Embracing Chaos and Challenges in Treasury with Wade Olsen Part 1

Foreign.

Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where this week I've got a bit of a treat for you guys. This is our after over 140 podcasts and we're approaching 150th, I've got a special guest for that. But this is our first ever two part podcast with Wade Olson. Wade is actually the co founder of Treasury Suite, the Treasury management system. But more than that, Wade is actually an experienced treasury professional with over 25 years of corporate treasury expertise before he co founded Treasury Suite. Now we'll do that in the next week's episode. This week Wade was incredible, really interesting guy, amazing treasury career all the way. He's come all the way. He's got experience at Utah and different states in the US and actually we onto this week's episode we go from his beginning in treasury up to working for AMI Semiconductors in Idaho and he tells you about how lovely the city is. Well you'll have to listen towards the end of the episode to find out exactly how funny he found Pocatello in Idaho. It's exactly as you might imagine. So this is part one where we run up to AMI Semiconductors and then we continue the rest of his treasury career and how we then and why he co founded Treasury Suite Treasury Management System which you can find out about as well in the show notes. But this, this is week one of a two parter which I hope you enjoy as always. I say well actually I'll shut up now and let's get on with the episode. So over to the episode. So welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every 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 to next and this week's show. Delighted to be joined by Wade Olson, co founder of Treasury Suite. Now for those of you who don't know, Treasury Suite are a Treasury technology solutions company that provide cash management, banking and investor relations solutions. The actual company itself, I'm going to get Wade to describe it more but they basically scalable cloud based treasury management system. But actually prior to Treasury Suite and this is where we connected Wade and I over LinkedIn and I was fascinated by his background because he actually comes from the profession. So he's worked for tenfold Personas Iomega Ami and Chugash Alaska Corporation as well most recently. And yeah I was practicing the pronunciation of that with Wade just before the show started. But originally MBA from Thunderbird. So an incredible background. We're going to go right back to the beginning. Wade's going to. We're going to rocket through. The only thing we've got to do is try and keep to 40 minutes because we. We've had two calls, we've had a blast. And we could just probably make this a three hour podcast. But I know you guys. Yeah, you haven't got that much time. But anyway, we have. So we'll keep talking. Wade, take me back if you would. We talked before the show and even just there about Japan, there was all that stuff. But maybe just take us back to how you first discovered the world of finance and then treasury and the beginning way back when, and then walk us through.

