How Consultancy has Evolved with Craig Jeffery

Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I speak 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 this week's show a little different from the usual ones because I'm actually delighted to be joined by Craig Jeffrey, the managing partner for Strategic Treasurer. I recently had the pleasure of being on the other end of the microphone and was interviewed by Craig on his Treasury Update podcast. So in some ways it's my turn to get my own back, really, and interview Craig. On our show, the show we did before, we talked about the future of treasury talent and things like that, but this one I want to focus a little bit more and we'll have Craig on future shows, but Craig actually formed Strategic Treasurer consulting firm who provide advice and implementation assistance in treasury and risk management technologies for a lot of clients. I'll get him to describe that a little bit more, but in many ways I wanted to sort of go right back to the beginning of Craig's career, how he got into that and where he's seen, for instance, consultancy evolve and why he chose that career path. And because there'll be listeners, you know, perhaps out there now you're listening and you're treasury analysts or managers. Actually I could do consultancy, but obviously Strategic Treasurer are more of an independent consultancy, but he can talk a little bit more and some of the alliances those guys have got. So as always, enough from me, let's get over the man himself. Mr. Jeffrey Craig, talk to us. How you this is a few years ago now, how you first ever discovered treasury and coming out of university and things like that, or just talk me through your background.

Sure, Mike, glad to be on your podcast. So after, after university, I started at an insurance company. I was in a finance area of it of a very large insurance company and that's got me into treasury activities. It was a little more on the accounting and tech side initially and then moved into some of the areas about paying vendors. And we started moving activity over to ACH and understanding the business model there and then from there I certainly got bored at a certain point in time and then moved over to the investment division, treasury, which was the area that I found most interesting in my interactions with throughout the company. From there, working on the investment side in treasury was really, really good experience for me mentally, just to see a well rounded view of the company.

What were you finding interesting about treasury at that stage? What grabbed your attention? That you got to see different parts of it or that you actually made a difference or what was it that sort of grabbed your attention then?

Well, it may sound, I'd like to say it was finance or other elements, but I think one of the things that I like best about it is that there was so much change. There was so much change with payments, with managing risk, with what goes on in investment portfolios of insurance companies and how investment mortgage backed securities make a change, they pay earlier and it creates a new requirement on forecasting things accurately. And we were able to develop a lot of systems to take advantage of what we needed to do. So we needed to forecast, we needed to move money, we needed to make sure that the portfolio managers were running smoothly and it just allowed us to create many, many new things. And I found the amount of turnover of information and activities was the most interesting part.

And that was, you know, so in these early days you were SunTrust and then Wachovia. Whereabouts were you in that part of your career path, as it were?

So that was with the Hartford Insurance Group. So it was part of the investment in Treasury Group. And then at some point after working and building systems and developing the group and treasury at the Hartford, I moved over to SunTrust. It was a product management, technical marketing role. We did consulting with customers there. And then after some time I was based in Florida. After some time I moved to Atlanta and with Wachovia, which is Wells Fargo now. And I was a practice leader in the Treasury Consulting Group. I was a for profit consulting group and we did tremendous number of projects in different areas of treasury, all geared towards the client. And we also had the ability to interact with all other areas of the bank. And that was where I would say I learned how to do consulting properly with many companies. The business of consulting, not just knowing treasury, but being able to work with many different companies figuring out the process and how to make it work well.

And with that you say it was a with profit sort of consulting team. Was that a conflict? And you know, if that's the right way to put it, but you know, you were, you were just focusing on your clients and just what, trying to make sure that everything straight through process for them or what was the consulting element of it?

Yeah, so the fact that clients would pay us, we would obviously maintain the information separately, separate servers, separate access. So the bank wouldn't, you know, other members of the bank couldn't for that type of consulting work. Now it's certainly fine if there's smart advisors and banks to do consulting for Free. But many companies enjoy the independent view. You want to hear exactly what someone's thinking and the recommendations that are 100% for your benefit, not tied into a bank or a company. You just want that, you know, that, you know, whatever the biases of the person has is fine, but nothing that might be tied into making money in the institution. The bank was very supportive of that. It was a lot of fun.

