Kenneth Micah

Bolt, Europe's first mobility super-app, is on a mission is to make cities for people by offering better and sustainable alternatives for every purpose a private car/motorbike serves — including ride-hailing, shared cars, scooters, and food and grocery delivery.

As Bolt's Eastern Africa Regional Manager, I was part of the global executive leadership team and was responsible for commercial, team and operational success of the ride-hailing vertical.

Some of my achievements in this role include:

• Tripled Bolt's Eastern African monthly active riders, and grew gross merchandise value (GMV) run-rate from a few USD thousands to several dozen millions USD. (Actual regional numbers redacted as these are privileged and not public). Over the three year tenure as Regional Manager, Bolt gained ride-hailing market share from less than 20% to over 50% across Kenya and Tanzania. This was despite lockdowns during the COVID-19 containment period, increasingly complex regulatory and tax landscape and competing with much larger platforms that had first mover advantage and hence better product build and brand awareness.
• This trailblazing success was resultant from formulating, earning internal input and buy-in for execution of a growth strategy fitted from identifying and narrowing on the top 3 value propositions items that the marketplace prioritised: fair ride pricing, short pick-up times and safety for passengers and higher take-home earning per hour for drivers and couriers.
• Leveraged local insights, customer feedback and extracted data driven cues from thoughtful analysis of big data to identify growth limiters at product/app level or service offering gaps. Applied these skills to determine and sequence successful city launches in over 10 urban centres across East Africa. These was also instrumental in Bolt Eastern Africa being the first platform to pioneer and launch motorbikes and auto-rickshaws as a service offering. This accelerated growth in ridership and revenue by over +30%.
• Designed, negotiated and rolled out partnerships ecosystem that positively impacted the economic welfare of several dozen thousand drivers and couriers by lowering their cost of doing business by +10%. These included preferential insurance rates, fuel discounts and rent-to-own vehicle financing arrangements at transparent, non-predatory, sustainable rates. This also had the network effect of improving platform retention/stickiness by drivers to over 98% and positively shrinking curb-side pick-up times on the platform by over 50% to under 4 minutes, which was an industry best-in-class then).
• As the public face of the company in Eastern Africa, I guided and offered input to our amazing Policy and Public Relations teams in the formulation of Bolt specific lobbying strategies and also guided joint industry positions to objectively influence government stakeholders towards positive win-win and sustainable policy outcomes for the nascent growing industry. Notable of these was the reversal of restrictive revenue capping policies in Tanzania that had posed a going concern risk to our business. Bolt lobbied for 9 month and the restrictive revenue capping regulation was reversed favourably thereby enabling full resumption of operations that offered safe urban mobility solutions to millions of passengers and sustainable livelihoods to several dozen thousand of drivers. This policy win was lauded and set precedence for a playbook on successful relationships with Policy shapers.
• Transformed regional P&L to achieve strong profit margins within two years. With learnings from the 2020 Pandemic where revenue plummeted by over 50% due to travel containment measures, I achieved this through focusing on shifting OPEX from fixed to variable as much as possible, such as automating operational processing through API integrations with government databases, document authentication third parties. These had the positive effect of reducing human error and also cutting down the driver onboarding process by an additional 10 days (90% reduction). This also included optimising office space requirements from self-kitted facilities to Grade A co-work spaces which made us more adaptive to marketplace conditions while still maintaining a healthy positive P&L bottomline.
• Nurtured, motivated and led a world-class team of highly engaged professionals. I valued growing a strong talent pool internally for the pro's of deep industry and institutional knowledge. This provided: 1) merit-based growth in scope and upward capillarity to senior roles, 2) unparalleled non-monetary driven motivation, 3) high WorkDay Peakon scores from quarterly surveys), 4) well under 5% voluntary attrition rates and, 5) organically de-risked succession gaps.
• Fostered stellar cross-functional collaboration with the central teams that supported regional commercial success, namely: Product, Marketing, Customer Support, Policy, Tax, Legal and People teams. This enabled strong mission cohesion, strategic congruency and the diffusion of shared values across the multi-cultural and geographically dispersed Regional Team.

Some of the achievements during my tenure in this fast-track career growth role include:

