Defining your Treasury Legacy with Chris Fulton

Foreign.

So welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each week I talk to treasurers about how they built their careers, where they are now, and where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going next. In this week's show I'm delighted to be joined by Chris Fulton, who's actually the CFO of Celandia and Gay. They're a high powered New York litigation and law firm which he'll describe much better than I can. But actually Chris until recently was actually a treasurer. He'll talk through his career and everything else, but he's now achieved the role of cfo. I'm not going to give a quick overview of his career as have done sometimes, except to say, because usually at the end of a show you say thank yous. Today I want to do it differently. I want to say thank you to Chris. He was very kindly on our panel at the AFB conference in Chicago end of last year. We didn't really get to catch up afterwards because we were talking about investing in your treasury career and we're getting some of that today and Chris was very kind, a really great panel member, really enjoyed it. And we'll have a link to some of the speech with Chris's and my bits as well later on. But what we said on the show and on the conference stage rather was that Chris had actually already become at the time the CFO of Celandine Gay. Real life example, if you like, of a treasurer making the step from treasurer to cfo. Chris can actually describe that and maybe some of the choices he makes. So that can explain to you guys, the listeners, what you need to do. As always enough for me, let's get across to Chris Fulton. Let's kick it off. We would take us back to the dim distant past. Bring us up to now and then let's talk about a bit more about your role and everything else.

Mike, thank you for the kind words. I appreciate you having me on the podcast today when we talk about my career past is the right way to start it out of university. I graduated with a degree in finance in Colorado and went to work for a a small publicly traded company called OEA Inc. Ordnance Engineering Associates. About 200 million a year in revenue came in as a financial analyst. What I didn't know at the time that meant is that I was the only financial analyst in the entire company, which meant that I had a pretty good start to my career and that it was a publicly traded organization that did SEC reporting that had debt Outstanding. So a very good broad background of treasury accounting finance. Spent three years at that organization and unfortunately they were acquired by a company called Autoleave in 1999 which ended up insourcing to their finance department the role that I held. So I transitioned away from OEA and went to a startup telecommunications company. So I went from an airbag initiator and inflator company to a telecom company who. Whose business model Convergent Communications was basically outsourced telephony. A business model that ultimately didn't really work. A lease model. I went in as a business development analyst which quickly turned into more of a financial analyst treasury analyst. As they were bleeding cash and trying to come up with ways to mitigate the cash burn which ultimately didn't work out. That company ended up going bankrupt. Went to Quest Communications where I was in their capital management group. Had direct responsibility for one of the lines of business for capital budgeting. Roughly a $2 billion budget was my line of business. The entire Quest Communications capital budget was about $9.5 billion. So that presenting capital results to the financial executives sitting with the managers, outlining their budgets, ultimately collaborating with the VP of finance on post merger integration type issues. As Quest was going through a merger with at the time had been given some advice from a mentor at the company that I should probably go back and get my MBA and then went to Duke University to get my MBA from the Fuqua School of Business for the summer at an investment bank in New York. That stint really cemented for me the fact that I didn't want to be an investment banker long term and wanted to stay in the corporate space. So ultimately went to Avaya Inc. The spinoff from Lucent Technologies. Their inaugural of the finance leadership rotational program. And what that program was, you do six month stints in each of three departments. So I did a role within business development which was basically the negotiation pricing related to the high revenue clients of the organization. So high revenue for Avaya was $10 million plus which ended up leading into redoing the pricing model. And at the end of that rotation, managers from other groups basically bid on their financial leaders if they want to come into their group. Had the pleas of getting pulled into the Treasury Department at that point in time where I reported directly to the assistant treasurer. A great, great learning experience as Avaya had interest rate swaps, FX swaps, did a lot of capital markets type work as well as the normal blocking and tackling that you'll see in a Treasury group. So the cash management, the Sarbanes oxley work that was going on at the time, spent six months within that role, had a fantast within the Treasury Department, then moved on to investor relations. So that was the communications with the sell side analysts. Institutional investors helped to direct the quarterly earnings process. Really got to dig into the weeds of prepping the CEO and CFO for Q& A portions of the earnings calls. So a really great exposure to how publicly traded corporation works across the three rotations. As happens inaugural class of the first financial leadership rotational program. There was a little bit of confusion around how people transition into full time roles. So that 18 months became 20 months, which became 22 months, which became 24 months with still some uncertainty. So I decided to leave the organization and go to consult. So Ernst and Young had reached out to me, had seen that I had done some work in the Treasury Department and I went to work in the global Treasury Advisory Services group of Ernst and Young. Also a fantastic experience as well. I throw my experience there into a few different buckets. One was Sarbanes Oxley. It was in full swing at that point in time. It was drafting 404 narratives across different organizations and industries, creating control matrices for clients. Then it was treasury audit support. So working with the CPAs that don't necessarily have a great understanding of treasury, what you would find is that a lot of the audit folks didn't know what a derivative was or didn't know what an interest rate swap was. So they wanted somebody with some treasury experience to come in and help with the audit of those types of products in the treasury space. They would pull in from the global Treasury Advisory Services group. And then there was the pure project consulting type plays that was foreign exchange trading company feasibility study. Did a Treasury carve outs of assessment type work. It was a great learning experience because the average tenor of my projects were around two to three weeks. Which meant that I was constantly moving on to something else where I could create change within an organization or help the auditors. Unfortunately, I was on the road about 80% of my time, which really takes a toll on you as an individual.

