Nnanna explains. 

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Rewriting the Narrative on African Talent

One of the biggest challenges that REACH faces is dismantling the stereotypes about talent from the continent. Often, Africans are discriminated against because people still believe that they are undereducated and unable to speak English properly. This is a result of decades of bad PR for the continent. 

In America, “if you look to your left at your doctor, your dentist, your lawyer, your accountant, you’re probably going to encounter an African. And so if you can trust those people with your health, with your finances, why can’t you trust where they’re coming from?” Nnanna asks. 

Compared with other outsourcing hubs such as the Philippines and India, Nnanna argues that African talent performs better on several metrics. African countries have a larger English-speaking population, trained on American or British curricula. Instead of teams in Asia working nine hours ahead of the U.S., African teams typically work four to six hours ahead. This enables real-time collaboration. 

Quality Assurance

Before hiring a candidate, they undergo a thorough vetting program. This includes a spoken and written English assessment, a soft-skills evaluation, a technical interview, and a real-world, project-based task. The final step is an interview with the senior team members to assess compatibility. 

What sets REACH apart from regular recruitment companies is that they don’t leave once the hire has been made. They embed themselves inside client organizations. “My HR team stays with you; my client support team stays with you. We’re also on the same Slack channel where you and your team members are,” Nnanna said. This is how they boast an 85% employee retention rate and a 95% satisfaction rate. 

Collective Growth and Future Development 

Rather than succumbing to diaspora wars or competition between Africans and African Americans, Nnanna envisions a world where we can all win, together. REACH Support uplifts Black businesses in the U.S. by providing them with operational support. It concurrently creates opportunities for Africans across the continent to earn a living wage. Nnanna has built a system where these two communities can grow in unison. 

Main image: Solo Nnanna

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