How Haleon Built a World Class Treasury Function from Scratch During a Major Spin Off

So welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I talk to treasurers about how they built their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next in this week's show. Delighted to be joined by Tom Gilliam, the VP Corporate Finance treasury at Helium Halion is the is a leading consumer company that specializes in everyday health, working to put better everyday health in more hands to superior brands including Sensodyne and Advil Centrum, a wide range and we'll get on to that later on in the show and Tom will explain. But it's basically as brands which crazy are trusted and used by more than 1 billion consumers and recommended by health professionals all over the world, which is just fantastic. So Tom, if you would. That's where you are now. We're going to go back to the beginning and how you first started and obviously we've known each other for many years, sir, so looking forward to going back to begin it. How did it first start and how did your career start? Over to you, sir.

Yeah, thanks first off for having me on and thank you. Nice to catch up. It's been a little while. Sure. So I guess where should I start? If I go back, I'll do a little whistle stop tour through my early career and then probably focus on the last few companies I've worked for being larger ones if I go back a long time. I studied maths in university, which was something academically incredibly interesting, little bit far removed from the real world, if you will. So I was very keen coming out of university to do something much more sort of business focused. So after university, initially trained as a chartered accountant, the view being it was good broad business qualification, allowed me to understand the business world. Having done that, actually that was the first time I stumbled across Treasury. I didn't know what treasury was when I was at university and said not before then because I think at this point this is early 2000s was a relatively small industry compared to where it is now.

Yeah.

So after. Yeah, after having trained as a charter accountant, I moved in and worked for Rentokill Initial for a few years as the treasury accountant. So halfway, I guess, between the accounting world and the treasury world.

And who are Rentokill Initial for? Maybe our US listeners are going rent to who they might know them. But again, this is one of the things because it's quite different across the world sort of thing. Yeah.

So it's a rental initial. Certainly at the time a company that was focused on hygiene. They had facilities management business, the pest control business. Yeah. So it's those sort of fields, but they're also.

But they're global as well. That's one of the differences, isn't it? So it's like you go there and there's local companies there, but that's. Rentokil are a global company as well.

Exactly. And this is something, actually, that's a really interesting and important point, is certainly for me, all of the treasury companies I've worked for, the companies I've worked for in treasury have all been big global businesses. And I've always worked in the UK head office of those big global businesses. And it's a sort of interesting point and theme, I guess, as you go through it, is that the nature of being in a big global business is that you have similar things to worry about. I mean, whatever the business is doing, the underlying commercial business, you still need to worry about foreign exchange movements, about how you actually move cash around the world and centralize it, how you manage the company's debt portfolio. All of these sort of things are consistent, no matter what the business is like.

And you come from an audit background. Was that helpful? Again, if someone's listening today and they think, oh, actually I can make the transition into treasury, what are the plus points or the points where you struggled sort of thing?

I think it's mainly plus points, actually, because it's having done the accountancy and working at audit that that allows you to learn a lot about the sort of the. Like reading a set of financial statements, for example. Take that. That is a really helpful skill because it helps you understand, actually, what does the business look like? Where might there be risks? Things like just being able to interpret a company's net debt, company's working capital profile, leverage ratios, these sort of things are extremely relevant in Treasury. And then also there's a big point around the sort of interdependency of the different teams that you work with. I spend a lot of time working with our tax team, with our internal audit team, with our group finance team. All of the teams that you would have in a big organization, it's really important that they work together.

Yeah.

And having a good understanding of what each of those teams do and that level of detail, it just makes that process much, much easier.

And you did that role in controlship, then you moved to the dark side, then you joined banking. What happened? How come you made that move? Because I know you went there and then came back. So talk us through how come.

