Flexibility and problem solving as a Treasury consultant with Shawn McCarthy

Foreign.

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 in this week's show. Delighted to be joined by Sean McCarthy. Sean has been a corporate treasury professional for over 25 years working at a variety of companies right the way through, from PLCs to law firms, private equity backed spin offs. So she's got some really great stories to share with you guys today. Sean, I've given a slight taste of some of your career path. I know we spoke before the show, you're like God, are we going to go right the way back? I think it's fascinating because I think you know, how you discovered treasury and then you went on from there is actually really going to be of interest to the listeners. So over to you as always, it's your show. How did you first start in treasury and discover the wonderful world?

Strangely enough, I found treasury in university in college. As you can tell from my accent, I am not English, I am British, I am American. I was trying to become a doctor and hated my science courses at university. My roommate was taking finance courses in the business school and it sounded really interesting what she was doing. So I checked out a couple of her books and I switched from pre med to business with a finance specialty. But finance, what's different is finance in the US is Treasury. However finance in the UK is accounting.

Yeah.

So it's totally different outlook. So when I say I graduated with a degree in business with a finance specialization, everybody thinks I'm accountant here. And I have to explain, no, no. In the US I find that in the US our Treasury is a structure career path from university through Treasuryship or CFO or whatever. Whereas in the UK a lot of times it's accountants that take a further education and become go into a Treasury career path. But anyhow, I started as a Treasury assistant many moons ago in America and ended up after several years doing international treasury for Universal Studios in la. They were acquired by Seagrams, the drinks company and the treasurer of Seagrams said we'd love to keep you. You can either come and work for us in New York or we're just opening shared service center in London. And strangely enough I had gone to London for a two week holiday that previous summer. This was like autumn of 96 and loved it had two weeks of terrific weather.

Oh my God, we fooled you. Yes. Those two weeks we slipped them in. It was like, oh, this place is perfect. What does everyone go on about? The rain and the cold.

I don't understand this thing about all the rain. So I said, oh, London sounds wonderful. So I moved to London. So it was a corporate relocation with Seagrams. That's where I started my Treasure career in the UK and stayed there for about two and a half years. But Sea Grams was very acquisition oriented. And finally when they acquired Polygram, which is quite a large acquisition, the only person who would come over to Seagrams from the Polygram group was my equivalent, which at that point was about a deputy treasurer, assistant treasurer level. So I was like, well, I see the handwriting on the wall now, there can't be two of us. So we went through a process, but I was made redundant, basically. And then, strangely enough, I had spoken at the Euro Finance Conference the year before that. And so when I put my CV out in the marketplace to see if I could find work in the uk, the treasurer of Kingfisher saw it, remembered me from my speech in my talk, I guess, about setting up shared services center and said, oh, wow, I've got a maternity cover. I liked her, she was interesting. Let's get her in to talk to her. And that is the beginning of my interim role.

I think that was with Sheila. Was it? Was it Sheila?

The original? Yeah, exactly. That was really interesting and educational. And from there I went on to several other permanent and interim roles. My whole thought process is I really like to bring sort of order out of chaos. I like project work, I like big projects or multiple projects that you're working on at the same time. So interim work really fit my skill set very well. Or a permanent role when it's with a very acquisition oriented company or a PE house or something like that, where there's multiple transactions and there's a lot going on and you're trying to manage several different things at once, that's when I'm the most happy.

So walk us through perhaps from the Kingfisher days, maybe that good interim in some ways, maybe explain to the listeners what you consider to be a good interim business. Come in, make loads of changes, stuff like. Or is it just look after, do the knitting, keep everyone happy. Thanks very much. Turn the handle and then apply that to some of the roles.

No, I basically like Beth when I come in, basically drive transformational change, make everything work like a Swiss watch, hand it over or train whomever is going to do the function after me and move on to my next role.

Why is that so important to you? Why do you enjoy that?

