Pushing the Boundaries in Treasury with Rebecca Hirschboeck

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've built 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.

This week's show delighted be joined by Rebecca Hirschbeck, the director of finance International treasury at the Kraft Heinz Company. As I said just before to Rebecca, you know Kraft Heinz, one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world, you eat or drink something of theirs and I certainly know I do probably every day. Globally trusted producer of high quality, great tasting foods for over 150 years, co headquarters in both Chicago Pittsburgh brands are truly global and marketed in over 40 countries globally. As always, I'll shut up. Let's get on with the show with Rebecca. Rebecca, if you would take us back to the beginning of your career and how you discovered finance and then you came into treasury because there's a few nice interesting stories. So over to you.

Yeah, thanks Mike. Happy to be here first and foremost. But yes, onto my career. So I started, I grew up in Illinois, went to the University of Illinois in Champaign and majored in business administration in French. And coming out of college I really had no idea what I wanted to do. And so I ended up taking a gap year. I went to France, I taught English for a year. Really realized at that point in time that working with 4 to 11 year olds was not my forte, but got some great experiences out of it. Really learned how to hone my skills in communication, in teaching. And so coming out of that, realized, you know, I want to figure out what's next for me. And with that I ended up going to a government agency called Investors Quebec, working in the Midwest here in Chicago as an economic development agency. So working with my manager to find areas of opportunity for RFPs and looking at companies that would be willing or interested to relocate some of their operations into Quebec for tax, tax credits and savings and just growth and development.

That was also linked to you. Very good on your French side as well. And that was, I know that we spoke about this before the show and that was a strength that you sort of utilized, wasn't it, as well that you could actually do that?

It was, it was interesting because I did French in college because it was a passion and it was something I've always been interested in kind of understanding cultures and the diversity, you know, within the globe and getting a better view of the world. So I did it more out of interest than out of potential use and was lucky to get to use it right out of college and after that. So I did that for a few years and after that, you know, economic downturn happened and things slowed down quite a bit and realized in working on this side that my passion wasn't necessarily there, it was more the finance side. So when we were going through some of these projects and having conversations, really realized that I was more driven to kind of get a better understanding of how the economics worked behind certain deals or, or why it was of interest to different organizations. So I ended up going back and getting my mba, getting my master's in accounting and going into an FP and a role super interesting. It was with a subsidiary of Publicis Group, the big large marketing and advertising media forum based in France, but this was a subsidiary based in the Chicago area. Fun company, very entrepreneurial, very growth set oriented and very fast paced and really allowed me to kind of see kind of especially on the FPA side and really understand how quickly companies try to drive growth, try to drive value, how they do so and then shortly after that I was having a conversation with what I would consider not necessarily a mentor but someone that more of a sponsor actually and realized that my interest really sat on the international side of things. And at the time I wasn't doing that with my organization. So I ended up going over to a company called Mettler Toledo. It was my first step into treasury and probably never looked back after. That kind of built my building blocks of my treasury career. It was an organization where treasury covered not just the treasury function of typical cash management, fx, risk management, but also real estate and investor relations also rolled up into the treasury organization.

And just to jump in there, Rebecca, the interesting thing, you didn't have treasury and we're for instance we are recruiting a couple of treasury analyst roles in and around Illinois, Milwaukee and things like that. And they're saying actually we don't need treasury, we can train the treasury piece. It's more that sort of accounting finance mindset that's which is critical for us with yourself. Did you think actually I've got finance in my back pocket or well, what's this treasury stuff? Or did you know Treasury? How did you think it was going to take you further? Because now you see Director of Finance International treasury. So it's really taking you on some steps. But what was it like to you?

I mean it was somewhat of a natural progression. I didn't feel like not having treasury was a hindrance to my entering into Treasury. I had A team that was willing to teach me. And I think you find that in a lot of treasury functions is sometimes you don't have, especially at that lower level, a skill set of foundational treasury experience right off the bat, you have to build it and you have to grow it. And so from my perspective, I was welcomed, very warm from the team. I was able to really get a very deep understanding. We didn't have a Treasury system, treasury management system, so everything was via spreadsheet, revaluations were done, you know, manually. So it really forced me to understand what was happening behind the scenes and really allowed me, and really drove me, I think, going forward in my career to have this much deeper understanding. And I would actually say for people in the workforce that don't have treasury experience, it's not a hindrance. You can highlight the fact that you work very well cross functionally. You can highlight the fact that you understand the accounting that goes behind the scenes with so many of the things that we do in Treasury. You can highlight the fact that you maybe have IT systems knowledge, which is becoming more and more important these days.

