How to Recruit Good Treasury Candidates with Shailesh Bettadapur

Hello, it's Mike Richards here from the treasury recruitment company. I hope you're enjoying the Treasury Career Corner. If you are great news, perhaps you give us a rating on itunes or wherever you consume your podcast content. This means that even more treasury professionals can benefit from finding out, or by finding out about how treasurers have achieved their career goals. The link to rate our show will list at the bottom of our show notes. And please remember as well, the show itself is as much about you as it is about us. There are specific questions you want us to ask or there's feedback you want to give. Please drop me an email. My direct email is mikeresuryrecruitment.com inventibly enough, but anyway, that's enough from me. Let's get on with the show. So welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals and about their treasury careers. I talked to them about how they got started in treasury, where they are now, and where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going next. In this week's show, I'm delighted to be joined by Shailesh Bedaddupur, VP and treasurer at Mohawk Industries. Mohawk are part of the Fortune 500. They manufacture flooring globally for both residential and commercial spaces around the world, employing more than 38,000 people worldwide. Previously they were considered to be an American carpet manufacturer, but now they've grown into, well, the world's largest flooring company with operations reaching the world, basically. So they provide a lot of the flooring surfaces, carpet, rugs, ceramics, vinyl flooring. Real leading group. And you can find a lot more on their website as well. That's a bit about Mohawk, but let's talk about Shailesh Jalish. Got a really good background within treasury right the way from Northwestern Kellogg School of Management, where I actually studied as well. So thumbs up with that right the way through. And he's grown his career through Johnson Controls and a number of other corporates. But we'll get Shaylis to describe those and bring us up to date with his career and look at the future and what he considers the developments of treasury that he's seen over many years. So if we take it back, Shailesh, how did you first ever get your first break in Treasury?

I would say that was accidental, I guess. When I came out of B school, I went to Motors and that was more in the traditional finance, even global economic staff. I ended up answering a Wall Street Journal ad for a position. I got a callback and now up to that point and even probably since I Never actually heard of anyone getting an answer back from a Wall Street Journal. So that one worked out nicely. It was a company that I had never heard of, Wholesim, which was called Holder bank at the time. One of the companies in the world at that time. I took the interview and it was for Wholesome North America and kind of just went from there.

So you'd started in finance but then that was your first step into treasury, was that right? Or had you had.

That's right. So I mean actual capital markets and so on. Yes.

How did that appeal to you? What was treasury like when you first started? That was back in the 90s. So quite different to how treasury is now, sort of.

Yeah, well, so there were a couple of things, right? One was this was a subsidiary of Wholesome in the Swiss. Swiss model subsidiaries are self financing, right. Other than the equity part. So it was a full treasury type of thing. Now I went in as the manager of treasury, but that's a bit of a misnomer. I was both the manager and the staff at that time. But it was a lot of. Because we were privately held, not. Not a publicly traded company. We. It was a lot of bank debt, a lot of private placement type of stuff, a lot of industrial revenue bonds, those kinds of things. All of those things evolved during the time that I was there at Wholesome, at least Wholesome North America. The concept of treasury was a much broader animal than what we think of as Treasury. So there is this idea of treasury which is the standard cash management, let's call it operations and capital market stuff. But beyond that is actually things like M and A. Capital evaluation. How do you actually evaluate capital? I spent the first year doing strategy work in terms of how should we invest money, what should we get rid of? Those kinds of things, right, Which. Which in a. In a narrow sense would not be. Might be under, you know, FP and A or something like that in some other company.

So you started off in Detroit and then moved to Belgium and then that was the start of some international moves or explain that for our listeners a little bit because obviously quite unusual. Detroit. I know, let's go to Belgium.

Well, so wholesome, like I said, Swiss company. And they for years had been trying to get Americans in particular to move overseas. It was easy to get the Swiss to move overseas. It's generally easier to get Europeans to move overseas. But Americans have always been a little bit of a tougher nut. And I had been in the chair six and a half years. I decided to position came open in Belgium that They wanted me to take a look at. And I did. And it was. My children were the right age. They were, you know, six and three at the time. So it was kind of a good time to do it. So we said, okay, let's do it. Yeah.

And you did a period of time there, but not that long before you were sort of.

It was a little. A little less than a year for a lot of different reasons. But. But ultimately I had a nice. Again, luck, serendipity. I had met a guy at Johnson Controls a few years before that at a budgeting conference of all things, and he asked me, he said, are you interested in Singapore? And at the time, I didn't know anything about Singapore. I just knew something about chewing gum and that kind of thing being really clean, kind of a Disneyland of Asia. But I said, yeah, I'm happy to talk to them. And I did, and it worked out nicely. So all of this was. None of this was planned. It was completely accidental. And sometimes that works.

