From Treasury to CFO: A Journey of Career Growth with Brian Feldott

Foreign 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 build their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next. And a special thanks to Flywire, our fantastic sponsors. If you've ever wondered whether there was a way to ease your international transaction hassles, they're the guys to talk to. If you follow the link in our show notes you can see me talking to my mate Greg Levin, their Senior VP of Sales. I get to ask Greg about who are Flywire and how they can help you and your treasury team with your cross border payment headaches. Just follow the link to the interview in today's show notes. And now let's get on with the show. In this week's show I'm joined by Brian Feldot, the CFO VP of Investor Relations at Treasury at Rise Oil and Gas. Rise Oil and Gas are an independent oil and natural gas company focused on securing high quality long lived oil and natural gas assets to create a sustainable inventory of highly economic wells. But I'm going to get Brian to explain that a little bit more who the company is. Brian and I were just talking, we're going to talk about that interface between treasury and CFO ship but we're going to start way back when and how Brian first got started in finance and accounting and then discover the world that is Treasury. Brian, over to you.

Thanks Mike. I really appreciate you having me on and appreciate the work you do for treasury professionals around the world. Can start with how I got into Treasury. After graduate school I went to the University of Houston and studied finance under an MBA program and, and got out and was looking to launch my career and back then in Houston Enron was one of the big companies and if you couldn't get on with Enron or one of the other big energy firms you look to do public accounting or work in a consulting practice. And so I went over to Arthur Anderson and I tell people that public accounting is just a a great place to to get started because they hire just a ton of of people out of the graduate school and undergraduate school and they do such a great job of assimilating people into the career world. There was Place St. Charles in Illinois where they would send us for training and bring people around the world and they just, they spend a lot of money on you to get you really fine tuned for the business world. So I'm real thankful for the opportunity that Arthur Andersen gave me. But I got to work in there and it just never. There was a lot of intellectual debate and a lot of really great work and a lot of great experience. But at the end of the day, I guess maybe for me it felt like I was grading a lot of homework. It just, I felt probably disconnected from the business. But I thought this is my career. I'm. I want to be a partner one day and that's the track I'm on and I'm hopeful to do it. But lo and behold, as you make kind of career plans, things actually happen. The firm was obviously went through its struggles with the Enron failure and the firm pretty much broke up. Some groups went other places and the point of my life, I just purchased a house and I needed a job. And luckily for me, Continental Airlines was going through a spin off of their regional division and they needed a whole new back office. And I was fortunate enough to get over to ExpressJet in a, in an accounting role in a. As a controller group of the maintenance division. And it was just a wonderful experience. I felt more connected to the business in that accounting role. But still something felt a little missing. And Rob Austin over there at ExpressJet gave me an opportunity to develop the, the treasury group after a few years in the controller group.

And just let me just jump in there, just briefly. Brian, that sure. You. When you and I had our pre. Conversation we, we talked about the fact that going in a lot of people, you know that I want to be in the front office, I want to be in the dealing, want to do all this. But as you talked about the, the back office learning that is getting the foundation and then you were given that springboard and again I was looking into my notes that you then went into treasury when treasury wasn't really a thing there. Treasury was out there in the world, but it wasn't so much. Talk us through why you thought that was important. I think.

Now let me give you a little bit about the dynamic there. So continental spun off ExpressJet and they didn't build the back office out for ExpressJet all at once. Continental remained in place to manage the treasury function for ExpressJet until such time when they could take that on. I got in. I was working in the controller group doing the accounting closing accruals, all the heavy lifting on the accounting side.

Yeah.