Thanks for having me on, Mike. I appreciate it. So my journey started out when I was a child, and I told you this a little bit earlier, but my father was the president of an international mining machinery company. And when he was doing business, he liked to bring the individuals that he's working with from all over the world to our home. And by doing such, he introduced me to the world, basically me and my brothers and we got to meet people from all over and I started getting fascinated with different cultures in different places and I fell in love with the Asian culture. And on top of that, when I went through college, my first couple years of college, I was trying to follow in the footsteps of my older brothers and my father, engineers, steadfast, very. One of them is actually a rocket scientist and helped actually launch the space shuttle for a period of time. So, yeah, I got rocket scientists in my background. Well, I found kind of interesting. I was going to Camp or University of Utah and on campus here in the engineering department, a lot of the professors back in the day were not from the United States, and that's okay. I had difficulty understanding what they were saying, but I really loved math. And so I found a way to get around some of the things I was having in engineering school by going to the finance school, where there's math. And I kind of gravitated towards that and ended up going and finishing my undergraduate. But while I was doing my undergraduate, I went over to kind of satisfy my Asian curiosities and lived in Japan a couple different times and went to school over there. Went to Kansai Gaida University, for example, in Osaka, and had a great time learning and feeling and understanding what the cultures were. And the differences were not differences from a bad standpoint, but why their differences were there. And it really opened my eyes further on the International Front came back, decided there's no other school for me but Thunderbird. I turned down two or three different law schools because I couldn't go to law school at one time and went to Thunderbird and loved it. Had a great time at Thunderbird. But I felt incredibly insufficient at Thunderbird. The vast majority of the people that I was working with at school didn't speak two languages. They spoke four, five, six, eight languages and I could barely speak my language and barely speak Japanese. So I felt a little bit insecure there because amazing talent and amazing people. And then when I got out of school, I had the desire to stay in Salt Lake City for a little while. My father had passed away unexpectedly while he was pretty young and I got the opportunity to join a smaller international gas exploration company called FX Energy. They really didn't have any treasury talent. They were just doing things off the cuff from a controller standpoint. I didn't have treasury as a background yet, but I knew that's the kind of things I liked. I studied foreign exchange derivatives and all that stuff when I was in college and said this is where I want to be. And I started helping them out and was with them for a year and had a great time learning about international transfers and international settlements and stuff. I enjoyed my time. But then I was fortunate. One of my brothers is an engineer up at Iomega and I lucked out. He introduced me to the treasury person at Iomega. His name is Rob Simmons and he was the treasurer. He was used to be at Oracle prior to going to Iomega. It's a funny thing, I told you this. He and I grew up kind of around the corner from one another, but we didn't know that. He's a lot older than I am and we started talking through the interview stuff and turned out it worked out. I was able to go and work with him and he was an incredible mentor from day one and he's been an incredible support to me and my family ever since. That's one of the key things I always talk to people about when they ask me when they're coming out of school or they're getting ready to start their treasury career or any finance career or any career for that matter. Find a way to identify a good mentor and always find a good mentor that has your interests at heart, that understands your family interests, your career interests and and your other passionate things is I'm passionate about activities. I love to be outdoors in the backcountry and doing stuff in the backcountry. When you have a mentor that understands those things about you, they can really do a lot to guide you. And I'll give you one quick example of how Rob really guided me off the front of my career. And it's stayed with me ever since. While I was at Iomega, working with him, I started out in a rotational program where I rotated through Treasury FP&A, and then Operations Finance. And then I was supposed to go over and spend time in Europe on another role. But at the time, Iomega was just crescendoing from almost becoming a $2 billion company. And they just started a little bit slide down because the product life cycle of their Iomega zip disk was kind of sliding a little bit. When that happened, Iomega went through a series of about five or ten different restructurings. That first restructuring, everybody was nervous. Everybody's talking about they're going to do a layoff, everything's going to be crazy, it's going to be sad, everybody's going to be gone. Rob was a great mentor. He came into me and he pulled me into his office. Actually. He said a couple things. Number one, keep your head down, keep working hard, you're doing a great job. But number two, which stuck with me the most, it's kind of a modification of a Sun Tzu quote, chaos breeds opportunity. And the time I sat there not quite knowing what he was saying, but he said it again, there's a lot of chaos going on right now. Opportunity is going to come out of this chaos. You keep your head down, you keep working and keep performing, you'll be the person that lands that opportunity. And he was right. I kept my head down. I worked pretty hard. They offered me a position, and at the end of the day, the position ended up taking me over to Geneva, Switzerland for a little while. So looking for that chaos wasn't what I tried to do, but I also tried to embrace the idea that chaos does happen. And it helps me realize chaos ends. But those that can manage their way through and organize that chaos more effectively, usually things happen better for them.

And as a Treasury finance guy, you've probably got a real bent towards trying to sort out, grab it, right? What can we do? What can we do? And you're saying that with that cash that's coming at you, are you always trying to sort out, or do you just have to take a backseat, or how have you dealt with that over the years?