And the role over there, describe that for people and how you made that move.

Yeah. So the role initially, well, the title was treasurer for Asia pac.

Yeah.

Over time, I did that for two years, and that gave me a good way to sort of settle into the region culturally, you know, learn the geography. It's a huge geography. Just Asia PAC alone is a huge geography, if you'd say it really goes from India to Japan and Korea and Australia, New Zealand. So that alone is just an enormous geography. After two years, I added to that being the finance director for the automotive portion of the Johnson Controls business. So I was carrying both. Both hats. And so that included a lot of controller work and all that that you would normally find in those kinds of positions with that role.

And, you know, you made the move Detroit, within Treasury through to now, you were Singapore and leading the Treasury. What was the cultural difference in treasury terms, you know, terms of treasury staffing or the way that people approach, Was it different or was it exactly the same? You know, treasury was Treasury.

Well, so it was different on a couple of fronts. Right. One, first of all, Johnson. So you recall I described in a previous answer that at wholesome North America, treasury was a much broader animal. At Johnson Controls, it was much more traditional. Treasury was treasury what you would normally think of. So it's the standard, you know, capital markets, FX operations and so forth. So that was different. We had a pretty thin treasury staff. It was really just a few of us based in Singapore, but we utilized people on the ground in various countries, obviously, but we were able to centralize a lot of this through. In those days, it was Citibank. In Asia in those days anyway, it was Citibank and everybody else. But they had great systems that we could use that to essentially common and centralize the way we did all of these things. And that just made life a lot simpler and what I found. So that was one difference. The other difference was, of course, in addition to being a very large geography, it is a very culturally disparate region. Chinese are obviously different from the Japanese and the Indians and so forth. And even within China, the Beijing people are different from Shanghai people and so forth. And so those are all things that you, being somewhat new to the region, you had to actually learn. And that's that. That's the. That that's usually mark success or failure in the next bad assignment. So.

And when you say learn, is that what. Learning those cultural differences about how people think?

Yeah, yeah, how people think and, you know, how they might react, what will work, what won't work, and so forth.

And so then from there you sort of were pulled back to work in the center, you know, the head HQ back in Milwaukee in the US and then made a move on to Laureate, but talk us through the sort of transition from Singapore back to the US and then. And then a move back to Singapore. How did that all come about?

Wood Johnson Controls. All roads led to Milwaukee. And so having Internet expat for them for six years and they felt that it was time to come back states. And so I said, okay, that's fine. I mean, I don't think I was all that crazy about it, but, you know, I'd kind of done what I needed to do. And absent some professional opportunity, it was probably time to do something else. So came back, ended up taking over the. We had a captive finance company that was really helping out customers in terms of financing again, another one of those things that we inherited from York, it was relatively small, if I recall, it was something like $100 million in assets. So relatively small. In the course of, let's say, six months, I basically came up with a strategy kind of working alone, really. Either we had to grow this to a billion dollars or just close up shop. It's not worth the. It's not worth the effort. In the end, we ended up closing it. Now, in hindsight, that really ended up being the right decision given the financial crisis that came, you know, literally the following year. But of course we didn't know that at the time, so we can't take credit for that. But having closed that, again, it was kind of time to do something else. And that was. That was one of the things. I hear this a lot from expats. I agree with it completely. Which is biggest challenge for returning expats is keeping that level of involvement. You get to do so many different things when you're an expat, particularly in Asia, because of the time change. Right. If you're with a US Company, the time change to Asia is large, and so you are responsible for much more. And then when you come back to the, you know, the corporate. Corporate house, you're not. I mean, staffs are bigger, there's much more, you know, process and some people see and so forth. Yeah. So it becomes a little bit more frustrating, I suppose. So when I got the. When I got the call for Laureate, you know, I was interested, I listened, and I mean, ultimately, you know, they asked would, you know, they were trying to set up something in Asia, and they asked me if I'd go back and I said, yeah, where do I sign? Plus, it was. Plus, it was, you know, it was minus 20 in Milwaukee. And that was. I was ready to go.

So you headed back to the sweltering heat of Singapore.