Yeah, it's a good point. Treasury is obviously very well linked into the banking sector, so there's a lot of similarities, there's a lot of crossover. But I think particularly for most companies, the treasury team will be pretty small. If you exclude the biggest multinational companies that I might be able to work for. Most of the treasury teams are relatively small. So what that means is there's actually limited opportunity for progression within Treasuries. If you're in a team of five people, let's say. Clearly that's going to be quite limiting in terms of progression opportunities and having had a good amount of exposure to the banking world, I thought it would be an interesting move, really in terms of broadening my career, broadening my experiences. But I knew quite a few people who worked in banking in different roles, different capacity.

So you joined RBS and. But it was not in their branch bank, but it was more in their global markets. Can you explain again why that was a good experience for you Stinkers? Again, for our listeners, they might think, oh, there are different forms of banking globally, but you actually went to the City of London and things like that. Talk us through that just briefly.

Correct. Yeah. So this was within the investment banking side of the business, the global banking and markets. The team I was working for at that time was it was within finance, but it was actually more of a market risk team. What that means is the team was really focused on looking at things like valuations, whether it's derivative valuations, bond valuations, so some actually quite technical stuff in there. And interestingly, the feel of it was almost a little bit similar to going back to my university days of reading maths, being really quite academically technical, quite quantity, but a little bit removed from the sort of the actual. The business side of it. So it was an academically very interesting time. Also just an interesting time, full stop, because this was. I was led from 2006 to 2009, which for anyone with a history book will tell you was right bang over the financial crisis period in one of the banks that was very heavily impacted by the financial crisis. So really interesting time to be there.

And how would. How did that build you as a Treasury professional? As you say, it's. You have to be thick skinned in a situation like that.

I think it's a. Yeah, a combination of thick skinned and being able to put things in perspective. Being able to step back, put things in perspective, not panic, I think was quite helpful. Yeah. So, yeah, it's not very common that you wake up in the morning and see your office on the sort of BBC News in the morning.

Yeah, yes.

On the day that they. That RBS were taken over. Taken over by the government.

And so what happened next, then? So you've been there at RBS and you decided back to corporate Treasury. Obviously, I know this because I've known you all the way through, but what happened? How come the change?

Yeah, that, that. That was really it. I think as I alluded to earlier, it's quite similar to how I was feeling. Having done my university is academically, really interesting time, but I just wanted to get back closer to. To. To a commercial business, closer to a business. And having spent a couple of years in treasury previously, but also maintained very good contacts with the Act. Yeah, so I'd sort of. I'd still remained quite well plugged into treasury even through that time that I was working for rbs and so, yeah, at that time I was looking for opportunities to move back into treasury and unluckily a role came up in SAB Miller.

I was going to say SAB at the time.

People.

People will know maybe, but again, one of the world's largest brewers of beer. Our favorite. A favorite of both you and I. Yeah.

At the time it was the world's second largest brewer with very significant businesses all over the world, but particularly a very strong emerging market scheme. So a very big business in South Africa, across Sub Saharan Africa and also in Latin America. So really interesting footprint as well as being a huge business. It was Footsie 10 business at the time. I can't remember the financial metrics to it, but just a very significant global business.

When you got in there, you were. You went in as. Again, using your treasury accounting background, but obviously it was a. What's the word, as you say, you were entering all these emerging markets, so quite a challenging time sort of thing.

Yeah, well, it's more. The business had been pretty well established in these markets in terms of knowing how to operate in these markets, which is really important. And this is from a commercial business perspective. Yeah, the business was very well set up for that side of it, I think, where there was a big opportunity and something I spent a huge amount of my time focused on whilst I was there was how do we go about managing the risks associated and particularly FX risk being associated with being in these markets. So I think that was really my main focus through my time at swm. I fairly quickly progressed into a role that was effectively the head of treasury risk management there. I spent a lot of time analyzing how a big business could and should manage, particularly emerging market FX risk, although it's relevant to any currency really.

And okay, so how could you. And should you. What was it? What was your ethos or how. What sort of was your guiding light or weather vein if you like?

I think. How long have you got on this one? There's a couple of key principles. I think the first one is it's every currency and every sort of country is different.

Yeah.