Because I don't like to be bored and doing the same thing every day or generating the same reports every day or every week or every month or whatever and sort of business as usual. It's just not that interesting to me. I've done it a lot and I prefer the sort of rock and roll of multiple transactions and things happening and I just don't like to be bored. And generally the day to day work after a while seems to be boring. So after Kingfisher I went into KPMG thinking, well, I'll be a consultant at kpmg.

Yeah, Made lots of changes and lots.

Of different places, lots of different projects at different ages or whatever. And that worked for a couple years, but then the market weakened a bit, you know, there was. So KPMG decided to leak their treasury function. So made redundant again. Then I went out and did some work with PE houses with Carlisle Group and Vetco Gas Technology. Carlyle Group is probably the largest PE house in the world. It depends on what measure you use, but that's okay.

We actually had the previously the treasurer of Carlisle, Dana Leidhold, who's now over at Peloton, Wonderful lady. And then we recently had Julie Fabris from Britax and she's been through a number of private equity backed groups and things. And we were talking to her about, you know, and I threw it to her, is it about cash? Cash, cash. And she was like, well, yes, but no, it's, you know, you know, cash is king. But then once you've sorted out the king, right, what else do we need to do?

And then the information flows going correctly so we can see what's happening in our transaction. You know, that type of thing. Most of the time I'm called in. Yeah, well, people want my skill set when it's like two or three things. The company has grown so fast, organically or large organically, they realize that what they've been doing in the past isn't working and they get things in a better state of play or there's been a huge transaction and they either are hiving out a portion of the company for sale and they need to set up a whole separate treasury function, or they've merged or acquired a large transaction and they realize, oh my gosh, our footprint is not the same anymore, we're in places we've never been before and we need to do things differently. I don't know how we're going to merge the cash of the two legal entities. How's that going to work. But that's when they call me in and I figure that out. So Carlyle and Vetco are basically were PE transactions where I set up a Treasury from scratch and there was no treasury or there was just counting function that reconciled the bank account manage their cash more closely because generally with the PE transaction there's a huge debt service. I would go in, set up a Treasury system generally and make sure that they can get the reporting on a daily basis that they need for their transaction.

When you're going into these places and you show up day one, have you got your notebook, your checklist? And again this is for the treasury guys listening out there that they might be in a similar situation or they're facing a spin off themselves. Now they might have a pre existing treasury but sometimes they say well this is great and you use Kyriva, use this system, whatever, but now you're spinning out, you're not allowed to use the same system for segregation. So what do you do? What's the SHAUN checklist?

Well, generally when I go into a client I say what are your problems? You know, what, why do you know through the interview process why they hired you? So what are the problems that you want to solve? And then I dig into the existing treasury or the existing function as it is and say okay, you have this and this, but these are the other five things that you need. And in order to get those five things, you probably need a new treasury system. Either you need your own version of the existing treasury system if it's fit for purpose and many times not, you know, and a historical thing that's just sort of if it ain't broke, don't fix it kind of thing. So then I go out and do a search and selection, then put it to the board or the CFO or the treasurer, whomever, the approval, whoever, whoever has the control of the budget. And then I, you know, I put it to them, get approval and then contract negotiation and then move on to implementation. And by using the treasury system that's how I solve most of the other problems. There are other things like documentation that has to be done that you know, I mean, but it's really dependent upon what industry they're in and what their needs are for that industry in order to, you know, and what their funding process is. A recent client of mine, Deliveroo, it's all private equity funded. So it's like they don't have to worry about debt service or anything. And other companies were highly leveraged and they had to worry about the debt service and there was quarterly covenants and how do we calculate those and what does the report look like and all that kind of, it really depends on what the client thinks they want. And then after I review what they have, what I think they want and we come to a marriage of those two to a skill data set and then I go on and deliver the.

Combined process and looking overall. I was going to ask a question which you actually asked. I was going to say when you go into a typical client, is it cash or is it risk or is it the staff? But as you say, you've answered that because it's. Different companies have different pressures and different things. But are there any themes out there? Is it a lack of management, lack of investment in treasury or is it a lack of awareness?

