Building Up Treasury Infrastructures with Patrick Clarke

Foreign to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I talk to treasures about how they built their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and treasury profession. Going to next this week's show. Delighted. We're joined by Patrick Clark, the group treasurer. Excellence Logging Good mate of mine. We've put a few beers down and talked a lot about treasury over the years. So he's got some good war stories for some of you guys listening there. Excellence Logging itself is a specialist oil field services company. A get Pat, again to describe a little bit. Founded in sort of 2015, benefits, experience, management teams, 35 countries, you know, across the world. So you can do all that stuff. Pat, let's go back to the beginning. Let's take you back now. Again, I apologize, guys. He's in Australia and we'll let him off with this, but take us back to the dim, distant parts of Australia and how you first discovered maybe treasury finance. And over to you, sir.

Oh, hi, Mike. Thank you. Thank you for that. Yes. Lived here 15 years. Still haven't lost the accent, but I'll try my best to be coherent. I asked the interview question every time I'm hiring someone, how did you get into Treasury? And no one ever says they wanted to grow up being a treasurer. Most people aren't even aware of the profession. I don't think I actually started off. I did an economics degree in Adelaide, where I grew up. At the end of that, I hadn't really planned ahead of what I was actually going to do for a job. I think, like most young people, I just assumed somebody would hire me. And because I'd done economics, I thought, well, well, I'll do the Australian version of the Civil Service exam. So I did that, did very well, and then got hired at the Australian Taxation Office in Adelaide. And my job for the first 18 months was data entry for tax returns. Oh, wow. So I learned the hard way. One of my first lessons is if you enter a job that you don't think it's what you're after, don't stick it out. The only upside I had was that's where I met my wife. So it had a beneficial side. After about two years, I'd had enough and I just decided, I just looked up, I'd done economics, I knew about foreign trade, I thought foreign exchange, that might be something. Maybe I'll apply for a job at a bank for an analyst job or something like that, which didn't go very well. And I Saw an ad for a job in Sydney for a company called BOC Gases, traditional English company. I applied from IT in Adelaide and got the interview the following week. So I got in my Mitsubishi lancer and drove 2000km across Australia, stopping off somewhere in the middle of nowhere in a hotel overnight. Got into a state. What I learned later was a very dodgy area of North Sydney in a hotel. Got up the next morning, put on a suit, did the interview and got the job the next day. And that was as Treasury Analyst at BOC Gases in Sydney. And I've pretty much been in and out of treasury for the last 25 years.

Awesome. See, that was your first introduction. What was that sort of role like? Good all round treasury manager role. Just in ego is Treasury.

Yeah, I mean, it was analyst. I mean, two weeks into the job, the treasurer actually said he felt sorry for me because he got me for about £5,000 cheaper than I probably should have asked for. So I learned a bit about salary negotiation there. Yeah, very much. Treasury analysts then up to treasury manager. The Australian office dealt with the Asian and Far east operations of boc, which is the global industrial gases firm. So we did all sorts of cool stuff for a young treasurer. We issued our first MTN program, we had commercial paper, lot of foreign exchange risk going around. Even just doing the accounts, the statutory accounts, was quite interesting just because of all the different businesses. I learned very early on about very clever tax schemes that companies put in place in that we'd done a sudden lease back on all of the gas cylinders for Southeast Asia and that was seven years ago and someone had just forgotten to make a lease payment because nobody who did the trade was actually still there. So technically, for about three days until we settled, there was some poor leasing company that owned about 45 million gas cylinders in places as easy to obtain as Malaysia, China, Japan and so forth. So, yeah, I mean, those were the days when I think regional Treasuries had a lot more power than they probably do these days, which is good and a bad thing. But it was, yeah, it was, it was a great introduction to treasury and that, yeah, that. That sort of took to my fancy and made me sort of fall in love with what we do.

And then you moved on. So then joined C and H. A.