So it definitely, it's really worthwhile spending some time understanding how different currencies behave and then understanding the framework in each country. So what I mean by that is things like currency restrictions, tax rules, it's all the other bits that you need to think about rather than just how does the FX rate move on screen up and down? Yeah, yeah. I spend an awful lot of time both myself and also with some of my banks running things like historical analysis, like actually looking at trends, looking at how the currencies behave and in particular looking at the relationship between carries that have the interest cost on hedging versus realized FX moves over time and mapping that. Also spend a lot of time looking at FX options in that market and understanding how those behave. There's FX options can be extremely useful hedging tools and it's something that I don't think many corporates use because they're also very complex. You need to have a fairly sort of detailed understanding of how FX options behave. You don't need to go and understand how to derive the Black Scholes model of how you actually calculate valuations, but you do need to understand some of the principles behind that. So it is quite technical and it's not something I'd expect most, most people to really be able to understand, certainly not intuitively.

Yeah. And you actually, as you say, you're working hand in hand with your banks and some of those very technical guys who they live and breathe as well. But you're then living and breathing from the corporate side of things. What was it like stepping into that and then getting buy in from the business? How did you get those guys to realize? Because obviously it's quite a complex thing and at the end of the day they're saying, well, we sell beer. You and I know they were very much interlinked because we talked about it at the time. Yeah. How do you get them to on side?

So interestingly, the timing worked out quite well here because I was studying for my MCT at the time, which is the sort of top level qualification that the ACT used to run. Yeah. It's unfortunately been discontinued in recent years, but hopefully it's something we'll see. Come back. And as part of that, I did a very comprehensive research project on FX hedging. So I was able to do this sort of very detailed piece of work that allowed me to then illustrate what. Why this was significant, why this was important for the business, but also where there may be opportunities to do something a little bit different. Yeah, but it. But that took me several months of work. Super work through it. And that. And it is that complicated. It is something that you need to have sufficient, let's say, academic rigor to be able to present something like this, because it's a complex area.

And how did that. And what practical. Did it bring. What practical. What did it bring to the business? Because I know that it did as well.

I'd say probably the main. One of the main outputs of this was illustrating the high cost of just hedging with FX forwards in emerging markets and how over time, that's a real. Generally a very expensive thing to do. It reduces volatility, it provides all the benefits of hedging, but it is very expensive. And so I did a lot of analysis of what could this look like if instead of hedging with forwards, you were hedging with options, you were hedging with collars, with other tools and illustrating actually what that looks like, and not just the numbers, but also like putting graphs together to say this is what your actual cash flows would have looked like over this period of time, hedging with different tools. And that was a really powerful way of illustrating it. It's actually quite an important point in general of what some of the things we do in treasury is we're trying to take complex topics and explain those complex topics to people who are not specialists, and it's how best to do that. And there's obviously lots of different tools you can use, but I find doing it in picture form, turning it into graphs, tends to be the most effective way to actually illustrate it.

Yeah. And you translated that for the sort of senior management, and then that actually made an impact on the bottom line, didn't it?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's lots of things that we did over time that you can quantify, and I've got lots of illustrations that I've talked with you about previously where I can point to very significant cash savings that were made as a direct cost consequence of actions that I've taken in the business.

Okay. And then Sab. Well, there was lots of things happening. Well, talk us about the next move.

Yeah, of course.

So.

So Sab Miller was taken over in 2016 by AB back end of 2016 and as you would expect off the back of that, they didn't need a second head office in the uk, so that the head office was closed down. The whole sort of whole. All of the corporate functions were effectively disbanded and all of the treasury team moved on at that point. So at that time I joined GSK. So early 2017 and GSK at that time were WHO. So GSK, big global pharma business. So in particular they had sort of three big divisions with pharmaceuticals, vaccines and consumer healthcare. At that time, the consumer healthcare was run as a joint venture and I'll cover that a lot later. So quite different industry to SABMiller, but actually again, big FTSE 10 international business. So a lot of the issues were very similar. Lots of foreign currency flows to manage, a large debt portfolio to manage. And the same. Yeah, the same sort of principles, really, making sure you partner very effectively with the businesses around the world, understand those matters. And yeah, it's actually what we were.