And then it came time for ExpressJet to take on the treasury function. And yeah, Rob Austin gave me my break and believed in me because of the work I was doing and the understanding of the business, maybe not the complete understanding of the treasury function, but the complete understanding of the business and the needs. Having learned that through the accounting side, to take on the treasury piece, it was a great opportunity. But I got to tell you, when I got over to treasury, there was like I talked about, there was a piece of not really feeling 100% connected to the business. But I tell you, the day you wake up and the organization is counting on you to clear payments and collect money and just all these wonderful little activities that go on in treasury and keep the business liquid and flowing, that was a great day for me. I can remember I started waking up without an alarm clock. I was ready to go to work. There was just these challenges of day to day, month to month, looking out over the next year and, and when you had debt maturing and when you had money maturing and matching it all up and the accounting group still counted on you to help them through the close process. But every day I, that was the first time in my life, in my career where I was like, man, people depend on me every day. And it was just a great awakening because you study finance, study accounting and there's a lot of wonderful careers out there. But there's this one was definitely for me and in terms of giving me a lot of energy and connection to the business was what I found, just a wonderful element to it.

And obviously your early days and you expanded the role. Again, you talked about Continental. Can you explain the sort of size of the group and what treasury was like there as well for the, you know, again, for the listeners, if they're thinking, oh, that's good, is that the sort of size of organization I should develop or join or whatever?

Yeah, it was hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. We managed, at one point we had a million dollars of cash to manage and invest overnight, midterm and long term, very. A little bit of international activity. There was, I'll call them small scale problems. Back in the day we would collect cash for the alcohol sales on the airplane and trying to figure out how to get that cash to the bank when the plane lands in some remote area. Because everything from the kind of little micro treasury problems to the big. We got a $20 million. Yeah, we got a $20 million plane we need to close on and wire funds for. At one end of the spectrum you had a couple dollars for a liquor bottle and on the other extreme you had a multi million dollar lease payment or something to take care of on a daily basis. So it presented a lot of unique and interesting little challenges. And there was even times when the plane was down for maintenance in a. In an area where you didn't have a maintenance base. And they wanted to sell you apart, but they wanted the cash up front. And you'd get these strange calls like, hey, we're trying to buy them apart for this airplane and we need to get cash and oh, and it's got to be in pesos and hurry up, because the plane's down and we need to get it back in service. It had a lot of activity and a lot of fun from both, like I said, an operational standpoint and then more of the traditional business and finance realm. Yeah.

And then talk us through the sort of development of. You were there, you were taking a wider role than just Treasury. You did some tax and corporate finance, but then you moved focused with the new. The move to New park and things. Continental Express, obviously an airline. Talk us through the next moves.

Yeah, funny, there was the tax and Treasury Group was. One group had reported to one vp and there was a period of time where we couldn't hold on to a tax director. And so my boss came to me and said, can you just keep things within the fences here for us and help out for a little while till we find somebody? And a year or so later, I guess I was able to keep it within the fences enough. I guess he slowed down looking for somebody or whatever happened that I just found myself managing both the. The treasury and the tax piece of it. And so it was the opportunity calls and in strange ways sometimes, and raising your hand and not being afraid, even when something that can be somewhat intimidating in terms of tax, especially if you're not traditionally raised in that area of the business. It did help me gain a ton of experience and give me a great solid foundation to. To get some other roles down the line for sure and some other opportunities and talk about.

So talk about then the next move to New park and everything else.

Yeah, we talked about Arthur Andersen having its indictment and that. That led me to Continental and ExpressJet. And when Continental and United merged about the same time SkyWest acquired ExpressJet. And you guys know, in the treasury area, they don't need two treasurers and they don't need a bunch of duplicative treasury folks. Typically, with a merger, when you're being acquired, that gets consolidated. And so I was on the street looking for my next opportunity and the director of internal audit had actually gone over to New park and from ExpressJet and she said, hey, they're looking for someone to head their treasury group. And I applied through her and my information Got to the right people. And when I got over to New park they liked my background and my experience in terms of developing the treasury group from the spin off of Continental. And they said we've got a little bit of treasury work to do, some things to improve on. And they definitely undersold it. When I got over there, it was a great company, good people over there still, a lot of friends. And Greg Piontech's a close friend, a CFO over there still.

And I don't want to go over there and the well talk us through.

