Racheal Allen

Racheal Allen is a Lean Six Sigma certified strategy, systems and operations consultant with nearly twenty years of experience leading and serving startups and nonprofits.  As a second-generation entrepreneur, she believes entrepreneurship is a pathway out of poverty and credits the entrepreneurial spirit as a catalytic driver of cycle breaking and generational wealth creation. After scaling her first startup into a six-figure insurance agency by the age of twenty-one, she piloted initiatives in the legal, retail and service industries.

In 2019, she created Operations School, a nonprofit business service organization with a mission to train, empower and equip BIPOC startup and nonprofit leaders with the skills to successfully manage and scale their organizations.

As CEO of OPSIDIA, a management consulting that helps its clients operationalize their visions, Racheal leads a diverse team that empowers organizations to build capacity via program design and fractional operations support.  Alongside her husband Gerrard, she is also co-founder of Centric Place, a first of its kind hub for Black arts, culture and entrepreneurship in Metro Detroit.

She previously served as the founding Chief Operating Officer for Marygrove Conservancy, a transformational cradle to career initiative that represents the Kresge Foundation's largest investment into a single project with a commitment of over $75M.

Racheal plays an active role in the small business and nonprofit ecosystem, serving as a coach, mentor and board member to various organizations. Recent recognition includes being named the 2022 Small Business Hero of the Year by Connect313, a Young American Leader at Harvard Business School, Oakland County's 40 Under Forty, DBusiness' 30 in Their Thirties, Crain's Detroit Business' 40 Under Forty and receiving the Great Expectations Award by the Detroit NAACP Branch.