Building a Portfolio of Skills with Stephen Kaufhold

I've not heard of many people. A lot of time we say people accidentally discover treasury, but you have this drive towards treasury which, which is unusual in itself. But how did you then grow your treasury career? Did you then choose each of the roles, saying, I want to build out on this or what happened?

Sure. As we thought about treasury back in those days, and I attribute it a lot to the leaders that I had, it was important for people to rotate through the various different treasury role. So for example, in cash management, a lot of times when we hired people into treasury, that's where they started. We kind of viewed that as a good foundation, you know, cash management, bank accounts and understanding all that. And after that individual spent some time in there, then it was moving into one of the other roles within Treasury. Whether it was on the capital market side, which was really the debt execution, FX hedging, whether it was in securitization, we were as a leasing company, that was one of our financing tools. We took the opportunity to rotate people through the various different disciplines within treasury. So really creating a well rounded treasury professional. They may not be an expert in everything, but again, they're grounded in all those different functions. I took the opportunity when it rose of a much smaller company, that being Virgin Mobile, who was looking for a treasurer, they were building out their infrastructure because they were transitioning from a joint venture into, to a public company. And I said, hey, here's the opportunity to get the treasurer's title and secondly, here's an opportunity to work on an ipo. And I think from a Treasury perspective, that's one of the things that, you know, a treasurer or a Treasury professional would love to have on their resume is the opportunity to take a company public. And certainly, as you know, Mike, those opportunities are far and few between back in those days, you know, a lot of times from a career perspective, it was cradle to grave with one company that has changed dramatically. And you know, we didn't talk about all the different ownership changes that we went through. And it almost seems like, you know, five years in one job is a lifetime. You know, unfortunately, I think at the end of the day, I mean, we all become contractors at the end of the day. And it's important that as individuals progress from a career perspective, you know, they're really thinking about fulfilling or filling out that resume, taking advantage of opportunities within the company. You know, when somebody comes to you and say, you know, Steve, we want you to spend some time in cash management. And some people may think that cash management is not the exciting part of treasury because I think if you give people most choices they want to be on the capital market side dealing with the banks and so forth. But I think they would be doing a disservice if they're not taking advantage of those opportunities and really kind of having that solid foundation from a Treasury perspective. And then sometimes in my case I had to make the jump from the CIT Group to Virgin Mobile to get that treasurer's title to get the experience of taking the company public which I would not have had within the CIT Group that, you know, sometimes you may need to take a look outside the company, take that risk, take that leap of faith knowing at the end of the day that you're going to be better off at the other end no matter how that opportunity to turn out because now you're adding new skill sets to your career development and again that's just going to make you more valuable as you progress and pursue other opportunities, opportunities.