From Treasury to the Big Screen with Dave Ash

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 them about how they've built their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next. Let's get on with the show. In this week's show, delighted to be joined by Dave Ash, Senior Treasury Director at Ecolab, trusted partner for millions of customers. Ecolab is a global sustainability leader offering water, hygiene and infection prevention solutions and services that protect people and resources vital to life. That's right, that's their statement. But he will explain later on in the show, Dave will talk a bit more about it, explain what Ecolab are, who they serve and everything else. As always, I'm going to hand the microphone across to Dave. Dave, if you would, how did you first ever start in finance and then Treasury? Over to you, sir.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Mike. Well, yeah, I've been Treasury, I'd say 21 years now, believe it or not. Kind of came up a more non treasury path after grad school, which is about 100 years ago now. It feels like maybe it's only 50 years ago, but it's a while ago. Out of grad school, mainly worked on kind of more FP and a stuff, budgeting, forecasting, some accounting here and there. And then I took a job at My last company, HP Fuller, I think it was 2001 and that part of things, the capital markets which I wanted to get into was in treasury and did a year in capital markets in treasury, but then was promoted to International Finance Director and that kind of led me into where I'm at now, which is focus on foreign exchange, interest rates and now pensions and 401s as well as part of my purview. But that's kind of where I started 20 years ago. I've kind of stayed in Treasury.

That was a great quick summary. But it started with HB Fuller. What did HB Fuller do?

HB Fuller is an adhesives company, so they sell glue, paint. Very, very old school, very, you know, been around for 150 years, I think. So it's very commodity kind of business, a good business. But yeah, I did that for eight years and that's another company here, about half our format in St. Paul.

And in terms of treasury, how was the treasury set up? Good place to sort of cut your teeth, sort of get started in.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, that was my first taste of foreign exchange. The person that was above me, they moved on to something else and I was basically told that's what my new job was, to manage foreign exchange debt and cash for HP Fuller. Yeah, it was very dynamic, kind of like E Collab, they sell all over the world. So you're dealing with every region in the world, almost every country in the world, as I'm doing here at Ecolab. Great place to really get going because they're not nearly the size of Ecolab, but got just a ton of great experience in foreign exchange, public debt and also managed cash there. So it was a smaller company where I was able to like really learn the basics of treasury at a smaller scale than we have at Ecolab here.

And then how did you then discover Ecolab? What was Ecolab like when you started? Because you joined the group back in.

09, looking for something a little more, a little more dynamic industry house with HP Fuller and larger company to be with. And I thought it was a very exciting opportunity. Came here like I said in 2009. Main focus initially was foreign exchange, which was I think a long time issue for the company. So a lot of trouble dealing with it, getting processes in place and that's what's exciting to come here. It's like taking what I learned at HP Fuller and doing it at 10 times the scale at Ecolab, which is what we've been doing. I'm doing it for 14 years. Just thought it was very exciting to get into something bigger and more complex and have a chance to really improve something because it was really a very non optimal, I would say, process we had in place back then. It was very exciting to come in and put, I thought, something close to best practices in place for performance change management.

And what's Ecolab? I mean I gave a bit of a overview but you're massive. 13,047,000 plus employees. Talk us through.

Yeah, I think you actually gave a pretty good high level summary. We call ourselves the global leader in water hygiene and infection prevention solutions. So we provide sanitation products for a wide variety of industries including healthcare, restaurants, textiles, et cetera. You've probably seen our products in bathrooms or kitchens of your favorite restaurant. That's a big part of our business is just all things sanitation in a wide variety of industries. And yeah, it's been a fast growing, very exciting company to be part of for 14 years.

What's kept me there 14 years. Exactly the same job since day one or how has it evolved?

Yeah, I mean it's evolved just my job itself. I've always managed foreign exchange here, which is I think probably my favorite part of Treasury I think it's the most exciting bias being the most exciting part of finance because you're dealing with very dynamic markets, people all over the world, all regions, different cultures, time zones. You're just trying to manage a very difficult to manage area. And that's always been. I think my main focus here is foreign exchange, but I've also in recent years also taken on interest rate risk management as well as the management of our investments in our 401 and pension plans.

