The woman running a R7 billion accounting giant in South Africa
Ruwayda Redfearn, the CEO of Deloitte Africa, went from humble beginnings and struggling to pay her tuition fees to running a Top 4 accounting firm.
While Redfearn is now in charge of one of the largest companies in South Africa, her love of finance started years before in her parents’ clothing factory.
Redfearn was born in 1975 and grew up in a small neighbourhood in Durban as the youngest of four children.
Her parents led a simple life, with her dad working as a factory worker and her mom a machinist.
Redfearn explained in an interview with the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) that they played a huge role in her life as her first real role models.
She was first exposed to the business world at about six years old when her parents decided to resign from their jobs as factory workers and use the little money and education they had to open their own clothing factory.
She spent every day after school at the factory, learning various skills along the way. She worked on different machines and eventually learned about finance and accounting.
“I was involved in putting together the wages on a weekly basis and reconciling the bank account,” she explained.
Although she was only about 13 at the time, this experience sparked her love for finance and business.
The clothing factory also instilled a keen interest in fashion in Redfearn, and for a while, she thought she would grow up to become a fashion designer.
“As I went through my teen years, the interest in business just continued, and I watched my dad become a very successful entrepreneur,” she said.
Her family was hit by hard times in her matric year when her father, who was her greatest supporter, passed away in a car accident, leaving her mother to run the family business alone.
Although Redfearn did very well in school, growing up during apartheid meant that there were no bursaries available to her.
“I have always learned more from my challenges than I have from doing the easy stuff,” she said.
Her excellent school marks earned her reduced fees, enabling her to complete a Bachelor’s in Accounting and Finance at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 1995.
Throughout high school and university, Redfearn worked to cover her education costs, but she couldn’t afford to pay for her honours degree.
When the local Indian community heard about her situation, they rallied together and helped fund her degree.
In 1997, Redfearn began her career at Deloitte as a trainee accountant.
“I applied at Deloitte to do my articles, and I put all my eggs in that one basket,” she told SAICA.
“From the moment I walked in, I knew that was where I wanted to be. There weren’t many women in the building, and there were even fewer people of colour, but Vassi Naidoo, who later went on to become CEO, was the regional leader at the time, and he was an important role model of mine.”
“I was incredibly excited to be accepted.”
Afterwards, she went to work for Deloitte on secondment in New York. This was an incredibly proud moment for Redfearn, who had never left South Africa before.
Afterwards, she returned to Durban as a manager and became a partner in 2004, at only 29 years old.
“I was determined to be a partner before I was 30 years old, and it’s something that I worked quite hard for,” she said.
In 2010, she was appointed to lead the audit practice in the KwaZulu-Natal region and later chaired the Global Young Partners’ Advisory Council, reporting directly to the global CEO.
In 2011, she joined the Deloitte Southern Africa board and its remuneration committee.
A year later, Redfearn transitioned to a CFO role at a global commodity trading company, where she served for three years.
She rejoined Deloitte in 2015 as the office managing partner for the KZN region, overseeing the risk advisory business for both the Eastern Cape and KZN regions.
In 2016, she was appointed to the Deloitte Africa board, where she chaired the firm’s remuneration committee and served on the performance, reward, succession, and nominations committees.
In 2022, Deloitte announced that Redfearn would take over as CEO of Deloitte Africa. Under her leadership, the company generated R7.2 billion in revenue across the continent in 2023.
Emotional intelligence, values-based leadership, and a zero-tolerance approach to ethics are essential to her approach as a business leader.
She told SAICA that one of her visions is to be “an organisation that is underpinned by purpose beyond profit”.
“Taking into account the macro-economic volatility of the past decade, the global financial crisis of 2008, the recent pandemic economy and now the war on Ukraine, it is apparent that companies cannot rely on profitability alone to survive.”
According to Redfearn, companies need to be both purposeful and profitable.
“I don’t believe that you can be purposeful or purpose-led if you are not profitable, and that’s why the two need to coexist,” she said.
“I want to make a significant contribution to society, so being purpose-led is important to me.”
Environmental, social, and governance issues are especially important to her, and she believes that climate change is one of the biggest issues of our time.
“We are the last generation that has the ability to do something about it or lose the opportunity at great cost to the planet,” she said.
“I believe that Africa’s time is now, and if we can bring the collective intellectual property of our 7,000 people in Africa, 415,000 globally, to solve some of the challenges and the problems on the continent, that would be a legacy I could be extremely proud of.”
- By Kirsten Minnaar
- This article was first published in Daily Investor and has been republished with permission. Read the original here.
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