Remote Work and Finding a Work-Life Balance with Wade Olsen Part 2

Foreign. So welcome to week two of the Treasury Career Corner podcast. My first ever two part podcast this week. Again, we then move on from Wade Olson and his move from AMI Semiconductors, the second half, if you like, of the podcast where we then makes the move to Chugach, Alaska, the company there, but actually an early adopter of working remotely. Incredible conversation with Wade. As we said in the episode, he's a co founder of Treasury Suite, the Treasury management system. Experienced treasury professional with over 25 years corporate treasury expertise. And this is the second of a two parter. If you haven't heard the first part, go back. It's amazing. I just, you know, we rocked on through and at one stage we were rattling through the episode. I think, God, this is just going to keep going. But at no stage did I ever feel that, oh, this is flagging or anything else. He's an incredible guest and I'm really thrilled. He gave us enough time to really explore his background and then talk about the challenges of treasury moving forward. Wade, thank you for your time and well, we're going to go straight into it. Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corn podcast. Over to Mike to do another intro over to you. And so Wade, from there, you know, Ami, you'd had enough of this beautiful town of Pocatello. He said, hey guys, if you wrote remodel, that's it, I'm out. But joking aside, you then joined. As I say, we talked about the pronunciation, Chugash, Alaska Corporation. Maybe you can explain what those guys do a little bit. So it was a wider role and different roles at just Treasury. But then also you're working remotely and we noticed this, we discussed this just a moment ago, just off the air, what was the situation there? And describe that, if you would.

Yeah, absolutely. So I had the opportunity come up. I don't remember exactly how I connected with Chugach, but Chugach is an Alaska Native corporation. And at the time that they hired me, they were basically about 95 to 98% government contracting. That was the majority of their business. And, and I have no background in government contracting. And really, quite frankly, and I told them this, I had no interest in government contracting either.

I don't want this job, I'm out of here.

Yeah, exactly. And then they started talking to me about, well, we have some resources and we're trying to diversify our business.

Right.

And we want to see if we can be less government contractor focused, not take that business down in size, but add to what we're doing and diversify our Opportunities. And it intrigued me a little bit. And we had a conversation. Was really interesting. Is the first interview I did was a phone interview. And on that interview was this chairman, the CFO, and the president. And I'm like, well, this is interesting. I've never. Or the CEO, excuse me, I've never had on the first call, all these people. And it was kind of surprising to me. And we just had a little bit of a conversation for about a half hour, 45 minutes. And they were really pleasant and really neat people, it seemed like. And then about two days later, they said, we want to invite you to Alaska, but we want you to do a presentation. And they said, we want your vision for what treasury is. That's it. They didn't say anything else. I said, what do you mean? They go, that's up to you. And I said, okay. Well, I was putting together some information at the time for Treasury Suite, because we were building it up back then, getting it started a little bit. And I pulled some of that information about what we felt treasury should be and what I've been saying for years. And one of the slides I had was a picture of a wooden path, a wooden pathway through some trees and in a forest area up by my house. And it just kind of struck me as, hey, this is the path to take to go forward, go through this beautiful stuff and get to beautiful places. And that was my starting slide. So I landed in Alaska. Go to the boardroom and cheat. Alaska's building is in one of the most amazing buildings in Alaska. It's an anchorage. It's on one of the top floors of one of the tallest buildings. It's probably the tallest building in Alaska, actually. And it looks out over the Chugach Mountain Range. It's absolutely stunning, unbelievably beautiful. And then all those people I talked to on my phone and interview came into the boardroom. It's a beautiful setting. And I have that slide up there with that pathway. And I started giving my presentation about what I think treasury should do and how treasury helps and how treasury does risk aversion, how treasury does diversification, how treasury does visibility, and all these different things. And I got done, and the chairwoman says to me, where's that picture taken? She goes, have you been to one of our villages? I was like, oh, no, no, that's from. By my house. And she goes, I took a path almost exactly like that when I was a child. I was like, oh, wow, that's kind of funny. That's interesting. But there was this instant Connection to them. Unbelievably great people. And my job was to come in and help them diversify their portfolio. So I didn't do your traditional treasury work per se. My job was to come in and say, where's all the money? Where's it at? Where's it coming from? Where's it going? Assess it. Then put an investment policy in place, an investment policy for short term, medium term operational cash. Then also put a policy in place for strategic cash beyond the operating needs. And that means educating and working with board members about what is their risk tolerance, what's their investment objectives. Chugach Alaska corporation is a forever corporation. So it's not bound by quarterly earnings reporting and that kind of stuff. It's more about generational wealth. And so we built this together as if it's like a large endowment, if you will. And I had the fortune of working with some really great people on the finance team and the executive team to build out a new vision for Chugats. But what was interesting is when I got up there, I moved up. I drove. I actually did the drive from Idaho up to Alaska.