And he did that for a number of years, sort of four and a half years. And then what prompted, I mean, and actually you started back in 04 and I started, actually the Treasury Recruitment Company was Mr. Recruitment back then in 2002. There were early days in technology, but also in recruiting and it was the inception of LinkedIn, for instance, stuff. But what was it like in that market then that you thought, right, I'm going to go out alone. Or what was the situation then? What prompted the move sort of thing, to start up the, your, your firm, as it were?

I hope you're not expecting me to say this was some master plan where I had everything marked out to the year. You know what, really? Well, it's like you have your five year plan or your ten year plan and that falls apart within a couple months because your interests take you other places. Yeah, you know, it really, it came about by a couple incidents. One is eventually the bank had decided to exit the for fee, for profit consulting line of business. It wasn't huge and it just was, it became a bit of a distraction to them at the time and so they decided to exit, exit the business. And it freed us all up, you know, since the group was, you know, being let go. Excuse me. So with, you know, becoming a free agent, I spoke with my wife and I said, oh, I'm just trying to figure out if I should look for another position at the bank somewhere else, et cetera. And she said, well, I think you should start a company on your own. I said, really? And she said, yes. You finally found the type of work that you love.

Yeah.

And I said, what do you mean? It's like every time I had a job, I would do it, I'd throw myself into it and then there'd get to be a point where there was not much else to do. And she said, I knew when you were going to get another job because you would be coming home exactly on time, you would work what you needed to. And I said, she said, I knew you were bored, you weren't challenged enough. And this is, this is the first type of job, this consulting work, where you're always learning new things, identifying new situations with companies, providing that type of advice, helping with different types of projects where you are continually engaged. And so you always wanted to run your own business and you need something to do that will keep you mentally engaged, which means lots of new things. So this seems perfect. And I was like, really? And she said yes. And I didn't ask again because we had a number of small kids and I got the yes to go off on my own. And so I took it. So that was very good advice from Sue.

And so what was then. So sue said, go do it. What was the. As you say, you didn't have the grand master plan, but what was the plan then? Were you. What was the competition like? Were you going up against the, you know, at the time, the Big six or Big seven at one stage, but then became Big five and then became Big four consulting firms or other firms? Because at the time you had, you know, the guys at Treasury Strategies and various others, you know, what. What were you aiming for?

So we found, or I found that was originally planning on doing it primarily on my own, maybe getting some assistance. And it was. There was a number of companies and treasurers who had experience. We had experience working together. And so they were some of my first clients or the strategic treasurers first clients. And that was a good fit. So getting new clients who had no awareness. I think I quickly learned that it's much easier to go into a company saying, I'm with X bank or Y bank. You're lending them hundreds of millions of dollars, they're going to listen to you on any topic. And it just was a. It was a different approach. Gaining their ear and gaining a voice or a seat at the table to discuss things require having good content. So part of that was we always provided content through the Treasury Update newsletter. That's the name of our podcast, Treasury Update Podcast. But it's provide good content. Providing good content that is useful for people no matter what, without the strings attached to. I'm not going to share information until, you know, you're paying me for a project. But our competition.

Sorry, go on.

Yeah. So our competition was some of the more independent consulting firms that were more specialized in consulting. There's a number of them and occasionally it would be the bigger four firms we find we compete with them. And we competed with them. Usually if there was treasury had a real need for specific treasury expertise. Oftentimes the big four are locked up at the CEO level and will get most of the projects. But sometimes there's a project in play or there's something that's needed, that's specialized. And then treasury says we need to get someone who really knows this deeply, not a more general, a generalized firm in finance.

So you're looking at, you know, if we. That was 2004, so 15 years ago. What was your USP then? If you like, was it just, hey, I'm a subject expert versus the your competition, who perhaps were less experienced. You'd actually been there, done it, you had the T shirt and everything else and you were selling on your own merits or what were people looking for at that time?

So I think I understand, but we. Did you say usp?

Yeah. What was your uni. Unique selling point? If you like, why was. Yeah, why were people thinking, do you know what we need to use, Craig, over these other firms? Sometimes I know with the consultancies, as they say, that they perhaps use more junior guy or they'll win a project and then put the more junior guys on it. Was it because you were there and the man to deliver it, or what were they buying as it were?