Or lack of awareness or a lack of treasury knowledge? You know, because you can do treasury badly and no one's going to fire you because they're not know that you're doing it badly. They're not going to know. But I'm called in like when they had a big FX loss and they're like, we know how we've been doing it in the past and obviously that isn't working right, so we need to do it better. Or, you know, when there's a transaction and the scope of your treasury or your, you know, the function is going to change materially, they realize that nobody's gonna, they don't have the knowledge base in order to make this happen. This is what happened with the two law firms that I set up in treasury from scratch. This was, one was the US law firm that had acquired a UK based law firm and they realized, oh God, you know, how are we going to merge these two entities? They had different underlying systems. They had, I mean, not treasury system, just accounting systems. There are two law firm systems in the world and one had one and one had the other as a classic.

So, so how did you. Right, so you got that, you've just, you sat there, you've gone your head in your hands going, right, okay, so we've got these two opposing firms, let's do this, do that. So, you know, because they are, you know, this is, this one, this is, and they, they probably don't want to talk to each other because like in.

Any acquisition situation, you know, you take your guidance from the person who's paying your bill.

The acquirer. Yeah.

And the acquiring firm is generally riding her. Now, strangely enough, for one of those law firms, I was hired by the UK law firm who realized, oh my who the American law firm was asking them for things they couldn't provide. And so they brought me in and said, okay, we've got an expert now that's going to provide the things you want from us. And then I ended up actually going to America, to Chicago where this law firm was, and saying, okay, this is what I can provide. How do you want that to merge with your reporting or whatever? Do you want to keep it totally separate? One thing I will say about law firms, which is really cool, is that all their data is in one database. So if you can find the right IT person, you can get a dow of all of their cash flows by currency for the last year. And that can be your budget. I mean, they have budgets, but it is very high level and things move around a lot. You can get the underlying data you need to compare against the actual data that's coming in for the treasury system through their system. That's not generally the same with corporates because corporates grow many times by acquisition and they just bolt on bid and they use Hyperion to do the consolidation. So it's like, oh, well, there's an ERP system here and there's an ERP system here & there's an ERP system here- they're never going to communicate with each other or if they are, it's like in three or four years time. So it's like, oh, I've had corporates that grow very quickly via acquisition that had nine or 10 different ERP systems underneath. And one company's SAP is not another company's SAP. And so there's not a lot of combinations. So you have to, you have to use whatever they can give you. Law firms, they can give you a whole lot, you know.

Well, that's what I was going to ask is actually I've recruited the treasurers for a couple of law firms and actually what's been interesting is, you know, both of them came from corporates commercial backgrounds and then, and everyone might think that law firms are commercial groups, sorry, they're corporate groups, but they're not, they're commercial groups. And actually what's interesting is that the getting to know them and the treasurers that then I placed in the light. Cheers, Mike. In the first couple of months go, wow. So just describe, if you would, from a treasurer's point of view how the dynamics of it, because you've got this wealth of experience and said how you found that the dynamics of a law firm contrast with that of the typical court like a Seagram or you know, Willis was it? You know, how does it, how's it different?

They can be very, very large and they can be very multinational. Really. They're silos. You know, you have to deal with the silos and you can find that in corporates as well. You know, I mean the data that. But the thing is, is that at some point the organization has to come together. So I mean, I can go speak to the head of the commercial arm of the law firm, but he's more into billable hours. He doesn't really care about the details underneath that. That's what the accountants deal with. He's all about maximizing the billable hours. And so when I say well okay, what do you think your billable hours are going to be for the next year? He's like, well, I mean that is proprietary information that he doesn't want to give me. Why? For law firms it was always better to go back into their own databases and pull the actual data from last year and use that as your forecast and then maybe overlay that with whatever you can get a hands on for the forecast for the current year and do some kind of hybrid or just use last year because that's a good measure in most cases, you know what I mean? And then if you see that last year, no one can argue about it and then you can see what last year's exposures were on the foreign exchange side. And obviously if you had those exposures last year, you're going to have those exposures this year unless it's changed dramatically. So you can go to the head of the commercial division or the head of the banking division or whatever and say, well, this is what you had last year. Do you expect an incremental increase or are you going into a new area that you worked in prior? Can you just give me a little flavor for what you think this year or this coming year is going to fall out at?