• Improved same-month revenue collection rate by over 30%. This was achieved by applying insights mined from platform data to safely lower the credit ceiling per driver by more than 15x to ~USD 5 (from USD 75) without adversely impacting platform availability. Also, I supported central Treasury and Commerce teams to identify, negotiate and deploy a regional payment processing platform that further helped to offer bespoke, locally and affordable payments options for drivers and passengers in each jurisdiction.
• Championed the innovation of Early Cashout feature that offered drivers access to credit amounts on their Bolt account to fund any needed working capital needs on-demand instead of waiting for the weekly payments cycle. This gave Bolt a first-mover advantage in this product feature and had a resultant effect of creating stickiness as it addressed a major pain-point that drivers had.
• I applied the industry experience and institutional knowledge I'd gained to developed and deploy best-in-class playbooks covering the broad breadth of commercial and operational topics to offer guide rails to the respective country teams across Eastern Africa. These covered price optimization, deployment of marketing and incentives investments, competitive market intelligence collection and reporting to inform net-rate decisions, and many more commercial and operational excellence topics. This did not stifle innovation, but served principally to document and cross-pollinate learnings. It helped mitigate teams in multiple locations and at different stages in the growth curve from reinventing the wheel. These also helped reduce onboarding time for new joiners by +50% and had immense advantages in our business agility by shortening adaptive decision making loops.
• I helped cultivate and entrench an analytical mindset across country teams by promoting operational/commercial strategy proposals that were backed by sound insights mined from the wealth of data on the platform/marketplace. The prerequisite for analysis did not cause execution paralysis. We focused on top 3 items that would shift the needle positively and moved fast through the analysis > decision > execution > measure and iterate loops by harnessing business intelligence tools and logic.
• I demonstrated incredible work ethic, ability to influence a positive growth mind-set across regional teams, manage self-effectively, and engage cross-functional teams collaboratively.

M+R Spedag Group is a family owned transportation and logistics company headquartered in Switzerland, with over 82 branches and delegations across various sea and inland port cities. I worked with the Eastern Africa regional team headquartered in Mombasa, KE. My role and achievements included the following:

• I conducted insightful analysis of Group level performance that gave the Board deep perspective to the Eastern Africa operations facilitate strategic firm-wide decisions. I developed innovative dashboards from the ground-up that presented insightful rich overviews of group's performance, highlighting wins and focus areas for the Board and management team across the Region.
• I guided and shored up capacity in the regional finance teams in my portfolio on best practice financial reporting in accordance with IASs, IFRSs. I also studied, prepared briefs and guidance compliance memos on emerging regulatory requirements, and commercial best-in-class practices. I also monitored adherence to tax and other statutory requirements across different Group entities in Eastern Africa region.

• Managed client relationships and contributed to business development efforts thereby extending lifetime value of audit engagements. I developed and maintained rich relationships that created opportunities to cross-sell other services that Deloitte offered to unlock additional value to clients.
• Evaluated engagement risks, planned, and executed organisational financial audits, expenditure verification, and agreed-upon procedures. I administered audit and assurance engagement teams to ensure efficient client service delivery.
• Complied with International Standards of Auditing (ISAs), International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs), and other regulatory and donor requirements while reporting comprehensively.
• Communicated statutory compliance findings, internal control weaknesses, and other insightful value-adding audit findings to clients' boards and senior management
• Conducted statutory audits for over 15 social impact and not-for-profit development organisations and provided best-in-class recommendations to management boards on corporate governance and treasury management that contributed to grant/revenue growth and OPEX savings of over 10% yearly through the recommended optimisations.

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited is a British multinational professional services network headquartered in London, England. Deloitte is a leading global provider of audit and assurance, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory, tax, and related services.

I worked within the Corporate Finance team and my role included:

• Proactively researched on macro/micro-economic trends and conducted immersive sectoral/industry viability analysis and shared these as opinion pieces and briefs to guide investors evaluating investment vehicles and best yielding capital deployment opportunities. I generated a pipeline of viable investment leads, built and maintained strong relationships throughout the investment lifecycle.
• Built robust financial models that yielded logic backed project feasibility evaluation and/or entire business valuations that guided buy-side or sell-side negotiations. This financial acumen and deep understanding of financial modelling were instrumental in helping clients secure equity or debt funding and offering insights to drive scenario based business growth.
• I performed thorough and timely investment target screening and conducted financial and operational due diligence assessments and reported insights and recommendations to equity/debt stakeholders to inform capital deployment decisions. I was an instrumental team player during market, customer, competition, product fit assessments, profiling management team strengths and development areas, and reviewing exit timings and strategies.
• Carried out portfolio management through follow up on monthly and quarterly financial statements and preparing reports to various fund shareholders.
• Gained a wealth of exposure and experience in transaction advisory, capital raising, investment appraisal, financial and market analysis, financial modelling, business valuations, business advisory and consulting.

I was a grant management consultant under the World Bank USD +80M Total War Against HIV and AIDS (TOWA) Project in Kenya that funded non-governmental and community based organizations in Kenya to fight the spread of HIV/AIDs as well as mitigate the social-economic impact of the scourge. I was actively engaged from the initial stages of the program with the Fund Manager (PwC Kenya Ltd) and was involved in setting up offices and finding innovative solutions to the pioneer program. I held the following responsibilities:

• Conducted pre-grant financial and operational due diligence assessments, developed program trainings on the identified capacity gaps in the management teams,
• Approved tiered grant disbursements and thereafter prepared financial and technical reports post-audit, engaged in period monitoring and evaluation field visits.
• Participated in donor, local government roundtables and liaised with a wide range of senior stakeholders throughout the implementation of the program and contributed valuable inputs to the structure of the Program.