If you are then thinking about you're coming into, you can reflect on this maybe with me, that if you're coming in, you're new to treasury, what are the areas you should get to know as quickly as possible? You know, there's, you know, you can do qualifications, you can do research, you can talk to different business partners, you can talk to different other people in the Treasury. Was it quickly, you've got to understand cash or FX or all of the above, or what were the areas that you start to think? Right. I really need to know, you know, to reflect back on it now. Right. I need to learn this. Or was it relationships? What was it that you felt? Again, this is for the listeners out there. They're going, oh, I'm new to treasury, what did Rebecca do? Because I'll copy that. So what did you say?

I mean, it's all so very important. I think you hit out a lot of really important factors there. For me, it was just being open and being curious, number one. Number two, really getting to understand how the organization runs. What is the culture, what is the expectation, understanding who your cross functional partners are? Is it tax, is it accounting, is it FP&A? And how does the treasury team kind of integrate and work side by side with some of these other areas of the organization? Yes, all of the areas within treasury are important. I guess it depends on what role you're taking on from the start. Right. Whether you're going to focus first and foremost on cash management, foreign exchange, risk management, for example. But as you grow and as you learn and you realize all of this is interconnected. So having that understanding and just being open to the experiences and kind of pushing yourself to and challenging yourself to be open to, you know, maybe not knowing what the future looks like is probably the most important part.

Also slightly different company as well. What I mean by that is, you know, there's a range of different things, again, for the audience, they might not know metal. Can you just give us a quick insight to that and then how that then affected the work you did in treasury per se?

Yeah, sure. So Mettler Toledo is a company that produced a manufacturing company that produces weighing instruments for lab, industrial and food retail use. I always say in the U.S. one of the most common things you see is at the deli counter you see a scale that is typically a Mettler Toledo scale. They also do a lot of lab equipment and analytical and measurement technology type products. Global company, 15,000 employees. It's probably about 4 billion in size now. Was probably 3 billion when I was there from a revenues perspective.

So amongst online treasury wise that, you know, was there, what were the things that you had to face and get on top of treasury wise, you know.

I always say, right, in working for Kraft Heinz now, which is a $26 billion company, size is relatively right. International companies of a smaller scale have just as much complexity oftentimes as the larger companies. So it's for me just having an understanding of who your key stakeholders are, where you need to focus your time, where your partners are within the organization, especially if it's international and you're doing kind of a global role and making sure that you have your connections on a regional scale set and you know who to reach out to.

And you did there, what, three and a half years senior treasury analyst there. You then made the move. Talk us through.

I did. So I was very happy at Mettler. One of the things that I found was, given the fact, and I think I highlighted this earlier, is that it had all of the areas and aspects of treasury and I was able to learn and grow in those different areas of cash management and foreign exchange and get some very basic understanding of the investor relations side and the pension side. I ended up leaving because I had family reasons to move closer back to where I grew up, which was Chicago. So took a job with Whirlpool, became the manager on the foreign exchange side. And over, you know, the course of the next six to seven years really increased responsibility within the organization. Really honed my leadership skills and my scope within the global treasury team. For those of you that aren't familiar with Whirlpool as well, there you go.

You got. And that's it.

Yes, I like to, I like to be forward thinking, think about what's coming next. Whirlpool is a major home appliance manufacturer, probably about 70,000 employees and about 22 billion in revenues.

What was the shape treasury for when you had a Mega Toledo size wise to then Whirlpool is obviously bigger company, international again, but different. How did you sort of transition between the two, would you say?

You know, it was interesting and I think I mentioned, I look back and I think that moving from a manufacturing operation of smaller scale to a larger scale manufacturer, again had very similar complexities, just on a slightly larger scale. So it was very interesting to kind of go over and realize, oh, we have some of the similar, you know, FX exposures or, you know, the same types of risk. And so that was really nice for me to kind of step in and have a little bit of the more basic understanding of how the, how the company operated. Very similar cultures as well. So it wasn't, you know, a shock to the system. I was able to jump in and feel relatively comfortable from the start.

