An Interview with Award-Winning VP Treasurer, Srikanth Dasari

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Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I talk to treasurers about how they built the careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and treasury profession. Going to next and this week's show, I'm joined by Srikanth Tasari. Now, Srikanth himself, he has a fascinating career journey which he explained to you, but it's not the same as many of our other treasury professionals. Well, the experience, if that's the right way to put it. He's been a winner of an Alexander Hamilton Award, TMI Award, AFP Pinnacle Award. So he's been through a number of different roles when we spoke before the show. He's most recently worked for a number of different companies. We've got O.I. owens, Illinois. Illinois. We've got Daryl Corning. You might have heard of them, pretty large club. Westinghouse, most recently the Andersons. He's moved on from there. But the key thing I say with shriek hands. I've met him originally, met him actually in over some drinks on the Trump Tower. Don't have a go at me. It was fine. Trump Tower in Chicago. And he had listened to, well, he'd seen a lot of my blogs. This is of the podcast, got to know each other on a personal level. And I think he's got a fascinating treasury career story to share with you guys. What I want to do is like maybe get you to listen to some of the things he has, particularly focus on cash. He loves the cash, does our Shrikant. But the key thing is let's get as I say every week, enough from me. Let's get Srikanth talking about him and his career story. You'll, you'll hear about it. Connect with him on LinkedIn. He's a great guy. And you know, Srikanth, sir, it's over to you, sir.

Thank you, Mike. First of all, thanks for having me on your podcast. Pleased to be able to join you today. As you know, as noted, it all started in India for me. That's where I did my undergrad in chemical engineering and came to the US to do my master's. I did that at University of Toledo and started off working as an engineer in my first job at Shakespeare Monofilaments in South Carolina. Columbia, South Carolina. And you know, after two or three years, I got a call from my graduate advisor in Toledo. He said, hey Srikanth, you must be familiar with this local company, Owens Lenoi. You know, they always send me this in A project work, research work. They might be looking to hire somebody so they have somebody in house to take care of this work. Would you be interested in working for them? And I, of course was at the opportunity of coming back to Toledo. And that's when I joined Owens Illinois as chemical engineer, materials engineer.

Does a materials engineer do just so again, I think I might know, but so more guessing, you know, you did it firsthand, so maybe explain it.

Yes, within chemical engineering. My thesis, my research area was plastics. So when I refer to materials that plastics and polymers processing, they could be injection molded parts, blow molded parts, or extrusion related parts, primarily polyolefins, you know, polyethylene, polypropylene and some polyethylene terephthalate. So those are the everyday plastic that we all at least probably touch, you know, once in our daily life.

And you were doing that and then, and then made the natural transition into finance and Treasury. But you said to me before the show how I did so you were there, this product development engineer, materials and everything else. And the natural step to Treasury. How did this come about then?

Yes. So if there was one incident that got me thinking about getting into finance, this might be it. When I was in engineering, we were starting up a contract manufacturing operation in Singapore. The finance manager on the team was a little behind and asked me for some help with formatting and building some logic into a large Excel model he had for costing and pricing. So I looked at it and took care of what was necessary and spent some extra time studying what the model was trying to accomplish. In the end, I remember thinking, you know, if this is what they refer to as finance, then that's what I want to do. The idea of, you know, working with a large set of numbers and the modeling was very appealing to me. And that's how I transitioned into, you know, business planning and pricing. And I think it was around 2001 at Owens Illinois, where I was in engineering. It wasn't the easiest of the transitions I ever made. You know, I have to say it was hard to convince folks that an engineer somehow could get into finance and make a difference. But after a while and some persistence, maybe a lot of persistence from my end, the guys, you know, the finance folks let me in. After some time in business finance, I moved to a corporate treasury role. I figured corporate finance role might afford me the bird's eye view of the entire business. And that's something that was important to me. And also I was always interested in learning how the financial markets operated and, you know, how the macro factors factored into a business. So those being my interests, you know, treasury was an easy choice for me after that.

And with that, you know, you got that, you know, brain for logic and everything else. You know, you started within business, business planning and then you sort of moved into treasury and a number of people discover treasury by accident and everything else. Was that the way with you or did you start to get to know the treasury guys and go, oh, actually that's what I want to do, or how did it, how did it work? Like that?