I think that the unique selling point is that we're all practitioners, very senior level people have experience doing things. We've run them and been accountable. And because we've done that, our recommendations are very practical. It's not just boilerplate, it's specific, it's customized and it makes sense. And that has very good credibility. And combined with that, because all of our senior consultants, for example, are treasurers, ats, very senior people who have done these things. We also have experience in banks as consultants. And so we've had the added benefit of not just working in a few companies, but working with many companies. So we have that broad view as well as the deep expertise. And that tends to be quite compelling to treasurers who want things done that.

Are practical and in terms of the firm as well, just so the people who are listening, you sort of draw in different people, different projects or how are you structured and things. So if someone's listening, thinking, actually I should call these guys, or how, you know, what's the offering? Not to the USP about, you know, not being a massive sales pitch, but just how you structure your clients, as it were.

Yeah, I'll just try to describe it as like you said, as opposed to making a sales pitch, we have three primary areas of our business and this is morphed over time. So we have the advisory piece, which is everything from doing an assessment, helping someone architect what their group needs to look like, what their banking structure needs to look like what their technology stack needs to include to be modern. Everything from risk to technology to treasury operations. We have an assist side of the business and this sometimes we call it the headache removal part of the business. And this is taking paying off of company. So if someone has foreign bank account reporting or fbar, we can do the corporate and individual filings, take care of that entire process and lift that out of there. We do bank account management for firms, bank fee management so someone gets concerned about. We got all this work to do with opening accounts, closing accounts, KYC activity, we take care of all of that for those types of firms. We have a connectivity team that will connect you to your banks for information reporting for payments, for transactions and confirmations. We have the onboarding group will help connect you to your bank services. So that just takes a lot of the pain out of the process for what treasury has to do. And then we have an informed part of our business which is the, the content piece. We just keep providing content through podcasts, through public discussions at events, whether it's a user conference, the New York Cash Exchange, afp, Treasure, any type of in person event we do, we have video, we provide ebooks, newsletters, we put out a lot of content in terms of what's happening, what's going on. And then another component of that has to do with our surveys. We have 12 annual surveys. And you know, people love to hear what's going on, what are your peers doing, what are they planning on doing, what are they thinking of spending, what are their issues, what's at the top of their mind. And some of those have run for over a decade now. And so we have very good longitudinal information. So that is great information for the industry. And we also leverage that on projects. Whether it's for a corporation to know what are your peers doing, how are they staffed, what are they doing with risk, et cetera. Or even banks and technology firms want to know what's going on in the mine. So we use that information as well. So it's advise, assist and inform is the way we logically group the work we do.

And you talk there. You've got this great depth of treasury resources over a period of time to draw from. This is your sales pitch and this is you. But it's actually a serious question as well. Why would someone choose you over a Deloitte or a Big four firm? You know, they're, you know, they, they've got this global reputation and everything else. Why would they come to strategic treasurer? And again, that's for also, if I'M sitting there as a listener, I might be thinking, well, yeah, but strategic treasure, why, you know, okay, you've got this great knowledge and everything else, but what makes you more special? Stand out, if you like.

I think the best way to say is, why do people choose us? It's usually because they know us or they were referred to us by a trusted treasurer, a trusted banker who said, you need to look at them to solve this type of problem or this type of issue. They're very specialized, they're all experienced, they get things done. It's practical. Now, if those are key elements, that puts us in a good standpoint. I can't speak to all the other reasons why people use different firms, but those are some of the key elements of why we get into projects and then we'll get follow on projects and follow on projects. So oftentimes it might be something about designing and structuring your treasury group or your technology. We tend to be recognized very well in those areas as providing great information. And I know sometimes we have to fix what's been designed because there's so much change taking place in technology. Someone provides a template that was pretty modern eight years ago, but is completely out of date for the company. And so I think our ability to calibrate what an organization needs technologically and structurally helps us serve our customers quite well.

