Career Pointers for Newcomers to the World of Treasury with Thomas Balish

I really, I had to get an international tax 101 lesson. But you know, in, in retrospect, I mean it's, that was incredibly important experience for me professionally learning the way an international business works, learning about tax and international tax planning, working with folks across different cultures. At Staples, I ran a team out of Belgium who ran an in house bank in internal to Staples. It was an in house bank, got to manage an international team. All tremendous experiences. But, but certainly in the first few months it was a really steep learning curve. Luckily the, the treasurer who hired me had the confidence that I would figure it out and ultimately I did. I thought in terms of, you know, the first three months, the first hundred days, let's say, and that I want to spend the first hundred days really doing a deep diagnosis of where the company was, where the treasury team was, understanding the company, understanding the culture, understanding, yes, cash flow, banking structure, foreign exchange risk, the debt, which is a very important piece and understanding what the priorities of my CFO were. And then at that I set the target for myself that I'm going to have a, at least a high level plan, action plan that I would then go to my CFO with and talk through. This is my action plan, this is what I need, this is what I intend to accomplish over the next year to two years. And then trying to execute that plan, get selling it and executing it. The way I've thought about this is for someone that's starting in a Treasury career or maybe mid level or upper senior level, that's really, you know, I'm targeting folks that are not necessarily treasurers at this point. And what I have a few things that I jotted down that I think are important. And you know, I've shared these with different people along the way, but it does make me think I want to have this discussion more specifically with my team as well. But I think one of the main things, if you want to progress to a role, a senior role, like a treasurer role or a high level treasury role, you really have to demonstrate mastery of all different aspects of Treasury. So if you have come up, as I did on the debt side, I had to learn cash management. If you come up on the cash management side, you need to learn about capital structure, you need to learn about debt, about FX equity, you know, share buybacks, all the different pieces of Treasury. And so I think it's really important that if you are in coming up in one of these areas that you take every opportunity you can to get outside of those silos and to learn more about the. You know, the people across the hall who are. Who are doing a debt offering. Well, how can you be involved in that?