Sign of things to come in that BoC decided to centralize their treasury operations into the UK. So I've sort of been the branch guy and the head office guy and I'll be honest, I, as a head office guy, you always want more control, you want to manage all of those tasks. And I mean, let's face it, in 2021 that is the generally the ideal model. But it did also mean that there's a lot of good treasurers around different parts of the globe who suddenly found their jobs were essentially cash management reporting. Now C and H. I'll be honest, it spoiled me. It was Case Corporation, which is a tractor manufacturer. They compete with John Deere and Caterpillar. And because those are two brands most people know, in case you probably never heard of, I joined when it was a single A credit and left when it was double B plus. Wow. Yeah, those are interesting days. It actually ended up being bought by Fiat, which we thought at the time not necessarily the best parent for a company that's struggling.

Well, what we'll do is actually we. Andrea Paulus, the executive VP and group treasurer at cnh, I interviewed him what, three months ago? So I'll put a link to his because he sort of, he's been through it as well. So as you say, it was a challenging group.

It was. But I mean again that was, you know, I was the Australian treasurer or I think director of Australian treasury was the official title. And yeah, we had commercial paper programs, we had bonds. I mean mostly the business was. Or the treasury activity was there was a leasing arm called Case Credit which had sort of taken the GE credit model which had its issues as well. And essentially leasing tractors to farmers, which is generally a good business because you can, if you need to repossess a tractor, you generally know where it is. It's not easy to move and you know where the, where the farmer is. So we actually did the first asset backed securitization in Australia for leases. And that was back in the late 90s when things like asset backed securitization and mortgage backed securitization were actually good things. I can see how it got corrupted. It's a pity because it was a really good method of financing and it's extremely interesting task for a treasurer to do. I mean there's a lot of documentation and paperwork and so forth. It was good to get your name on a new type of deal. And given the time zones, there was a lot of autonomy. I mean it's a really great. People spend a lot of time in the States with them. I'm still friends with quite a few of them. It was a little bit Wild west. You wake up in the morning and all of a sudden you're bbb. And the C markets dried up a bit and then a couple of months later you're double B and it's gone and you're hitting your backup revolver lines and then all of a sudden you're trying to negotiate with your auditors who were Arthur Anderson and fairly easy to negotiate with in terms of loss levels. And then yeah, one day you wake up and you're junk and you've hit all your lines, your covenants are under task. But the thing is, we got through it. I mean, it did help that Fiat bought us, but it's one of those, you went through the full credit spectrum, you learned all the different ways you can finance, different ways of finding out how bankers relationship managers will with you when one day you're an A and next day you're a double B and just built up some friendships there that last long time with the bankers. You know, I do remember, you know, it's one of the, one of my prouder moments is that when I eventually left and the main reason of that is, you know, Fiat bought it, Fiat with then running the treasury, they basically said the only reason they stuck with this was because they could trust what was coming, coming out of my mouth. You know, I think that's a, that's a key thing for a lot of treasurers is that, you know, you're representing the company to the banks and often you can think in the short term you might get away with fudging a bit, but these relationships can last for years and if you're not trusted, then you really can't be a treasurer.

And then you did sort of two more roles before coming to the uk. How did that sort of pan out? Because you finished there because we had taken over, they saw more short term or what was the situation where you then came to our Sunnyshaws?

Okay, so the first one was career mistake one. And I'll be honest, I don't think it's the same in 2021 in the UK, but I work for a supermarket retailer called Woolworths, which wasn't connected to the one over here. Treasury in a supermarket is very boring. Essentially all the cash comes in on the weekend. You have to organize the armored trucks for the collections and so forth. But you generally know what the cash is going to be. And in a country like Australia, not a lot of your products that are coming in are imports. Most of the stuff you're selling is in local currency. So you got limited foreign exchange risk. You're a very good credit. Cash management is essentially money gets banked into branches at a single bank. You count it in the morning, you send a Report off. And that's pretty much it. So I'd gone from almost the Wild west of treasury doing absolutely everything to being the sort of deputy treasurer. And I'll be honest, just. You'd wake up in the morning and say, well, what special things can I do today to improve the business? And there just wasn't any. So I did a project with them. They called it Project Refresh, which I think it was sort of a copy from Walmart, where we would go through the business and just look at the P and L line by line on how we could save expenses or costs out of the business. And I did a project on insurance, which sort of opened my eyes onto how that world works. So I learned a lot about the retail industry and it was a worthwhile experience. But, yeah, if you like variety in your job. I'm not sure a supermarket is really the necessary chain you want to do from that point. I was. I was just finishing my MBA and I sort of got this notion to go to the uk. Yeah. Try to think why. I mean, it just. I think Australia's a great place to grow up. I really, really, you know, I miss aspects of it, but it's just so far from anywhere. Sort of growing up in Adelaide, which is the middle of nowhere, and Sydney's fairly relatively exotic, but if you want to go on a holiday to just Bali or Indonesia or New Zealand, you're talking six, seven, nine hours in a plane. So I think it was all about the travel. I think my wife. I wanted to do that, so I decided to do a year at a company called Charles Parsons, which was a privately held firm owned by the Parsons family, who. The last four CEOs were named Charles Parsons. But, yeah, it imported fabric and textiles for women's fashions. So that was sort of an interesting bit. And so that was my first group treasurer role of actually being the guy in charge. And I think they gave me. You're on the. You're on the pension fund trustees board. You're actually talking with the owners and the CFO and the controller and all those things. And I think that gave me the rounding I needed to be able to come try my hand in the UK and see how a newly minted MBA with various treasury experience would go.