Yeah.

What the growth might be, you adjust accordingly.

Yeah.

Then you pass back how you've adjust last year and get their sign off.

Hopefully now you might have a view on this or not, I don't know. So Mark, a friend of mine, I placed him, took him from a normal insurance company, you know, so typical with. Yeah, well actually more, more so the, the drivers of the business. What was funny, I placed him from that what we call normal assurance. And again for the listeners, this is, you know, household insurance, car insurance, you know, so typical stuff. And then I moved into a life insurance company thinking that'd be great. And we then had lunch a Couple of months later. And I said, how is it? He said, it's just weird.

I said, why is he different?

But he goes to the, you know, not even the brokers, but to the actuaries and they say. He said, what's our profits going to be? You know, because he's trying to do these cash flow forecasts and everything else. Then they say, is it going to be a tornado next week?

Yeah, I know.

And he said, well, I don't know.

They really can't tell you because it's weather determined, it's acquisition determined. I mean, all the things are unknown, so you have to go by whatever. I mean, I will say that generally insurance companies do forecast very well and you know, there may be swings and roundabouts or whatever, but they have a forecast. Law firms don't have it in the same way as a corporate does. Yeah, but insurance, most insurance companies operate much more like a corporate. But as you say, life insurance companies are totally different from sort of retail insurance companies. And so this is the thing, the underlying business can be very different.

It was funny because again, when I got into it with him over beer and stuff and we were talking much more about the subjectivity rather than the objectivity, and I was like, no, you're meant to be objective. But what it was, you know, they were going back 10 years and then look at. And then they said, subjectly, do we think this many more people, you know, mortality rates, do we think this is going to. And it was much more subjective about the world and world events rather than.

Physical happening today or tomorrow. Well, I mean, look at the pandemic. Yeah, we're looking back to the Spanish flu. Believe me, A lot of actuaries are looking at those Spanish flu numbers and multiplying it by the world population and trying to figure out where they might end up.

Well, I don't think we mentioned the Spanish flu on our podcast today, but that's really deblum in the depths. That's it. We'll take that one.

The only measure that we have that makes any sense.

So then talk us through some of the, you know, we've got this wealth of other. And people see this on your LinkedIn profile that we'll put in the show notes later. But as they look through then, you know, perhaps pick out maybe a couple of other examples of different treasuries and some of the different issues you faced and how you've got to, you know, this is that sort of problem and answer that you see in a magazine site or something, you know, so give US a couple of other examples.

Well, so moving on, I won't touch on the law firms anymore, but there was one where I was working for MISYS as a sort of a fill in because sometimes when two key members of treasury leave at the same time, one through maybe long term illness and the other through the a new job acquisition, the treasurer is like oh my God, who's going to keep the wheels on the bus kind of thing. So I've come in and helped done that. And when they don't have learned their system, when they don't have desk procedures of how to do the function, learn the function either through the person who's leaving or through the system provider if they have a Treasury management system and then document how to perform the function so that any reasonable person can pick up my desk procedures and do enough to keep the function going. I think every treasury should have some version of DES procedures because you don't want to have all the data up in one or two people's head and then when they get, you know, if they leave for any other reason, you know, the treasury is really in a bad place. So the MISYS thing was really strange because I did that for Misys as a plc. Then I went to a totally different company called Turaz that was in a similar market but then Touroz bought Misys. So I went back to MISYS again. So that was a very strange thing and I knew all the players so I was like oh hi, old home week, you know, and then, and then they become finaster after I left. So I mean that was an interesting thing. But in all cases it was trying to now when Torres bought Misys it's like okay, how do we meld these two very different entities? But theres really didn't have much of a Treasury so I stepped in and created the treasury within that and then I knew enough about Misys to merge the two and then you know, there was very capable people at that point on the MISYS side. So I just provided the linkage and then I went off to my next client. But another one that was really interesting for me was KCA Deutag which was up in Aberdeen if you can imagine it. I commuted to Aberdeen for a year.

