Patrick McCartan shares how he built a decades-long career at Caterpillar by focusing on teamwork, networking, and creating value in treasury and finance roles. He discusses the rewards of staying at one company and developing deep expertise in corporate strategy.
Foreign. It was super rewarding. I think from a professional perspective, every opportunity that I've had with the company, whether it be Mexico City, Monterey, Mexico, Luxembourg, there was always more challenge from a professional perspective. I was always learning more, learning more about the company, learning more about treasury and learning more about all the different ways that we as a corporate treasury team and with leveraging the expertise that I had gained through my experiences can add value for the company. And that was something that I learned early on in my career is, you know, all of us have a responsibility to think about how is what we're doing creating value for the company. Because if you're creating value for the company, chances are that's going to continue to create opportunities for yourself on the professional side. Very quickly, what I learned is, and I think that this would be true with all the network of people that I've met over the years, internally and externally. I believe that this is true as nobody is ever on an island when you're managing any of these things. Yes, I was the corporate funding manager, but there was a team that was responsible for managing everything that I touched on earlier. So when we think about managing the corporate bank group, it's a team effort. We've got a big captive finance company, a Caterpillar, that's got a. On. On average it's a $35 billion portfolio that they're managing. When you look at the finance portfolio, plus insurance services, when I talk about the team, it's Caf Financial and Caterpillar Inc. Managing the bank routes. It's not just corporate treasury managing the rating agencies. It's a joint effort from the CFO to the senior VP team plus CAD Financial US telling the enterprise story. And it really starts. It's not what are we doing to manage financial strength. It really starts with what's the enterprise strategy. We really make it a very focused effort to make sure that the rating agencies understand what we're doing from a strategy perspective. Then we talked about financial strength and our commitment to the mid single A rating. So I think probably the biggest learning that I had when I was the corporate money manager, it's never one person. That was probably my biggest learning when I was in that job because I reached out to so many people that helped me manage a lot of different variables. When I was graduating college, I would say a lot of what we see today was starting to be more of the norm. People that you would talk to that had good finance careers, they probably were changing companies every two or three years. It probably was not as prevalent as it is today when I reflect kind of on how I got here. It's an amazing company. It always has been an amazing company. We're constantly evolving. We're very focused on what we can do to help our customers. And then when I look at what we're doing in finance and what we're doing in treasury, we offer a career path where if you want to stay with the same company, you can achieve the same thing that. That's possible, jumping from company to company. But the biggest benefit for me is I've been able to achieve probably the same thing as people that I graduated with. But I've built. I've built an amazing network of colleagues internally at Caterpillar, which really helps to get things done. But as much as being great colleagues, they're also friends. So I was just at a. At a leadership summit, several hundred of our key leaders across Caterpillar last week. It was amazing. I know the vast majority of them, and I've been working with them for decades. That's pretty special because I don't think that that's anything that I could have done, really done, if I was jumping from company to company. I also don't think I would be able to work with my team to create as much value as we can create by being able to leverage those networks that have been built over many, many years.