When you're in consultancy. One of the other issues as well as the lifestyle choice, you know, you've got to, as you say, live out of a suitcase. But certain period you're building your experience so you can help. But one of the other frustrations I've got, and we're going to do a show actually in the future, we're talking about some of the guys who are in consultancy or what they do as consultants and things like that. But did you find the other frustration in which a lot of people said that they go in, they give a load of advice, help me bake the cake, they slice up the cake and then they escort you out the room and you look through the window and they either say, yeah, I don't like that cake and we'll have this one, or they take a slice of it and say, we'll do that bit, we leave the rest, or actually we'll just see how it goes. What were the frustrations that came to you and how did you deal with those?

There are some projects that have some immediacy to them. Right. If you're going to come in and you're going to do it, if you're going to do Sarbanes Oxley 404, if you're going to do a Treasury audit, you know exactly what you're going to come in. If you're going to come in and more of an advisory role. There's nothing more frustrating than pouring your heart and soul into a consulting project and giving some advice and then finding out six months after the fact that they didn't take your advice and maybe to your point, they took a slice of the cake. Or what's even more frustrating is if you don't know what they did. If you do a project and you're there for three months and you leave and you just don't know if they implemented your suggestions because you've moved on to the next role within the organization or within your consulting company. I found it to be a gratifying profession though. I think the fact that there's constant change, it makes it a fun role to have because you're constantly on your feet, you're dealing with senior leaders within organizations. Where else could you go from being a finance manager to a consultant? And you'd be presenting to CFOs of very large organizations. I did a project at a big automotive manufacturer. I had a seat at the table with the gc, the cfo, the executive VP of finance, all roles that you probably wouldn't have exposure to that level of executive as a manager within a corporation, I would think unless it's a.

Small corporation and with learning wise from that you obviously developed over that period, where did you go from and to as a person, you know, what did it give you for your treasury toolkit, if you like, would you say from that period?

A few different things. When you're thinking about confidence, Number one, you're going from being a practitioner in treasury investor relations finance to pitching and proposing and presenting to senior folks. And generally when you're in these consulting companies, a lot of the time you're doing these projects by yourself or a small team. So you, as a junior to mid level consultant are presenting to senior level folks within an organization. That helps with regards to, let's call it gravitas, the ability to convey a topic from start to finish to an executive. Second, just the sheer learning. I did projects at financial services institutions, at commodity houses, at public corporations, private corporations, did a Treasury carve out, did a foreign exchange feasibility study, did natural gas hedging audit. How many times can you say that you did a natural gas hedging audit? There just aren't that many companies that do that. So it gave me a very broad breadth of experience that carried me through the rest of my career up to this point in time. Because I ended up getting recruited from Ernst and Young to go be the treasurer of a video game company. So I ended up being the corporate treasurer of Take two Interactive Software based out of New York. And that was a building process. So that was coming in and I was given a mandate by the CFO to create foreign exchange policies and procedures to renegotiate the revolving credit facility, redesign the cash management programs of the firm. They had an international office as well as a domestic office that was setting up an in house bank, improving the intercompany loan process and settlement process. So all of these lessons that I learned as a consultant, I immediately parlayed into a corporate treasurer role within the video game space. Unfortunately, about a year into my stint at Take two Interactive, the economy fell apart. As you know, you had the mortgage crisis and Take two was under a hostile takeover from Electronic Arts. Around that time I got a call from a recruiter about an opportunity at a law firm. A big law firm based out of New York named Scadden, Arp, Slate, Mar and Flom, which is one of the five largest law firms in the world. And they were looking for a treasurer. So they did not really have a formal treasurer at the time. It was their director of tax who was also serving as the treasurer. But her bailiwick was more of the tax space and not necessarily the treasury space. Came in with a mandate to create a treasury department. So when you come in like that, it's the blocking and tackling. It's looking at what's the lowest hanging fruit. They did not have a foreign exchange program. They had way too many bank accounts. They needed to set up a term revolver. So it was going through step by step by step. And Fixing the Treasury process along the way. So it was implementing an FX auction program. It was rationalizing all the bank accounts so that you can concentrate your cash in a more effective manner. It was setting up a revolver loan that would get you past the downturn in the economy while training my staff. As the staff had been there for a significant amount of time and their background wasn't necessarily on the treasury side. So it was getting them trained up, getting them comfortable in their new roles. So something as simple as making an individual cash manager was not something that was there before I came in. Fantastic organization. I spent 10 years at Skadden Arps. Midway through I picked up up the financial Planning and Analysis group within the firm. So that was the reporting to senior management, the budgeting process. And ARPS is a bottoms up type budget. So it was going out and meeting all of their 22 offices. So it was going out and meeting all the managers within the organization. A fantastic way to learn the organization and to get out there and communicate with the other offices.

