Rita Korkor Agyei, a Ghanaian-born business consultant with Law and MBA degrees, has spent six years building brands across telecom, fintech, and consumer goods. She currently works in Chicago, United States, as a senior consultant in technology strategy and operations. In this interview by KINGSLEY ALUMONA, she speaks on her work and how branding, law, and data drive business and investment.

You started your career on a telecom graduate programme in Accra, Ghana. What did that first job teach you?

Rotation. The Discover programme moved me through functions. It taught me that a business is a system, not a department. When you sit in enterprise solutions one quarter and watch commercial teams the next, you stop believing that marketing, or any single function, wins on its own. It is also where I learned that every function keeps score differently.  Sales has its pipeline. Finance has its variances. Network teams have their uptime. Learning to read each scoreboard is how you learn the business. That instinct, to find the numbers before touching the machine, is the oldest tool in my kit.

Two years in, you joined Nsano as its first-ever marketing lead. What is the Nsano experience like?

It was the deep end. There was no manual, no predecessor, no existing team structure. My job was to stand up a marketing organisation for a fintech company operating in four African countries, with a startup’s budget and a startup’s impatience. But starting from zero has one enormous advantage: you get to instrument everything from day one. I set baselines in my first months so that every claim I made afterwards would have a denominator. I built the brand identity, set marketing strategy for both the business and consumer sides, and got very close to product. By the time I left, digital engagement had grown roughly seventy per cent against those baselines, and the structure and talent I brought in continued years after. The real lesson was personal, though: I learned that I could be handed nothing and produce something measurable. Once you know that about yourself, you stop being afraid of blank pages.

Then Nestlé, and the coffee business. Going from a four-country startup to a multinational region sounds like the opposite problem.

Completely the opposite. At a startup, the constraint is resources; at a multinational, the constraint is coordination. As brand manager for the coffee business unit, I ran innovation and renovation as a project manager, which meant aligning cross-functional teams across markets. We launched four soluble coffee products in four markets that way. I also worked the regional media and digital side, and that job was lived inside the data. I led the implementation of a new website, the e-commerce and CRM build on Salesforce, and the search strategy underneath it. Under that programme, digital marketing spend grew fifteen per cent, and engagement rose eight per cent, and in our 2020 brand health tracking we recorded eighty-five per cent brand recall. The region named me a Nestle Digital Warrior in 2020, and in 2021 I was recognised for my performance in the coffee business unit. I am proud of the numbers, but what I actually took away was the craft of moving a large organisation.

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Almost every answer you give resolves to a metric. Where does that discipline come from?

From being wrong early and finding out late. In my first years, I watched campaigns get defended with adjectives, and I decided I never wanted to be in that position. So my rule became: no initiative without a baseline, a target, and an agreed way to measure the gap. In brand work, that meant living in the brand health tracker, holding my media dashboards to the same metrics every month so the trend line meant something, and tracking every purchase order against budget so I always knew my true cost per outcome, not just my spend. The other thing data gave me was a common language. I have worked across four-plus markets, multiple functions, and now two continents, and the one thing that translates everywhere without losing meaning is a well-constructed number. Opinions vary by culture and seniority; a baseline and a delta do not. The habit is identical. Define the metric before you fall in love with the idea.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, you earned a law degree. How did you manage to do that?

Curiosity first, discipline second. I completed the LLB at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration in 2020, studying alongside full-time work, and it rewired how I read the world. Marketing teaches you to ask what people want; law teaches you to ask what the rules permit and who bears the risk. Every commercial decision lives between those two questions. I did not train in law primarily to litigate. I trained because I kept sitting in rooms where contracts, regulation, and liability shaped the outcome more than the campaign did, and I wanted to stop taking other people’s word for what the documents said.

You had a decorated career in brand management. Why leave it for an MBA?