How long was that?

I did it in the winter, so I took a little bit extra time because I didn't want to be out in the middle of nowhere. So I had to stop at hotels along the way. And it might be another 400 miles to another hotel. I didn't want to do that in the middle of the night.

Yeah.

So it took me four days. And I did that for a couple reasons. One, I heard the Alcan is beautiful. Not so beautiful in the winter. It is in its own way. I love winter. So that's kind of beautiful. But it kind of put the punctuation mark on me. Alaska is a long ways away. Yeah, I'd flown up there and I'd been there the one time and it was neat. And I told them when I went there, this is like my backyard on steroids. This is unbelievable. I love it up here. So I drive there, I get there, find an apartment. Getting ready to find a home, getting ready to list our house in Idaho, get ready to move. And then we had some disturbing news that some cancer had come back in my family. My wife's family also had some other health issues. And so we decided that's a long ways away to be if there's some health issues for members of our family. Not my immediate family, but extended family. So I told Chiagachi Alaska Corporation I had to head back about five, six months into the job. And I said, I Will help you. I'll help you transition to whoever you need. This is not what I intended. I apologize. They completely understood. They're very family oriented. It was fantastic. Their support was unbelievable. I came back, started working remotely from Idaho, helping them do the transition. They're bringing people in and interviewing people. And over the course of about six to seven months, they said, hey, Wade, this is working pretty well. Would you mind just staying on and working from Idaho? And I said, yeah, that'd be great. I'd love to do that. I'd worked remotely a little bit before with Tenfold Corporation. I said, yeah, if that's working for you guys, that works for me. And so, yeah, about 12 years ago, I started working remote.

We just discussed this 12 years ago. Nobody works remote 12 years ago. You know, now in the past pandemic year and bit of stuff, there was some flexible working and things like that. Sorry, it's just so pent up. It's like, what, 12 years ago? How dare you? You know, this is a great way of working. How did you make it work back then? We're talking pre zoom, pre Skype, pre this. How do you do it?

Well, Skype was around a little bit.

Yeah.

The biggest thing was pushing the preconceived notions, right? I mean, most of the time I cut this joke about, are you working your pajamas today? Did you even. Have you even showered yet today? You know, oh, were you on the beach today? You know, I'm gonna say today, so.

I'm gonna interrupt there. I'm gonna say that we're actually doing this on video. Although you guys are only gonna hear the audio, it is quite disturbing to see Wade in his pajamas. And I will be asking for this video to be deleted later. But anyway, carry on back to you.

Thank you.

Yes, nice, bj.

But that's one of the biggest preconceived notions is those that don't work remotely. A couple things. I'm not sure if it's because they wanna work remotely and they're not, or if it's just this whole idea that, oh, you can't work when you're at home. Well, I found exactly the opposite. My commute time is gone, right? So I don't have that funny drive back and forth stuff. So I'm going to the office earlier, number one. And number two, I'm only a couple yards from my desk almost all the time. And so what ends up happening? And this is a hard work life balance. And I actually posted about this on LinkedIn. I did a write up about this last year when everybody started going to remote that work life balance gets tilted. Now some people do the exact opposite. They tilt right to the life balance side of things and they just start taking advantage of the freedom and they don't do their work. But I tend to have a work ethic. My family's kind of from a farming community, farming background. And so work is kind of ingrained in us. And what happens in that environment when your work is that close to you, you finish dinner and you walk back to your computer and you start doing more stuff. And it even made it a little bit more difficult because Alaska is two hours behind me. So when I'm finishing dinner, they're not done with work yet. And so it would be too uncommon to go back to my desk, start doing stuff. And I'm now interacting with people, sending emails on things, and the next thing I know it's nine, ten o' clock at night. So you have to be mindful of that work life balance don't shift too hard one way or the other. But the other thing I found when I worked at all the other companies I've been at, because I've been in charge with investor relations, I was tied to Wall Street. That meant that everybody came to me to talk about their own portfolio because I was some Wall street guru. That's not true. I just happened to interact with Wall Street. So that meant to me was I would have at least an hour to three hours a day of people coming to talk to me when I was at my desk at the office because it's their own personal story. Gosh, did you get this talk today? Did you see what happened? Oh my goodness, it's going crazy. I'm a good person. I like people. I like to interact with people. So I would always engage and have conversations. Unless I had pressing earnings releases or something to have to get ready, I would interact with them. But then at the end of my day, six, seven o' clock, my time, I've still got two or three hours of work because I was talking to these people for an hour and a half, two hours. Now when I'm working from home, I limit that what I call water cooler talk. So when I get on the phone and talk or a Skype meeting or a zoom meeting with somebody, when it's a meeting, when I'm doing remote stuff, yeah, there's personals you exchange at the beginning and you do stuff to kind of renew. When I was up in Alaska last quarter, we talked about this. How's things going to Keep the relationship alive, but you tend to more focus on the tasks at hand and you get a lot more done. So to me, it became a more advantageous situation to work remotely. I got a lot more done and shoe gas was great to kind of tolerate some of the things that happened. Being remote. I was one of the first people to work remote for them. They started getting more and more people working remote. I know for a fact the CEO did not like that I was working remote. He gave me grief a lot of times when we were traveling around together, looking at potential acquisitions and stuff. Great friend, good guy. But, you know, he always kept saying, well, hey, you're out here on the road. I'm glad you bring your pajamas today.