Wow.

I get on the plane every Monday morning and I get on the plane to come home every Friday afternoon for a year and I never missed one flight. So you know, I had a lucky year. It was not that bad weather wise in Aberdeen that year.

So what did the group do? What did describe?

They actually construct and install Manage oil drilling platform. They brought me in because they had a very small treasury and it was all done on Excel and most of the information was in one or two people's brain, specifically one person. And when that person went on holiday, the rest of the team had a lot of trouble maintaining what he had created, the model he had created. They wanted to computerize it. So that's what they hired me to do, which was fine. And I started doing that and I went through a search and selection and started implementation of a Treasury system. Then you go to meetings to discuss the treasury system and then there are other topics that come up in the meetings. And then they were saying in the meetings they were having a great difficulty getting this far flung organization to do their cash forecasting appropriately and consolidating it at the company level. So I'm like, you know, the treasury management system can do that. Each one of the operations can upload or input their forecast or their new forecast into the treasury system and then it can be consolidated in your functional currency and in the currencies of all the underlying currencies of all the operations. They're like, it can. And I'm like, yeah. So I bought another module, bolted it onto the treasury system and basically installed that via webinars all over the world, you know, walk people through how to input their forecast on a monthly basis and or update their forecast from the budget. That worked really great. And then another problem that they had that I heard about in the meeting is that they had these huge intercompany balances because you can imagine it's lots of material. Part of the platform was built in uk, part of the platform was built in Germany, another part was built elsewhere. You know, then they had the institution installation costs and whatever, depending on what part of the world it was installed in. And I said, you know, there's a multi currency netting process that you can have on the treasury system that, you know, we could get the download from the ERP system and the whole thing and everybody would make one payment to whoever their parties are either receiving or paying and you can get rid of that in a week. And they're like, really? And I'm like, yeah. So that was another bolt on. So it's one of those things that you come in for what they hire you for and then you keep your eyes open and look around and see what other their other issues are and suggest solutions to those issues.

Made a couple of notes here just, you know, not to deep dive into technology because we do that some weeks and it's a rabbit hole that we then spend half an hour of the episode doing. But I'd rather just without you giving you necessarily, you know, we don't want it to be an advert fest for all the treasury system providers out there. But it sounds like you've seen, you've seen a whole host of them. Some of the good, some of the bad and some of the in betweens. But just when you look at them, you know, what is it that you, as a treasurer, you know, you've seen them, you've seen all of them and you know which ones are in your back pocket per size or stuff.

Yeah. The biggest determinant is cost. Right. So, you know, there are some that are inexpensive and terrible. There are some that are inexpensive and terrific.

Yeah.

There are some that are hugely expensive, but. Hugely expensive.

Yeah.

There are not a lot of companies in this world that. Well, you know, for an example, my last client had a 500,000 pound budget for the treasury management system because they really didn't know how much it was going to cost and that was including my cost and anybody they had to hire. So I went in and did it for less than 150,000. And so they're like, oh, great, we're on the budget.

Yeah, yeah.

So I'm like, you know, you don't need the $500,000. You're not GE, you don't need. And even GE many times doesn't need the £500,000. So it is. And the law firms did not want to spend much money on this. You know, this was not their entire focus. Their entire focus was billable hours.

Yeah, yeah.

So I found one that worked for them for 35,000, 50,000 for install and then 35,000 a year going forward.

Yeah.

So I mean, you know, it really depends on what the needs of the business are. Do they need just to see their balances? Do they need to just see their cash balances around the world and to do their cash position, are they going to hedge their exposures? If they are, then they're going to need a port, you know, be able to manage those FX contracts or whatever. So you sort of get a laundry list of what their needs are and then you go out and see. And I always look at three providers. You can see very clearly if some of the providers can't provide what you need.