I had spent six years watching technology decide the fate of every marketing plan I wrote. The website, the CRM, the data, the search infrastructure: those were the levers that moved my results, and I was operating them from the marketing side of the glass. I wanted to be on the other side, where the technology decisions get made. The MBA at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business was the bridge. I went in openly as a career switcher, from brand management into technology consulting, and I will not pretend the imposter syndrome was not real.

You also led the Africa Business Club at Kelley. What did leadership look like there compared to leading a team at work?

At work, people follow you because the organisation chart says so. In a student club, nobody has to show up. As president, everything ran on one question: did people believe this was worth their scarcest resource: time. That is the purest leadership training there is. I have always considered myself an all-round business leader, and I wanted to test my influence where people’s livelihoods were not on the line.

I was the club’s second president since its founding. In my term, we raised $10,000 to support Black-owned enterprises, and built a blueprint for growth that future leaders could run with. I still consult with incoming presidents of the Africa Business Club each year. My takeaway: leadership is influence, and influence is the most durable form of power

Now you advise large enterprises on technology strategy. What does a former brand manager bring to that table?

Translation, backed by measurement. Technology transformation fails in the gap between the system and the human beings who are supposed to change how they work because of it. I spent years learning how people actually adopt things: how trust forms, where friction hides, why a technically superior option loses. When I build a business case for a technology investment now, or evaluate the costs and benefits of a platform decision, I am running the same discipline I ran on brands, just pointing at enterprise technology and the executives who must sponsor it. My work is client interviews, research, financial analysis, and getting a C-suite to a decision they can defend. I try not to bring opinions into those rooms. I bring models, and we argue about the assumptions. Brand management, it turns out, was excellent preparation for all of it.

Does the law degree show up in that work?

Constantly, and usually invisibly. Technology decisions are wrapped in contracts, data obligations, and regulatory exposure. A technology strategy consultant requires depth and breadth. My law training gives me the contractual depth I need when analysing supplier contracts, looking out for exit terms and clauses, and ensuring that clients do not leave money on the table. It makes analysis richer, recommendations stronger, and hypotheses more achievable.

Along the way, you have been elected a Fellow of two professional bodies: the Commonwealth Academy of Leadership and Management in 2020, and the Institute of Management Consultants in 2023. What do those recognitions mean to you?

They bookend the two halves of my career, which is why I value them. The Commonwealth Academy fellowship came in 2020, on the strength of the leadership and management record I had built in brand marketing: standing up a function at a startup, leading teams, running strategy across markets.

The Institute of Management Consultants fellowship came in 2023, as I was crossing into consulting, and its citation looked at the same career through a consultant’s lens: the ability to translate market insight into business results. Fellowship grades in bodies like these are peer judgments. I do not treat that as a trophy. I treat it as an obligation, because both institutes expect fellows to mentor the professionals coming up behind them, and that is the part of the bargain I actually enjoy. The recognition also matters to me for a quieter reason: it is a record, held by institutions on two continents, that the work I did at home stood on its own before I ever set foot in an American classroom.

You are part of a generation of African professionals building careers abroad. How do you think about what that movement means for the continent?

I think the honest answer is that it is still an open question, including for me. The continent invests in people like me, and then we carry that investment into other markets. The optimistic version is circulation rather than drain: the skills, networks, and standards travel back, through the work we send home, the people we mentor, and eventually the institutions some of us return to build. I try to live on the circulation side of that line. What I built at the start of my career is still running in Accra, and I have never stopped treating that as part of my record rather than my past. But I resist tidy conclusions about it. The question of what we owe, and how it gets paid, deserves to stay uncomfortable.

What would you tell someone earlier in their career path, staring at their own blank page?

Volunteer for the job nobody has done before. The roles with no manual are the ones that compound, because you leave them with proof instead of just experience. Then measure yourself the way you would measure a brand: set a baseline, pick honest metrics, and check the trend line instead of your mood. Every switch I have made — marketing to law, to technology — looked from outside like starting over. The data said otherwise. From inside, it was the same project the whole time: learning how decisions really get made, one discipline at a time, with the numbers to show for each.