Doing was quite similar in that sort of context and function, if you like. But what were the big differences from obviously brewer to healthcare? Quite a different change of industry. What did you. You see that struck you as being different?

I think where best to start on this one? I mean, one of. One of the biggest things personally is that it was an industry that's much harder to understand, much more sort of complex. Making beer is fundamentally pretty easy. You only really need four ingredients. I've made beer myself under a bit of guidance, so the process is quite well understood. So the focus, I guess from SAP Miller was much more on how. How do you build brands and how do you focus on the consumer much more directly.

Yes.

Whereas pharmaceutical business is obviously it's focused much more on the. Not consumers per se, but it's conditions that you're focused on. Yeah, So a lot more technical, very interesting from an academic angle, like getting a chance to understand some of the science behind it. But it's a very different focus with the exception of the consumer healthcare division of gsk, which was much more similar because that was still based on brands and more similarities.

And so then when you were there, you. It was an interesting one. You won in your early days at gsk, you won Deal of the Year. What was so. And I've talked to people about who have won prize and things. Why was that so special or what was. I know that was one of the. As you say, Deal of the Year. It's a big deal. What was it and why was that special?

Yeah, I think one, one of the advantages and actually one of the reasons I joined GSK was the company had a large debt portfolio and also was there's a lot of M and A activity within the. So from someone who works in treasury and particularly focused in the corporate finance side of treasury, that means the opportunity to work on a lot of big deals, a lot of sort of complex deals as well. And this is not just the raising finance, which is where the focus is for the deal of the year tends to be, but it's all of the work around that as well. So if you're going out raising significant amounts of long term financing, there's also a lot of thought around how do you manage the interest rate risk on that portfolio? In what currency do you want to raise your bonds? Do you want to overlay FX hedges on the top of those to change the overall shape and structure of your net debt portfolio? And then there's the practical consideration. So like in which country do you want to be issuing bonds? So a big company like gsk, there's several different legal entities around the world from which you can issue bonds. So there's a big consideration about where do you want to hold those bonds, the internal structuring of it and it's all of this work together that sort of feeds in, I think, to examples of things like the deal of the year awards. It's not just issuing a bond, which is what the outside world sees, it's all of the other work that goes along.

What did you do? Because it was quite special, wasn't it?

Yeah. So I think from memory, I think that this all relates to the buyout of Novartis joint venture. So when I joined gsk, they ran the consumer business as a joint venture venture with Novartis and then they bought out Novartis's stake in that joint venture. From memory, I think it was $12 billion deal. Without going into too much detail of that, I think for me, probably the most important step in the process of this was a sort of point of mindset within the team, is that we were trying to work out where after this deal, where would the company be? So what would our earnings profile look like? What would the overall size of our debt look like? And then given that, how would we want that to be structured? In what set of currencies, in what interest rate profile? And then it's working back to say, well, how do we get there? Here's where we are today, here's where we believe we can issue bonds. Because when you're issuing bonds in that size, you need to think about different markets. It probably would be possible these days to go out and issue all of that in the US dollar market, but that might not be the best thing to do based on relative bond pricing, based on all sorts of different factors that DCM bankers would be able to talk through with you. But it's working through that journey in a very methodical way, but with a clear endpoint in mind. And that endpoint really reflects the company's policies, the company's risk appetite, all of those different factors. But I think that was quite a different mindset for GSK at the time. Whereas I think previously there'd be a lot of focus and a lot of companies probably are in this position where the focus is just on what am I doing today, what bonds I want to issue on those bonds, how much do I want to top into floating rates, for example, but perhaps without looking at the bigger picture and looking at the overall portfolio.

