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Grad Combines Passion for Music and Accounting

May 29, 2009

By Lynn Graham

He’s an accountant -- but he looks like a rock star. Amit Sandhu (MAcc ’04) is just fitting into his work environment. No banker’s suits for him. His career with Live Nation Global Touring – “a fabulous job,” as he describes it -- combines his accounting skills with his passion for the concert stage and fans reveling in the pulsating rhythms of a high voltage band. 

His career is vastly different from what he anticipated in high school when he applied to UW’s AFM program. “Accounting is a career path,” he explains. “It’s something that I did to make sure I was always employable.”

Amit spent the early part of his career as an auditor. First as a co-op student himself and then as a senior auditor who led audit teams that included co-op students, he followed part of the path that a career in a big firm traditionally offers. But he needed an environment that suited his personal interests, so he took his accounting expertise and applied it to his zeal for the music industry.

Amit challenged himself with a key question: What am I accounting for? “You need to give the numbers on a page a context,” he says, “because if the numbers are relevant, that means you get something out of it.”

 

Music is a driving force in his life, and because he knows so much about the industry he can operate at a high level within his company. As he says, “I understand the business and I care about the business.” Currently he is working on major concert tours and interacting with some of today’s biggest name bands.             

Meanwhile, the guitar he has owned since high school sits untouched, and after rubbing shoulders with some of the most famous acts in the industry, Amit wishes he had more time to play it. Maybe there will be a band in his future, but right now he is thriving in the high-tension atmosphere of professional musicians and tight concert schedules.

What would he share with today’s AFM students? Unsurprisingly, he advises them to continue studying what they are passionate about. “It is important to care about the business you are in,” he observes.

The time he spent at the SAF gave Amit Sandhu the basic framework for thinking through core accounting methods. Now, working in industry, he rises to new levels as he often has to seek solutions not found in any textbook. The show, as they say, must go on!