Broadening Your Treasury Career with Richard Garry

You try and plan your career and sometimes things take a bit of a turn which you don't expect. And some of the times it's about capitalizing on those unexpected, let's say, opportunities. So yeah, I looked to leave Toyota, I'd say spent 10 very happy years there, but it was still a subsidiary of a large Japanese manufacturer. So I wanted to get exposure to PLC World to the board. So I moved and it's one of those moves that just didn't quite fulfill my expectations. So I went to an auto retailer and things just weren't as I wanted. So I decided to move on and took some interim roles which actually turned out to be some nice, interesting work I've done. Particularly you mentioned high speed rail. So I worked for the high speed rail high speed one, which is the infrastructure from London St Pancras out to the Channel Tunnel. And I wanted somebody to go and refinance their acquisition debt. It was bought by two Canadian pension funds and they said, look, we've got this bank debt, we've got this asset for 30 years. Can you help us restructure our financing to match the life of the asset? It was just a golden opportunity to do something I hadn't done before. Really interesting work with some very, very smart people internally at the pension funds, but also externally at some of the banks and advisors and had a great time. But a big driver is development and it doesn't matter how senior you are, you can always be learning something and you can always be developing yourself and making yourself more valuable to your company or your future career, whatever that is. I think a big part of it is that and becoming a non exec just gives you a different perspective. It helps me and it helps my company. Happy for me to do that. Because when I'm interacting with my board, if I have a non exact kind of understanding of what information is required, how the information is presented, the kind of decisions that a non exec has to make. I can interact with my board a lot better than I do today. So it's that development part of my career. The time is right and yeah, you're right, it's really busy and it requires a bit of discipline. But I think it's a worthwhile investment in my own career, which is why it kind of came up. Why now? Again, it's about opportunity and it's about kind of. Sometimes these things take a lot of time to get off the ground. Sometimes they happen very quickly. I think mine was somewhere in between. So it was a case of saying I need some Development, here's an opportunity. Let's grab it. And it's an industry I know nothing about, and it's been great fun so far, learning about how the housing association sector operates and its challenges. Again, taking some of those learnings and apply them to what I'm doing here as well. Our first step is to align with what the organization is doing. And it sounds a bit of a cliche, but it's absolutely true. You know, I don't want to be going off on a tangent with my team doing stuff which the organization just did, doesn't care about, and doesn't support. So, first of all, what's the organization doing? What's this driving? What's my boss? What's important to him? And from that, we kind of set our broad. Well, this is what the department is aiming for. And then literally, and again, it's a bit of a cliche, it kind of cascades down. I have my objectives now. I will look at what my boss is doing, and I will set my objectives in line with that. And to your point, I will set those myself. I go to my boss and say, look, this is what I think I should be doing. Of course he'll challenge that, and of course he'll put some stuff in which he cares about, but broadly, it's kind of driven by me. Then try and take the same approach to the team and say, look, Tim, this is kind of stuff that's important to the cfo. This is kind of what work kind of how I see it panning out broadly. What specific things do you think you should be doing? Kind of. Which helps us get our goal as an organization. And then so they build them up themselves and they kind of, you know, so my direct reports will cascade that down to their reports and so on. And that way it means that when people are working, whatever they're working on, they know that it's going in the right direction to the business. So don't sit down in December and say, well, I've done this great thing. I say, yeah, that's great. But actually, what we needed to do is this other thing over here, and we haven't communicated. So getting it right at the start, but yet to your kind of earlier kind of example, making sure that people are setting their objectives and buying into their objectives right at the start, and then it's part of their job. So there's no surprises throughout the year in terms of what they're doing. It's all aligned. Because that helps. Frankly, it helps me. If we're all heading in the same direction that I hit my objectives, my boss hits his, and the organization is doing the right thing.