And so you've been doing this 15 years, started back in 04. And we'll talk about the evolution of, you know, some of the stuff that you guys have done and, and as you've seen the market. But just looking back at you, you know, particularly as a person, what have you enjoyed most about it, you know, going from 2004 up to now 2019, what. What's been the, you know, gets you up in the morning and stuff and has that. I'm assuming that has changed maybe from you as you perhaps was. Was it desk, phone, office, that's it, Start to pick up the phone, or did you immediately bring in people or, you know, what's been the evolution of your firm, as it were.

Early on, I brought some people in to help with, you know, different types of office functions just to keep things running so I wouldn't be tied up with, you know, all of the admin stuff that has to occur. And then we quickly. I brought in another analyst who had worked at the bank before. And then we continued to expand, hired some more analysts. And then over time, as activity went on, we were able to continue hiring people in different areas. I guess one of the things that's interesting on it is it's not an exact linear path. Just like risk management, people come up with, here's an expected value for cash flow, and it's an exact line. It's like if you roll two die people, oh, the expected value is seven, but you can get two to 12 when you roll the die. And there's a variance there. Same thing with the growth of an organization. You grow. And, you know, I thought, man, I'm brilliant. We're growing really rapidly, multiple hundreds of percent the first few years. And then 2008 happened, and people cut back expenses. They were a lot consultants. Yeah. I mean, people would hire us to help find capital, and everything else was we're not hiring consultants at all. And so it was very, very significant changes that took place. But I think one of the things that I learned and I am finally figuring out is that, you know, as you grow and as things go on, you have to continually reinvent your company. And, you know, things are different when you're three people to five to 10 to 20 to 30, et cetera. Every area of growth, there's differences with how you staff, how you support things. What is, you know, something you do off the side of your desk for 10 minutes becomes three hours, and now and then it becomes a point where you have to hire someone who does that activity. So if I can hire someone to do something we do just like we tell treasury people, if you can have someone outsource something, do it. Only do what you need to do specifically. And that has helped us a lot. And I am embarrassed to say I keep learning that again and again. It's like, I got that lesson, but there's a slight nuance. And so you have to keep adjusting quickly over time.

And you mentioned there about recruiting and bringing people in and, you know, once you hit those tipping points, as it were, when you're looking at those people coming to join the firm, what is it particularly you're looking for? The, you know, some of the podcast guests I've spoken to look distinctly for qualification, or they look some for the attitude they might be able to move countries lots and take different challenges and things. What is it you're looking? Not well, maybe from a resume and then also on a personal level. And again, this is to give a tip to the people that are listening today thinking, right, what do I need to focus on if I want to follow it, you know, and join a firm? Knight Strategic treasurer.

You know, qualifications in the business. You know, having deep experience as a practitioner is one of the Key qualifications for our senior consultants say you have to have that because that's been what our model is and you have to be able to run a project on your own. Now for consultants and analysts that, that can look a little different. But the business qualifications and the experience are, you know, that's the starting point. Then there's a couple other elements. So there's intellectual property, there's personality, and then there's the practical side of getting things done. So from an intellectual property standpoint is how much of a continual learner is this person? Are they continually learning? Can they recognize that company B is not like company A in these areas and is similar to company A, C and D so that you're not providing a recommendation that is, this is the best practice that is universally adopted because it's not. I mean there might be leading practices that make sense for every organization, but it's very different if you're working for a non bank financial institution like an insurance company that does 10 million payments a month, payments look a lot differently than a manufacturer does 10,000 payments a year. So what you do from a technology standpoint or organizational standpoint will look different based on the organization, its complexity, its structure and where they're doing business. So the intellectual side of being a continual learner and being able to calibrate responses and see those differences. You know, I was joking with someone about switch latency, but this is the idea of, you know, you can't multitask, but you can switch from one topic to another. That's an important aspect of a consultant, is that they can switch quickly. And then the other piece which I just spoke about before has to do with how can you have that judgment capability between what is appropriate for this particular organization. Treasury is the same and treasury is different. Where is it different? What, so what is this organization intents in? And so the ability to understand those things from an intellectual standpoint, to be continually learning and I guess I would say is to be able to share that information to our team and then to also help the side of our business that is informed. This is podcast, ebooks, speeches, white papers. We want to get that information out to help the industry at large in addition to what we do with individual clients. So that's a piece there. And then there's the do they fit in the team? There's obviously people have to be able to travel, but can they fit and work well in a team? You could be the smartest, best person, but if you can't work with other team members or communicate well or communicate exceptionally well to our team, that will be a problem. We look for really good communicators, people that work together well, and then people who can communicate at any level in an organization to any role. Those are the key things once we have the critical content qualifications down.