It was nice, though. I mean, we literally got back almost. Almost a year to the day. But then again, kind of plays itself in this case. We got back There, you know, August 1st, 45 days later, Lehman fails. You know, we had all of our funding, so that was good. But a big part of my job, along with a bunch of other folks, was, you know, we were going to try to roll up a lot of university systems, like do a lot of deals. So the idea was, you know, we're going to do eight or nine, 10 deals, whatever was a year. And we ended up doing, you know, three. So the math didn't make sense for the company. And so there were a number of us that left after a couple of years.

Okay, and then treasury pulled you back and said, right, this role came up. What did you think with Stage? Obviously, Mohawk. That was eight and a half years ago. Different company.

I'm imagining, first of all, coming out of the financial crisis, everything was a different company. And again, this just happened to occur. We were in the States for summer holiday and I got a call to Atlanta and, you know, Atlanta, I've always liked Atlanta. So it's a big city. It's, you know, the weather's good. Not as drastic a move from Singapore to Milwaukee. Here. Winter is br. So came back and, you know, it's the senior, very senior position at that time, Fortune 500 company. Yeah. And there was a lot of opportunity to do some stuff which I've been able to do and now I've been here eight years.

And with that role itself. What was treasury like when you started and where have you taken it from and to sort of thing, was there a Treasury when you walked in the door?

Oh yeah, yeah, there was. The focus was probably a little bit different. I mean, number one, you know, again, you have to remember, you know, 2010, really people are coming off of the financial crisis. Right. So there's a fair bit of that. Mohawk had gone from call it 8 billion top line before the financial crisis to something with a five in front of it. Most times you're out of business at that point. The thing that impressed me so much was the folks here made the hard calls and did it fast so that they actually never had a non profitable year. They were write off. So it looks like in one year it was definitely a knockdown. But these are all non cash items. But the result was that the capital structure was more than 100% fixed debt. And when I say that all of the debt was fixed and we had an ABL line because it had gone to high yield at that point. But we're sitting on a boatload of cash. Right. So that makes it more than 100% fixed debt and fixed rate debt and high cost. And so over time I was able to kind of get that down either through maturities or through opportunistic buying and so forth. And as we sort of climbed the ladder back into investment grade, which took some years and some, you know, being more transparent with the rating agencies and so forth, you know, we were able to do number of things like implement commercial paper programs both in the US and in Europe. So we now have a fair amount of European debt, Euro debt. We issue commercial paper in euros at negative rates and have been for probably 18 months or so. So it's hard to lose with that kind of thing as long as you can take advantage of it.

And how's the Treasury Department structured with Mohawk and your organization on it?

Yeah, so we, yeah, so it's really treasury and risk and so we sort of conflate the two. Risk being the traditional insurance type of risk. When I say conflate, we have a lot of cross work going across because we just don't have. Mohawk is notoriously lean. So it's not like we have large staffs. In fact, this is a $10 billion company. We have a Treasury risk staff of, you know, five or six now we do use people on the ground in different places, but nevertheless it's not a large, it's not a large group. Now the way we've gotten away with that to some extent is through kind of almost brutal automation. So very robust in terms of electron automation. Any of those kinds of things that we can do that we can, we, we do.

And when you say that you what, everything goes in the system and if you can't, you force it in there or what?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, so you know, I mean like to give you, I mean just a real simple example, treasury workstation which we put into place, oh, I don't know, back half of 2012. Right. So before that it was all Excel spreadsheets. I've been actually a little bit shocked at how many of my peers still use Excel spreadsheets. A lot of this stuff. And, but, but with, so, so this has enabled us. I mean this, this took a whole bunch of work out of the, you know, just kind of basic work, a lot of manual work. It took a whole bunch of that out of the system, which saves time and reduces error rate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Right, so is that been one of the keys to success or what have you, you run it lean, lean and mean in a good way. What have you seen? What's your ethos within Treasury? What's the thing you said, right, let's keep it like this or where do you focus your efforts on making a better treasury and the offering to the business or do you work closely or what's the sort of.

The idea is that by doing more of this kind of thing, getting rid of the manual work, we're able to help the business more. Right, that's the idea. And that for the most part that, that does work because otherwise we get too bogged down with the non value adding manual. And that is the idea. And so whether we're advising on foreign exchange, whether we're advising on leasing structures, you know, businesses will say, oh, I'd like to lease this or I'd like to do this, I'd like to go buy this in various currencies or do these kinds of hedges and so forth because they're trying to protect their own internal P and L. And so these are all things that we can talk to. And then there's a whole bunch of, you know, I spent a lot of time with my CFO and my CEO in terms of, you know, what does capital structure look like? What is the optimal capital structure? Why are we doing this again, once more with feeling. What are we doing? Right, so it's not something that we just do put on the shelf. It's a fairly durable strategy. So that is the concept.