What the treasury was like was a little bit of a meth. It was a company that had grown through acquisition, acquiring what are new the audience. Yeah, New park is an oil field service company and it's got two. At the time it had three businesses. Primarily it was drilling fluids, which is a fluid system that gets engineered to support the drilling and the drill bit for oil wells.

Right.

And then they had a mat business which provides matting foundations to part park the oil rig and the ancillary equipment on and provide a foundation in an area to work. And then they had an environmental services business. And so it was a great company, kind of a billion dollar size company, but boy, I gotta tell you, it was international and it had a lot of locations. And if you love a complex treasury organization, this had it for you. Tons of bank accounts, tons of currencies. The company gets drug wherever the big driller is headed. So if Exxon calls and says we want to drill a well in the North Sea or something like that, you got to figure out where are you going to park your treasury operation? Where's the entity, you know, domicile that we're going to do this with. And you got to work with legal and the banks and figure it all out. And it was, it was a Treasury system on steroids in terms of international operations. And it was just a great opportunity for me to come over there and not only learn, but also apply what I had picked up in terms of consolidating and streamlining a lot of treasury systems and working with a lot of great bankers to put an actual global treasury function in place or improve a global treasury function.

Talk us through the development of treasury there before we get on to the most recent roles. Where did you take treasury from? And to. So stepping back from it a little bit, we. This is an advice show if you like. I know that where you were there, you. You did all that heavy lifting as you said it was. You referred to it being on steroids and stuff. Why was it like that? What was so good about it and how would you replicate that?

Maybe, yeah. The challenge is day one, when I showed up there, you just had a hodgepodge of different banks. No, none of the SWIFT reporting or none of connectivity type activity was in place to really have a view, an accurate or near term look at where you were on a kind of daily or weekly basis. In addition, some of the, like the ACH payments and releases were not files sent out of our Oracle system. We were implementing Oracle at the time and we went through just an ERP implementation, but we also had a big push to get down to one or maybe just a few files that came out of Oracle that would push our disbursements. And prior to that we had things like we'd get our payment runs and things of that nature and we'd have to go to multiple different banks and log in and submit files. We even had one where we had to, it was so old we had to dial up and enter in these phone codes to release the payment. And we had some real antiquated type activity. We didn't have complete positive pay and things of that nature. Around the world, it was a unique instance because our customers would pay us in dollars. If you're drilling for Exxon and us being a US company, mostly want to work in dollars, but locally, which is where we had our activity, we had to pay a lot of times in the local currency and there's some hedging and not having the visibility where the cash balances were and made that difficult. We had to, we had to kind of take the first steps in terms of getting a more accurate picture of where we were and getting a sense of what, if anything, we could do about it in terms of. And we weren't hedging the currency, we were sometimes hedging the payment of large transactions. We just, we had to do a lot of that heavy lifting to get not only the visibility but then the streamline of the process, like I said with the Oracle implementations. And then ultimately we got to the point where we were kicking out a few files from Oracle and they were going to banks that were set up to receive them. And our disbursements and remittance type information was flowing back. And we got it going with the help of a lot of great people over there. It was fun working on that over the course of years. And along the way we had a number of additional mergers. I got to work on some international M and A and just when you think you got your treasury system HUMMING Guess what, you picked up another company and you got to fold them in and work through that effort and get them on your standards and things of that nature.

And then because I don't want to run out of time, talk me through the next moves or talk through again what happened next, what were you looking for and everything else. Yeah, the.

We got the treasury system going and along the way we had a number of bank deals in terms of credit facilities and things of that nature to maintain liquidity and have the right capital structure. And so I got to working real good with the banks and the relationship managers and things of that nature. And we had outsourced a lot of the investor relations and Greg came to me and said, would you like an opportunity to work on the investor relations side with me as well? I said yeah, it's great. It made a lot of sense because we worked with the banks, your debt financing that you have a relationship and a relation with the banks and you got to be telling them the story and it needs to align with the same story you're telling the equity investors. And so Greg gave me the opportunity to start helping out on investor relations and so it was a wonderful opportunity to expand outside of traditional treasury and really tell the story of the company. Loved. Like I mentioned, I love operating the business in the sense that treasury works day to do that. But up until then I didn't get to really tell the story to a lot of people and go into investor relations conferences and energy conferences and talking about the company, what we do, how we do it. Our strategy is really just a great opportunity that Greg and really Paul gave me to hit the road and promote New Park.