You mentioned earlier in the show that you were talking to, I think it was sue, you said your wife and you were, you were getting bored where you were and she could, you know, she said, go and do your own thing and everything else, which is, you know, fantastic. And you started out with this, not the master plan, but you had perhaps an idea of where it might go from there. I mean, just thinking about, you know, what you thought it would might look like and now you're 15 years later and maybe they look completely different. But what has been your favorite thing about that path? Would you say, what, what's the thing that's kept you. You've done it 15 years. Someone said to me, the. They said, oh, why did you get in recruitment? I said, well, one reason is because nobody, you know, I'm running your own firm, rather your own recruitment firm. I said, well, no one can sack me anymore. Not I did get sacked. It was very good, but it was more that I actually had control and actually I could do the different things I want, like this podcast. You know, one of my ex colleagues before said, oh no, I don't believe in it and things like that. I should have started this podcast 10 years ago when it was first starting. I think, you know, it would have been really interesting journey and I'm glad I have done it. But with yourself and coming back, you do all this content, you know, is this what you planned? You said, right, we could have a firm that does this, this, this or what was your sort of, what was your mini plan? Not the master plan, but just a plan?

Well, I think the plan was, you know, make enough money to. To be able to afford to live and continually be challenged mentally. And I think one of the continually challenged, continually learning, helping to develop the industry and work with individual clients. And part of your question was, what do I find most rewarding about it over time? I think I would say relationships. Trying new things and learning this continually learning process. So the relationships are. We've had very, very good relationships with our clients, most people in companies, and they're definitely work friends. Sometimes they become personal friends in different ways too. But really good relationships where you trust each other, you get a lot of good stuff done and you make a difference. That's really rewarding trying New things, the mental encouragement or excitement that comes along with learning, experimenting, seeing developments in other fields, reading, trying to apply them into treasury, taking what four different clients do differently, putting them together and being able to understand the landscape. There's a bunch of things that we learned that I love and we've gained by trying new things and this continually learning and coaching, being able to help staff grow, find ways that their vocation or their calling is, you hit the things that they're good at, try to get them to do more of those. And yeah, sure, you work on some of the areas of weakness, personally and as a group, but helping people do what they do really well and being able to emphasize that it just seems that the performance improves. And that is. That's both fun and quite rewarding.

And you talked about the landscape there, and it's obviously changed radically over the time. Both you and I have been in the industry looking at now and the future, obviously the rise of technology. It's the key thing and everything else. But as we've spoken on a few other shows and we'll get you back on some others in the future, Craig. But we talked most recently with Royston Da Costa from Ferguson, and one of the key things he did, and we had a great quote from him, was that technology replaces processes or assist processes. It doesn't replace people. And then the people add the value there and it gives them more time to add the value. But looking at the landscape changing and what you've seen, because you see it across so many different clients, not just from within one institution or one corporate. Where are you seeing it going? What are the exciting things you see within Landscape changing and evolving.