And at the same time you were getting a lot more involved in treasury, saying you weren't. But what I mean is get involved in the AFP as well. Or had you been involved in that already or how did that come about?

I'd been involved with AFP since I was a consultant and that was at the direction of a partner within the Global Treasury Advisory Services Group. I think there's something to be said about career developments and credentializing yourself. And one of those mechanisms in the treasury space is getting the certified Treasury Professional designation. I was given the advice to get this designation early into my consulting career as the clients wanted to see it on your resume. Obviously got more involved with the AFP at that point in time. Used the AFP quite frequently just for questions that I had. The AFP has a lot of content that's relevant to treasurers. So whether it be an in house bank country profiles, articles with people that have done what you were inquiring about before, it's a great resource for treasury professionals. So that was my first foray into the AFP. Around 2005 is when I first became involved with the AFP. And over time that involvement has expanded ultimately to where I'm on the Finance Committee and the board of the AFP now.

And looking at your role as it developed at Scadden, as you say, you took on more responsibility and everything else and then you made the move. How did that come about? Because obviously a lot of people made the move. Treasury, treasury did you always want to be a cfo or how did that come about?

It's the natural progression of your career. I thought that I would like to take on that role at some point in time. To be frank, I could have stayed at Skadden for the rest of my career. It was and continues to be a fantastic organization that gave me a lot of responsibility, increasing responsibility as I was there. But I've heard a few of your other podcasts and what you see is a lot of. A lot of folks that are fixing issues and problems and create essentially a consulting type project. You fix it, you move on to the next thing to fix. You move on to the next thing to fix. And at some point in time you don't have as many things to fix. Yeah, right. So you become a little bit complacent and things tend to slow down a little bit. So I think it was looking more for a challenge than not being happy in the role that I was in. And nothing says challenge like coming to a brand new firm that's looking to change the paradigm of law firms. Right. As a CFO in an organization that's growing significantly while growing while building out its finance function. So it's one of those things, I think you watch out what you ask for because I'm most certainly not bored anymore and there's a very challenge. And bored isn't the right term. I was looking for a challenge. Now I'm at the challenge stage again and looking to build out a world class finance organization at a rapidly growing law firm.

You mentioned we spoke before the show. Skadden obviously very well established a lot of stuff that you got involved in, got it fixed and everything else. But it's quite different with Solinda and Gay. Can you perhaps explain to the audience? Because I found that fascinating about how it's a different balance within the organization in terms of staffing and everything else. But perhaps just explain for the listeners, as it were.

Yeah, more than happy to. So Celandian Gay is a litigation firm, an elite litigation firm. We have about 100 lawyers and we do both plaintiff and defense work. We're a majority woman owned partnership, which is very rare in the law firm space. What you'll find is that obviously the law firm space is a very, very old profession and it feels like that at most firms, but it doesn't really feel that way here as we're majority women owned. 21% of our attorneys identify as LGBTQ. So we've differentiated ourselves from the start by the way that we're structured. We're also different in the way that we operate, we're giving our associates a lot more substantive work than you may see at a larger law firm. Just given the fact that we are a small, nimble law firm that does have 50, 50 split up defense of plaintiff work and these are large organizations that we're defending or litigating on behalf, it becomes a very good recruiting thing with regard to our associates and that we're committed to training and mentoring them as well as giving them exposure that they won't necessarily get at the larger law firms.