Yeah. And then how did that role then lead you into rise and things like that? Because I wanted again we spoke earlier in the show, we spoke before the show about how your role treasure and investor relations, then investor relations taking more about telling the story. And you and I were just talking about some of the that step up into the CFO position. What's it been like VP of ir, you got treasury, you've also got CFO ship. What's that like?

Yeah, let me. There's one more step there. Yeah. New park was great to me but the opportunity to join a company that was a much larger came calling. Newfield had a treasurer that was retiring and and they needed somebody and didn't have any internal candidates and through some bank relationships they got wind of my name and they were looking for somebody with some international experience because they had operations in China and I went through the interview process and Larry Massaro hired me over at New Field and we were off to the races. And it was lucky for me that the role at Newfield had tax and insurance and a lot of the things that I'd worked on before and so I could talk about my broad experience from before really helps build a career when a broad opportunity comes along and you've got some of that experience under your belt. I think I was able to separate myself from some of the other candidates and landed the job over there. And so it was a great couple of years but I got hit by the acquisition bug again. New Field was acquired by Encana which is now Oventive and like I said earlier, they don't need two treasures and you usually get squeezed out at that point. And so I took, took my exit and have been after the next big thing which is going after a CFO opportunity and was able to get on with rise the industry if I can talk about that a little bit. The oil and gas industry has gone through just a. A ton of consolidations. You see it everywhere from what the folks over at Exxon have been doing in terms of their acquisitions and even Oventive just there's a probably 40 to 50% of the oil and gas companies have gone through some sort of restructuring or consolidation since 2016 call it. And so the opportunity to move over to do another big treasury international treasury type function is very limited as it's really a lot of treasures are squeezed out in my particular industry. But I also wanted to broaden my horizons and obviously take the next step and take on the CFO type opportunity. And Kelly and Danny at Revise gave me that opportunity and I'm thankful. And we are off to the races on building this company. And it's interesting because you go from running just a large scale treasury function and then all of a sudden you're in charge of treasury accounting, tax, you name it, you got the whole kitchen sink. And then going from a larger company to a smaller company, you've got a lot more of the day to day type activities. And I think my experience that I talked to you about in terms of trying to figure out how to get the few dollars from the loan liquor bottle sales to the bank helps out from that standpoint.

You say that though, but if someone is in treasury at the moment, they're thinking they've got hankering to be a cfo. How do you see it as being different? You've been in the position for a number of years now. How would you contrast that? We had Sam Palossa on the show. Previously, he'd been with Rockefeller as the treasurer and we talked about the different things he'd learn. Had a great controller that works with him and he, although he knows that stuff, that's what he really needs to plug in. What sort of stuff are you looking for?