So was it jealousy, do you think, because you'd managed to control that aspect of your life and maybe he would like to have done it himself?

I don't know. This jealousy or just still tied to tradition? Yeah, primarily more the latter. This is the way it's done. Everybody comes in together, they talk. And it's probably more of that, I.

Think, because I think, you know, we've got that happening now in London, you know, with this Credit Suisse. You know, they've said everyone must be back in the office. Everyone should do this. And, you know, okay, that works for them. And I'm not going to comment on that because I'm not close enough. And that's their ethos. That's fine, you know, but will they be positive? I think it can have a positive effect. I think it have negative. I think it's up to them. Again, you know, why would I comment?

But you're right, but they need to be cautious of one thing. Or cognizant, I should say, of one thing. The younger generation, they're not the same. So not my generation. Right. But Those that are one to 10 years out of grad school or undergraduate, that's more common for them. This last year was kind of what they've been raised, and that's what they were expecting. Their life has been in front of a small screen or a regular screen already for them. It's kind of a difficulty to go into the office sometimes. Not everybody. Don't get me wrong, their tradition is different than our tradition. And companies that don't embrace the difference in that tradition or the understanding of their capabilities from a technological standpoint, I think they're going to get left behind from a talent standpoint.

Agree. And I think also it's. There's this live to work and work to live ethos as well, and I, you know, I take it back. And I did this story when I did keynote speech in Belgium before and I was showing this thing about my youngest daughter at the time and she, I got her show this video of her, she was in primary school and we talked about social media and these guys were all laughing. I said, what's Facebook? What's this? And LinkedIn? And they were all going, laughing at. And I went, hang on, that's a nine year old that knows about what LinkedIn is. I said, and you guys, how many of you all got good photos on your LinkedIn profiles? Like, oh, hang on. And then I also did this other story and there's the work to live. One was my daughter then Emma, so my eldest, 21. So she was 17, she was working in local cafe, the brasserie sort of thing. And she was saying to me as she was getting it, she was 17, she was just waiting tables, just being a runner actually. And she said, oh, you know, dad, as well as my wages, you know, they're talking about these flexible benefits and this is what they're, you know, so what else will they give me? I was like, sorry, I don't understand, I didn't understand the question. I was like, I literally couldn't understand. I said, well, you go to work and they pay you, they give you wages and you walk away. No, but what other things will they give me?

A pension?

Will they give me this? And she was just more inquiring, she wasn't saying I want this, but she was seeking that because that was what she's been brought up with. I did a paper round, I was like, you go, you deliver these in the snow and you get paid and that's it. Take cash and shut up. You know, now papers don't exist, but move on. But it was more. That was it, you worked, you got paid, not live to work. And it was just. And it's different, you know, and I think it's a, it's a positive thing, but I think there's also a balance on both sides. But yeah, it's a, it's a weird new kind of world.

The employers that embrace, that are going to be differentiators going forward.

Yeah, definitely. So you did this period of remote working and then at the same, same time, because you weren't busy enough, obviously, this amazing Treasury Suite. So tell us if you would, about Treasury Suite and your company, that is you and this co founder and just give us an insight to you guys.

