Building a Successful International Treasury Team with Jim McHale

Foreign the reason everything changes so quickly is it's just, you know, the global economies and the interrelationships between global economies and I'm not an economist, but I would like to be more of an economist. But once you're in that and you're enthralled in it, you really pay attention to everything going on globally, not just in your little world. So from a business perspective, very exciting. But then in through all that I had opportunities to travel and in fact my MBA program, we traveled in the international specialization aspect of that for project work in three or four different countries. So just recognizing the cultural diversity, you know, in the world and certainly how it impacts business has always been a key driver for excitement for me. It's just incredibly dynamic, changing all the time, and I love it. And building a global treasury organization, I mean cash is king and always is king. So it really starts out with the access to capital and making sure that we protect that access to capital and maximize that, make sure we manage the relationships around that, whether with rating agencies or the lenders themselves. So that's kind of the baseline. And then from there, you know, for me it's all about a risk management mindset. So as treasurer of the company, I represent the company and I represent, I always call it kind of the guts of the company. You know, treasury is enabler for the company to do its business. And to be an enabler, I maintain a risk management mindset that I need to make sure we can continue to enable you having disruptions and there are market events like COVID 19 and things that do impact, of course, but that's why you have to have a risk management mindset. So whether, like you said, from a currency's perspective, you know, it's. For me it's, it's protecting, you know, the company from currency risk as best as I can. Insurance programs for corporate insurance, you know, I've done that. It's all about protecting the company. So it's having access to capital, protecting that access, deploying it in a risk management mindset kind of way, and then recycling that cash to maximize the use of that liquid assets for the company where we're not straining our credit capacity unless we have these external events or whatever. But then sort of my checklist, it's really about access to capital and then maintaining the cash cycle with a risk management mindset. I had about 17 people indirectly and directly reporting to me at one time. Primarily I had a treasury manager, an equity operations manager, a credit and collections manager. And then I had. Those were direct reports. And then I had a couple of treasury supervisors sort of focused on cash and payments and a credit and collections group of fine collectors and collection representatives. And then our equity operations group, we had a few equity operation representatives which kind of focuses on the equity aspects of relocation programs. And then I did have a Treasury specialist in Ireland. You know, I was fortunate enough to be part of a core, part of a team that we established a financial shared service center in Ireland and was able to, you know, based upon the regional aspect, the time zone aspect, insert a Treasury specialist there to do kind of all of our international subsidiary treasury activities. So managing people is an interesting and ever evolving process. And for me, from a hiring perspective, let's say, and it's always hard to really judge, but, you know, I'm always looking for, and probably most people are, but, you know, somebody that you can assess that has the personal values that allows them to take ownership and accountability of their job. They work autonomously and everything else. Because if you think about treasury organizations, except maybe Dow with Gary, you know, that many people, but, you know, they're very small organizations, so none of us have the opportunity to just sit back and purely manage. I mean, I've always been a very involved working manager. So you have to rely on your team, and you're only good as your team.