And you've been 20 years plus in treasury, just like I've been in treasury recruitment as well. How have you seen it change when you first started? What. You know, and I'm not talking, you know, we could just say, oh, you know, with systems like this. And we talked the other day with the treasurer and they're saying, you know, I remembered when we faxed CVs and he was saying, well, we fax confirmations and yeah, the technology has changed. But how has treasury in itself changed, would you say, over that time?

Probably in the same way that the CFO role has changed? I mean, I think the CFO role historically was a former controller. In later years, I think it tended to be controllers and treasurers to a lesser extent. But even beyond that. Right. Could be M and A folks. It all depends on the company. Obviously. I would say it has become much more of a. A business type of role as opposed to a transactional type of role.

And with, you know, with. You say you run this quite lean operation, you know, staffing wise, but when you are recruiting, what is it you look for in the people that work with you?

I always look for really two things, right? If you have the energy and if you have the gray matter, integrity. Obviously, my view is I can teach you anything. So it's not per se that we're looking for specific, you know, you have to have done this or you have to have done that. It's much more of a, you know, can you learn? And because my view is that, you know, this stuff is so dynamic and it's not that hard, you know, none of this is rocket science. So can people learn from this? And if the answer is no, then, you know, I don't care what kind of experience you have, I'm not interested.

And when you say energy, how are you assessing or measuring that when you're interviewing someone? Are you. Come on, do some squat thrusts, you know, come on and show us your.

You know, you can tell in the interview how engaged people are, right? And so. And you can tell. So, you know, what I do is I put a problem up on the board. I'll just make it up. I'll just put a problem on the board. I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, but I can kind of. All right, let me see how you solve this problem.

Yeah, right.

How would you approach this problem.

Yeah.

And. And, you know, might even be a problem we're working on. So, you know, how would you approach.

This good way to get your money's worth as well?

Well, you know, and it's all, you know, it's a whiteboard, and so you get up and there with the, with the marker and kind of walk me through how you would think through this and let's, let's debate it. And that, to me, that's the best kind of interview. I prefer that.

And have you struggled to recruit when. When you're looking for that, or has it changed throughout your. You've obviously recruited over a number of years. Yeah, obviously. A podcast, we're hosted by the treasury recruitment company. So this is one of the reasons I follow this and try. Have you seen the candidate pool change or have you seen differences internationally or what have been your thoughts?

No, I don't think things have changed that much. I mean, you know, recruiting people have trouble recruiting for all kinds of reasons. Could be location of the position, it could be all kinds of things. Right. So it's hard to know necessarily what those are. You know, when I used to recruit, I had really good success recruiting at Wholesome, in part because it was a bit of a circular thing. You know, we recruited good candidates, and because we recruited good candidates, we were able to recruit more good candidates. So generally recruiting them right out of business school, where they were sort of a clean sheet of paper and we could teach them, and that's how we did it. And I remember telling one of the candidates who ultimately came to work for us was because I think he was entertaining a position at gm, actually. And I said, yeah, I used to work at gm. It's a good company. You'll learn a lot. But I said, if you like what they do, you won't like what we do, and vice versa. I said, the thing that I can promise you, I can't tell you what your next job will be. What I can tell you is that whatever it is, you will learn a lot that you can take somewhere else if you need to. And so that's the way I think about it.

And I saw an interview that you've been. We were talking just before the show started that you gave where you looked at that time. It was from a few years ago now, and you were talking about technology coming along and various other bits, because it was coming more at it from that. But where do you see treasury going from here? What are you thinking is changing or approaching the world of treasurers?

I Don't think there are a lot of people that hold this view. But I think there are going to be two major changes. One is blockchain. I'm still trying to understand blockchain fully. I've gotten the basic concept, but that again takes out more manual stuff because it's already there. Right. Once something is in the blockchain, it can't be taken out and you've got instant verification, you've got instant settlement. It changes the way you think about these things. Right. Number one. Number two is artificial intelligence. I don't know exactly how this is going to work, but artificial intelligence. And I think about artificial intelligence in a very layman's way. And that is it's code that writes code. Right. It adapts, so it learns and then it adapts. If I think about what I do as a treasure, the value that I bring as a treasure, it's in some part based on my experience. Right. I've seen this movie before. Okay. This has worked. That hasn't worked, so on and so forth. There's no reason that can't mean. If you think about artificial intelligence, that's kind of what that is. Right. It's a lot of aggregation of past experiences. Yeah. Only it's much faster and it never forgets anything. So I can see a lot of that happening. I don't know. Is that a 20 year thing? Is it a 10 year thing? I don't know, but I think it's faster than people think.