Yeah, I will tell you, unlike a lot of treasures, I've got this mindset and in terms of you've got to understand your internal customers. So throughout my career I focus on this. What's my internal customer? And in treasury, your internal customer is accounting. So I've got to understand what the accountants need and what they do. And I've obviously had experience in that, but I went on and got my cpa. It solidified my understanding of that activity and how important it is. And I view accounting as a customer throughout my career. I view investor relations as a customer. I think for me, I've had a number of opportunities to get outside of treasury throughout my career and I would encourage anybody to do that because not only does it open up more opportunities, but, but, gosh, when you do get to that next level, whether it's CFO or treasurer with tax or what have you, it just really opens up the, that knowledge base and understanding before you get there, if that makes sense. Because there hasn't been really anything I didn't have a little understanding about prior to me taking on the CFO opportunity. I know a lot of times the CFO will come from inside banking and I've seen it and I've got some friends have done it and been able to fight through, but they have got no understanding in terms of what the accounting process is, in terms of reporting and things of that nature and the nuts and bolts, and they get a little frustrated working through that and fighting through it. A lot of the bankers who become CFOs, and I'm not picking on them, they're highly capable. But yeah, they put together a lot of deals and, and they, they've had tremendous careers of putting debt together deals, but they've never lived with the deal the morning after. And like, how are you going to clear payments? And how are all those little things that a Treasury professional hey, let's do this, we're merging or we're putting a deal together. We know what needs to get done, we just need to work through and consolidate it together. I think the treasury function is just a great place to understand all the detailed activity that happens in a business. And so when you do get it to that level and when you've been Working hand in hand and helping out, whether it's internal audit or accounting or what have you, helping each other make the organization better. You'll be much more comfortable when you do get to that next level.

And Brian, I know that you also. Sorry, just moving on from that as well and taking that to the next level. I'd seen that you were helping out with the student Advisory Council, that you were helping out. What's the word? Briefing university students and trying to give more back, if you like. What was that like? Something as you reflected on your career and why do you think that is important?

Yeah, it's funny, it's probably something that was instilled to us by my mother in terms of giving back and continuing to learn and continuing to grow. You'll see me and my brother are guys that have gotten master's degrees later in our careers because we just feel like there's this need to continue to get education, to continue to get better and continue to learn things. There's still things that I want to learn. I think one thing that's really important right now for a lot of treasury and finance people is cybersecurity. I don't know how many nights I stayed up worried about payment transactions in far remote places. But one of the other things is I had a wonderful professor in college and he told me and it just stuck with me. I was a 20 year old kid. And he said, you're here at a great university and you're getting a great education and it comes with a responsibility to give back to it. And it doesn't have to, doesn't have to be money, it doesn't have to be anything. You'll find a way, figure it out. And connecting with the university students, helping them get insight into their. I talk to them a lot about their functional career than their industry career. Their functional career being treasury accounting, whatever it is that I talked about their industry career being energy or IT or chip making and things of that nature. They've got two types of careers they got to manage through. And if I can be helpful in giving them insight into either their functional career or their industry career, I'm happy to do it. It's very rewarding.

And Wendy's, when you just. That's elicited a really good question. So I've been approached in the past when I'm recruiting treasurers. I remember way back when I, I was approached by some hr, an HR lady, she went, we need a treasurer, right? I was like, yeah, brilliant. It's functional. Yeah, great. I can do this. And then they crossed over, said, yeah, but I want one that's been in heavy logistics and done this and this. And I was like, okay, treasury doesn't quite work like that. Yes, it does. Yeah. I said, no. I said, functionally, yes, you need this level of treasury experience, but you can move between industries now.

Yeah.

How are you, then? Was that some of the coaching or the stuff you were explaining to people, or how does it work, would you say?

Yeah, it's. It's one of those things where it's like, you can have all the functional talent in the world, but for some reason there's just this preference to have some industry experience. And I. I think for me, I. There's been times where I don't want them to have any experience because I don't any of the industry because I want them to bring a fresh perspective. When I was at New park, we were disjointed and growing through acquisition, and we hadn't really done the merger integration. I just want somebody with a clean slate, with no bias to come in here who's got a lot of treasury experience and can get. Help me get on the right treasury track, and then we'll customize things to the business as we see fit. I think a lot of times people tend to mistakenly, and I've done it, it seems easier or logical or you don't have to explain to them or teach them the business, but you do miss out on that outside perspective, for sure, and adapting things. There's things I took from the airline industry that I applied to the oil field service industry that we would have missed out on at New park if I'd been somebody from an oil field service. Another oil field service company.

Yeah.

Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to hire somebody that comes outside of an industry. I get it. It does make it easier. And if maybe you're going at a rapid pace and you got a lot of activity going on and you need somebody right away and you need them to hit the ground running. But there's been a lot of wonderful perspective that people brought from outside.