And that's part of the point. That's one of the things I was leaning into there with you, that it's very much. You've got that sort of level of intellect and things like that. As you say, lots of people go out to the markets and say, we're going to do this bond, we can do this. And. But you're actually having to work from reverse principles. If you're like, okay, if we did deal this, the end result is this. But actually, let's start with the end in mind and start at the end. And actually, if we do this. Hang on, this could affect the entire profile of the company.

We got to be careful. Exactly. Because you're solving for different things. Yeah, there's one, there's one. One. One thing you're solving for is I need to raise a lot of money. So in this case, I needed to raise $12 billion to complete this deal. But then also you're solving for what is the risk profile that I wanted to group. And those are quite different things, but they're clearly very interlinked. And I think it's something. And I'll maybe come to this a little bit later anyway, but it's certainly something I've tried to do with. The Pelion treasury team is really try and separate those two. So we run quite a separate process for how we manage the risk profile of our debt. And that's something we look at on a very regular basis. We make a lot of changes to it. Outside of bond issuance, we don't just issue swaps at bond issuance and leave them there. We look at our swaps portfolio on a very regular basis and make changes based on where we think they should be made. But they're quite separate exercises.

Yeah, and it's active management of it and you've touched on there. Helen, can you then bring us up? Because I know that people are itching to hear about it. So talk us through who it was, what happened next.

Yep, no problem at all. I'll talk you through it as through the story effectively. So, back end of 2018, GSK and Pfizer announced that they were forming a joint venture between their two consumer healthcare businesses and that that joint venture would subsequently be spun off, be separated out of gsk. So that that joint venture was formed in the summer of 2019 and it was spun out into what would become Halion in the summer of 2022. Why that is, why that was really interesting and really helpful is that we had visibility that this was going to happen about three and a half years before it did happen. Because the spinoff of a company the size of Halion is a very significant exercise. There's a huge amount of complexity in there. So having that amount of time to think through it and then execute it in a very, let's say, methodical manner was extremely helpful and allowed us to achieve a successful separation of the business. Because if you think about it, you've got a business that had been run just as a division of gsk. It relied on all of the head office functions within gsk. So the underlying commercial businesses all set up, all run, run very well, in many cases, have been run for many years. Certainly some of the brands have been around for a very long time. So there wasn't a huge amount of disruption to that commercial side of the business. But we had to put in place an entire, effectively entire head office function, entire corporate infrastructure. So from a Treasury perspective, what this meant was I guess probably three things, mainly for us. One was that we needed to hire a team.

Yeah.

So we needed to actually hire a team from scratch for a give or take FTSE 20 business. So significant number of people in there. The other one was that we needed to raise a huge amount of debt initially. So as part of the deal of this separation, the company was going to start its life with a net debt to EBITDA ratio of around about four times, which translated to around about £11 billion worth of debt. And this is raising debt for a company that at the time didn't exist, or at least the head office didn't exist. The top CO didn't exist at the time. So that was a pretty interesting exercise. And then the third leg was about really building the infrastructure, the policies, the processes to be able to operate as an independent business. So things like putting in place the right bank account structures that we need. It's those that sort of. That side of it as well.

Those are all the practical things about setting up the standalone and things. But one thing I think we shouldn't skip past and you and I have talked about in our pre call was you were doing this all with the Shadow and all the overarching with COVID as well. And it was remote working, hybrid working, setting up a new spin off. Talk us through that if you would and how that interface with it and how you manage that.

Yeah, and that was. It was obviously a sort of very interesting time at that point because this is. We started the thinking and planning probably late 2019 for this, then obviously ran into Covid in 2020 and had to negotiate all of that as well. There's so much I could talk about. What was it?

Yeah, I was gonna say more. More just if someone's in a similar situation you would suddenly actually you have to work independently but you have to set this up or how did you make sure it worked well think there's a group and you got the right people in the right places when you perhaps have to do more over zoom or like this or things.