So like I said when I was at Ami Semi, just Before I went up to Chugach, that's where we kind of birthed the idea of Treasury Suite and we called it Treasury Solutions first and came out under that realm, more of a consulting really, to build software to support the consulting. And the software took off and so we had the basis for the software built before I actually went to Chugach. So the majority of the software is there. We already had a couple customers running before I left to go to Chugach. And my co founder, by the way, still working, runs treasury for a very large company. With that, there's a different way to do this. So when we talk about remote, we have a complete flexible work environment for our people at Treasury Suite. In fact, we have a large group of people we contract on for our development work. It's a firm we rely on heavily, they're close to us, very partnered with us, they help do a lot of development work and then we have a team of analysts that help us on a day to day basis get data in for our customers, answer questions for our customers, resolve issues on the platform, what have you. So but we built that in a remote environment and we were probably the first treasury workstation to be in the cloud. We started in the Cloud Day 1, back in 2008. That's when we built everything in Microsoft. And we had a couple guys that were large scale database developers that were the Microsoft framework. That's what they did. They were so good at what they did that one of the guys actually got hired by Microsoft and now he's one of their evangelists for their Azure platform. And when he left, he was one of our core developers. We had to find some other developers and we went for another team about four years in and they were a team that was based in Amazon, the AWS platform. So not only did we build our system once in the cloud, we already had customers on board. We had a bank as our customer as well, on board for their corporate clients. We actually took them all and we built a new version of our system in Amazon Web Server aws and we've been running in AWS ever since. It was a good move for us, good move for our scalability, our security and all those things. And yeah, it was an interesting thing. The basis was there when I left to go to Chugach. Chugach knew all about it. I was very open about what I was doing, how I was available to it, what my time was going to be spent on it. We started growing and getting customers from a couple different standpoints. The first was Word of mouth, obviously, we were using it for our own dog food. Other people started using that we knew, who then told their friends about it, who told their friends about it, who told their friends about it. And as a result, we have kind of these little pockets of users. We have a big user base in Chicago, for example, because a person that was there started talking to a lot of their people and their friends. That grew in Chicago for us. We have a good basis in Salt Lake City, obviously, because that's where we are. And most of the global companies in Salt Lake have talked to us or we're working with them. We have a good contingent in California and as well in the Northwest, up in Seattle and Portland and that area as well. And it's because of word of mouth at first. Then we started growing a little bit further and putting a bit more effort into sales and marketing over this last couple of years because we felt the platform is where it needs to be to grow.

Sorry to jump in, but again, some people won't know the platform. You know, and this is, you know, we're, both of us, Wade and I, we know, we've discussed this. You know, it's not going to be a total sales pitch, but I love the sales pitch because you guys are different. What was the ethos behind this? You know, I know we spoke about this on our call a couple of weeks ago. There was an overly complex, overloaded other systems that you were finding yourself as a treasurer, and this was your solution to it. Is that the right way to describe it?

Yeah, the best way to look at it is as we talked earlier in the podcast, we looked at systems for forever, right? The Sun Guards and the SAP, Oracle systems. And when Kariba came out and G Treasury, we've looked at them, and as we were evaluating, the same themes kept coming through. The first theme was they're incredibly expensive. Not only does it pay for an implementation setup fee, they're incredibly expensive from an ongoing basis standpoint, too. And that was just hard to swallow, whether I had the budget for it or not. It just seemed overly priced because we were looking at stuff on the cloud and saying, why does it cost that much? You have to buy servers and routers and switches anymore. The other part that was really striking to us was how overbuilt they were for the majority of the companies. You said this a bit earlier. They're built for Fortune 1000 companies and they sell to people that are smaller, don't get me wrong. But as a result, they're overbuilt. You have a lot of system information. You have to work your way through menus and sub menus and sub. Sub menus. And each one of those menus has 10, 20, 30, 50 items on them. You have to. Something with it starts to become a nuisance to get to the information, you're just trying to get cash positioning. You're just trying to do a simple forecast or maybe a complex forecast. You're trying to do unique analytics on what happened with your cache. But to get to it, the system is kind of in the way. Does that make sense? It's just, yeah, too many buttons and too many things confusing to the average user. And then on top of that, they charged you by the number of users you had. Well, the idea of a Treasury workstation is to increase visibility to those that need it. But now I have to pay so they can see that on top of what I'm paying to have the system. That didn't make sense to us fundamentally, from a what does a Treasury person need Standpoint. Those things kind of flew in our face. Too expensive, overly built, and had to pay for more people to have access to try and create visibility. Just didn't make sense. So we said, there's got to be an easier way. And we said, well, everybody's using Excel, so it's going to be Excel that's going to be the answer. And Excel's got some great features. It's very flexible, pretty powerful, pretty amazing. But it's hard to share Excel, and it's hard to lock down Excel from breaking if you add a line or do something different or change a formula or what have you. And Excel runs out of space when you start getting hundreds of thousands of rows of data, it starts having limitations. So how do we bring that all together? How do we make this user experience paramount? Instead of the technology being paramount, let's make the user experience the best part of this whole program. How do we make this so that regardless of whether you're doing cash every day, you're the cfo? Maybe, maybe you're a board member, maybe you're an outside auditor when you land on our site, how can we make it so that you understand what it's saying and you don't have to go through a series of menus and features and functionality to get to your answer? And we were always answering similar questions to CFOs, board members, outside auditors, whatever. We said, let's build our experience around providing information as a service that treasury always does. And let's build it so that when you're looking for that information, it's easy to navigate and those are kind of the guiding principles of Treasury Suite affordable. Because the way we built it in the cloud, we don't have that legacy overhang and infrastructure that the others do. How do we make it user experience focused? So that's right to the information when you want it. And by the way, if you have to go one level or two levels in, you don't have to study the system and take training for weeks and months to understand it.