Yeah. With an emphasis on tech. So, yeah, and I like that quote from Royston. So, yeah, I guess we see technology as a set of tools, different level of skill of or capabilities of those tools. I think it's technology has continued to change through all of our lifetimes and before that. And so there's an ability to take advantage of that technology that the treasurer and treasury people need to understand. And the rate of change has been extraordinarily dramatic recently. And this represents a risk and also an opportunity, I would say. As you know, when I started off, I could give you some examples of we had a connect to banks and we needed to dial out, we needed to pull down data to set our cash position, to do reconciliation. And so, you know, you'll laugh, but it wasn't teletype machines. I'm not that old, but we did have teletype protocol and so we had things like Pro Complus, and we had a device that was bought at Radio Shack, which is an electronic store that had seven days you could plug when it would go on and off, just like your lights instead of it turns on at 8 at night and goes off at 11. This you could program by day. And we would set a computer up and it would have all the scripts in Pro Complus to dial out, download the files and prepare them. And then there was a physical device that kicked it off well that saved a lot of these functional steps or activities like, as Royston said, processes. The early data, the early systems that we did allowed us to replace many of those different activities. And then it got a lot easier. The systems could have Wingron or scheduling programs that could then kick off the jobs. And then you could integrate between systems. And what we're seeing now, and what we're able to do now is the data is better, the formats are much better because connectivity is faster. We're not limited by how much the bandwidth is. So now instead of a file that comes in that's, you know, position eight is the value of the transaction. And if something extra data gets in there, it breaks the process. You know, the delimited file formats. Now the we use extensible markup language, for example, where the data also has a tag that tells you what it is. That's, you know, that's not necessarily as efficient if your cost of data transmission is really high. But data transmission costs are like nothing now. Now the data is more enriched. I can use that data in more systems. And so we think about how that matters in Treasury. Well, I can use that data for posting for processes. I can save on how much I do. And that's just one element of the tech stacks, that data. You have connectivity, systems reporting, analytics. And so connectivity, whether it's the use of APIs, whether it's leveraging networks like Swift, there's a whole range of what we need to do in most organizations with regard to remodeling their treasury technology stack that will help de risk an organization that will help with the efficiency, that will help with the efficiency between processes and allows you to get into the visibility and analytics side of the business. And that part means that there is a lot more capabilities for those who can help leverage these tools of automation and leverage the tools that help us analyze more deeply. That is a massive opportunity and it's not as much of a risk in treasury as some other areas. Treasuries are very thinly staffed and so it's not like we've got five fixed asset accountants or we got 12 people on an audit that some AI tool or machine learning will be able to go through and pull out the data. And so now you need two auditors rather than six or one. Treasury has been thinly staffed and there's always been a pile of work that isn't done that's very valuable and there's too much time spent on tasks that are not best done by people. So I'm not sure I'm answering your question directly, but the idea that there's so much to be done and there's so much, the tools are so far superior to what they've been that it's amazing. And anybody who's designing their new treasury system or treasury group or figuring out what to do needs to make sure that your structure, your treasury technology architecture is modern and makes sense across the different conceptual layers of data connectivity, systems reporting and analytics. And sitting on the side of that are things like robotic process automation and machine learning that can help us cheat our way to straight through processing, as opposed to saying it's going to be in one system, everything's going to work perfectly. Treasury has to be able to be adaptable because when there's a new risk or a new issue that comes up, you have to respond immediately. We don't have time. Like accountants may have to say, the new accounting rule is going in place in three years. We know it will only get delayed one year. So we got four years to adapt to it. We have to respond to the market. We have to protect the organization's assets. And by looking at the technology, making sure our group is ready to handle these changes is monitoring what's going on. We can have organizations that are ready, ready for the unpredictable and ready to take advantage of the technology and the changing increase in expectations on Treasury.

Craig, you very kindly robbed me of one of my good questions there in a nice way, because I was. They're going to ask you where you saw it going from here and what perhaps you guys were going to see next for you and the treasury and the team at Strategic Treasury. But it sounds like you're helping with those things and helping your clients deal with it so well. Great. That was great.

Yeah, I think you have. I mean, I'll just continue. Part of your question is still valid. Where do we see things going from and what should people be doing? You know, it's one thing to talk about buzzwords and maybe I could. I don't know if this is too Much of a discursis. But you talk about eBam for example. Oh, that was a big buzz. Everyone was talking about it, it was cool. And then is RPA is Robotic Process Automation AI Are those buzzwords that we need to avoid or just say it's going to go away? It's a fad, it passes. Now I'd say a couple things. We need to be in the process of continually monitoring what's going on, but also experimenting and piloting. So why did EBAM not work? I would say we can say some banks would just print stuff out and move it around. That's not really the issue. The issue why it didn't take off or it's like growing so slowly and will take another decade for example, is that people didn't have their bank account activities automated and systematized. Well, you can't have a paper based system or separate files all of a sudden interface and have these communication about open an account, add these signers, add the services, cancel this if your underlying process is a combination of paper and some Excel files, that's not going to interface to have these electronic conversations. But when we look about, we look at API, machine learning, robotic process automation, all of that's been around for some time, the capabilities are greater and so something RPA allows us, like I said before, to cheat our way to straight through processing. We can start off and should start off with different pilot programs, get people learning the new tools so that you can experiment, say well how do I get this data from this system to another? What do I need to look at it? How can I identify if there's a problem in the underlying flow? I can use tools to sit, go through that and identify problems and then it informs the treasury person when they need to get involved and solve something that isn't there. But this allows us to build to a far more effective structure and then it gets us into what we think about data, how we analyze and self serve on some of the analytics that treasury group should be doing.