And you did that. And then you came to the uk. You started off with GE Insurance, but then went into consulting. Give us a walkthrough of those roles.

Okay, so the GE consulting look, when I first landed on these shores, I put on my. My shirt and tie and suit and I started talking to recruiters because I hadn't actually made contacts beforehand, which is not necessarily the cleverest thing, but, you know, when you're young, you. You always believe in your ability to. Just to get through.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think I've told you this many a time, Mike, Most of the recruiters I met basically said, what are you thinking? You've come from the colonies, there's no chance that you'll ever get the sort of job that you're expecting. And, yeah, it was discouraging and I think it was that the one day I met you, I'm trying to remember where your office was.

Always been more to do.

So you're a revelation. You're actually. Well, you know, you've done this and you've done this and yeah, these, these might not be within reach, but, you know, there's definitely opportunities to do, to do things. So I think rather than tucking tail, I pressed on again. The GE job, it was a contract job, it was their insurance arm. Yeah, that was kind of interesting. Met some good people, but it was essentially a cash management job, just sort of being used to pay the bills. Whilst I looked around for what was going on the uk, and it lasted longer than planned. I mean, I got a little bit discouraged again in terms of just getting back to a group treasurer level job or getting back to a sort of more senior job. I mean, I was. I was 30 at the time, going to 31, and I had two master degrees and six or seven years experience in Treasury. I just sort of thought, you know, that these sort of roles would come along and there's reasons why they do and they don't. The EY consulting job, I'll be honest, I was. I was four weeks away from giving up and we were just going to pack up and head back to Australia, tail between our legs. This didn't work all as planned, but, yeah, fortunately that came along and, yeah, through them and then moving on to Accenture, I did four years of treasury consulting, which I learned a lot. There's up and downs with consulting, which we'll probably touch on later.

That's just on them now. Listen, what were the. What's. What's good about consulting somebody, you know, some of the listeners there, relatively junior. A lady who was asking me the other day, oh, I'm thinking about consulting. I was like, well, it would have been her first move, actually, out of a blue chip. And I said, what, so you've done one blue chip and then you're going to go out after four and A half, five years and go into consulting maybe she's like, yeah. I said, I'm a bit nervous. You had a, you know, range of different experiences with different treasury teams and stuff. She just had one. I said, look, the problem with that is people will say, well, so what have you experienced? What have you seen? And well, in the one place I've worked, this is how we did it. And I said, oh, you know, so you know that I said I felt she needs to do some more experience. That was for her. But what did you find about consulting? Was it about sales or what was it about and stuff?