That's a great question. Because if you think about cash and treasury and accounting and finance, that's Almost exactly what you're doing all the time is putting order to the chaos or putting order to the disorder. And that's a good objective and that's what you're trying to do all the time. I always looked at accounting and finance this way. I did a finance degree, not an accounting degree and there's no disrespect to either side. I kind of look at accounting as what's happened up to today and I do a little bit of future stuff in the accounting but most of it's what's happened and what's to today now look at finance as being that handoff, what's happening today, what's going to happen in the future. And so as a result, my chaos or my disorder is kind of forward looking typically. Whereas some of my accounting peers, their chaos and disorder is what's happened. They're kind of bringing it into understanding of what's happening today. Make sure we have a good understanding of what happened. So there's been multiple times in my career where you're faced with something that's completely unexpected. Like for example, when you're running risk management in the insurance part of treasury and you get called up from your head of security at the company that runs the security of the physical security and some of the other security and they start telling you about an employee that's a potential problem and it's such a problem that's a potential liability for the company. We need to inform our insurance providers about it. Those are the kind of things that as a finance person it's got more HR related issues with it. But now here you are thrown into that mix because you're managing the policy for your insurance. But it's just one kind of strange little example that if you don't embrace that chaos or the strange stuff that happens or even the non strange, but it's going to happen anyway. Items that are just kind of random. If you can't embrace that, it's very hard to move forward in your career. Very hard to move forward. Find a way to embrace that, find a way to solve it, get the solutions right. You know, there's no, like Thomas Sowell always says, there's only trade offs, there's no solutions, there's just trade offs. And so you got to find that right and appropriate trade off.

That'll be one of our quotes of the show. Embrace the chaos. And then you embrace that and then you made the move to tenfold, you know, talk us through why and you've got some really interesting moves. We spoke about this before the show that you really some. I mean this could be a literature two hour show but we've got to, you know, go through. But how come you made the move or what happened?

Tenfold Story actually started out at Iomega. When I was at Iomega it was shortly after Iomega had really done its big climb and Iomega was minting millionaires with its stock quite regularly. And I was too late and too small down the totem pole to get me that million dollar mint out of Iomega. But at any rate, one of the outside auditors they brought in from a non outside firm. So it was not our direct auditor but somebody else came in. His name was Win and super nice guy. Think the world will win. So funny. When I first met him I shaking his hand and the first thing he says to me, are you an I Omega millionaire? I'm like what? Because well, everybody here is right. You are too, right? I'm like no. But we started joking. He was helping out in something with the FP and a group and we started talking more and more and started having interactions and then he left from his project was over and about three or four months went by, maybe even about six months to a year went by and I get a call from him, he says, hey, I'm at Tenfold. This place is amazing. It's a bunch of Oracle people. We've jumped off with creating our own universal application that develops big large scale software. It's really amazing. They're looking for a Treasury person. I'm telling them you're the guy, you should do this. And I said, well I appreciate that Wynne, but I've kind of got a good spot here. I really like Iomega. There's good things happening for me. Oh, you got to do this. And I went interviewed with the Tenfold team and I told them no, actually I just didn't like what they were trying to offer for me. And I didn't quite buy in some of the hype that I was hearing about the Tenfold at the time. Well then I started talking to more people and they called me again and asked me to come back and talk with them again. And I just couldn't get over how many smart people were at Tenfold, like absolutely brilliant people. Unreal. What was there? The talent there was incredible. And so one of my other things, what I always like to tell people is associate with people that are smarter than you because that makes you smarter, right? To me it does. I don't like being when I walk into the room, I love being the dumbest person in the room. That's a good thing, actually, because that means you're in the right room, in my opinion. Yeah, you always keep pushing, always keep stretching. So it was great to be able to join Tenfold in that regard. Fantastic situation at Tenfold. When I first got there, it was a rocket ship. It was going crazy. They were landing some of the largest Fortune 500 companies as software clients. It was an amazing situation. Part of the thing that I do in cash management, though, is forecasting. And I've developed a unique bottoms up and top down forecasting models that kind of like an MBA in a box, if you will. In fact, they came from Rob Simmons, and then I took them and adapted them to fit my needs. And I started running those cash forecasting models. And the more I ran them, the more I got concerned about what was happening with Tenfold in the next six to 12 months. I kept getting some of the feedback from some of our team, and I'll talk about that in a minute. That kind of told me I wasn't in line with what the actual forecast for the company were. Well, here I am running investor relations and treasury, so I'm the outside voice for the company as well. And so I'm starting to get a conflict that my forecasting is not matching up with the corporate forecast. And then I keep going a little bit further, a little bit further, and move a couple more months down, a couple more months down. And unfortunately, I proved to be right. That wasn't what I wanted to prove, but that's what ended up happening. And we went from being a rocket ship to being in trouble pretty quickly from a cash standpoint. And that creates some unique environments. And we talked a little bit earlier about this, but when you are put into the fire, you're either forged or you're melted. And what happened with me in that situation was I pretty much lived at the company for several months. I mean, I rarely went home at night. I was in the same clothes for a couple days sometimes. A lot of us were. I mean, I'm not the only one. There's a lot of people jumping on there and rowing as hard as we possibly could. And we went through some pretty tough times to the point that even I mentioned this earlier. Some of the people that we had as our vendors, they were coming to our office physically and ringing the desk, the front desk, and asking for me personally to pay them because I'm the person that was in charge of payables and receivables and getting the money going in and out. You learn a lot when you have those collectors and you have your debt facility providers on top of you pretty much every day. And you test your team too. I had a good friend of mine that went to Thunderbird with me, that was working with me at the time. We went through quite a bit, getting everything, all the information available, running cash forecasts almost hourly, it seemed like, I mean, probably once or twice a day for sure. And that really tests who you are. And so, although I was only at tenfold for a short period of time because of the trouble that it had, it taught me an immense amount of stuff. So I always say to people, I know things might be bad where you're at, but look for what you're going to be able to learn. Embrace that chaos a little bit from the downside too. It'll teach you things that you will never be able to find at a positive story. You have to have these experiences. It really helps who you are. And so, again, difficult. But wow, I wouldn't change it for the world. As far as what I learned, it was amazing.