I think there's probably a couple of things in there. It's. We had as everyone had all got very used to using the to being at home to talking over zoom or teams or equivalent. So I think the sort of way that ways of working point because it was forced upon everybody was something that people got used to relatively quickly. I think there's a couple of things to draw out through the process is that it was a really busy time for us which in many ways was actually pretty helpful. So I personally I had no time to dwell on the fact that all of this chaos was going on around the world because I was just so busy I was able to just focus on this very big but very well defined project. So that side was really quite helpful when it came to actually putting the team together, for example. So I was running the recruitment side of this exercise where she's hiring and putting in place the Halion team. The fact that all of that was done virtually actually made it probably made it easier in some ways because it meant the process was very consistent. So everyone, all of the sort of interviewing and recruitment process that we Ran was done on a very consistent basis, a very good clear framework for how I was running all of the interviews there, which is. I think it's good practice anyway. But I think when you're doing it in the same room, I'm sat at my desk, you can make sure it's done as consistently as possible, which allows for a much sort of fairer process as you're running through it. So I think again that probably helps versus if I was trying to do this sort of face to face that's always going to be a bit difficult because for some people that the traveling might be difficult, for example. And I think if you're trying to run a run an interviewing process where you're doing some interviews virtually some in person, it's going to be very hard to do that on a sort of a fair and transparent way.

And when you talked about this again when we did our pre call, you talked about having some principles in mind when you were looking at people, what were they or how did you measure people? Because again, we don't often, although we. Someone actually asked me yesterday when I was briefing them about the book, I said, oh, do you talk about recruitment all the time? It's like actually we sometimes we don't at all. And it's because it's not just an advertorial for us, it's quite the opposite. It's more an advertorial for treasury and why people should work in it, but with. With yourself. And when you were doing the recruitment, what were your guiding. Guiding principles, if you like?

I think. Yeah, and it's a really interesting and really good question because what I was recruiting for was not at all a sort of normal situation. I was recruiting for a team to come into a company that at the time the corporate functions did not exist. So through all the process, for example, the name Halion was only announced, I think it was the first February 2022. So all the way through the process I didn't know what the company was called. Yeah, I was just saying at the moment it is run off co. Yeah, exactly. We had to make up a name for it effectively because we also knew that we were going to have several people moving from the GSK treasury team into the Halion treasury team. We were also recruiting not just for an individual role or an individual company. So through all of the interview process I was explaining to people this is the role we're nominally hiring for. However, we also expect there's be quite a lot of roles that are need backfilling within the GSK team. So that in itself is also really unusual because even when I've done recruiting previously, I've just recruited for a single role. That's still quite sort of hard and long process here. There was a huge amount of complexity to it. So I think what that meant is one of the main things we were looking for is people who were not just comfortable with change, but actively embrace change, because this is not. This was not a usual journey that people would be going through. And also we knew that after separation of the businesses, there was inevitably going to be a lot of change, because the way the separation had to be executed was maintaining sort of consistent systems processes from what had been run within gsk, within sort of big pharma company, because doing it any other way would have been far too risky. Effectively. It's a difficult enough thing to execute anyway. So because Helion is a consumer goods company, what we need is quite different from what a pharma company needs. So we knew that there was going to be quite a lot of change to how that business operated in the years after separation. So hence we really needed this sort of culture within the team of people who would embrace that. And there's lots and lots of things that you'd also be doing for the first time, which is always harder. If you're in a very long established business, you can look back at what you did last year, copy it, and that's probably going to be what happens. There might be. There'll be tweaks, there'll be little changes. Fundamentally, things don't tend to change too much. Whereas we knew that we had both the opportunity to make all of these changes and almost a necessity to do so.

When you were interviewing people, how did you assess their openness to change? Because obviously I sometimes said this to some of our interviewees. They say, oh, we assess for this, we assess for this and say, yeah, but how did you assess or measure it or what was your ethos?