I think the big four consultants, they all have different models and different focuses and they do change over time. I mean, I was brought in as an industry expert. So essentially you're brought in on a slightly different pay scale. And part of the good thing is you've got all this knowledge and experience and you've actually got people who will listen. So you've got business development time that you can actually put together spreadsheets, PowerPoints and consulting teaches you all about presentation. The quality of PowerPoints I put together when I have time, a lot of them. I still use the same taglines and formats that I learned from those two companies. And yeah, going out and talking to clients, I mean, you're often, I think the Americans call it the color man. Like you've got the commentator who calls the plays, who's the person, the partner or the director selling. And you're the person who says, look, we've actually got a real life treasury here, so we're not just trying to sell you some expensive product that you don't actually need. We've got someone who can sit down with you and actually go through the nitty gritty and will understand your business better and the trusted advisor and all those sort of things. So, I mean, I always thought I was a useless salesman and I never wanted to go in sales, but then I spent four years consultant and it's like I'm not, I'm not a great salesman but I know what I'm doing and I. All the things about getting down to what the needs are and those sort of things. And it also helps when you're the buyer, you know exactly what triggers the salesman needs to hear and you can just, you can make a two hour presentation, get cut to 30 minutes by just you answer the questions that they're getting around to asking and yeah, great camaraderie. And you're traveling to different places. And when I worked in Munich and Geneva and Paris. I did a nine month job there. I had a weird one. I worked for Standard Life up in Edinburgh as an assistant to the chief Actuary despite never having any actuarial background or insurance background or worked in Scotland. But it was, it was a, it was a fun three months, you know, it was quite good. So getting that variety and not sort of being stuck in an area, I mean I think if you, and I think you're giving the right advice there, you need to have seen a few things yourself and you need to see when things are going well and things are going badly because a company there, the treasury is going well, they're not going to buy any consulting services. You need to see things that are broken that you can actually fix.

And then you made the move, you done, you did two different consultancies, ey, Accenture, two good moves. But then you were like back to hardcore treasury and then you were suddenly well read. But then emi, which I know was a challenging time, should we say over to you?

Yeah, I mean, I suppose just in finishing off on the consulting part, the only trouble, and I think a lot of treasurers will find is within sort of a big consulting organization is you're selling to the cfo, not the treasurer, because most treasurers, and I'm the same, you don't want to come a consultant coming in to show you up. Now it's a, it's the wrong attitude to take but essentially you need to, it needs to be accepted that you're doing a good job. But there's an area that you need some help on or a project or something like that. So I think the people who do particularly well in treasury consulting, they have the relationships with the CFOs and in many cases that's because they're an accountant or they worked in banking or something like that. So you find there's very few treasury, treasury partners in consulting. They're generally from the banking lead or from the accounting or an audit lead. And so your career path is fairly restricted and you're sort of dealing with someone who's putting you out to sell things that they don't necessarily understand themselves. So I recommend everyone should potentially do it. But if you're looking at a long term career in treasury plan on it being just a sort of interlude and I think that was it. I sort of missed the fact that I was going to organizations and fixing things or I'd do some audit support or I'd identify problems and I couldn't really take the credit for it. I was just a Helper. I wasn't the ultimate decision maker and the person who could say, look, I did that.

And I think also treasury, being a specialist smaller area, you're never going to get the wallet share. You know, I know that some guys used to do quite well when they used to get sort of bigger remits, a big banks and big reviews, but you come into a Treasury and you know, we, you know, you're small and perfectly shaped, you know, like sort of, you've got some, maybe they come in, do a review and fix your treasury management system or do some controls or do this. But the scale of the, the wallet isn't just, isn't big enough a lot of the time sort of thing.

So. Well, yeah, you're often the tip of the spear. You're brought in to sell some management consulting for 30 or 50,000, but the actual money is implementing SAP or putting in a system or some large risk management tool or something like that. And yeah, and that's generally got specialists who do that. You're sort of on the edge, helping be done, but that doesn't pay the partners. They don't make their income from small treasury consulting, small gigs.

So then you return to core corporate treasury with a couple of interesting moves. Give us a quick run through of those.

Okay. The REIT job, it was essentially they were going to spin off one of their divisions and that was setting up a Treasury. And it's interesting to me because that gave me a taste for how interesting and how exciting I find in starting from a blank piece of paper and building up what structure a Treasury should have from simple things like where the treasury company's gonna sit to, what system would you get, how many people would you hire and job descriptions. And that was going really well for six weeks until the spinoff got cancelled. So, yeah, I mean, I had a fun trip to Boston out of it. That was a, that was a nice visit. But yeah, then EMI came along and EMI was my first exposure to private equity. My first exposure to, I think the banks call it distressed assets. Yeah, yeah. The owner had bought it in 2008 at the peak. And I don't think it's a secret that pretty much from day one, the liabilities exceeded the assets. The company was probably technically insolvent from day one, but there was a good three, four years of just trying to keep it going and trying to find a way to get through. So that was. I'd sort of had a break of about six years from being a group treasurer. So I was back to being a Group treasurer again we had a team of three people, cash manager, an analyst and I think we settled on risk manager but essentially it was everything else and project and it was. And so forth. That's where I really learned about cash management. I'd never heard of a clean down before, didn't understand how it all worked but very quickly worked out those sort of requirements and yeah, it was a global group, there was a Treasury system.

