How to Be a Treasury Leader in Turbulent Times with Ben Helsing

Foreign 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 them about how they build 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 tonight to be joined by Ben Helsing, the group treasurer and head of debt investor relations at P3 Logistic Parks headquartered in Prague. P3 Logistic Parks are a leading long term investor manager and developer of European warehouse properties 100% owned by GIC, sovereign wealth fund of the Government of Singapore. Again, as always, I'll get Ben to sort of explore a bit more about P3 later on in the show. We've recently done a lot of recruitment for Ben so that's been very successful and really enjoyed working with him and then I twisted his arm to be a guest on the show. So yeah, I hope you guys were going to enjoy today's show. But we're going to go right back to the beginning. Ben, if you would take us back to how you first started and your degree and then coming through and discovering the world of finance and then Treasury. So back to you sir.

Thank you. Yeah, well I actually by coincidence started my career straight in treasury which I guess is quite unusual. Usually you start in some general finance and then move to Treasury. But I graduated with master's degree in finance 2002 and I had a friend from business school who, who had just started working in HR of the company. I then joined and she called me that they are looking for a currency and money market trader in their treasury department and at the time I barely knew what corporate treasury was or did. But this was in beginning of 2002 so just after the IT bubble had burst and the job markets were really slow so I didn't have many options. So I applied, applied for this, this job and were lucky to be chosen for the training position. So that's how I got started.

And what was treasury like back then? You know, I've talked to a number of guests, we're talking 20 years ago. You know, I've shown my son things like a fax machine. One day I think he pointed out what does that mean on the keyboard? And I went yeah, that's when we used to send paper through. And he was like why? And I was like yeah, that's just not even. So what was that like in those early days of Treasury?

Yeah, well as you said it was still pretty paper based and bank trade confirmations were still sent by fax to the banks at least the first years. Yeah, we already had web banks in the Nordics at least, but they were not like browser based, like now, but they were like locally installed software that you contacted the bank. So the transfers were already done electronically, luckily. But of course the functionalities were pretty basic and it was a bit more cumbersome all on the software side.

But you started with Partech Corporation. What did they do? And because then they got taken over. Let's talk through that process. But what was that? What was that organization?

Yeah, it was this huge or well, by Finnish standard, huge industrial conglomerate. So they did, you know, everything you can imagine. They did tractors and they did cranes and they did diesel motors. They had I think 300 different subsidiaries all over the world. But as often is the case with this kind of conglomerates, they were not priced very highly on the, on the stock exchange. So Kone Elevator and Escalator Company did this. I think it was considered a hostile takeover at the time. So they, they actually made a bid for part when I had just been there for a few months, even if I was just a junior trainee at the time. I had a Reuters kind of desktop at my table. And Monday morning when I opened it, I saw on the screen that Cone2 acquiretech and I went out in the corridor asking my colleagues that, what is this about? Why haven't I heard about it? And they were like, no, no, that's. You have misunderstood something. But that's how it happened. Yeah.

And can you again maybe talk then through what that was like for you? You're an early stage in your career, but you've. I've actually had that. Remember I joined a search firm, been a Treasury recruiter for three years, very successfully joined a search firm to set up my own practice. I was in there about, about four weeks, I think. And then they brought me into a boardroom and I thought, oh, this is good. What's going on inside this NDA? We've been bought, you know, and I'm like going, oh, hang on. Yeah, we've been bought by a global mega player. You know, Hydra struggles at the time. And I'm like, hang on, I've just joined here to cut my teeth and learn my graft in a smaller search firm. And it said, suddenly we're back to global search. What was that like for you? Maybe you joined Partek, but it's something a part of and how do you say Kone? Is that right?

Yeah, I think so, yeah. In a way. I was almost Lucky probably that I was still a trainee because I had this one year fixed time contract because I was a trainee. They actually did cut down stuff quite a lot to get the synergies as you would in an acquisition. So quite a few of my colleagues from the Partech treasury were laid off but because I had a fixed time contract they could not end my contract. And then when the one year had passed they realized that Kona that they. They kind of need. Need the resource. So then I got there this time or like a permanent contract with Kone.

Talk us through that because that was the early stages of your career but you were there for five years so you developed within that and you developed your treasury experience. But then you made a move onto Uponor. Uponor.

I mean it was with Partec and Koner were pretty big treasury departments. We were like maybe 10, 15 people and I did mostly the currency and money market dealing together with one colleague. So the scope was quite narrow. So in a way I guess I became an expert in that field. But after five years I really wanted to learn more about treasury and that's when I decided to apply to a slightly smaller still international company, but slightly smaller with the four person team where I knew I would get to learn all the other aspects of treasury and participate in everything that we do in Treasury. So that was the main driver why I decided to go to opener.