I was interviewing Ian from BHP just on a recent show and he was talking about how his role as treasurer won't exist in the future the way it did where he was before. But one of the key things he said that new people coming in and you guys was the understanding of it and data. That's where he sort of linked it to blockchain and everything else. And making those decisions based on all the data that was coming out him as the treasurer. The way we sort of got to it was much more. He felt he was an interpreter. We didn't use that word at the time, but an interpreter translates being that conduit for the cfo because there was so much stuff coming the line down. Treasurers.

Yeah. But I tend to think that it's always been that way. When I was at Holcim, the thing that we would try to encourage was say you were evaluating a $10 million piece of equipment that a plant. And so the manufacturing guys would say, oh yeah, this is going to do. It's going to increase production by 30% and all of those kinds of things. Right. So one of the things that. But in our evaluation of it, you go through the standard NPV types of calculations, which is, anybody can do that. But the key is, then is to interpret, that is to say, okay, let's say you don't get your 30%, say it's 25%. Do you make your numbers? If the answer is no, then essentially you have to then translate that back into manufacturing metrics to say, okay, you're saying you're going to get X, but you're really going to get. Let's say you only get x x minus 2. Are you willing to stake your bonus on that?

Yeah.

And that's, that's where the rubber hits the road. Because the manufacturing guys, they won't understand the. I mean, and you wouldn't expect anybody to understand. It's so amorphous, you know, NPV calculations. What does that even mean? But they will understand machine efficiency because that's what they do. And so you are, you're translating it into financial numbers and then you are translating it back and. And so essentially you're telling a story.

So it's the cost benefit analysis in some ways of if we were to implement blockchain or if we do bring in this technology, what, what does it give us? You know, what's the benefit to us.

In, in the case of blockchain or any of those kinds of things? That's going to happen anyway. It's not going to be choice, I think, so it's, it's going to happen. And the question then is how do you make use of it? How do you deal with it?

Yeah. And implement it the best way or sort of leverage it as well.

Yeah. And yeah, yeah. What do you do now based on that?

You looked at the future of treasury, but, you know, to wrap up today's conversation a little bit, and I use this quite a lot so it can be a big answer, so don't worry. But someone looks at you. We spoke before and Trellish has very kindly said that if people do want to connect with here or, you know, hear more and things like that is, you know, to connect with him by LinkedIn. So we'll put his LinkedIn profile in the show notes. But we also talked about, you know, Shayla's career. You know, it's encompassed a lot of international moves and everything else. Just looking at that, if someone wants a career like yours, they want to come into treasury, but then it sort of parachutes them around the world and does, you know, what would, what advice would you offer or give them?

So I can say this now because I'm old, but the biggest lesson that I have taken from this is you never really know what's going to happen. So all the planning in the world is great. It's. I think there's a famous quote from Clausewitz which is all battle plans are obsolete the minute the first bullet is fired. And that's true. I mean, so, you know, I never plan, in fact. So I'll give you an example. So I was born in India. I came to the States when I was less than a year old. So I grew up in the States. And it had never occurred to me. I mean, I thought about it a little bit every now and then, but it never really occurred to me that I would work overseas. And then the Belgium thing came up. And then without that Belgium opportunity, Singapore probably doesn't happen. And if Singapore doesn't happen, the kinds of things that I would have missed out on. Now, as I think about it, you know, both professionally and personally, you know, for professional growth, personal growth, my family, you know, my kids more or less grew up overseas. They are different people because of that. You know, it's just made our lives as a family much richer. It's made my professional life much richer. And none of that was planned. Right. And so I guess the advice that if anybody asked the advice would be kind of go with it. You know, you don't have to have all of the answers before you jump. Obviously, you don't want to make foolish mistakes and things like that. But at the end of the day, as long as you're learning something, then you're okay. You know, that's something that you can then talk about. You can, you can take somewhere else. As long as you're learning, you. It has not been a lost opportunity and you never really know what you're going to learn until you do it. And so that would be, you know, don't be afraid, I guess, would be the main thrust there.

There you go. What a great wrap up to today's show. Exactly as Shayla says, don't be afraid. Grab those opportunities exactly as he's talked about, and away you go with your treasury career. So as I said before, we'll put Shayla's details in the show notes. Thanks for the chat today. If you want a career like his, look at his profile and hopefully don't be afraid about following him. Jaylash, many thanks for your time today.

Thank you, Mike.