Sorry, explain Pat. Was a clean down then in a.

Lot of revolving credit facilities there'll be a requirement that. Well, in the old days you had to pay off the RCF for the revolver for a period of 10 business days. So you're basically proving that you were using the facility as a working capital facility, not as permanent debt. I mean we have one at my current firm. The better way it works now is that if you can just show that your cash balance exceeded the outstanding amount that you had drawn, then you've cleaned down, then you're down. Yeah, yeah, that's right because banks don't like when you permanently draw large parts of your RCF because they generally charge different margins and they've got different credit requirements. So that's why a lot of facilities have those in.

Yeah and then you moved on to Temenos.

I mean the issue essentially with EMI is that we did go insolvent, temporarily owned by Citibank then I think believe Universal has taken that up. So Temenos, yeah, it. Well it's a. Basically it's an IT firm, sells banking software to second tier banks because most of the larger banks had their own legacy systems that were probably built in the 60s and get built on and it was a Swiss company so but with the headquarters in London and essentially it was a complex group and we went through the time of the Greek collapse and a lot of countries shutting down their currencies and so forth and so you had a lot of difficulties with repatriating your funds was good practice for now again it's one of those. I mean there was only so much to do. I mean we did do a great refinancing actually issued bonds into the Swiss private market which is a different sort of funding that I hadn't done before with interest rates in Switzerland generally around zero it was always attractive I think with interest rates at the moment everywhere around zero. It might not be, but it's certainly worth. If there's a Swiss connection in any firms that people have it's quite a good market that you can tap in if you're looking for Covenant Light Funds, I think, is probably the best way to call it.

Yeah.

And yeah, once they have it in place, I mean, there is sort of a pattern with me. There's only so much to do there. It was listed company, everything was fine. Put in a Treasury system, you'll be bored. Yeah, yeah. So much you can do. And just decided to take a bit of a career break after that. Just took a few years off, then did another consulting gig and I mean. And that was Travelopia. So that's again, it's a spin off from Chewy and it was private equity backed. And yeah, again, that tapped into what I really love. It was no treasury fund. So it was again, building up the infrastructure. The job description, putting in the treasury system, hiring the treasurer, the team for that in place. So essentially, here's the keys that the Treasury's built. So that was a job that sort of started off being about three months and turned into a year. And then. So then gave me the opportunity to try a few different things.

So you went from Travelopia to this latest role with Xalog, perhaps. Explain what. I didn't give the best description. I'm sure you can explain a bit more about the business. So what XLOG is, you're the treasurer there. Give us a bit more insight. You would.

Okay. With my eight months of experience in the oil industry, so my apologies to any oil and gas people who, when I get the terminology wrong, but essentially oil firms, when they're exploring or the producing oil, they outsource a lot of the functions to different firms. In our industry, the larger firms are people like Halliburton or Schlumberger. What we do is two main parts of the business in terms of exploration. We set up cabins with lots of wires and sensors and so forth that go down the exploratory well and we review what comes out of that hole. Essentially looking at the substructure, looking at the various bits and everything else that you're extracting. Yeah, essentially. I mean, we're a bit like this, bit like S and P and Moody's for oil fields. I mean, we're essentially. Look what's coming up. And we're saying, look, if they say there's 10 billion barrels of oil, we'll say, well, based on the geophysics of the terrain, that is true. We'll do a report. We also do something called well intervention or Slickline. And that's essentially support for when the wells are producing. We will be looking at the drill bit and to the pipes that are going down. One of the cool things we have is we've got software that we can tell you when your drill bit's going to fail because obviously a multi million pound piece of equipment that explodes in a well is very expensive, but you don't want to be replacing it when it's only half used because they're up there. So essentially we were started by some career veterans who set up a company called Geoservices which they sold to Schlumberger and they essentially wanted to get back into that industry. I mean they, they're world experts. And so with Blue Water Energy, it's a private equity firm, they essentially started buying and building the company all over the various parts of the world, including Italy and Asia. About in May of last year, the company sort of went through a transformational acquisition. It bought the mud logging assets from a company called Weatherford, which doubled the size of the business and basically gave us that footprint across 35, 40 companies and made us quite substantial in the Middle East. So we're essentially in North America, Latin America, Middle East, Italy, small parts of the rest of Europe and Asia. So we've got this global footprint, turnover doubled and so forth. And so it was sort of time to upgrade the treasury and sort of get a better position to be able to cope with the greater complexity.