Talk us through. You were there for, well, nearly six years. So this is a career podcast. So when we're talking to people say, oh, I really enjoyed that interview because that person told us what they did to position themselves as success because you did that and then joined Craft Times. But what were you doing when you were there in your day job? You know, sometimes we talk to candidates like, and I would say they're not doing very much. And that's a criticism of them. I'm not going to say their names, but they're not really pushing the envelope. They're not putting their hand up. You know, a lot of the time on the podcast we get people saying, I was willing to get stuck in. You know, if someone was needed help on a system project, I was there. Someone can I help? What can I do? And that outward, although working inwardly, but working with other people within the team, saying, I'll help you with that. That really seemed to be a springboard. What was it for you? Would you say that really helped you there? How did you develop?

I would say it was a larger team. Right. And so for me, first, right off the bat is I had more opportunity from a leadership perspective to. And really kind of my first role in a leadership perspective Right. And how do you lead a team? How do you lead individuals? How do you manage that process? It's a little bit different. So taking that leap always comes with a different set of challenges and learnings and growth as an individual. I think for me, right, is this was now my. I had built my kind of foundation in Treasury. I had built the understanding of the importance of compliance, the importance of understanding what actions need to be taken on a Treasury per side, how you manage risk, what you should be on the lookout for. So I really had the opportunity now to raise my hand a lot more to really push the boundaries a little bit and think of different ways and perspectives to view how we operate and different ways to partner cross functionally within the organization. How do you partner with tax and accomplish kind of what they're trying to achieve on their effective tax rate perspective? And how does that impact Treasury? Oftentimes they're not always, you know, moving in the same direction or expect the same outcome. So really kind of honing my skills more on the cross functional partnership side here. It was a great experience. I also had the opportunity at Whirlpool. Right. I started in FX and then over time took over cash management, took over the capital market side of things. Really kind of going from leading an individual kind of treasury function to more of leading a global team.

From there, you make the move to craft talents. Talk to us about that again. The head of the show has said we use their products, we eat everything, drink their products. If someone that doesn't know well, can you give a comparison maybe of Whirlpool to Craft size? Because that's then going to lead us into how it's different as well. So back to you.

Yeah. I mean, after spending, you know, a good chunk of my, my career, my treasury career at Mettler and Whirlpool being large manufacturers, going over to a consumer goods kind of company and a food company was a bit of a change, but it was also the reason why I left. I left for more of a challenge. I left to see something different. I left to grow new skills. And so craft was that opportunity. Very different culture in terms of how we work, very different speed in terms of how we're expected to execute, but without kind of giving up the controls and the foundations. So when I look comparably to Whirlpool, slightly larger in size, it's 20, about 26 billion. So not. And also from a scale perspective, there's not a huge difference in terms of kind of the international coverage. It has different aspects of it that I really was looking forward to it. Had a larger debt portfolio at the time when I joined, it was split rated. Right. And that wasn't something that from a capital markets perspective or you know, finance, financing and funding perspective that I had really kind of worked through or worked on. So it was very interesting to kind of think of what are the different challenges and where are the areas where I can participate in this organization that are different from what I was doing at Whirlpool.

How is that different insofar as without giving confidential information about the company more. How are you telling me different? You know, what are the differences is that you have to sort of have different means of mind as you go through that financing or you need to work with different partners or how does that affect you as a treasurer?

I would say from my perspective, you know, it was definitely something I wanted the challenge in it was something that I was looking forward to. Definitely looked at things in a different light, right. In terms of where our leverage was, what our expectations are, how we communicate with the rating agencies as we're trying to push to get back up to investment grade. So different communications, different expectations of ourselves as an organization and then also really having a good understanding of future forward looking thoughts. And how are we going to transform this organization? How are we going to develop Treasury? How are we going to have better visibility to our cash so that we know what we can do in the future in terms of managing our balance sheet and our debt portfolio?

This has been a question on us now. Rebecca, you and I, we had a lovely chat before this previously. You recently spoke at the Globe Treasury Americas about talent, treasury talent position. You and I spoke about this before and I've been holding myself back because I did want to just do treasury, treasury people, people. But now I've got to get into it. What was that like? We've been through this crazy situation. Everything from pre Covid during COVID and we're out coming out the other side. You as a Treasury director, how would you know sort of got through that? What balances have you found? What are the things that affected you? It's your pitch. I'll show up as a Treasury recruiter because I could do this all day. Back to you.