And you did a year there. And what then led to it was it went pop.

It's going to keep coming back to my mentor, Rob Simmons. We were actually talking one day, and this is funny. It was right when chat boxes were becoming kind of popular. My chat box popped up and he says, hey, how you doing? I said, oh, man, it's tough. He goes, I can tell from your public disclosure, it's probably a bit difficult. He said, do you want to come meet me? And I said, yeah. He goes, let's go to lunch. I'd like to talk to you about an opportunity. So this kind of comes to one of my things that I always like to say to people. If you really work hard and you put your head down and you learn things and you do things that are difficult and you embrace those difficulties in a way that others can't, and you provide those solutions and alternatives that others don't. Or they actually even ignore the idea because it's so difficult. If you have the ability to take that difficult concept, create an alternative or a solution to make it work, you get recognized, you become a trusted advisor. And that trusted advisor is kind of a nice status because then people know you're going to be relied upon. When you have a difficult thing in front of you, then opportunity finds you. You don't have to go find opportunity a lot of times. And that's kind of what I was seeing happening When Rob was calling me back and saying, I have a new job, I have a new place, and this place needs somebody like you to come in and help us. And I went to a company called Consonus, which was a data center company that a couple different data centers. And Rob was a cfo. And he brought me in because we were going to try and take that company and do an IPO or spin it out from an investor, private equity standpoint, whatever, from the current shareholders. And the current shareholder was the local gas utility company in Salt Lake City. Great story. A lot of good people there had three different data centers. We're trying to grow it, get a bunch of different people in it. And here's where chaos comes in again.

Follows you around, doesn't it? Like a bad smell.

It does. Maybe it's me. Maybe you're right, Mike.

He's cursed.