Treasury. There was an opening. The controller in the company where I was working, he knew I was looking to get into corporate finance at some point and there wasn't an opening. When we had that conversation, he said, you know, why don't you come over to internal audit? And that's a good parking lot, you know, that will give you the bird's eye view, you know, you've been talking about. And when something opens up elsewhere, you know, that's better suited for you. He knew I was not an accountant by training and internal audit was not going to be a long term thing for me. But fortunately for me, you know, within a few weeks something came up in treasury and that's how I ended up in Treasury.

And what was it like? You say you started off, you were quite an experienced person, if you like, so you'd got, you know, two degrees. You know, you've come in, you're a Treasury analyst, you're that much more ahead of people in some ways. You know, probably some, some of the people similar age and background yourself, you know, were further on in their treasury careers. But you came with a whole host of different expertise. What was that like for you?

You know, I was first and foremost happy, you know, that I was able to get into Treasury. Right. I don't think it bothered me in a way. I was starting in treasury and as time proved, you know, I didn't have a problem in learning the trade and moving along. And while, yes, I went into treasury with no prior treasury experience, a lot of what I learned in engineering, right, the analytics, the numbers mindedness, all that was actually very useful. That was, I think still is very foundational to what I do today.

And this role, you were very much within that role, focused at capital markets. And that's been a sort of a passion or something that you've carried on through. And again for the people that that was with Owens, Illinois, what were they as a group and maybe explain that because you made some great progression there over the sort of 10, 11 years. You were there?

Yeah. So Owens Illinois used to be a huge conglomerate, a rather large company, used to be a part of Dow Jones 30. A lot happened there. I think a turning point in Oi's history was KKR's leveraged buyout I think 1988. And in 91 or 92 they went back to being public and they started to divest a lot of non core businesses and acquire in A packaging businesses around the world. So that reshaped the company and its product lines. That's why you see a lot of references to M and A and some divestitures. So when I was in treasury we, as you noted, we engaged in numerous capital markets activities to facilitate the M and A transactions. You know, during that time I made acquaintance with the VP of M and A who asked me in the hallway one day if I might be interested in working in his area. We talked and that's how you know, I ended up moving to M and A. M and A, at least in my mind those days, especially at oi overlapped with treasury quite a bit. You know, what you took to work and you know, what you did. There was a lot in common in those two. So it was a relatively easy transition. I was there for I think about three years and it was 2006 when we had a new CEO come to Owens Illinois. He was a big believer in Lean Six Sigma and was looking to deploy the same at a global level. And I was asked to be a part of that. And I was there I think for a year and a half or so. Not to, not, not too long. My job was to set things up for the deployment to succeed and subsequently, you know, went back to a Treasury where my heart was overall. I was at Owenville Illinois for 12 years in a variety of roles and.

Then the move onwards to what tempted you to Dow Corning, the fact that.

It'S a chemical company. A lot changed at Owens Illinois whom I look to as my mentors. My managers moved on, retired. So it was a good time for me to move on to Dow Corning, not too far from here, maybe 150 miles north of fear, was managing, you know, what we called treasury front office. Quite possibly my, my most fun and productive time. Looking back we, I thought we were a dream team. You know, I was there for about six years before I moved on to Westinghouse.

When you say the dream team, you know, what, what was it about the work you were doing at that stage? Because I know that you've got a real you running the Front office, you're doing systems, platforms, doing trading. You did lots of. Why? Why was it such a optimal period, if you like?

I think, you know, it. It suited my background really well. We had great leadership, fantastic vision, and we were building the treasury team and the system from Roundup. So it felt like a six year long project as opposed to a role where, you know, you're just, you know, keeping the lights on, maintaining status quo.

Yeah, just run day to day. You were doing all brand new things in a massive.

That's right.

And I know at that time, and we will come on to some of the other more recent roles, but is that when you really started to speak at some of the conferences as well and got involved in those?