Just go back to your founder story a little bit. You know, the way back when this shows my age, you know, so if I'm on super Calc, yeah, that's back in the day. And there you go. Yeah, yeah, I used it and then it was going to be, I don't think, hang on, I'm going to invent a new system and I'm going to use, hey, I'm going to invent, you know, Excel. If I was that way inclined. You just were like, actually these systems don't do it. So what's your founder story? You know, you're sitting there and go, I can make this, I know, I'll build my own system. There's a lot of treasurers sitting there listening now, going, what, you just build your own system? What was the driver? You'd always done that stuff or what? What drove that?

So a couple things. Number one, like I said, I like to make order and advancement out of chaos and disorder. But one of the jobs I had at Iomega early on was when I rotated through FP and A. I was in charge of the data for the data sell in and the data sell through. So basically what I meant is Iomega would sell from Iomega to its partners. That was the sell into the channel and there's a sell through the channel from those partners to the actual end customers. My job was every day to take that information and disseminate that to all of Iomega. When I got that job, they were taking a lead person who was one of our developers helping out in treasury suite, by the way. They took him from his role and said, hey, we need you to take and transition this to Oracle. Create an Oracle system out of this. Because it was an access database at the time. I had to learn how to use the access database and then I had to work with them in the transition to the Oracle. It was a year or two year project. Can't remember how long it was actually. I was sitting there watching this be made and shaped and I Was the person adding in from a user experience standpoint, if I'm going to get this information, make it like this or make my activity to get that information like this. It kind of emphasized to me, wow, the user should be driving these things, not the technologists. And a lot of times in that day and sometimes still today, technology drives it, not the user. I had that experience of taking that sell through database, putting it out into a SAS type environment before SAS even happened, really in Oracle. That kind of stuck with me. It's not as hard as I thought it was. I mean, it's difficult, don't get me wrong. So when we took the idea of why how can we displace Disrupt, make everybody's idea and day better in Treasury, I kind of linked back on that a little bit and said, we can do this. We can find the right talent that understands the user experience matters. You have to have great technology, there's no question. But the user experience matters. And when we did that and had that conversation, we also did an evaluation of the market and started looking at what was available 10 years ago. We look at it every about every month now. It seems like what's happening in the market and trying to say that's great. We love what they're doing, we don't like what they're doing. We want to advance our platform this way, but we always want to advance it from the user's standpoint.

What made you go, well, I'll set up, do my own company to do it.

So a couple things. I wanted this tool myself because I was tired of dealing with Excel and its limitations. I love Excel. I still work in Excel a lot. I'm Excel jockey just like most everybody is in finance. But I wanted something to make my life and my employees lives better. My team to be more effective and more efficient. I didn't want them spending their days managing the Excel spreadsheet to be a.

Super sized plumber, super sized plumber of information. Get that stuff in, get it through and then present it and make it easy for the user. Yeah.