And you've talked there and as you say, you've listened to a few of the other as the other podcasts we've done and this is something that came up when we did our speech at the AFP last year. What about your mentors and coaches over your time? What role have they played for you?

I think they've played a significant role over the time and that's part of why I've joined the AFP to give back as well as I have my own mentees. I probably would not have gone to get my MBA without some heavy coaching. Early in my career I had a senior finance person come to me and say, look, you obviously have the skill set that would parlay into moving up within this organization, but you do need to credentialize yourself. You do need to go back and get an mba. You should go to the best school that you can and we would love to have you come back after. Obviously I didn't come back after, but we had several discussions where we sat down and he would outline how he made it to his place within the organization. And he attributed a lot of that to getting his MBA as well as getting some substantive work opportunities as a result of mentors. I think at the end of the day you try to put yourself in the best position with regard to your career. And then it's also how you network or how you get pulled into roles within an organization. So you can I got the ctp, I got the mba. But it was also being at the right place at the right time. Sometimes while at Scadden, as the treasurer, the head of FP&A leaves to go to another firm rather than go out to market for somebody to run that group. I had done enough things internally to warrant picking up that additional responsibility. So it's being visible, it's communicating, it's creating political goodwill within an organization. Obviously 10 years is a long time to create create political goodwill and you don't necessarily like to lose that as you move on to another organization, but it was a fantastic time. And I think, to take this back to your question, I think it's the mentors that say, and this is true of Skadden as well, my boss at Scadden said, look, when I told him I was going to leave to go to Slylandian Gay, he told me that I knew at some point in time you were going to move on to, to bigger and better things. It's just. And that was his expectation of me.

And what was your. When you left, as you say, most recently, what did you leave behind you? What was your legacy? If you like, what were you focusing on?

When you're leaving an organization, you want to just make sure that all of the issues are buttoned up before you leave. So on the FP and a side, it was making sure that all of the budgeting work was done so that the person that came in after me could do an adequate job of presenting the the budget findings to the CFO as well as the finance committee within the organization. It's making sure that on the treasury front that you have all of the documents taken care of, make sure that any renewals that need to be done, the communication out to the entire organization. Fortunately, over 10 years with 22 offices globally, I had a pretty good working relationship. So it was making sure that I communicated out to all of the offices and made sure that they were comfortable with the transition plan. Unfortunately, when you work at a place for as long as I did, you build up friendships within the organization. So just because I left doesn't mean I'm not available for folks when they need some assistance. So I think the legacy is that you want to make the organization better than it was when you got there. I think that I can say that I did that by creating a world class treasury as well as implementing a lot of improvements within the FP and a process as well as being a good mentor to your employees. I can say that I had very little turnover when I was at Scadden while giving a lot of substantive work experience to my employees. So I would have bring folks into meetings with me, I would have them travel with me to the international offices just so they can see how the organization would work.

And now you've made the move to cfo, what's that like?

Oh, it's like drinking out of a fire hose, Mike. I'm not going to kid about that. It's kind of interesting because this is a relatively young firm that I'm at, but it's a young firm made up of partners that come from very prestigious large law firms. They are high profile attorneys that are expecting a world class organization and we're building it. Try to staff up to an appropriate level while implementing the correct systems and processes while dealing with fire drills. So in a place like my prior firm, you have a large group that's dedicated to billing, you have a large group that's dedicated to accounts receivable, you have a large group that's dedicated to accounts payable. And you have a treasury department, an fpa, a management reporting department here, that is me. So what that means, but that's also a good thing in that my days fly by buy I have a very, very competent staff who's getting a lot of exposure that they wouldn't necessarily get at a larger firm. And as we grow, this is only going to make us stronger.

Looking at yourself and your career, you know people, we said this before, if people want to connect to Chris, you can buy his LinkedIn profile. But whilst you're on there, you know, make a note of some of the moves he's made and some of the other things. And as we come towards the end of today's show, what would you say stands out for you? You talked about the NBA, but what would you pick out for people to say, look, this is what you need to do to copy me to emulate your career, as it were.