That's difficult. I mean, we went with a lot of standard interview type questions that we're using to really get a feel for what had people done previously, what their passions were, where was their focus was. And a lot of it was really through that. It's through getting a good understanding of what people had done previously and which sort of stories or which activities that they really draw out that illustrated that sort of desire for change and that ability to think very clearly of, what do I want, what's the business want, how do I best get there? And it's probably a little Bit similar to the example I was using earlier on the sort of the debt portfolio. It's really identifying what is best for the business and then working back to what that means today.

One of the ways that one of our previous guests we talked about and what they did is they would explore through some people's resume and things like that in the US and they were particularly saying right is someone much more. They were looking at their sports track record and were they in sports that were very much team sports and although with the more individual contributors and they said the funny bit was for their two teams they were re recruiting one was all about team and one was the total opposite. They said anyone that was team would be really bored in this team or would. It was very in depth and it was more analytical. And they said actually we got two great teams but the people that were together, they got well, but their ways of working were very different. So it sounds very similar as well. And with yourself, I know that collaboration, innovation, we've talked about that a little bit. As treasury evolves sort of thing and your role continues to go, where do you think treasurers should be? What should be they be doing to continue to develop within the professional. Where do you think we touched on technology obviously coming along all the time, but you know, we don't. It's not a tech show, it's more. Where do you see more things coming through for treasurers?

I can talk from my experience and where I see the team and the company at the moment, I think it's probably just as much focus as possible on what we can do in treasury to support the overall business objectives. It means really understanding the business extremely well. And I think what I've seen particularly over the last few years is the sort of the breadth, I guess where treasury has got involved and where we've been helpful and supporting business has got much, much broader. Right over the course of my career. And part of that's just naturally what happens as you progress and get get more senior in your treasury career. But even at the sort of the more junior levels within my team, I see this a lot more because I think treasury has a lot of good skills or treasury professionals tend to have a lot of very good and helpful skills for the business. I think the ability to be able to see the whole organization to step back, think about how the organization behaves, look end to end. If I can work out where we're generating sales, for example, how that flows through the value chain within the business and what that ultimately means in terms of overall result in profitability in a way that not many other functions do. I think most areas are a little bit more narrow in terms of where they're focused. And I think being able to bring that sort of holistic business mindset and that sort of strategic thinking that's quite common amongst treasurers, that those are all extremely helpful viewpoints to bring in broader business conversations. So I think it's building those relationships, building that sort of credibility and trust with senior management to be able to help drive better business results.

And how do you encourage your team to form those relationships? I know that one of my first videos, which we just announced, we just done over a million impressions just the past few days because. But all I do is I relate. I've said it's not me to you guys. I just relate some of the little stories, the snippets, every week. One of the key ones was a number of years, few years ago, but actually then became one of the stories about this junior guy and he wanted to make lots of relationships and his boss said, go and have coffee with everyone. And he wasn't making it quick enough. He had more coffee. But he then quickly became very well networked with the company. How do you do it with your team? What's the. If people, again are listening, how do you encourage them to get to know the business as a whole?

I think spending time with people is, in my view, one of the best ways to do it.

Yeah.

I'm not sure about having 10 coffees.

A day, but actually doing one a week. It was at one a week. And.

Yeah, and that's really helpful because it's. Because it allows you not just to learn about the other departments, but it's also get to know other people, because we're all working with people and you need. It's really important to build that trust. I think that this is a really key point. If you've got a trusting relationship and you both know that you're trying to do what is best for your business, that just. That makes. It makes it so much easier for that sort of personal relationship to be really productive in a business context. And you can't, you know, that's not something you. I'm trying to think how best to explain it. I'm going to back up a touch and go onto an example. Going back to my SAP Miller. Yeah, please do.

Yeah, fantastic.

So at Sab Miller, one of the advantages of being working for a large brewer is that there was a bar in the office.

I've been there. It was lovely.

Exactly. It was over on tap.

Love it.