And when you've been within foreign exchange, I've seen massive, you know, I've been in the industry 25 years. FX has changed radically. You know, when, when I first started, I was talking actually someone just yesterday and there were foreign exchange brokers and dealers in the banks and you call up for a price and they do. And then automation came along. You know, things like tools like FX all and everything else.

Right.

Why do we need someone in foreign exchange? Where do you end up?

Sometimes you get that. I mean, the biggest issue is, you know, especially for a public company, you have to report earnings every quarter. And a lot of private companies don't actively manage foreign exchange because they're not having to report earnings publicly. And for the public company, if you've got large swings in a foreign exchange that are not offset by hedges, you are always at risk of having just a horrible quarter, not because the business didn't do well, but because you didn't have large positions covered. Our first mandate is smooth the earnings and profit of the company by wherever we can, offsetting material foreign exchange risk with hedging activities so that we have a much smoother earnings reporting and we're not at risk of missing earnings, for example, because we had a big FX miss. The biggest thing we do is to try to just manage the P and L volatility, which we've been able to do, I think very successfully here for a long time. Probably I'd say 85 to 90% reduction in volatility based on our math in terms of what hedging brings you, versus doesn't bring you.

And how have you done that? I mean, you've got 170 countries to manage, you know, and.

Yeah, very good.

I remember one of my first, well, the first ever podcast was Sarah Jane hall from GlaxoSmithKline. And, you know, she and I have known each other for many years and I was talking to her one day and she said, well, it's the Pareto principle, you know, she said it's 80, 20. She said 80% of our countries Just, it's easy, you know, it's a mild flow, there's stuff to be done, but it's sort of light touch. We, you know, it works. She said, I spend 80% of my time on the 20% danger. When I say that, I mean in terms of risks and stuff. Is. Is that similar for you guys?

Absolutely, yeah. I mean the G10 countries are pretty easy to manage. You know, we get exposure reporting. We're actually able to get daily exposure reporting for most of those through called fire apps, which has been a big game changer for us that we put in place several years ago. We used to get foreign exchange exposures in through spreadsheets on a monthly basis. It was very awkward and time consuming getting everything and most everything coming through fire apps, we're able to see exposures every day, adjust hedges every day, and that's very easy. For the G10 countries that are on fire apps, we have very minimal exposures, I should say net impacts for those countries. Other countries where we're not getting daily exposures and there's also currency controls and other geopolitical issues. These countries, I would say take at least 80% if not more of my time just managing, not getting killed there with some kind of crazy FX overnight adjustment or currency control where you can't get money out. All kinds of bad things can happen there. 8020 is very close, maybe more like 9010 almost. Because I spend by far the bulk of my time just trying to manage those types of countries with all of the potential pitfalls that they can have and making sure that we don't have a major hit. And that, that's definitely a true part of FX is that kind of 80:20 ratio with your, where your attention goes.

And without sort of prying into company information. What's your ethos around fx? What's, what's the sort of. Is it get rid of hedge everything, get it all, you know, get it away, you know, da da, da. Because then you can deal with other stuff. Or again, this is for the listeners who might be thinking, oh wow, yeah, I should be think, thinking about that or what. What sort of advice would you give to those?

There's different ways to do it. I mean, we are so big in so many countries and there's so much exposure to manage. We try to keep it simple in terms of the instruments we use. So we really only use spot contracts, you know, deliverable contracts on spot and forward contracts to manage our exposure. We don't get into, I've never really gotten into options or Any kind of other, you know, more exotic structures. And by keeping it simple, we're able to, like, then have a high volume of trading to make sure that we're not missing any exposures and recovering everything. So we basically, if it's over a half a million dollars of exposure, we hedge it up to a certain hedging cost, over half a million dollars on any given day. We have it hedged and just through a forward contract, and that kind of keep it simple, but it gives us a great overall reduction of volatility by just closely managing it that way.

Now, the other side of things, you know, we'll go into that now. I heard about Dave because I saw this really great article about balancing a role. And they call it finance director, we call it Treasury. We know what it is, you know, we know being, you know, treasury and also film director. Can you just give us a sort of insights to that? What's that been like?