It's an also weird one. You know, we've attended many Euro finance and international other conferences as well. Well, and we'll show up there and then one year there'll be 15 providers. And then there'll be a massive period of consolidation. Then there'll be seven. You know, it's like, well, that's the.

Sun Guard and Wall street, you know, all the little providers. I mean, one provider had went through a divorce and had to sell his company. And that was Sungard, picked up that one. And then one provider wanted to retire, and so he sold off to Wall street and another provider of a good system, Wall street, made them an offer he couldn't refuse. So now he's doing software in a different area.

You know, but I was going to ask, does that. Do you think that I, when I was speaking to treasurers at that time, you know, depending on the cycle, if you like, you know, I was saying to them, is it a positive or negative thing? And, and they were, you know, the, the answer was both. You know, when, when there were 15 providers said, they said, it's great, but you have to go and see 15 providers and beauty parade of 10 of them. And then you sort of reduce it. It was a lot of work. And then the problem was the flip side, when it was down to seven, they went, yeah, beauty parade of only seven or whatever. And it might not be more seven, but it was more the fact that they were like scratching their head going, actually unlimited for choices. And it was quite quickly between two. And it drove up the prices. Sometimes these big budgets, not only that, but sometimes.

I won't state names, but many times when these much larger organizations buy smaller software houses, they hire all the capable people that we're installing and hire less expensive people. And they don't put any energy into maintaining the software. They're basically buying the installed customer base. So you have to watch out for that. You know, the recommendations are really important for any software provider. You want someone who has a similar profile to you who has installed within the last year or the last year and a half, you know, depending how long it takes, who can actually tell you who the best installation people are at the provider? You know, so all that kind of stuff is really important.

So if you're speaking directly now to. And we assume they're listening because they should be listeners to the show, but, you know, say some of the CEOs or the leading figures in all of those TMS providers, you know, would the advice be hire some more support staff to look after your customers then?

Or realize that your customers are growing, their needs are changing, so make sure you know what those needs are and that you're willing to support them. But, you know, some of These providers get the corporates into these ironclad horrible contracts that it doesn't matter if you want to leave or not. You can, because the, the downside payment that you have to make is another year's worth of normal, you know, cost of a Treasury management system. I mean it's so it's definitely. You're selecting a Treasury management system, make sure you get it reviewed by a very capable attorney so you don't get hooked in or you change the. Nothing is boilerplate, you can change anything and make sure that you can get out if it doesn't work or if it doesn't work in two years time.

Yeah. Sean and I spoke before the show. We've been friends for many years and we were talking about her wealth of experience. We touched on it a little bit there. Obviously this is show hosted by the treasury recruitment company. We don't do the sales pitch and as you guys listen to regular listeners, that would be the most boring show, you know, to buy from us. And if you need people. But actually I just want to explore the people aspect for a moment there, actually, from two aspects. Firstly, I was going to say some of the people you've met over the years, maybe some of the, when you look at the treasurers you've met and you think, wow, they're a blooming superstar. And you know, they're not such a superstar, you know, what are the, the positive and negatives. And then I was just going to, you know, maybe come on to your tips when you've hired teams, what you look for in people and stuff. So let's treat them separately. But I wanted to give you that sort of forewarning, as it were. But let's look at the, actually let's look at the bad ones who are the rubbish treasury guys.

I mean, if you have a treasure that's clearly out of his or her depth.

Yeah.

And how I try to, assuming I've been hired as an interim, Yes, I would have gone through the interview process and gone, no, I don't want to work. And then you say, listen, I mean, I want to support you to be successful. So how about you make suggestions of what report they can get on a daily or weekly basis that'll be. Make them have the right information if anyone asks any questions. So I'm like, I. In a nice way, I try to say, you know, I want you to be successful. Or if you think they're going down the wrong path, I'm like, I understand, but what about this? Okay, so that's what I'VE seen in other Treasuries.