Yeah, I mean there's so many different ways to take this question. I think about myself and going through Covid with three small children and really, you know, at one point when all three kids were home from school questioning how I was going to manage it all. I think you at the time I realized I may have three Small kids. This is my challenge. This is really hard. It's really hard to manage everything going on within the family, but then also make sure that starting a new job, that things are going successfully and I'm able to, you know, continue my successes within my career and really push myself at a new organization. But it also helped me realize that everyone else is going through something similar. It was not, not easy on anyone. Whether or not you had children or what your living circumstances were, everyone was dealing with different challenges going through Covid. That being said, from an organizational perspective, and I think a lot of organizations really hopped on very quickly to the Zoom way of working. Really almost didn't miss a beat sometime. And so for me, right, is we were able to continue to do the work that needed to be done. We were able to prove out that we were just as efficient in getting things done. But interestingly, starting at an organization during COVID made me realize the one thing that I really didn't see right off the bat was the culture and really get a good kind of first taste until, I mean, you get little snippets here and there and really from a Zoom perspective, you can really get an idea. But when it was coming back into the office, it was really nice to see kind of how people interact in the office and what kind of the difference is in terms of how you drive efficiencies in the office and working in person and being able to, you know, to work on things face to face versus the efficiencies you get at home, working on your own, in your, in your house or wherever you, Wherever you're working from. From a remote perspective, there's different levels of efficiency.

Are you able to keep that balance? And I'll qualify the question a little bit. I spoke to way back when, Luke Fleming from Remy Quantro, during lockdown, he talked about that they had this specific time. This is on the podcast as well, this virtual water cooler moment. And you weren't allowed to talk work. You're only allowed to talk about weekend and whether much had happened, a lot of time, not very much, and everything else. And then I. More recently, I had a conversation with a massive group of treasurers, N A C T, North American treasurers, amazing group of people. And they said, oh, we're all coming back in the office. I said, okay, but what I got, and I had this feedback from a couple of them as well that they were finding themselves back in the office three, sometimes even four days a week. Brilliant. Brilliant. I said, are you spending more time with your teams now actually, we've gone back to how we were. I said, what do you mean? I said, well, all the banks are catching up with this, all this. And then I'm just catching up the tasks. And we're doing Monday and Friday at the home, just getting the tasks done. Tuesday was, I'm in the office, I'm not even talking to my team again. And I was like, oh. And actually, some of them will find that balance. Crumbs. You know, how do we get that? I mean, are there methodologies or what's your balance? How do you guys find?

Yeah. So Kraft Heinz has adopted a flex work schedule. So we try to be in the office three days a week. We try as a team to come in on the same days if possible. We know that we still want to be flexible and we still want to, you know, be able to support some of the things that have happened over Covid and support people's kind of flexibility to do things where and how they need them to be done. But I do think right now it's working. Right now we do kind of interact quite a bit in the office. Granted, we're not, you know, chatting chit chatting all day long and really forming, you know, making up for those missed two years. But that being said, I do think it is a. Seems to be working for us. It's a good mix and it still allows people to enjoy kind of some of those perks of what we've considered in working from home. Having a little bit more flexibility, defining your hours a little bit differently. We know the work's getting done. We know we are all responsible adults. And I have seen, I've been. I was a little bit kind of concerned or worried that this may not work, but it seems to be working.

It's amazing. You know, I'd say it's. It's weird, isn't it? It's, you know, part of the other session. People say, what was I finding as a recruiter? And I said, look, forget about me being a recruiter. Look at me as a boss. Look at me as a CD leader five years ago. People have said flexible working fees and this, you know, can I not. I want every half Friday officer like that you say, right. I want all this. I said, get out my office. What are you talking about? Now it's got to embrace it, because if you don't, somebody else will. And that's what we're finding with our clients. And I know part of the other part of the session, without going too far away from it, is when you're looking out the market, looking at people. What are you looking for? Again? This is why we do the podcast as you know that again if they look at some people looking at your profile, they go that's someone I want to work for because they will want to follow in your footsteps. Now you know, be too platitudes about it, but when you're looking at people out there, what are you looking for to bring into the team? What's the things that are standing out it's resume or personally, what are you focusing on?

Yeah, I mean I don't think there's any set algorithm that I have built out, but I can tell you there are certain things that I really appreciate, especially when I see kind of some of the candidates coming true is curiosity really a lot. Oftentimes if you don't have that treasury experience, showing why you're interested in treasury, showing how you have demonstrated your curiosity over time drive and really wanting to challenge yourself to grow, to develop, to learn something new and then ownership really showing that you can and will be kind of responsible for what we give you. So from my perspective, it's not necessarily about the experience. The experience is great. We love to see it. I think from our perspective we've been lucky and since I've started that we haven't had huge turnover. But when we do and we find ourselves, you know, teaching and growing kind of the new people that come into the team, it takes away from some of the other opportunities to potentially work on more, you know, strategic and growth oriented projects. That being said, it is a growth oriented project in itself in developing talent and hopefully creating people that want to stick around in treasury or stick around in the organization if treasury isn't their, their end goal. So yeah, so for me it's really drive challenging yourself and having a growth mentality.