So within about three or four months of being there, Rob was a cfo. He had the opportunity to go somewhere different, and he went to E Trade and he left. And so now here's my mentor leaving me, and I'm like, oh, that's kind of bad. But I'm going to learn as much as I can while he's gone. And we had a great controller, another guy named Rob, Rob Muir, who's just a super, super guy as well. So Rob Muir and I kind of took up the finance thing together. They didn't place a CFO in charge. Well, while we're doing that, I'm also in charge of insurance. And one day, this is right before the Olympics in Salt Lake City. And at the time, they're going to get mad at me if I say this, but it was right after 9, 11. So all of the different cities and counties in Utah had to send a report to the state and to the Olympic Committee and say, hey, here's some potential terrorist targets in our city. And one of the places where we had our data center, it was like the only thing in that city that the city said, well, I guess that's a target, because we don't even know what's in there. It's a data center. There's probably something valuable in there. So we were listed as a target. Well, I was actually in Arizona with our operations person, and we were talking with a potential big customer helping them build their own data center. And we get a call while we're on our way to the airport to come back home, and it's his head of operations at the facility at one of the facilities. He says, yeah, our facility blew up. And we're like, data centers don't blow up. What are you talking about? He says, no, it blew up. The windows blew out. Inside walls have blown up. The data center room floor is chaos. There's pipes hanging out the ceilings. And we're like, you got to be kidding. Well, add insult to injury, because that was designated as a terrorist target potential. We were in the airport coming home. Still, we hadn't got there yet. The FBI there, the CIA is there. Every organization you can imagine from a defense standpoint is descending on this data center. Turns out what happened was they were doing regular maintenance work with a contractor on H VAC Mechanical Systems, and he did something that actually set off the fire alarm. There's a countdown that happens, and if you don't know exactly why the countdown is happening, you can't turn off the countdown. That's the protocol. So they let the fire energen system disperse the energen gas into the data center. But unfortunately, during the design and build of that, they built it incorrectly. And instead of releasing over the period of five to ten minutes, all this pressurized gas released in seconds, and basically from the inside out, the building just went boom.

Yeah.

So it ended up being kind of an interesting situation to come back. You know, we land, we drive down the facility, and there's devastation. And you're like, wow. Fortunately, we didn't lose any systems. Everybody's Internet was still running. All of our clients were still running. Everything worked as a data center was supposed to, which is great because the base isolation, the redundancy. But going through that event and watching that happen and then being involved with the rebuild and being involved with bringing new customers in during the rebuild and seeing success happen, it taught me a lot more about how closely related treasury finance insurance is to operations, really. We're an asset and a friend, and we're also sometimes the police. I don't like that, Asher. But a lot of time people say that finance is the police. I saw real closely and real quickly, it's integral. They work together. And if they don't work together, it's going to fail. So we were able to rebuild it, get it going, ended up doing great. They ended up selling the data center business I left there. But it was a great situation to learn a lot in a short period of time. Again.

Well, in fact, I might ask this now, why is Utah such an amazing center for treasury and finance? And you've got these amazing companies. You've spent so much of your career there and around there, and why that's.

A great question because I've always loved Utah. I grew up here, obviously. But that kind of is a little bit of biased. But let's separate the bias of growing up in Utah. You've got a unique situation here. Number one, let's talk about the environmental issue in Utah from a time zone standpoint. This is one of the most advantageous time zones for doing international business. Because in the morning you get all the folks like yourself in England and in Europe and all that stuff. You got an hour or two overlap at the end of the day here in Utah, 4 o' clock to 6 o' clock in the afternoon, you've got the morning in Asia. So it's a kind of a neat little time zone to capture front and back almost pretty much all around the globe. On top of that, another thing from an environmental standpoint is from a recreation standpoint, it's hard to find anything more amazing than what's available in the Utah infrastructure. Right? I mean, we've got the mountains for all the recreation, for skiing and hiking and fishing and biking and all the things you'd ever imagine. Some amazing mountains you can see. Then you can go to southern Utah and have this desert landscape that's just unworldly. It's unbelievable. And the mountain biking and rafting and boating and things down there are just unbelievable. So from a recreational standpoint, it's a good draw. Then let's add on another layer that's a little bit interesting. It stems from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. When you're sending people out in their 19 to 22 year old age, guys and gals out throughout the world to proselyte about the church, a couple things happen. They go out and they make connections with people in different parts of the world. They learn their languages, they learn their culture, then they come back to the United States and a lot of them go to byu, Brigham Young University or the University of Utah or Utah State or Weber State, the colleges here in Utah. And as a result you have a disproportionate number of people speaking a second language and having a deep understanding of a culture that you don't necessarily see in different parts of the United States. So Utah has a pretty unique environment. On top of that, it's a very industrious culture. People like to work hard, they're very hard working. So you put all that mix together, you get a good hearted people that are family oriented but have all that mix coming and it's, it's a pretty good formula, I think for Success.