Yeah, well, that's the, that's the, that's the objective thing. But let's go on the subjective thing about what? Again, bad treasury folks. Again, we're not naming shame, so it's all right, you can just allude to it. But. No, but what I mean is, what are the things that you've seen? Is it that they think they know everything, or is it that they're those kind of treasury folks, or is it that they need to be more open, less technical? What do you think? What's the key to success?

They want to do the latest and greatest things that the banks have talked to them about. And what I say is, how do you do the accounting for that? That pretty much drops it in its track. Or I say, can you explain that to me in words of two syllables? How does this work exactly? If this happens, what happens? Generally, it's some kind of foreign exchange thing or leverage buyout of the property underneath the buildings that it owns or whatever.

Overly complex.

Yeah. The banks that you're borrowing from take all that property into consideration when they lend to you. So that's a real asset on the balance sheet that they won't want to let you do, go through a sale and lease back, because that's what they're lending. I said, you can go ask them. He came back and said, yeah, you're right.

And then the superstars, you know, you've come across a public star.

I'm like, wow, that is just amazing. What can I do to help? Yeah, they hired me for a purpose. Yeah, the superstars. I said, if you want to go off and do that, I can do this other stuff. I mean, I find that there's always a million people that want to do the bank debt or any kind of debt, a bond, you know, there's a million people, whether they have experience in doing this or not, they want to do that. They want to be the banker. So I'm like, fine, either I will be a bag carrier and then just go around behind you to all the meetings, or, fine, you do that. I'll focus on the operational treasury. Because if that's working, we can't go badly wrong. I'll just focus. My whole career pretty much has been more on the operational side of treasury, trying to sort out how we actually get them cash back to the parent company so that they can pay dividends to their shareholders. That is, the superstars used to say, wow, that all sounds amazing. How can I help? Yeah, you know what they hired you for? I'm like. And you just say, well, I can do this. What would you. How would you. I can do these five things. What is most important to you at this point? You know, what order do I attack them in?

And before we move to, you know, giving your LinkedIn profile and your top tips for people out there, just, just coming back to that, as I said, you've hired these teams and the people aspect of things. When you're doing your hiring reviewing, you know, are you looking for the qualification? You know, what's the top things in. When you're reading a CV resume, is it looking for the qualifications or looking at the different kind of range of companies or, you know, where are they at in their career or is it a combination of those? Or what are the things that stand out to you?

Well, I generally look for somebody who's excited about Treasury. I can make a good case for treasury in any respect. You know, exactly what's happening in the company because they have to come to you for the money. So truly, you know, are they going to make an acquisition? Are they going to divest? Are they going to do this? Do they need more funding? You know, is the forecast not up to par? Are we doing 100% better than we ever thought we'd do with the forecast? You know, all those things, so you sort of know where it's driving. So if I have to hire a junior or someone in the role that I'm vacating when I leave a interim client, I find somebody who's generally excited about treasury, who finds it fascinating, interesting. Also somebody who's like a system hobbyist because it's really good. You know, you, I have some people who are so theoretical about all the wonderful things treasury and you bring in the socioeconomic and the economic thing that is not going to get the job done. You know, I mean, you need somebody whose feet are on the ground, preferably that. I remember once I was helping a client look for a Treasury manager and the person that, that they liked was very in his head, you know, was very like. And, and because the corporate treasurer was sort of serene as well, they really liked them. I said, you hire in your own image many times.

Yeah.

I said, you know, I don't think that person is going to be good at all. And unfortunately, the CFO asked my opinion, so I had to tell him. I don't think because they don't have their dilettante, you know, they worked here, they work there. Not all, not always work in Treasury. This is not a Treasury special this is a somebody who wants to try treasury, because it sounds interesting, you know.

Yeah.

That's maybe not the kind of person we want.

So an excited doer, but not in your own image.

Yes, well. Or in your own image, if that's.

What, if you're an excited doer. Yeah.

But we ended up hiring an ex accountant who had very little experience but was really in the interview, was really excited about treasury, really thought it was interesting and was an IT hobbyist because we had a very complex treasury system. And I heard six months later he was like the God of all things Treasury. So he sorted out all the issues they were having, you know, ongoing issues they were having with the treasury system and things that were taking people half a day. He did it in an hour. You know, it was just a good.

