A treasury professional shares lessons from working remotely across multiple companies and navigating the cannabis industry. She covers how to build skills, advance your career, and handle the unique challenges of treasury operations in emerging sectors.
Foreign started with LifeScan and then through Novavax, I was 100% remote and now with Cureleaf, I'm 100% remote. With LifeScan. It was really easy being remote because I had worked with those individuals. We kind of had a cadence of who did what, how we operated and we would have a daily or weekly call with everybody. At novavax, that was a little bit more difficult because the company was trying to transition from a phase three to branded company. I'm not sure that the individuals there really understood treasury because there was no treasury in place before that. But here at Curaleaf, I have a Treasury analyst, Julie Riggs, who works for me. She is fantastic. We talk two or three times a day. I report into the Chief Accounting Officer. We talk at least once a week. I have touch points with all of our regional operators at least once a week and I have a touch point with our VP of accounting at least once a week. There's a lot of great communication and I think if you're in a remote role, that absolutely has to be paramount because you're not in the office setting. You don't get to see these people every day or, you know, every couple of days. Having those 30 minute, 10 minute, 5 minute standup calls just to make sure that you're all on the same page is paramount to making sure that you have good communication and that things can flow smoothly. The industry is super exciting. There's a lot going on. Obviously in the US we were hoping that it would either be rescheduled or they would pass safe banking. For those of you that don't know, in cannabis we can't use traditional banking products, so we don't have a revolver or line of credit. If we were to get a line of credit, they require 105% cash collateral, which obviously doesn't, doesn't really do what we need it to do. We can't use credit cards, so all of our sales are cash or debit card based. It's exciting, but it's challenging at the same time because it's. Everything we're doing in treasury is literally cash based. The biggest piece of that is making sure we have good communication among our regional operators and corporate treasury, making sure that we get cash remitted as needed, working with tax, making sure we get tax payments done as timely as possible. We're a growing company. We've grown through acquisition. We're going through a lot of acquisition integrations which for those of you that have done that can be a little bit challenging. Luckily, I have a great group of people that I work with where we all work together really well. I tried to provide the best customer service to them as I can. So I'm beating up banks for them as I need to to get the best service for them as I can. It's really interesting, but at the same time, it's a little stressful because we don't have that safety net that traditional treasury groups have to fall back on. In the roles I've been in, when I start to get comfortable, I do get comfortable, but I need to look for that next challenge to expand my knowledge base. Expand my toolbox, if you will. The biggest thing, biggest advice I could give anybody is if you start to feel comfortable and you want to still make that next move, ask your boss what are the worst things they work on and try and take those on. Maybe they will let you, maybe they won't, but at least shows initiative that, hey, you want to take that next step. It's really imperative, especially as you advance your career, to try and increase your toolbox. In treasury, you know, you may not always have a path straight up. You may have to make some lateral moves. So finding opportunities where you can get exposure to different things, whether it's different industry, different aspects of treasury, whether it's documentation, fx, cash forecasting, hedging, treasury strategy, account analysis and relationships, whatever you can get experience in will only help you as you go forward.