And that that bar was extremely effective at helping to build these relationships because it was completely normal. It was a key part of the company culture that after work, once or twice a week you'd go and have a beer and just chat to people and particularly chat to a lot of people across different functions in different departments. So relatively quickly got to build really good relationships across lots of different departments within the business. That allowed teams to work so much better together. You have those sort of personal trusting relationships. Now that's obviously much easier when you're a beer company and you can have a bar in the office. It's maybe a little bit harder for other companies. But I think the concept, the principle remains exactly the same is that everything just becomes so much easier and so much more effective if you. Once you've got those relationships. But it takes a bit of time.

Yeah. Or maybe instead of beer is coffee. That's fine. It's similar whatever place.

Yeah, exactly. The principle is spending time with people.

Exactly. You touch on sab, touch then on GSK and Alien. You've seen treasury across a variety of sectors, a variety of companies. What does. And you've obviously seen other companies as well, perhaps that you've been in these leading blue chip corporates and what really great treasury looks like versus where treasury needs to develop and things. What are the things that make it stand out to you? Two or three points, if you like, that would that stands out for you?

Yeah, I pick a few. I think one of them is this holistic business strategic mindset. I appreciate there's a lot of words in there, but it's this ability to step back, really understand what is it that drives success, success in the business and what can treasury do to support that. I think that really helped and I think that's quite a sort of unique, unique selling point of Treasury. Naturally we think very long term and so that I think allows us to have that sort of good strategic mindset and then that could be coming through whether it's sorting the commercial side of the business, things like looking at capital allocation, the capital allocation policies of the business. Treasury is in an excellent place to be able to help help develop that. And that's one of the really important things that any business needs. I'm personally, I'm really big on academic rigor so it's really making sure that we understand what it is we're trying to do. We've done the right level of analysis, we've spoken to the right people and properly worked through anything that we want to do because we deal with quite complex topics and you really don't want to be going into running a hedging program if you don't really understand how those underlying products behave, for example. And then I think it probably is that point on collaboration is that we're in a sort of lucky position within treasury to be able to bring quite a lot of people together across the business and help help promote those sort of really interesting strategic discussions.

Yeah. So as we approach the end, put your LinkedIn details in the show notes, but we try and give takeaways to people that there's been lots already throughout the show. But if you're listening to this and maybe your early stages of your care, some of the thoughts for those guys and maybe for the more experienced treasury professionals, what are your takeaways that maybe you tell people at a conference or just in general something.

I'll use a couple we've already talked about. I think one of them is networking and personal relationships. Really put some time into it. Networking is really helpful to spend time building those relationships both within your company and externally. And this is something that's valuable for your company today, but it's also valuable for your own sort of long term development, personal growth as well.

And I think also just. I would just jump in there. Sorry to interrupt, but just. You're great at it. You and I have worked at it over our careers, but when I've done this and presented about this and I do this at our Treasure Curriculum lives, I said, guys, but don't underestimate the fact in the middle of that is work, it is an effort. And a lot of people go, oh, it's great, I win. Networking. And I said, well, who did he meet? I had some great drinks. Yeah, but who did you meet? It's, it is actually work. It's just that's where the work starts a lot of the time, certainly for me. But you're very good at it as well. I know that you're very good with the networking and things go back to you. I do.

I remember when I was younger I did think that it was like corporate jargon and I was quite resistant to the concept of network. Even though I was still going out just chatting to people. I didn't think of it as networking. Developing that sort of slightly more conscious view that this, that you're building relationships. So that's definitely important. And particularly when you're younger and in terms of other sort of big takeaways, I think it's built that sort of long term strategic view. It's have that ability to take yourself out of the day to day out of the weeds and get a good understanding of what is it I'm trying to achieve. That's, I think, sort of strategy in its simplest form is actually what is my objective here, what is I'm trying to do? And is what I'm doing right now supporting that longer term objective? And if not, then how do I change it?

Fabulous. With those. That's the mic drop moment. We're going to leave it there. You've been an absolute superstar. Thank you, sir. And looking forward to networking with you over a beer OR 2 in 2026. So thank you very much.

Looking forward to it. Thanks, Mike.

Thank you.