And when you did that, you know, you knew it was coming along and stuff like that. What were you focusing on? We were saying, right, actually number one, different treasury system or number one, we need more staff or you know, what was the sort of thought process? Because again we'll have a listening listeners today, similar situation. What were the, what was the key thing in the back of your mind? And again maybe come from your consulting days, knowing how to assess a Treasury. What did you think, what did you decide to do?

Sort of nails on the head. It wasn't going to be a permanent gig. I essentially started the end of October and I was going to be an interim essentially to sort of put out any bushfires, get things controlled for the year end covenants, get the cash management going and so forth. The decision on the treasury system being almost made, it needed to be confirmed. So I spent probably the first couple of months just doing, acting as a consultant, doing the day to day job of just making sure people could make payments and cash was in the right place, but it was okay. So this is the sort of structure you need. These are the issues you got with your existing debt facility. This is what you need to look at for your risk management, things like that, putting together like a Job description and so forth. And we were interviewing people for the role at the same time. And it's just. I mean, this one's slightly off topic. It sort of came down to, I think there was just a really good cultural fit with the team that was there and the people I report to and so forth. So I think we all just came to the conclusion that whilst I was probably a bit senior for the. For the role, for the size of the company, it was a good idea to have some certainty that I would be there for a period of time. And I was quite happy to sign up. And from then on, I actually then started managing the treasury as if I was going to be there. You know, it's one of those. It wasn't like I was less diligent, but when you know you have to push these things through, you start focusing a lot more on your time frames and what the spend is and the budget. To answer your question, first thing was get the treasury system in place. There's still a few things where we're finalizing with that proper liquidity management. We had cash flow forecasting, but it was more. I mean, a lot of cash flow forecasts in companies that don't have a Treasury, it's a bit more accounting focused. They'll be looking at weeks and so forth. We were probably giving too much information to the lenders and not giving them what they actually wanted. So it was more about focusing on compliance, looking at our foreign exchange exposures, looking at the debt profile, what the costs were, and then very much as we had some management changes and so forth, it's getting. I mean, we put out a budget in February which lasted three weeks because of COVID but it was very much about helping support the business in terms of its working capital needs to grow to the targets that our shareholders have.

So, looking at the future, because we were approaching the end of today's episode and everything else, but before we get there, what do you see as being key within Treasury? This isn't the three, usually at the end of the show, which we'll do in a minute, but three things. But you've got this depth of experience across all different Treasuries. You've been treasury consulting, you've been private equity back, you've been plc. What's your ethos around treasury, then? What do you see as.