Yeah. And then you. So coming back to you and you know, this was another move, actually, ID, with AMI and things. But there's again, there's a theme IT and technology. It's a theme of your, you know, your current role, but also your. Your career history. Is that just a pure personal interest? You're a very technically gifted person and things like that. I'm not going to say techie, coder and all that stuff, but looking through here, you just, you identify with the products or just see the development or what's the situation there?

I think there's a little bit of that. I like the identification of it. I like the newness of it. So in technology, there's always something new. It's kind of like that chaos thing, right?

Yeah.

I don't like polishing the silver. If you're going to bring me in to sit down and polish your silver and put it back in and the next day come and polish the next item of silver and put it back on the shelf. That doesn't intrigue me from a job standpoint. Right. Bringing something where the product, the service, the technology is unique and changing all the time, the environment, the ecosystem is changing all the time, so that I can come in and embrace those changes, those difficulties, the chaos, if you will. And I was unfortunate. When I left Consonas, I actually got called back to Iomega and what happened is they were having trouble with foreign exchange. They had a unique environment where they were moving money around, robining it around, doing stuff with. Caused them to do a little trip up, unfortunately, in their foreign exchange process. Well, I'm the person that set up their foreign exchange program before I left. And so when it failed, the people that were still there that knew me said, let's call Wade and see if he can come fix this. And it was a new CFO I didn't know, but I knew the controller and the assistant controller really well. They reached out to me and said, hey, would you consider coming up here again? So I came back to Iomega for a short period of time. And at that time, there was a big, huge change in the laws around dividends to your shareholders. So as a result, we had money all over the world. Most of our cash was actually sitting outside the United States. And so in addition to coming in and help resolve the foreign exchange problem and fixing the processes and the things to make sure our hedging was working the way it's supposed to, we had to collect cash from around the globe. Almost a billion dollars in cash from Multiple different sources. And then we paid out over a billion dollars in cash when we did dividends out to our shareholders because of the new changes in the laws. So you had this unique situation where I went back, so I knew everybody, I knew the product, knew the environment. I handled the investor relations too. And at the same time, I'd never had this global cash consolidation effort and global cash payout effort within a month period. It was a great learning experience around moving cash, appropriately moving it to where you needed it, and then getting it out through the programs you need to for distributions to shareholders. And just learned a great deal about how to move that cash around as a result of that. It's an intriguing process. It sounds simple on paper, but the actual steps to move that through was quite an interesting thing. Moving it through different intermediary banks, getting through different countries to move to this country, to get back to the United States. It was kind of a unique process.

And also that was 18 years ago. So that was still. What was it like dealing with the technology now, particularly based on Treasury Suite and what you guys do now? Was it a bit clunky? How do you do it?

