Forging Ahead in Treasury with Todd Yoder

So welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week, talk to treasurers about how they've 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 Todd Yoder, Director of Global Corporate treasury at Fluor Corporation. Now founded in 1912, Fluor Corporation is a global engineering, procurement, fabrication, construction and maintenance company headquartered in the US they work across the world, headquartered in Texas, revenues of approaching 20 billion I think it was in 2018, 53,000 employees across 100 countries. So a truly global multinational. So you're going to hear from Todd a little bit later on in the show exactly what the company's about and some of the different things that he gets involved in in his role as the director of Global Corporate treasury there. But as with all these shows, I want to get straight into the guest chat and go right back to the very beginning for Todd. So Todd, tell us about how your career got started and how you discovered the wonderful world of treasury, if you would so maybe go out to college and then bring us through to the modern day as it were. Over to you.

Mike, thank you for reaching out and inviting me to participate in your podcast. I'm a fan of the podcast and so very honored to be a part of it. This is a great opportunity, I think as a treasurer in this stage of my career to do some reflection. So this has been a good exercise for me. So I started out as a kid growing up. My dad owned a construction company and so I grew up as a kid on the construction site and, and my dad being an entrepreneur. I got an education from a very young age about running your own business and how that works and some of the challenges that come along with it. So that's kind of really the start of my business. Entrepreneurial education. Did go to university right after high school, but I was eager to join the workforce and I was really, really fortunate that I was able to find a part time job as an accounts payable clerk. It was for privately held chain of high end retail jewelry stores. So it was a very interesting position and it got a lot more interesting over the six years I was there. But it gave me an opportunity to get exposure to accounting and more of the business and entrepreneurial and actually led to, by the time I left that company six years later, I had grown to almost being a business partner to the owners of the business. At one point I remember being 25 years old and responsible for 15 direct reports and under them another 150 or so indirect reports at 25 years old. And this group of people was a very diverse group of people, ranged in age from 20 to 60 years old. So very diverse group of people. But it was kind of a crash course very early on in how to manage people and how to get the best out of people and how to have some of those hard conversations. I can remember being in my 20s and having to let people go from the business. And at that age that was a tough thing to do, but it was very, very good education.

And what tips would you give people? There might be people listening today, 25, 28 year old treasury analysts or senior treasury analysts managing someone. And then things change. There might be a Treasury manager and thinking, oh, finance, I've got, you know, things are changing, I've got to let them go. Or, you know, how do you process that? How do you deal with that sort of thing?

Yeah, well, you know, I was young and I didn't have an instruction book on how to do it. The owners of the business, they, you know, they just kept challenging me and stretch goals and giving me more and more responsibility. So that part of the job was, was something that I learned, you know, as I went. And the first one I can remember was very, very tough to do. You know, you learn to st what is the objective of the company and, and how does the person fit into the role? Yeah, you know, just because it's not a good fit.