Yeah, that's a good question, Mark, I think. And it's one of those. It's a couple of principles. And I think, you know, for example, when I look at cash management, I mean, It's a lot like air traffic control in that you have funds coming in and out. And essentially your job is to essentially make sure everybody gets the money they need to make their payments on time and then anything that's not required to be there. So you're sort of a. And it's a. It's a term that gets used by consultants and strong in the accounting word. I mean, a business partner and I think it's misused. But there's a lot of ivory tower. Treasury, I mean, I think less these days. I think the culture has very much changed, is that we're a support function. Our job is to make sure that in terms of getting the money that they need in the right currency at the right time for a shorter period as possible, sorting out their banking needs. If there's, you know, when it comes to risk, I mean, a lot of treasurers, I think, make the mistake that you can stop bad things happening to your company, where if there's a permanent change in a currency position or an interest rate or in a regulatory framework, all you can do is give the business time to adapt. You know, if oil prices now $40, when I joined the company, they were above briefly, we had zero. You can't hedge that away. You can give the company time. And I think there'll be a lot of treasures they've learned through the COVID is you might have your hedging program in place, but what if your activity stopped and you don't need those hedges? Then you've potentially caused an issue for your balance sheet. So you're protecting the company from the immediate impacts of bad things and you're facilitating the people who are out in the field who need to make the things or sell the things and so forth that they don't have to deal with the hassle of a guarantee or beg for funds or. Or be sort of left out of the loop when you're making a change in your banking decision and so forth. And I think that's a problem treasury has sometimes in justifying its existence is that we should be able to make the business run smoother and focus on actually generating the profits that we use the cash for, rather than sort of being the head office and just expecting compliance. Because it's in the manual.

Yeah, because you must comply. That's it.

Yeah, and that's it. And I think, you know, when you. I mean, I've learned the hard way, because it's always hard to justify spend on a system or on a process or something like that, because you can't put into numbers exactly what the benefits are going to be. Everyone just sees it as a cost center. So I think being able to articulate that you're there to support the business is a key for getting those sort of advancements.

And so that brings us neatly along to our top three. Two or three tips. You know, we'll put your LinkedIn profile in the show notes, but if someone is looking back through your background and they say, oh, you know, I'd like to do that because you've got this great variety. I know when Pat and I, we meet up for a regular beer years and you know, put the world to rights of Treasury. But I find a lot of the time it's amazing the different draw stuff from so many different areas. You know, it's like, oh, when I was in consulting, yeah, that's the way we would approach it. But then, yeah, when I was at such and such with you because you've, you've had this depth of experience which a lot of treasurers don't have. You know, they might be one company still for 10 or 12 years, a couple of different jobs, but they don't really have that exposure. You've had it in space. So, you know, with yourself, what the tips would you give to people?

Yeah, I mean, I'll sort of caveat it with. We're all, we're all different. I was, I was someone who sort of grew up in, I mean, Adelaide's not a small town but in the middle of nowhere. And I just, I just like the variety and so forth. So, yeah, and not, not having children, having the opportunity to invest in other things and so forth, it means I could take more risks. I think it's, you know, if, if you're struggling with a mortgage and you've got kids and you think about putting through university and so forth, I wouldn't listen to a single word I say. You know, I would do the exact opposite. But I mean, I think treasury should be need to go to jobs where things aren't stable because essentially accountants can run a company that's doing fine. You know, issuing new debt is fun. It often gets taken over by the cfo, but that's just the nature of the beast. But building a good cash flow forecasting process and improving the most regional controllers or territory controllers, I mean, they're useless at forecasting because it's not really that important. But actually meeting people and getting out of the office and going to a site and getting, you know, go to a factory or go to the sales team or those sort of things. Because, I mean, as you, I've got lots of interesting stories and I've loved almost every minute of it because I understand eight or nine different businesses and in a year's time, I should know a lot more about oil and gas. It makes what is essentially a job that involves sitting in front of a computer, playing with spreadsheets and entering data and putting together PowerPoints far more exciting when you can actually see that you're benefiting other people. So I think it's good to probably start off in a blue chip or if you're already in consulting, you've started down the accounting path or something like that, still under 30 and so forth. And you can take that risk. It's worth going to either a PE firm or a distressed firm and so forth. That will need change, that you don't have to spend a year putting together board presentations to get done. It needs to get done now. And being, you know, being next to that fire, it will forge, you know, you'll work out what you're good at and what you're not good at and you'll actually find that you love getting up in the morning and going in, even though you're basically just balancing a big bank account.

So, amazing stuff there from Pat. If you, as we say, if you to connect with him on LinkedIn, put it in the show notes so you can connect there, you know, but suffice to say, he's got some really interesting stuff and I think, you know, it'd be great to have in your network and everything else. Sir, as always, looking forward to a post lockdown beer and catch up. But thanks for your time today.

More than a pleasure, Mike. And yes, we'll. We'll do it as soon as. Boris, let us.

Yes, as soon as. Cheers, mate. Thanks very much.

Okay.