Someone on the podcast the other day and we talked about the fact that by making a move from that large mega company to then a smaller group, they got that breadth of experience. Part of the show was were they not worried that by making that step down in size of terms of size of company, not in terms of interest level because actually the way they put it. So my, my job suddenly became twice as interesting because they were too specialist and that it was great they could have made continue to make steps within that silo, if you know that stream, but actually by then taking a wider role which is unique about Treasury. I think in some ways with finance. Did you find that yourself because you were then there for a period of four or five years with openor and stuff. What was that like and what do they do by the way as a.

Group it's like mainly piping, plastic piping and underfloor heating solutions and things like that. So mainly active in most of Europe and North America, so quite international. Also openor. As I said, my role was wider in the beginning I still had the title dealer but then after I think a year or so I was the title was upgraded to Assistant treasurer, because that kind of more describes what I was actually doing, kind of helping the treasurer with more or less everything that we did in Treasury. So that's also when I got into cash management. We did a few RFPs and tenders and implementations for new cash pool solutions. So I learned that and then we implemented a netting for the group, which was something good to learn also. And then of course that was then my years when the financial crisis happened was when I was in openor and that was of course professionally interesting times to watch, but I was not on treasurer level yet at that stage, so it was more like a learning experience for me to work together with the treasurer and see how that affected all the funding discussions we had, et cetera. So interesting times.

Well, I talked about it. I was at a business thing last night, a business event, and someone was saying to me that what they'd been through in terms of some of the crisis, and we're just approaching our 20th anniversary as a company, and they said, oh, what was it like in the 0809 subprime crisis? I said, looking back, I mean at the time it was horrible, but at the time it was also quite freeing because we'd just gone to America, right, to start as literally everything stopped, you know, the markets just jutted to a halt. And I said, in a way, I do remember sitting, looking at the board a year before, been full with all these placements and we had everything going on and, and I sat there with my ex colleague at the time and we just looked at what are we going to do? And I said, well, should we just go to the pub? The phone wasn't ringing when you were calling. People like yourself, you go, mike, I'm in the depths of a crisis here, I haven't got time to talk to you about recruitment, go away. And so we just sort of, in a way it was, it was sort of not relaxing, it was the opposite, but it was just like, wow, okay, how are we going to get through this versus other crises where they've been a little bit more planned? How did then the company come out of that? What was it like you were coping? You know, what was the crisis mode? We've been through a few pandemics and things like that since then.

But what was it like then in the financial crisis? I would say that, well, Uponor, in a way was in a better position than many other companies because we were not super highly leveraged. I think those were the. The treasurers did not really sleep, but we tried to do some, you Know refinancing exercises and that was very, very different than just few months earlier. The bankers were like joking that they had the, it was like the fish market when you tried to get the indications from the, for bank financing that the. This indication is valid until lunch and then you know, we will have a different price in the afternoon. So it was very dynamic but also of course terrifying also for many treasurers because of course they had the attention of the board and the top management and they had go there and explain that how are we planning to cope with all of this? And nobody really had the answer. Everybody was a bit guessing because Jason.

Evolved every day and you then made the move from there. Talk us through the next couple of roles if you would with CPS and Citiconer things. So you've experienced private equity, you've been there and you've done different moves. Talk us through from there sort of thing.

Yeah. So after openor I went to CBS Scholar Group which was a private equity owned company and also was the first company where I kind of was on a group treasurer role. That was quite eye opening also from the sense that my three previous companies had all been this well managed listed companies where most things worked quite well and you had policies and you had guidelines and you knew kind of the rule book in a way. And then in this private company, private equity owned company, it was very different. It was more like that super thin organization and here's the laptop, you know, do your thing. And liquidity was super tight. Funding was, or the leverage was kind of through the roof. So you had to this covenant bridge this every second quarter. So I learned, learned a lot and in many ways very different from my previous work experience. Yes, I only stayed there for a couple of years because then I got the offer to join Citricon as group treasurer which was a much bigger company and for a treasurer a very interesting company like real estate companies usually are because the funding is such a key role for the whole success of the company. So you are unlike in most industrial companies where funding is like a small thing and more like an operational thing in a real estate company it's really the core of the success of the company. So as a treasurer you are in every single board meeting, you are pitching something. So it was a good move and I really enjoyed my quite long tenure there. I was nine years with Citicon and implemented a new financing strategy. That was where we moved from a bank financing platform to a debt capital market facing funding platform. We got the credit ratings and we started, started issuing once and as part.

Of that you'd grown your career from that internship right the way through now you're the treasurer you're running a team again when you're running that team treasury is at the heart of things but how did you then motivate the team or was it just they motivated themselves because hang on you're at the heart of things guys and this is what was that like for you being the.

Boss sort of thing it's an interesting question I think in treasury is I mean the base case is that your whole team they're all professionals and as a team leader I think my main task is to keep them motivated and if you have recruited the right people that are self going and have some ambition the best way to keep them motivated is to give them some freedom to develop things for themselves to learn new things and offer them opportunities to grow in their roles and through projects or through slightly switching the responsibilities and things like that so.