It's always been something, you know, I would say always. I've been making films for close to 20 years. Basic origin there is, you know, I was always writing through college, both in undergrad and grad school. I wrote for the newspaper. And I just love that I could use that side of my brain, as they say, and really delve into different part of the world and life than just business and balance sheets and stuff. And that was very helpful through college, and I just kind of continued with it after grad school. I did a lot of freelance writing on the side while I was still working. That became not worth it after a while and I decided to get into screenwriting. So I had always wanted to write scripts for films, and I started doing that and took a lot of classes on that and entered some screenwriting contests and ended up doing much better than I expected. And that kind of led to some other things, including a trip to Hollywood to meet with some producers on my scripts. And that was again about 18 years ago. And short story there is. I realized from that trip I was never going to actually sell a script that would end up with something that I wanted to see. Just the way that Hollywood looks at things. So I decided to come back here to Minnesota and learn all about filmmaking. This is kind of the early aughts from there. You know, I took all kinds of classes in directing, editing, lighting, everything else, and just started making my own short films. This is like 17, 18 years ago, very cheaply. And then that led to making, writing, directing, editing, producing three feature films. And then, you know, about three or four years ago, I started on this TV series project which we've just completed, which took a long time, but that's been writing, directing, editing and producing the first season of a TV show called Incompleteness with 45 minute episodes each. So it's about six hours of total material, which is a lot. So that's kind of the arc of my filmmaking career. And it's just been something I've done while I've done this other stuff really is a great distraction. It allows me to like not spend the whole weekend thinking about an email from work or something else where I really shouldn't be, where I do see, to kind of turn my brain off of again, balance sheets and forward curves and just let it rest with something else I can dive into. And that's been the purpose of it. It's been a great distraction, a lot of fun, and has really been enriching in ways that other parts of my life fill in other blanks, but not in that way. So that's my overview of it in a nutshell, if that makes sense.

It doesn't. How do you sort of separate or maybe balance the two? Got this successful treasury career, you've got this filmmaking directing, which is great. How do you find the balance? Is it. It's more than a hobby. It's not like just a pastime. It's like two full time jobs. How do you. Except for. By working 24, 7. Maybe that's it. You get. I don't know.

Yeah, I mean not having insomnia helps, which I'd summit sometimes. You know, I, that's probably my superpower is insomnia. I, I have, I do get up early and you know, most of my writing for this stuff has been done between the hours of like 5 and 6:30.

Wow.

Believe it or not. And that's kind of, you know, get a cup of coffee and start writing and then it's off to work. And it's been done early mornings and then, you know, the, the production is done on days off and weekends and the editing is the same thing early in the morning and weekends and days off. And it does get exhausting sometimes when it's especially the production side of things. The other side of things I can kind of do more on my own timeline, which is the editing and the writing. When it's going well, it is just a great distraction and relief from the other side of my life. When it's challenging, it does get tiring. But overall it's been again, a very fun part of my life. Met a lot of totally different kinds of people than you meet in finance. But that's the long answer, the short answer to how I do it. I just kind of do it in early in the morning for the most part, and obviously I do it early.

And there's two quite. Treasury, by its very nature, is a serious profession. Numbers and getting it right and looking at the risks of a company and things like that. This is using the complete creative side of your brain and things like that. Do you find that each flows into each other or they're interconnected or. That's it. You sort of. Sort of split personality, you step out. That's it. Right now I'm in, you know, film. Film director mode.

Yeah, that's a good question. I. I do see there's some, I guess you say, synergy between the two. I think in the filmmaking side, believe it or not, I do a lot of my writing in Excel, as crazy as that sounds, just because that's my software, I know the best. And it's helped me to, like, really when I'm doing a big picture narrative, for example, really structure things. I do all that in Excel and do a lot of the writing Excel, and just that kind of mentality I've learned from 20 some years in finance has helped me to kind of attack the screenwriting in, I think, a different way than you normally do in a very structured way. And I wouldn't have had those skills without my finance life. And then I think conversely too, I think it's easy to, in a finance role, just look at it as something that's very blocky and tackling and you're just doing concrete, sequential things all day long. And that's not what it's. When it's done best, it's not done that way. You're bringing creative elements to it. So I think, especially the areas I've been involved in finance that I mentioned having that way of looking at things that can really help you think of new trade ideas, new things, things that we could be doing to take advantage of different foreigners, for example, but trying to overlay not just the analytical side of things, but also the creative side of things too. So I generally think that they both help each other, big picture wise and.