So wouldn't it be great though my team, the information is already organized in a way that my team understands it. But any rate, anybody not part of my team also understands it. And that was the key differentiator we think we have is we organize it so that everybody can. So I really wanted to empower my team to be on more strategic value add projects. Working with Excel spreadsheet and managing it every day and pulling data from banks and just that's not value add Right. That's just silly. And I didn't say this beginning, but here's where it all came about. When I started at Iomega many years ago, I would come into the office, I walk past the fax machine and I pick up a stack of papers. It was probably about that high. It was probably about 3 or 4 inches high. That was all of my previous day information from all the banks that I omega had. And I'd sit down for my first hour and a half in front of my spreadsheet and I would input the balances, not the transactions, the balances. Then I could do a cash position based on that and I could look through the transactions if I needed to. But that was my day for the first little while there. Early on, the late 90s. So then my banker came to me one day and says, hey, we're going to make your life easier. I'm like, oh, that'd be awesome. Yeah. Here, take this disk, load it on your computer. It's going to connect it to our bank. I'm like, oh, that sounds cool. And you have to have a modem on your computer, though. Oh, cool. So I had to call it and have them install a modem, having a line installed in my desk. So then I'd dial up every morning, I dial, you know, the 10, 20 banks and pull down their information and I'd print it out on the printer. Funny thing is, I was taking that same exact stack of papers that I got off my fax machine, but now I had to spend the extra time to log in and connect to my bank and then print it out. It's the same thing that goes on for a couple years. Then the bankers come to me and say, hey, this Internet's changed everything. You're going to be able to get all this stuff via the Internet. I'm like, oh, that's awesome. That's gonna save me so much time. I'm so excited because I didn't have to listen to my fax machine crackling and scratching to get me the data. Funny thing is, I started pulling that same information, printing it out off the websites, but still the same stack of paper that I got via the fax machine. The bank successfully, over the course of about 10 to 15 years, changed the delivery method, but nothing else. And we said, there's people that are connecting to banks for other workstations, for accounting systems and the like. Let's capitalize on that. Let's advance that straight through process a lot. Exactly. So that's a given. All treasury workstations do that. We're no different when it comes to that. But let's do something a little bit different on this end. Let's make sure that once that data is analyzed, it's analyzed in a way that a board member can see it. I've kind of repeated this a bit, but a board member can see it and go, I get it.

Yeah.

They don't have to look at it every day to get it. They can look at it once a week, once a month, once a quarter. And they understand it because the way it's presented has context, has relativity. There's not just here's a data point in time. We always do analytics. There's comparisons, there's, you know, you don't just do a forecast. You do a forecast with last year's information the last couple months before you forecast on the forecast. That matters. It puts context around the information. It empowers the user so that then a couple things happen. Number one, the user looking for that information, whether it's a Treasury person or accounting person, they can see a lot more detail and insight. That means they don't have to ask questions and wait for the answers to come back to them. They can actually act on it right away, real time. But more importantly, the treasury team, they're not spending time answering those questions anymore.

Yeah. Before we run out of time today, we've got, you know, another 10 minutes or so, you know, before we got to log off as it were with yourself this ethos for the growth of treasury suite. Now you're 100% Treasury Suite and that's what you're focusing on and everything else. We, we spoke that looked at the website when before when I had my pre chat with Wade and you go on there some good information but you don't shout and scream about all your customers because we talked about sensitivity and why you do little bit differently maybe to. And I don't want this just to be a competitive pitch because that's not our ethos on the, on the podcast. But more so I was impressed with why you don't and the sensitivity there and how you respectful of that. You were. Can you just describe that for the listeners today as well?

The traditional way to market and sell a company is always to talk about your current customer base and raise it to the top of the rooftops and put their logos on your page and, and scream about those logos. Right. That's a little bit interesting twist when you start looking into the cash management and treasury world because now our customer base is putting their Cash Insights and their cash information and investment information and other information, their bank account information in our site. And the last thing they really want somebody to know is, wow, that's where all our banking information is. Let's just go there. You can see so and so customers using Treasury Suite. Let's go hack Treasury Suite to get their information. But we're also sensitive to the fact that a lot of our customers, from a Treasury and Cash standpoint, are very conservative themselves. That's kind of the nature of a Treasury person. They themselves don't want that out there. They don't want people to know. So we're overly sensitive because that's the way we felt about it when we manage our own cash. We don't want people to know where our cash is or our information about our cash. It's a risk aversion technique. It's also one more of the trusted status. Right. We want to become trusted advisors to our customers. Trusted from our system standpoint, trust us from our security standpoint, and also trusted from the standpoint that they know we're not out running around and yelling their names left and right about. They're on our system, they're on our system, they're in our system, they're in our system.

