This week’s Business Leader Spotlight highlights Sandeep Main, Partner and Head of Private Enterprise, KPMG Africa. Mr. Main shares key insights for entrepreneurs on sustainable growth, market awareness and navigating the evolving tax landscape, drawing from KPMG's global leadership in audit, tax and advisory services with a presence in 142 countries and 29 offices across 54 African nations. Here is the full interview;

A brief overview of your organisation and its key focus areas

KPMG is a global organisation that specialises in audit tax and advisory services. We currently operate in 142 countries globally, but from an African perspective, we do have 29 offices, that is 54 countries.

Major milestones or achievements your organisation has celebrated

KPMG globally has a number of milestones that have been achieved, but from an East African perspective we have been around for about 75 years and some of the notable achievements and milestones perhaps I can talk about is the first one would be the Top 100 project which I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs and family businesses already are aware of. This is an East African initiative where we recognise sustainable business growth of the top 100 companies and the second one would really be around the Global Innovator Tech competition, which we kicked off just about three years ago in East Africa. This is a global initiative run by KPMG Global and what we are seeking to achieve is to recognise innovation, recognise the innovator themselves. So that indeed has been something that has brought a lot of attraction to East Africa in terms of the great ideas and innovations that many entrepreneurs have. The third one would be something very recent, which is the first-ever inaugural venture capital summit that KPMG organised through its private enterprise arm and this venture summit was really to bring together an ecosystem. We brought together investors, we brought together investee companies and connected them. We talked about topical issues around the state of investment in Africa and that indeed I think would be critical milestones and critical celebrations for us as KPMG.

Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs or those starting their business journey

Having worked with entrepreneurs and family businesses in the last couple of years, I think it's really important to get the right person to walk the journey with you, whether this is a mentor or a consultant, because most of this goes beyond investors or goes beyond looking for money. It is about how you grow your business from a sustainable perspective, so that element of walking the journey as you start off or even as you grow your business from a startup to a scale-up is very critical for the people that you are talking to. So I think for me it's get the right people, talk to the right people whether it's mentors or consultants and have a big picture in terms of if your product or your service is no longer relevant in the market how then do you pivot. So market research, market intelligence is extremely important and above all the tax and regulatory environment changes and is constantly evolving. Keeping abreast of this is critical for sustainable business growth.

The video of the interview can be accessed here.