I think so. I've been around 2014, 2015. A lot of the work we did was recognized, I have to say, around the world. So we were invited to speak at a few conferences, you know, the Windy City, Euro Finance, afp, those sorts of things. And some of our work was published in several magazines and we had submitted our work to. Somehow this bug got into us to submit our work to certain institutions that had these treasury awards. It was about that time. You're right, Mike.

Yeah. Cause it's interesting. Cause that's when again we met and you know, you'd, you know, we bumped in and saw each other. Windy City and then number of other places, you know, we took the decision or I took the decision a few years ago now to really put ourselves out there on the stage. Probably came about the same time. I was actually about 2010, so I've been speaking on a lot. The conferences originally I did a disastrous one years ago in Paris. Worst conference I've ever done. Worst speaking session even. I. I've done better if I'd read off the back of a cornflake packet. It was terrible. But I threw the speech in the bin halfway through and said, guys, what do you want to know about treasury recruitment? And actually, you know, saved it a little bit, but still my worst, you know. And then last year's Windy City Summit, halfway through, you know, it was good speech, actually. I was, I was enjoying it. And the audience said they did. But I said to one of the guys, I just put myself, I said, look, do you know, I don't enjoy speaking? They're like, what?

You're here?

And I said, I don't know about you. But I said, I do it for the good of the business because actually I want to help people understand who we are, how we can help them with their Careers and sounds very altruistic, but we don't get paid to go to Windy City, you know, we don't get paid to go to these companies. We want to help people and introduce them to the world and coach them and you know, so they get on with their careers. I don't know. That's why you've done it particularly. I know that when we've spoken about it seems that's a key thing you want to do, not like, look at us more, how can we help you? Or maybe you want to do the similar things. Is that the sort of thing you found yourself? Yeah.

So I tend to agree. It was networking, information exchange, first and foremost. Anytime we have a problem or an opportunity in front of us, the first thing I'm trying to think about is, okay, there's a decent chance somebody out there might have had the same situation or maybe they have a solution already for this. So instead of me reinventing the solution, maybe I should just go ask within my network to see if there are folks out there who might have dealt with this. And sometimes maybe there are folks out there, you know, who like to know what you did and how you did, you know, how you created, you know, added value. Right. So that's in some ways, you know, giving back and in exchanging information with like minded folks around the world. Yeah.

And again, that's what I found. And when I said this to the guys in Chicago, they were like, well, why do you do. I said, well, because I also know it gets us better. And you know, by this information exchange, I know that I get stuff back a lot of the guys exactly as you say there, that there's sort of a crossover of lots of information. So we met and then you moved on from Dow Corning and then you made a couple of moves, perhaps just a quick run through of the moves from there and then we'll sort of talk about the future, as you see it, of treasury, if you would. So Srikanth, back to you.

Yes. Like I just said, Mike, you had a blast at Dow Corning. This was towards the end of 2015. You might have picked this up in the headline. We became a part of Dow and Dow and dupont were going to merge and the stated plan was for them to turn around and split into three separate public companies. And at that point, like I said, you know, Dow Corning, my role felt like a long, fantastic project and we were at the tail end of it and I didn't know where I would have gone within Dog Corning and knowing there was not Going to be a dog Corning. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do next. I wanted to just wait for these series of transactions to happen and see where the dust settles or if I should proactively look to do something else. And as I was starting to wonder, Westinghouse reached out to me. It's a nuclear energy company in Pittsburgh and the timing of it felt right for the reasons I just explained. And at a professional level, it was a treasurer role, so it was a step up. And at a personal level, my daughter at the time was talking about, you know, going to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. It checked both the personal and professional boxes for me and made it easy for me to, you know, have that conversation with Westinghouse and move to Pittsburgh.

And then subsequently you moved, you did Westinghouse and then they decided to come back to the locate location wise.

Yeah, I wasn't, you know, actively looking to come back to Toledo, to tell you the truth, but right about the time, you know, Anders started to reach out to me, I happened to be in Toledo that summer a few times, looking around, catching up with old friends. As much as I was not looking to leave Westinghouse, it was hard to resist the temptation to come back to Toledo and be among friends, you know, especially knowing, you know, my kids were gonna leave home and before too long I was gonna be empty nester. So that's how I ended up moving to Anderson's in Toledo.