So it's a. It's a bit of a nice to have rather than a must have sort of thing. Would that be right?

I would say so. I try to look more at the individual and, and what challenges they faced rather than what industry they've been in. It just my. My recruitment has been. I've been so fortunate focusing a little bit more on what, you know, what people want to do and what kind of makes them tick. I talked about how when I got to the point where I was working in treasury and I didn't have to use an alarm clock to get up, it was something that I was connected to the business and I try to find people that, that like to have a sense of connection and ownership and that. That makes more of a difference to me than someone who came from the same industry.

So we're going to put your LinkedIn details in the show notes because I think we're approaching the end of the show and we want to give some good takeaways for the audience, whatever levels they are. As you say, you've talked about the functional, talks about industry and things like that with yourself. You know what takeaways are going to give to people today and. Or maybe the guy's a bit more senior, you know, people more senior in their careers. What are the takeaways if you, as you sit there and reflect, what are you thinking about?

Yeah. So continue to learn outside of your function. That's my biggest takeaway. I think. It's been one of the key things that's really benefited me. Whether you're getting a CPA or CTP or a certification in cybersecurity, or you're leading treasury management group discussion in your local area or, or you're trying to be an industry leader in your particular industry, continue to learn, get outside of Treasury. Because the best way, I think, to improve treasury is to look at it from a, from an internal audit standpoint, or look at it from an accounting standpoint, or look at it from a business standpoint. One of the other things I really love about treasury is this kind of underlying challenge that you don't get in another field and in treasury there's somebody working against you, there's crime and problems that you have to face and deal with. And I can't think of any other area of the business where you need to focus on the security and the good housekeeping type effort to make sure you don't get scammed and constantly stay on top of the latest and greatest scammers. Every time you think like you've defeated or made it bulletproof, they make better bullets, it seems like. Yeah, that's very important. And then like I said, always be the person that's willing to help out and get outside of your area because that's how you make your organization that much better.

Brian. Amazing. So we got. Continue to learn, get yourself outside of just treasury whilst being aware of security concerns as well. Of course, keep on learning sort of thing, which I think is fantastic.

Yeah, I really appreciate it, Mike. Like I said, happy to help and love promoting treasury and the careers that many people have developed and worked on over time. And if there's anything I can do for anybody, let me know. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to another great episode. You really enjoy it. Thank you very much. You make it worthwhile, us recording them with these amazing treasury professionals right the way across the world, from the us, across uk, across Europe, and there's lots more exciting guests to come and lots more live events. We love delivering this content. We get asked now, is this what you do? Do you just do content? Do you just know? The reason we do the content is to get to know you guys, to give you back the tips for success, if you like. But we're here to help you hire someone. If you need to recruit, call us, because at our heart, we are a Treasury recruitment company. That's how we pay the bills, that's how we pay for the podcast and that's what we. We're passionate about. We hear from you at events and things. Can we also help you find your next great role? Can we help you hire? The answer is yes, that's exactly what we do. Yes, we do our treasury salary survey@treasurysalary.com that helps us know exactly how to benchmark not only your salary, but also when you're looking to hire. We know exactly what the market is paying. Wherever you might be, whether it's the us, UK or Europe, we want to make sure that we are the best informed, that we're not just finger in the air. We always know. If you want to hire the best in treasury, don't hesitate to contact us. Go onto the website treasuryrecruitment.com or for the US, you can contact Joe Grabowski Europe. Contact the lovely Katie. For more senior roles and roles across the uk, reach out and contact me or drop any of us an email. Joe@treasuryrecruitment.com Katie at treasuryrecruitment.com or Mike at treasuryrecruitment.com Let us help you make the hiring process as amazingly seamless and easy as our podcasts are to listen to. Thanks for your amazing support and looking forward to seeing you at either an event or a conference very soon. Or just give me a call. Let's help you find the next role or recruit the next treasury professional. All right, until next week, maybe. Thanks.