Fit and I'd like to give a real practical reflection from my side on that. Actually, there's one of my clients I'm recruiting four. I put forward four candidates, the most junior of which, you know, they were, you know, very junior. We're not sure. And. Da. Da. Yeah, not as much experience as any of those guys. And you talk about the excited a doer, but also the, you know, he actually said to me, we were just chatting and doing the interview and got. Later on, he said, oh, yeah. And then, you know, in the weekends, I studied Python, you know, so I was like, what? What? Like? And he said, well, I'm doing this so that it means that I make my treasury job less boring or I take the bits out, I can systematize those. And I was like, oh, my goodness. And it was buried in his cv. I went, right, we're moving that to the top. And there was another system he was using as well. And I was like, you're a blooming superstar, let's get those up the top. And actually, he's flying through the rounds of interviews because he's got that enthusiasm. He hasn't got a patch of experience on some of the other guys, but it's because he's fully engaged and will. Everyone's going on about automation and everything else. It's not just about that, but if you can use that, you know, people used to say, guys, who can program in macros for Excel, that's great. But, you know, people move away from Excel, but if you've got those system skills, you know, in your back pocket.

Or it's not even the skill set, but the interest drive, you know, the understanding of it. Do you have a PC at home? That's one of my questions. You know, do you have a PC at home? Do you have a couple PCs at home? You know, have you ever thought about building your own PC? You can pretty much separate the hobbyists, you know, the people who are really interested in. In software and PCs and whatever. And if there's a significant element of that in the role, you have to make sure that that person is not going to be, oh.

Well, knew this was going to be a blast and it certainly has been. And we could keep going, but we keep our shows to sort of 40 minutes, you know, because this was used to be the typical commute time when people did a thing called the daily commute. People don't do that no more. Well, I mean, the daily commute is. If I can make the podcast maybe a minute and a half from one room to the other and make a cup of tea, as we talked about before, then we'd be fine. But anyway, so we're going to wrap up the show, but we're going to put your details and Sean's. She's a great person to connect with, so you're going to wealth of people. We'll put our details in the show notes. But if you look back over your time and someone else is looking, you know, one of the external. You know, I said before, a lot of our UK listeners are more junior in their careers and their treasury managers and they're saying, oh, that's something I'd like to aim towards. Or some of the US listeners, they like to hear war stories. But what are the sort of top tips you would give to some of the listeners out there, maybe just in general, treasury wise, on how to progress their careers? What are the things that you can say for them to look out for?

I would say be flexible, because the way you've done it at another organization is not going to be the way that your client wants to do it going forward. If you really want to be an interim or a Treasury consultant, you have to be flexible and you have to do it the way they want you to, to do it. So that's very important. Also, you know, it's a. Being a Treasury consultant is a risky business because I've been out of work five months and seven months in my career, so both of those times are very scary. But I have always ended up finding a job and. But I would say, you know, if you have a passion for making things work, you know. Right. And if you. It is a bit of a people job, although not the wider public, but you have to get on with the people in your group and all the business with. So if you can. Oh, God, bankers mean so much, you know. So it may be that you told me, I have one banker that I knew at one bank and now he's on his third or fourth bank and I'm like, oh, hi, I know you. It is a bit of a people job in a relationship building job. And if you want to get the data that you need out of the, the systems of the company or the information of the company, you have to develop those relationships. That might be different types of relationships and different types of companies. But, you know, if you're flexible and you want, you want to really understand why they are doing things, you have to do that digging, you know, with the people that you have access to.

So a flexible people person who's an excited doer, that's probably a good little summary really for a lot of it, isn't it? So, Sean, been amazing today. Thank you for your time. As I say, we'll put your details in the show notes and look forward to seeing you when we get out and have tea or coffee.

Can meet up again for a cup of coffee or whatever.

It'll be lovely. Thanks very much for your time.

Thanks.

Thanks.