What's the word? So when we do the podcast each week, you know, that we get a whole range of listeners, so we get sort of junior treasury analysts, you know, stepping up to treasury managers and with treasurers who listen to war stories and want to know, you know, what you've been through and things like that. If you were to Take any of the examples from either of your sort of double lives, if that's the right way. You know, what are the advice you're going to give to some of those guys? We're not at the end of the show yet, but what are, you know, what are the takeaways or, you know, what does it give you in terms of perspective?

Yeah, I think one, getting back to the previous question as well, touching on, you know, that as part of this question, I've learned, especially in the filmmaking side, that it's so much about preparation. You kind of have to have things so planned out before you do a film shoot to a crazy degree because you have a very limited time on, generally on a location, you've only got a set number of hours, you got 10 to 50 people involved. The planning is kind of ridiculous, what you have to have down for that part of things. And that's, you know, that's what allows me to relieve the stress of it because I have things so planned out that I know that there's so many fail safes in place that if something goes wrong that I can step in with something else I've already planned out as a plan, a backup plan or backup to the backup plan. And that's also, I think, informed, especially the effects side of my career where it is very risky what we're doing if you're not doing it well, if you don't know what you're doing. We deal with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of exposure on a given day depending on what the project is. And you have to be so planful in terms of what you're doing that if you do the trade wrong, you could have gigantic negative impact. So I've kind of learned maybe it was from the filmmaker or just kind of doing FX long enough that you have to plan better than you think that you do. I don't want a better way to say you have to plan for what's going to happen if it doesn't happen the way you want it going to happen, and then have a plan if that doesn't happen as well, just because there's so much risk involved if you do a trade wrong, for example. So big advice is just, you know, front load the planning part so you can both relieve your stress with it with something that you're about to do, but also to just make sure you're doing it properly. Over plan is a short way of saying that.

Nice. And if you are reflecting, if you like, and you know, we've got the more junior listeners and you reflect back to HP Fuller days up to now and things. Any thoughts on choices you did make. And it's great that you've managed to sort of keep hold of the creative side as well. And not just, you know, because I sometimes talk to Trish. I wish I'd done this. I wish, you know, wishing you're doing it as well. So, you know, any. Anything, some advice you give to those guys. But, you know, again, we're not quite there at the end. But what sort of things?

I've learned a lot of different things just by doing. It's on the finance side. I've learned, you know, to really try to train well the folks that work for me. And I've had a lot of folks that kind of have come and gone in my area because oftentimes we want to get someone this exposure, especially junior folks, and then moving on to something else. And this kind of goes to the other side of my life too. It's like really investing in the people that you work with so that you're not trying to do everything yourself, that they're learning to do a lot of what you've learned to do. And so they also have back to kind of the planning and the risk manager side of things that you're not the only thing between standing between, you know, what are we working on? And failure, that you've got other folks that can step up if you make a mistake or if you have any issues. So, you know, really, it's just learned at both sides of my life that you really have to invest the time, energy into training and the people you're working with and having a good relationship and giving them, once they're ready, delegating a lot to them and overseeing it. Because I think early on in my career I was too much wanting to do everything myself. That goes for the filmmaking side too. Not trusting people enough to follow whatever vision I have for that project. But that's been a big learning for me. It's just like really investing in other people and then letting them kind of go on their own with some oversight, not trying to do everything yourself, which just leads to a lot of stress, more gray hair, and oftentimes things going horribly wrong.

If we look at both of our working lives, you know, both of us have spent most of our times, the majority of our time in an office, you know, direct contact, you know, meeting with people, being with them and everything else. And then Covid came along, then we now out of it. You know, I did a webinar actually with both Katie and Craig worked with me just past couple of days and we were talking about how prior to Covid, you know, if someone had said to me, flexible working, please. And this is what I want. I want to get out my office, you know, off you go now. This new way of working, if you like. And I'm, you know, I'm as guilty as the next man of getting my head around this idea of hybrid and what this new way of working remotely, it's working from home. I want to call it more working remotely. And you know, doing that you yourself, you know, I've seen that treasury keep saying to people is a social discipline. You know, if you're junior stages of career, a few of them are going, I want to work remote, I want to do this. Why? How are you going to be coached? How are you going to learn? You've just talked there and I wanted to link it into that for you as a teacher, coach of treasury, other treasury, junior treasury professionals. How do you guys manage it? How do you manage it?