So you're back there, you know, talk us through your treasurer role there or treasury per se, and then maybe more about your, the future where you see it with Treasury. Why are you enjoying treasury so much now?

So, you know, I enjoy treasury for all the reasons I already mentioned. Right. The numbers side of it, the analytics that goes into it, the financial market. I just like to, you know, keep up with that kind of stuff. You know, if I didn't have to work for money, I think I will still be engaged in some of the things I do as a part of my job today. So Treasury, I think is, is the right area for me or other areas that have the same ingredients. Right. You know, what's what. You know, M and A could be one of those certain areas. You know, maybe proper FP and a role might offer the same things. Terms of future for Treasury, I think, you know, treasury has come a long way still. Remember there was a time and I think when was it 2003 or 4, there were a lot more spreadsheets in Treasury. You know, there are compared to, you know, what, what I see today treasury was more into reporting, you know, as opposed to analyzing and, you know, forward looking Today, you know, there's a whole gamut of, you know, treasury workstations, you know, that are, you know, available, you know, if deployed properly. In today we have access to real time data, much more so than in the past. There are numerous, you know, dashboards that are available. I think treasurers have come a long way in terms of collaborating with the businesses in the past. I think, you know, it didn't exist as much. I think it's fair to say the businesses also looked at treasury as somebody looking at sitting in an ivory tower someplace and speaking some language they didn't quite comprehend. So there's a lot more collaboration today. Treasury is more real time, more forward looking and I think, you know, clearly there's more to go in the technology space. You know, I'm certainly no authority but you know, I've done more than my share of, you know, treasury workstation implementations, you know, three in total besides several other, you know, peripheral systems. Again, I, we keep hearing about, you know, artificial intelligence and other things. Certainly exciting but you know, having done a lot of technology implementations, you know, my, my word of caution is don't go chasing all these new technologies. It's important, yeah, I think it's important to understand what's out there, important to stay in touch. But in the end I think, you know, we have to understand our own businesses and pull what we need as opposed to letting you know, folks pushing these technologies onto you. And of course there's lightboard transition coming up. Understanding the macro factors, right, is always important. Coronavirus as an example. First of all, I want to recognize it's a humanitarian situation more than anything else. But there are business implications of things like that. It's important for treasurers to understand as an example how their supply chain might be impacted and what that does to their KPIs and how they need to be prepared to respond with yourself.

And as we approach the end of today's show, you know, bearing that in mind, so you've got things like, you know, viruses and things like that, you know, technology trying to sort of negate some of those factors and things like that. But you know, as people look back over your background and they will put your LinkedIn notes in the show notes, what are the, you know, sort of two or three things you might pick out or either memory roles or something that you, you're particularly passionate about that you think other treasury professionals should do themselves, you know, is that, you know, Mentoring staff, is that bringing systems when you can or, you know, what are the key things that you think make you stand out?

Maybe a few things. You know, I think it's important to, you know, sign up for what might seem like, you know, difficult and risky projects, you know, early, especially early in their careers. They'll certainly teach them a lot. Don't be afraid to venture into the unknown and the unfamiliar. Be uncomfortable with status quo. Embrace change. I touched on networking. Networking with peers in the industry is always a good idea. And last but not least, choose your bosses wisely. Your first boss might have more impact on your career than anybody else. Even later in the career, make sure you work for somebody who's a visionary and who has the backbone and the ability to do the right thing and lets you do the right thing, not cut your losses and walk away from your job. They cost more than you might think.

Yeah, I think there's a good point. Actually it's not one that's been made. I think choosing your boss mentor is a key learning point or maybe a point for the future. So again, anyone listening today, don't just think about the next job you might be going for, but also think about the next boss you might take on or inherit yourself because they're going to help interpret your future or help you with your future. So I think, Srikanth, great to chat to you today. I think we did a sort of good whistle stop tour of your background and everything else. But we'll put in your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So anyone thinks, oh actually I liked a lot there or want to connect with him, you can do it is appropriate. But you know, just all that remains for me today is thanks very much for your time today, sir.

Thanks, Mike.