You know, we'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes so people have got that to connect with you and everything else. Again, we started to change our stuff where I say I'll see you at lit every place and all that. Now what I want to do is give you the final words. So I think some of those were great final words actually. But if you're listening today, early stages your careers and people say oh what should I be doing? Or later stages people are thinking yeah, you should be focusing on this treasurer, you know, this, what are the recommendations you would give or what are the closing pieces of advice and I'll let you close off the show. So back to you and I'll shut.

Up no thanks Mike. I think top tips for me there's probably a couple and things where I've probably challenged myself throughout my career. One it's never, it never hurts to ask. It never hurts to ask for projects. It never hurts to look and ask for opportunities to partner on cross functional projects within the organization. Never asked to ask for mentors. It's a great area of opportunity to kind of understand and have conversations with someone to build out what your expectations for your career are and get really honest feedback. So look for those opportunities. Challenge yourself to get outside of your comfort zone. Find areas where you want to specifically grow that aren't necessarily skill sets that you already have. Just look for the challenges and then also, and probably most importantly is lead with your strengths. Find those areas where you're good at, whether it's communication, whether it's analytical skills and really use those to your benefit. Highlight those. So those are kind of my top tips that I think I've looked on in my career and said maybe I'm doing one of these, maybe I'm doing all of them at once. But I always try to keep them top of mind to make sure that what I'm telling my team and what I'm expecting of myself are oftentimes the same.

Amazing advice. Thank you Rebecca and we'll put your details in the show notes and I'll get to say I can't wait to see you one day soon.

Thanks Mike. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.

Hello, it's Mike here again. I hope you enjoyed this week's show. If you did, then maybe you want to follow the show or subscribe depending on where you listen, whether that's itunes, Spotify or another great place to listen to the show from. It's totally free and means that you'll be the first to see each and every week when we release a new show. And maybe whilst you're there you could even leave a quick review. Reviews and ratings are among the most important metrics for a podcast to effectively rank. And as you can probably appreciate, the podcast is a lot of hard work to produce every week. It'd be amazing. Destate say 20 seconds. Leave a quick review of my amazing guests and their great career stories. We'd really appreciate it. Thanks very much and I can't wait to see you soon.

That again the head of the show as said, you know we use their products, we their drink, the bars. If someone that doesn't know well can you give a comparison maybe of World Ball to Craft House? Because that's Then going to lead us into how it's different as well. So back to you.

Yeah, I mean after spending, you know, a good chunk of my, my career, my treasury career at Mettler and Whirlpool being large manufacturers, going over to a consumer goods kind of company and a food company was a bit of a, a change. But it was also the reason why I left. I left for more of a challenge. I left to see something different. I left to grow new skills. And so craft was that opportunity. Very different culture in terms of how we work, very different speed in terms of how we're expected to execute, but without kind of giving up the controls and the foundations. So when I look comparably to Whirlpool, slightly larger in size, it's 20, about 26 billion. So not. And also from a scale perspective, there's not a huge difference in terms of kind of the international coverage. It has different aspects of it that I really was looking forward to. It had a larger debt portfolio at the time when I joined it was split rated. Right. And that wasn't something that from a capital markets perspective or you know, financing and funding perspective that I had really kind of worked through or worked on. So it was very interesting to kind of think of what are the different challenges and where are the areas where I can participate in this organization that are different from what I was doing at Whirlpool.

How is that different insofar as without giving confidential information about the company more, how are you found it different? You know, what are the differences is that you have to sort of have different needs of mind as you go through that financing or you need to work with different partners or how does that affect you as a Treasury?

I would say from my perspective, you know, it was definitely something I wanted. The challenge in it was something that I was looking forward to. Definitely looked at things in a different light. Right. In terms of where our leverage was, what our expectations are, how we communicate with the rating agencies as we're trying to push to get back up to investment grade. So different communications, different expectations of ourselves as an organization and then also really having a good understanding of future forward looking thoughts and how are we going to transform this organization? How are we going to develop treasury, how are we going to have better visibility to our cash so that we know what we can do in the future in terms of managing our balance sheet and our debt portfolio?

This has been the question on the now. Rebecca, you and I, we had a lovely chat before this. Previously you recently spoke.