Craig, awesome. I'm looking forward to publishing this one because I think people gain a lot from it and actually better understanding of where things are going to as we discussed before the show and we'll put Craig's LinkedIn profile in the show notes you can connect to Craig and, and talk to, you know, talk to him and potentially talk about you guys and your headaches as it were. One of the things I was going to say as we do on every week's show is if someone's looking back at your LinkedIn profile and they look at this. Actually, I'd like to be doing that. I'd like to be involved with that kind of firm or set up my own firm or follow in your footsteps. What's the one or couple of bits of advice you would give to someone looking back across your history? What's the killer pieces of advice to someone who's treasury manager, listening to this today and goes, actually, I want to copy that. What would you say to them?

Well, I think if you're going to go into consulting, you want to have a broad set of experiences, so gain as much as you can. Try new areas. Don't do the same thing for six years in a row. If you're doing fx, move on to portfolio management, move on to domestic or global cash management, gain experience in multiple areas, gain deep experience in at least one, and then move on to other areas. I think in terms of what makes sense when you go into id, when you move into the concept of saying, I want to be a consultant, I think there's a certain element of I like a lot of new things. I like to continually learn and challenge my thinking in different environments and continually refine my thinking. If you like a lot of new, lots of new projects, lots of new processes that can be a good indicator of a good fit. You have to be able to consult and advise at different levels. Are you doing that where you are now in your organization with third parties? And not just third parties that you know are trying to sell you something because they'll be particularly amenable, but to other areas of the organization you're in, who you might have to convince and you can't just tell. So those are a few of the items. And I think the other piece is what I was joking about earlier is that switch latency. As you know, everyone says, oh, I can multitask. Well, nobody really can multitask. You're focused on one item, but your ability to switch between tasks. If you're doing two or three tasks, if you can switch quickly from one company or one type of issue very rapidly without having a problem, that's a good sign that you should be able to help be a consultant, because there is a fair amount of switching and yes, we can sit deeply and analyze things for a long period of time, but usually you're working with multiple companies, different types of problems, so your ability to be nimble mentally and the desire to do that is helpful. If you like, you know, 5% new consultancy, consulting is not the business. If you like 100% new you know, be an entrepreneur. If you like, you know, 60 to 100% consultant consultancy might be a place for you that's going to work.

So develop your depths of experience, then broaden it by going to different areas and things like that. Don't be afraid of something new. And if you particularly like new and various different areas of treasury consultancy could be good for you. But again, if you just want to just do one area and really focus on that, but not switch around and find that difficult, then consultancy is not for you. But it is if you want to really focus on that area and, well, great advice. Thank you, Craig. Mr. Jeffrey. Now, guys, who are listening today, you will actually get to hear Craig a few more times in the future. We've agreed we're gonna do a couple more shows. We're gonna perhaps do some more Focus Friday shows, actually, where we do things like treasury technology. Why bother? That's the working title of it. So it should be quite good fun and consultancy itself and why, you know, what that contribution that makes and things like that. So we'll get Craig back on the show. All that remains for me to say is, great. Thank you very much for your time. I think people enjoy this show. And we will also put a link to Craig's podcast. Now, what do you actually call your. Your podcast? Treasury Update Podcast. What's actually called for the people looking.

Up for it, it's a Treasury Update podcast. You can search for it on whatever device you listen to, podcast on your phone, or you can go to strategic treasure.com podcast and listen to it there if you like.

Excellent. We'll put all those links in the show notes. So, Craig, thank you once again for your time and look forward to further conversations.

Thank you.