Yeah, so that's kind of the impetus for doing Treasury Suite, but I'll talk about that in a minute. I mean, back then I was looking at treasury workstations and tools for treasury people at great length. I mean, because when I first started at Iomega, one of the tools that we had was an Excel spreadsheet that came from Oracle. So Rob was at Oracle. He brought a Treasury Daily Cash tool positioning system in Excel for us to use. And it was fantastic. It was amazing at the time, but it had some of the limitations that Excel had. Right. So it had like 20 tabs, and when you clicked on one tab, that tab may or may not work. And sometimes when you added a line, that would create trouble for the rest of the spreadsheet. So had all these quirky things involved with it. And the gentleman that passed it off to me, his name is Kurt, who I haven't talked to in a very long time. I probably should reach out to him. Great treasury cash management mentor. Understood the cash management process better than almost anybody I've ever worked around, except for my partner, Matt Brimhall. And Kurt was fantastic, but he was really clear, this is Excel. There are problems and limitations with Excel. So then that turned us into the let's look and see what's out there. So I started investigating systems back when Sun Guard dominated the treasury workstations. And then at the time SAP and Oracle were coming up with their own treasury modules and there was a couple of little small ones you didn't know about. And we started looking at them and these themes ran true back then and they still ring true today. Unfortunately, although the technology has leaped a little bit and is a little bit better, the things that we found were this. Most of these systems for treasury were designed for Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 companies. That doesn't mean they don't work for other companies, smaller companies, but what it means is they're overbuilt for the smaller to medium sized businesses. When I say smaller, I'm talking several hundred million. I say a medium, it's several billion in size, right? That's the medium sized businesses to me. And these workstations that are out there then and that are out there today, they've never really met that issue. They're still overbuilt, they're powerful, they do amazing stuff. But if I'm sitting at a couple billion dollar company and I just need to see cash visibility on my 20 or 30 banks that I have, I don't want to have to navigate through multiple menus and screens to get to that information. Just give me that information. Why do I have to navigate for anything? And so we saw that over and over again and I had the fortune of working with my co founder back at Iomega and was lucky enough to hire him into the Treasury Group and bring him in. And he's just an amazing data analytic person, understands data like nobody else's business, understands systems like you can't believe and just likes to roll up his sleeves and get into the details. And so did I. And so that was kind of nice situation. When we were evaluating systems back then, we kept coming to these same conclusions. Wow, they're so overbuilt. We don't need 80% of what's in the system. We're paying for the stuff we're not even going to be able to use or need to use. And on top of that, only one over two of us are going to know how to use this. The other people that need this information, we'll have to get it out and give it to them just like we're doing right now in Excel. So it just didn't make sense to us. And so we pondered on this for quite a while. I ended up joining AMI Semiconductor up in Idaho and one of the oldest semiconductor companies there is that moved to Idaho for different reasons. Kind of some of the reasons I talked about Utah, you know, attract talent, engineering Talent in certain areas and tax basis as well as I was fortunate enough to bring Matt up there. And we started talking even further about bringing in a Treasury workstation. I had the SAP workstation for treasury paid for. It was already part of the implementation they had. We took and evaluated it really heavily and said, can we bring this in and start using it? We came to the conclusion even though it's paid for, it's still going to take way too long to implement and we're not going to use most of the system. We don't want to go through that hassle. And then we'd have to have a dedicated SAP person that just focused. We couldn't do anything. We'd have to have them available if there's a problem. And that just didn't make sense to us. And so we struggled with that for quite a while, obviously from Iomega up to AMI even. And when AMI got acquired by On Semiconductor, we were both offered positions down in Arizona. And that's not the process. We're to graduate school. But we thought this is the time, this is an opportunity for us to take and hopefully change the way the user experience for treasury people can be around seeing their daily cash.

You and I spoke before the show about Pocatello, Idaho. Yeah, that. That center of treasury talent across the world was not, you know, exactly. It was, you know, so you've got. And again, some of the people listening today, you know, some might be based in Chicago, great place to go. New York, great. And then you've got Pocatello. And that not being negative, what I'm doing is I'm actually going to say, how did you sell that to bright young things of Treasury? And they're like, right, this is, you know, that's your competition. How did you beat those guys? When you're attracting those people, a couple things jump out.