On some of your prior podcasts, a lot of your folks talk about networking. I think there's something to be said for that. I think especially within industries like the one I'm currently in, there are so many opportunities to be involved in roundtables. Whether there's a controller's roundtable, there's a finance director's roundtable, there's a treasurer's roundtable, and as you get onto these things, you meet other folks, other like minded folks within the industry. And it's a very small world, right? So as good opportunities arise within the industry, these folks start reaching out to you and saying, hey, would you be interested in this? Or you'll have firms directly reach out to you as they know they've seen you, they've seen you sit down at a finance director's roundtable and they like what you have to hear. I think one, if within a specific industry, I think if you get involved within whatever the mechanism is for meeting other like minded folks within the industry, I think you should do that. Obviously getting involved in a large organization like the AFP is very beneficial to your career as well. I mean you have the opportunity to. And Mike, you've been at the AFP several times. You've got several thousand people from a lot of different industries that are there at a conference for three, four days. And it's great just to sit down and meet with some of those folks and just talk about that industry and what are the best practices and you can take some of that back into your, your own organization. So I think at the end of the day, networking has done a very, it's been very strong within my career because a lot of the jobs that I've gotten, my last three, four jobs from ey on were all referrals from somebody else who just happened to know me in some other capacity and said, hey, this guy would be pretty good for this role. You reached out to him and they reached out to me. So it's, I think I'm living proof of the fact that you, you, if you build a strong network, it starts to pay dividends.

And I'd love to take credit for this really great networking tip about business cards and things, but I'm not, I'm going to give this totally to Chris because it was a really good one. It's something I do myself. But he actually brought it up in one of our conversations when Craig and I were talking to Chris and pre briefing ourselves for the conference speech and everything else. Perhaps if you could, for the audience, it's basic, it's simple, but people don't do it. But about the business conversation of the business card, can you just for the listeners, you know, explain what that is?

Yeah, absolutely, Mike. So when, when I'm talking to folks and if they give me a business card, if you've had a meaningful conversation with the person, I take notes on the back of the card and then I'll file. Obviously I keep a card folder here that on the back I'll take notes of their name, their spouse's name, if we talked about their kids names, what their history is, just little blurbs of what could be a differentiator when you talk to them the next time. And obviously if you put pen to paper, it helps you from a memory perspective as well. And I've found that's been worthwhile throughout my career as well.

And the great thing that I found about it, when Chris and I talked about it, you talked about where the kids were going to go to college or whether could help them or you know, perhaps make a recommendation about somewhere to go to eat. If they were mentioning it, I thought, wow, that's actually because it was actually constructive, but it wasn't divisive wasn't just like, oh, yeah, what can I do to, you know, network and just use this for myself? It was actually that idea of giving out, giving back to people. First of all, seek to help out people and then you'll get stuff back. And I think that really came across just from that little tip. So I think the little listeners should do that.

That will pay all the dividends in the world, Mike. And this is true, especially in treasury space. You build up a lot of relationships with your banks. What you'll find is that banks, given that they're concentrated in specific. Well, at least the bankers in specific industries or specific size of companies, they tend to know a lot about these organizations and they tend to know a lot about jobs that are coming up or potential jobs that are going to come up. And they tend to be very forthcoming with that information. So what I've found is that they like it when you get a little more personal with them. They like it when you're friendly with them. And I think, again, I'm going to go back to earlier podcasts that you've had. I know that one of your podcast attendees, she got her job as a result of a banker reaching out directly on her behalf because they had built up a strong relationship. So I think that at least from a Treasury career perspective, at the level that you're a treasurer or a CFO or an assistant treasurer, you need to build strong relationships.

Anything else that you want to wrap up today's show with, and you want to be a cfo, what would be the one standout? Go away. Piece of advice.

Boy, that is an interesting question.

It's a million dollars.

Well, I think you need to make it clear that you want to move up within an organization. So you need to be front and center and asking for additional responsibility within an organization first and foremost. Even at my prior firm, it would was, hey, I was a treasurer, but I was looking for a broader role within the organization. That's how I picked up FP&A. And when you pick up FP&A, you get a broader understanding of the organization as a whole. You go out and visit all of the offices, you get more visibility within the organization. That visibility may not necessarily parlay into a more senior role within that organization, but it may within another company within that industry sub cycle or a subset of that industry. Right. As an example, when I sat in on the finance director roundtables, they know that I do FP and A. They know that I've implemented systems, financial systems, as well as the Treasury So you've already got the skill set that's there for a cfo. It's just a matter of somebody coming and reaching out to you.

Great advice. As I said to you, the guys before, what we'll do is we'll put in the speech notes in the show notes, which is there, which we gave Chris was very kind to be on that. At the AFL FP, we're putting Chris's link to his LinkedIn. So if it's useful for both sides, then connect up with Chris. But as always, thank you for an amazing one. And yeah, if you guys, if you want to be a cfo, just follow all the advice you've been given today, because I think it's been a great podcast. So thank you very much, Chris.

Appreciate your time. Mike.