So isn't that going to limit your growth strategy if you're going to put that in place? You know, it's a great way to be. And your customers know, like, and definitely trust you because they know that you've got all their cash and you've got all that information. But how do you then, you know, do you just shout from the rooftops about why the backstory and all use this as a good pedestal to shout from the rooftops or what's this at you?

Well, we talked a little bit earlier about the changing demographic of the people that are working nowadays. The younger generation likes the remote ID a little bit better than some of the others. They're embracing this idea a little bit differently. They're saying, we want our banks to act like a trusted advisor. And if our banks aren't acting like a trusted advisor, we're going to find somebody that does. And we want to find people that are going to make my life easier and better. So we're kind of going down that channel from a conversational standpoint and from a marketing standpoint, talking and appealing to that generation that's coming in and going to be taking over and dominating treasury over the next 20, 30 years. We enable the technology, we enable the security, but let's also make it so that, you know, we're not going to compromise that. So how do you grow that and get the awareness around that? Well, we have to do a lot of unique case studies, case studies without people's names. And when we have our conversations in our emails or in our marketing materials or in our actual direct conversations with potential clients, a lot of times we're saying it's a company of this size, this nature that does such and such. Or we can say we have a company exactly like you in your industry that does xyz and we're very careful and we try and pre connect with some of our existing customers and say, hey, we're talking to this person potentially in your industry. Would you be willing to share your story with them? And I talked to you earlier about a lot of times our sales come from word of mouth. Well, we don't want to over reference our customer base. That's always. You don't want to get them tired in that kind of situation. But here's the interesting thing. We have customers not only willing to do that, we have customers that reach out to us and say, we want to be a part of an AFP presentation or a podcast with you or a case study with you. We want to shout about the rooftops, what's happened with us with you guys. And we're careful about that. We talked to them a little bit about, hey, that kind of goes against our philosophy a little bit. We want to be quiet about where your money is. Well, that's true, that's true, that's true. But we'll talk to any of your customers you want us to. So it's a different approach. It will limit our ability to grow. There's no question we're not raising our name and awareness like some of the others are. But what happens with that is the old AFP standard, right? You go to the AFP conference, you walk through the exhibitor hall. Not to throw names around, difficulty, but Cariba has the biggest footprint almost every year. And then there's usually one or two TR workstations right by them spending a lot of money, but not the same as they are. And the same thing jumps out at me when I see that as a user. Number one, that's a pretty big marketing budget. That means I'm paying a lot for that system. Number two, what are they getting out of all the names and the logos they're putting out up there and the compromising that I might get if I put my sync and they put my logo up there? So we found that we're getting a very warm welcome from those that don't like that kind of flash marketing. They like the more humbled, quiet, but yet very effective approach that we're solving their need and we can show them real quickly who is actually going through the same problems they have and why our system helped them do that.

I agree and I totally understand that ethos and it's one of the things certainly thing that whilst the world of conferences has changed, I think it has changed as well.

In that sense it will limit our growth. There's no question we will not be able to grow as quickly because our name doesn't get out there the way it does. But the nice thing is we don't have customer turnover. We have very limited, if any customer turnover because once they understand what we're evangelizing about, how this is a user experience more than it is a workstation for you, they stay and they go to a new company. They take us with us. In fact, I talked earlier about a gentleman who's had it at three different companies because he's very compelling and we go head to head when he does his bid outs with the Karibas, the G Treasuries, the Travadas and the like of the world. We have no problem going against those people.

Well, you and I talked to as well before the show that you're self funded as well. So it makes a difference.

Well, it does because we're not beholden to investor needs or bank needs. Right. And that really makes a difference. When our customers call us and say we want to do this, this, this and this, we have a good conversation about it. It's not wow, wow, you know, that means we're going to have to wait more money, we're going to have to talk to our bank about this, we're going to talk to our investors about this or our investors want their money out in the next two years, we can' we don't have those conversations. It really helps us be more flexible. It's not to say that at some point in time we might find the right strategic investor, but that strategic investor or strategic event needs to align with our philosophies because that's what's making us successful. And if that doesn't align with that, we've turned down money. We've turned down money since they started the company. We turned down money probably every year, every other year from interest that comes in and says, hey, we want to do this. Then we find out real quickly their interests and our interests and our ethos. If you will, like you said, don't align on a three to five year term and that doesn't work for us, Wade.