When I look at places for opportunities for me and it's most importantly founded in what is my family's needs, what do I want my family to do. At the time I had young kids and I was looking for them to have an experience that was kind of like my experience growing up where the backcountry is part of your life, you're always outside doing something, up in the mountains, interacting. And when the AMI opportunity came up, Idaho is kind of like Utah on steroids in some respect because there's not as many people. So you have a lot more wilderness, a lot more open space. So that attracted me. On top of that, the people at AMI were pretty brilliant. There's Some pretty smart good people there to work around. And that's another thing I said earlier. I like to be around those kind of people. So when I joined, I didn't realize I was going to have to be recruiting people to Idaho. That was a shortcoming. When I got there, I didn't think about the long term ramifications of having to hire people when I took over the Treasury's function because I started up there doing investor relations and took over treasury right after when the treasurer left. When I started doing that, I realized a couple things. How do I retain the talent that we have? And it was clear pretty quickly that they're great people, really smart, and they've gone off and did some pretty amazing things. They were restless and they wanted to spread their wings and do more things. So we helped them and they ended up moving and going to somewhere else. But then I had that requirement, the chaos to bring somebody on and attract them to Pocatello, Idaho. And for the most part, when you think of Pocatello, Idaho, which you don't, you think of it as a place to get gas on your way to Yellowstone from Salt Lake City. That's why you go to Pocatello, Idaho.

Yeah.

And there's nothing there. It's like 40 at the time, probably 50,000, 60,000 people. It's an ugly little area. In fact, I don't really like the town itself from a setting standpoint. The town is kind of difficult. There's no shopping, there's no dining, there's no nightlife. There's none of that really. There's a university there, but that's okay. I'm not a university person anymore. But the mountains and everything within about an hour to two hour drive is incredible. You got Sun Valley, Yellowstone, Jackson Hole, Salt Lake City. So when we started looking for talent, I was fortunate enough to convince Matt to come up with me to work up there. Probably because of the family area or ideas and partly because of the ability to do stuff together because we knew we're going to take on things beyond just ami. We also brought in other candidates and we brought them in and tried to tour them around and show them what's going on in Idaho, show them what's happening with the company. And one of the things that kind of stuck out when we're doing that recruiting was the people were interested first and foremost in what's in Idaho because they weren't educated at all with what's in Idaho. Idaho is a small state for the most part, so that was a curiosity bump. If they were at all interested. They had to have some interest in learning about Idaho. Otherwise, they didn't even apply. Then when we filtered them out and they came and they started visiting, they were surprised at a couple things. Number one, how ugly that part of Idaho can be, because it pretty much, it's a high desert. It's kind of ugly in some respects, but, you know, just outside of town, there's beautiful trees and it's amazing. But for a little bit, they're landing on the airplane in the airport there in Pocatello, and they're coming to the office going, this place is ugly. And some of them had already made the decision before they even came to the office, and that's okay. And then as we talked a little bit more and we were able to share time with them, and I ended up making it so that I could take time in the afternoon, I could take them and drive them up to the mountains and start showing them. These are some of the things why our engineers like to live here and why you could probably like to live here as well. And that started to intrigue them a little bit. And then I started introducing them to the team and some of the players on the executive leadership and some of the players in finance. We had some really, really good people in finance as well. And that helped when they were able to kind of say, all right, I get it, it's remote, it's not a desirable place to live. But, wow, the cost of living is insane. The people are really nice, they're really smart, and the setting is going to do something that I've never had to do. And I liken it back to this. When I do investor relations for all the company I've worked for, I spend a lot of time traveling to the money centers. Chicago, New York, San Francisco and the like, Seattle, Boston, whatever. It's really intriguing when I'm sitting there talking to the investors, the sell side or the buy side, we're having the conversations. They're telling me before and after the meat of the conversation about the company. They're telling me about their upcoming ski or snowboard trip and how excited they are they're going to go to this part of Salt Lake City and they're going to go to Park City, they're going to whatever, or they're going to Jackson Hole, and they're talking about this and they're telling me all the prep they do, and that's their one trip per year to spend a week in the snow. And I kind of laugh and I don't laugh at them or for them, I say, wow, that's what I do every weekend.

Yeah, that's my weekend.

It's kind of a unique experience.

Okay. So I hope you enjoyed it thus far. Obviously, exactly what Wade thought of Pocatello, Idaho. But I think he's, you know, I don't think the residents will mind because I think he got some really amazing experience there and tempted some great guys to join his team. Well, we'll move on to next week's episode. Listen out for that. Hope you enjoy it and look forward to connecting with you guys soon. Really, thanks.