Bruce Edlund, who has worked at Citrix and Walmart, discusses how treasury teams operate remotely. He covers communication strategies, the shift to remote work, and how tools like Tableau and Power BI have changed treasury functions.
Foreign. I was at Walmart. I was doing some work on Tableau, if people know what that is, it's sort of like a reporting system. And I saw some statistics on growth companies and I'd seen that Citrix had doubled again while I was gone. When I started in 2004, it was about 750 million in revenues. It doubled in the five years where I worked when I worked there. Well, it doubled again while I was at Walmart and I was really impressed. And I actually sent our CFO at the time a nice little message and he responded. And Citrix always had this place in, I don't know, in my heart, I really just enjoyed working there. And so it had doubled and I had grown because I'd had this experience at Walmart. So I had seen a lot of new things and gotten to work on a lot of different things that I hadn't seen at Citrix. So coming back, it wasn't a super easy decision because you're going from a really large company back to fairly small company in comparison. But it just really felt like the right thing to do. And I really like the culture and what we do, and I'm especially proud to work there now during the crisis that we're having because of the mobility that we enable. I think we've got a really great product. So I'm really proud to work for Citrix. It's not easy when you're not around, you know, your people physically all the time. You don't have those informal conversations, you know, in the hallway or in the kitchen. Those times are super valuable. I don't remember at some point after I at Citrix, again, I set up basically a weekly touch base for our whole team. And I've got four people reporting to me underneath me, two people in Fort Lauderdale, one person in Switzerland and one person in Germany. So we're already spread out. I mean, even though those people work in an office, I mean, our whole team is not together. So we had these weekly touch bases on Monday mornings and we started out the meetings very informally where we really, I mean, it was everyone's choice. I mean, they could share what they wanted however much they wanted or however little. But we really asked things like, oh, you know, how was your weekend? What did you do? And the kinds of conversations that you would probably have, you know, in the kitchen when you're getting coffee on Monday morning. And that really helped us, I think, you know, come together as a team. I've always had an interest in, I guess, the technology side, treasury, you know, doing a little bit of coding here and there. And I see there's definitely been an evolution in Treasury. A lot of times you have someone on your team that's sort of tech focused. You know, the. In the past, maybe it was the Excel guru, right, that. That built all these big models. And I know for myself, I spent a lot of time automating Excel with VBA coding 10 years ago, and. And then someone introduced me to databases and I realized, well, these databases are doing a lot of the things that I was coding in Excel, so this is a much better solution. And so then building out databases, and then you start to see some of the limitations there in terms of, like, being able to pull in lots of different data sources and, you know, automate that in a way that's really reliable for somebody who maybe doesn't understand databases. And then that's kind of evolved into newer technologies that help to do this on an automated way or things like, I mean, we're using Power BI a lot today. And now I've got somebody on my team who has really taken Power BI and built a lot of automated pulling of data sources together and reporting together. So I think there's just been this evolution of technology within treasury where there's a bit of a diy, do it yourself mixed with external software providers.