This could be a three hour podcast, but we haven't got that time today and we're not going to do that to everyone listening. Well, look, what we're going to do is we're going to put a Link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes so people can connect to you, you know, and find out more about Treasury Suite and everything else that you guys are doing. You gave some, we went through each of the roles and then you were giving some, you know, embrace the chaos. And we got lots of, you know, some nice, some nice bits of advice as we wrap up today's. If you look back over all of that and maybe just look at your background, what are the things that would jump out at you as that lovely phrase. But there might be other things that you just think that people listening today, if they're varying levels, earlier stage of the career, later, mid later, and they're senior treasurers, they've got some of your war stories. Great. But what would you say? What advice would you give them to wrap up today's show?

I think first and foremost, keep your family at the center of what you're doing. Doesn't mean you take your family to work. That means you make decisions based on your family first. Meaning. When I came out of graduate school, most of my opportunities were over in Japan. I elected to stay in Utah because my father had passed away and my mother needed some time and some help with I'm one of her four boys. Then I started looking at my family when I started having children. What do they need? What are they looking for? I talked about moving to Idaho and giving that experience in the backcountry and kind of growing up the way I did. But even a little bit further, when you have that as your central compass, that really helps make your work environment so much easier. I don't care how much chaos and how much trouble is going on at work. When you're centered at home, it makes work a lot easier. I don't care how difficult things are at work. You come back home to a nice centered place. It really helps out whether you're married or not married. Keeping that focus on what centers you as a person and your family, whether it's extended or current or micro family that matters. And then beyond that, I kind of look at my career in a couple different phases and some of the things that stuck with me early on when I first came out and Started working. Another person I worked with early on made a comment to me. It says, don't focus on the money. That's not your job right now. Because when you're coming out of Thunderbird or any some of the bigger grad school stuff, so you're always comparing, okay, this is the average starting salary. How did I do compared to that? Right. This is what the national studies say. How am I doing? Right. I took the opportunities that I took early in my career, the first five to 10 years of my career, not because of pay. I took them because of what I thought I was going to be able to learn and who I was going to work with. It would help me learn during those early years. That's where you're trying to build off what you came out of graduate school with and build off and start and put a great foundation for the rest of your career. Of course you need to be able to pay your bills and do all those kind of things. But I downgraded the importance of salary. Now I tried to get as much equity as I could in those situations, but at the same time, you're at a low level. You don't get much. But salary was not the driving factor back then. As you start moving through your career and you start proving yourself as a trusted advisor and can solve difficult and complex issues and people start searching you out because of your abilities, then you can start having a little bit more of a conversation about the money aspect. It tended to work that way for me. And I'm not saying this is good for everybody and there's people that have done better than me on both of those realms, but it seemed kind of a grounding philosophy for me is I'm here to learn for a while. These companies are teaching me a lot in the early part of my career and as over time and I get further in my career. Yeah, I'm bringing more to the table now because I've been through all these experiences, learned all these kind of things. I'm not expecting the company to teach that me anymore. I can advance the company quicker. There should be a premium for that as with any employee and if any talent, that's the way it works. So those are kind of things that along with that chaos breeds opportunity type thing. Those are things that kind of been common themes for me. The family start learning first, worry about the pay a little bit later and then be available and ready for that chaos.

Amazing. You should have your own podcast because I usually do a summary. You've done it for me. It's Amazing. Wade, today was a blast. Just been, well, I just loved it, you know, Wade, it's been amazing to talk. Thanks for your time. We'll put your details in the show notes. We'll also put that link early we said about remote working that article you written in LinkedIn. I think that'd be good for people to look at. It's just been a blast with you today. Thanks very much for your time.

Thank you, Mike. I've enjoyed it too. Appreciate it.

Thanks. Wasn't that amazing? Just incredible. I just. Wow. I've had so many lovely conversations with Wade. I think, you know, we'll put his details in the show notes. As I say on the episode, connect with him. He's a great guy to know and, you know, no stage of the other, but I can't wait to see him when I next get across the US have a beer with him and, and thank him for an incredible two part, you know, podcast. Well, keep on listening guys. We are approaching 50,000 downloads. That's mental. We've got a really exciting guest on our 150th episode as well and it's just great. Wade, thank you very much for your time and thank you for being listeners and feel free to leave us a quick review. Takes, you know, really difficult to go to. It's not go on to Apple, itunes. Do you know, wherever you listen to your podcast, give us a big thumbs up if you like it. If you don't, don't bother. You know, just keep on listening. Talking to you guys each and every week and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Talk to these amazing treasure professionals. Thanks.