Yeah, we're hybrid here. We have three days in the office. We're kind of flexible around the three days. We try to get to a three day average. Personally, I like it, like it better than five days at home and I like it better than five days in the office. I mean, I like that there's, you know, often a Friday where I get to work from home and most folks do and you know, that's, that's great. Especially in the summertime, you're finishing work by four or five o' clock and you want to just go enjoy the day. That's, that's great. But I also like being in the office. I really, honestly, I got tired of being in the same room for five days a week for two years during COVID and really was great to come back and see people. So I think it's working well here three days a week, honestly. And it's a good mixture between in person meeting. But also there's more flexibility around working from home than there used to be pre Covid and I think that works for people too. So I'm a fan of the hybrid and three day model, frankly.

And with more junior staff who are coming to us and say, oh, I want remote, I don't want to, you know, any tips you would give them because certainly what I've been saying to them is you, yeah, you could do that. But also, you know, there was a candidate I spoke to the other day and he said, oh, I'm being overlooked for positions. I'm Doing this and. But the same in, you know, in. In probably the same breath, he was saying, but I'd rather be five days a week working remotely, even though he's meant to be coaching a team. And I said, well, yeah, but sometimes you need to be sitting with that person saying, don't press this button, press this.

Yeah.

You know, so I think that dichotomy wasn't quite there in his head, but it is what it is. Have you seen similar or, you know.

What would you think for sure? I think it's impossible to get the same level of interaction and oversight at home as it is at the office. You kind of discount how much you. In a given day. Like when the office today, you're just walking around, you're talking to people, you're reaching out. It's just so much easier to reach out. Like I said, making sure they don't push the wrong button is better when you're there as well, which is important in fx. You don't want to push the wrong button. That leads to a different career path.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I agree with you, Mike. I think you. You got to be there. I don't think it's necessary to be there five days a week always, but I think at least three.

Yeah, that's fair enough. And there's the social aspects as well, I think, you know, again, sort of there's a lot of getting together, actually get far more from it. So we'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. I know that lots of people want to sort of connect to you and things. Yeah, I thought of this before. What are the. What are the takeaways from. From yourself that, you know, you've listened to the show, you've heard some other people give, some great. What are your nuggets that you're going to give people?

Yeah, I mean, I think the focus of Reason Reached out is just kind of. I have this unique sort of dual life, and I don't think folks need to necessarily get something as involved as all the filmmaking that I've done. But you have friends that are looking for something else besides just their job to kind of just take their mind off their job. And I. I feel like I'm doing my best at my day job when I'm really also happy with the other stuff I'm doing outside of work. So kind of following the theme of this particular version of your podcast, I think you got to find that something outside of work that keeps you energized, because if you're working 80 hours a week, you have nothing else. You're not happy. But you're also probably not doing a great job because you're probably exhausted. You don't get to recharge through something else. So again, it doesn't have to be filmmaker. It could be any other pursuit you have. I think it's just a matter of finding time to do it so that you can again, energize. Re energize from your job by thinking about something else. I have trouble just not working and sitting on the beach and staring at the sky or doing nothing to recharge. I really need. Maybe some people can do that. They can just go meditate for days at a time or whatever when they're not working or do nothing on the beach. But I can't do that. And I think there's a lot of people like me that like, really need something else to re energize besides doing nothing. So I would just encourage folks to do it. Like I said, I started very small with where I got into writing and it led to a lot of more interesting things. So start with something small and just do. For me, it's like it was starting with doing an hour a day of something I really wanted to do. And you don't necessarily need more than an hour a day to really have that outlet. So do it. Just go for it. Stop talking to your friends about at the bar. Just. Just find that thing and just go for it.

I love it.

It's my big advice.

Fantastic. No, and I'm just going to leave it there because I. I don't want to talk over your words. There's loads of stuff I want to say, but. No, this is yours. Thank you very much, Dave. It's been great to talk to you.

Yeah, thanks, Mike. I appreciate it. It's been very fun. Appreciate it.

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