Reshaping Treasury Careers in a Post-Pandemic Era with Shailesh Bettadapur

Foreign.

Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast. We're talking treasures about their treasury careers. This is one of our revisited episodes, joined by Shaylish Better Badu. Shaylesh is the treasure of Mohawk in the US what you will hear is our original episode. It's been remastered, improved on the sound as well. So enjoy that. Then we also catch up with Shaylesh. I spoke to him originally in 2019 and I've recently caught up with him in 2023. So we talk about what happened post pandemic or throughout pandemic and everything else. So enjoy the show.

Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. I talked to them about how they got started in treasury, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going next. In this week's show, I'm delighted to be joined by Shailesh Benedipool, VP and treasurer at Mohawk Industries. Mohawk are part of the Fortune 500. They manufacture flooring globally, both residential 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, the lot. 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 Shayla. Jayla's got a really good background within treasury, you know, right away 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 Shaylus 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, Shayla.

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 General Motors and that was more in the, you know, traditional finance, even global economic staff. I ended up answering a Wall Street Journal ad for a position. I got a call back and now I, up to that point and even probably since, I've 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. One of the three largest cement companies in the world at that time. I took the interview and it was for Al North America and kind of just went from there.

So you started as in financial, but then that was your first step into treasury, was that right? Or had you had.

That's right. So I mean actual, you know, capital markets and. 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 how treasury is now sort of thing.

Yeah, well, so there were a couple of things, right. One was this was a subsidiary of Wholesome in the Swiss model. Subsidiaries are self financing, right.

Other than equity standalone.

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 types of things. All of those things evolved during the time that I was there. Now at Holsem, at least Holsen, 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, you know, the standard cash management, let's call it operations and capital market stuff. But beyond that is actually things like, you know, 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. Explain that for our listeners a little bit because obviously quite unusual. Detroit. I know, let's go to Belgium. How did that come back?

Well, the wholesome like Flip Swift Co. And they for years have been trying to get Americans in particular to move overseas. Yeah, 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 a position came open in Belgium that they wanted me to take a look at and I didn't. My children were the right age. They were 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. And you did a period of time there, but not that long before you were sort of.

Now 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 Control a few years before that at a budgeting conference of all things, and he said, he asked me, he said, are you, are you interested in Singapore? And at the time, I didn't know anything about Singapore. I just knew something about chewing gum and, you know, 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. Yep. Over time, I did that for two years and that gave me a good way to sort of settle into the region ultrally, you know, learn the geography is 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 and New Zealand. So that, 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 hats. And so that included a lot of controller work and all that that you wouldn't normally find in those kinds of positions with that role.

And, you know, sort of. 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, in terms of treasury staffing or the way that people approach. Was it different or was it exactly the same? You know, treasury was Treasury.

No. Well, so it was different on a couple of fronts. Right. One, first of all, so you recall I described in a previous answer that at Holzam North America, treasury was a much broader animal. Josk Controls, it was much more traditional. Treasury was treasury what you would normally think of. So it's the standard, you know, capital market defect 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, in various countries, obviously. So. But we were able to centralize A lot of this through. In those days it was Citibank and in Asia, in those days anyway, it was Citibank and everybody else, but they had great systems that we could use that to essentially commonize 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, right. The 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 know, being somewhat new to the region, you had to actually learn. And that, that, that's the, that that's usually market success or failure, Internet bad assignment.

So.

And when you say learn, is that what. Learning those cultural differences about how, 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, to work in the center, you know, the, the head HQ back in Milwaukee in the US and then. And then made a move on to Laurier, 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?

With Johnstick rolls, all roads led to Milwaukee. And so having Internet expat for them for six years, they felt that it was time to come back states. And so I said, okay, that that's fine. I mean, I don't think I was all that crazy about it, but, you know, I kind of done what I needed to do and absent some professional opportunity, I was, it was probably time to do something else. So came back, ended up taking over the. We had a captive finance company that was, that was really helping out customers in terms of financing. Again, another one of those things that we inherited from, 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, you know, I basically came up with a strategy kind of working along really either we had to grow this to, you know, a billion dollars or just, just close up shop. It's not worth the, it's not worth the effort. In the end, we ended up closing it. Now at. In hindsight, that really ended up being the right decision given the financial crisis that came, you know, literally the following year. Of course, we didn't know that at the Time, 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, is large. And so, so you are responsible for much more. Then when you come back to the, Come back to the, you know, the corporate. Corporate house, you're not. I mean, DAs are bigger, there's much more.

Yep.

Process and some people. Bureaucracy 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. They were trying to set up something in Asia and they asked me if I'd go back and 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 call it.

So you headed back to the sweltering heat of Singapore?

No, it was nice though. I mean, we literally got back almost a year to the day, but then again, kind of plays itself in this case. We got back there August 1st, 45 days later, Lehman sales. We had all of our funding, so that was good. But a big part of my job, along with a bunch of. 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, across a year. And we ended up doing, you know, three, you know, 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.

And then treasury pulled you back and sort of said, right, and you. This role came up. What did you. You think we're at that stage, Obviously Mohawk, that was eight and a half years ago, is different company.

I'm imagining, first of all, coming out of the financial crisis, everything was a different company. So. 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, you know, the weather's good. Not as drastic a move from Singapore to Milwaukee. It's, it's here to winter and brief. So came back and you know it's the, see a very senior position at, at that time, Fortune 500 company. Yeah. And there was, there was a lot of opportunity to do some stuff which you know I've been able to do and now I've been here eight years so.

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

Oh yeah, 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 the people are coming off of the financial crisis. Right. So there's a fair bit of that. Mohawk had gone from you know, 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 you know, they actually never had a non profitable year. They were write off. So it looked like you know in one year that was, it was definitely a knockdown. But yeah, these are all non cash items. But the result was that the capital structure was more than 100% picked at. When I say that all of the debt was fixed, we had a, we had a, an ABL line because it had gone to high yield at that point and but we're sitting on a boatletic path. Right. So that makes it more than a hundred percent fixed debt and fixed rate debt so. And high, high cost and, and so over time I was able to you know, 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 a number of things like implement commercial paper programs both in the US and in Europe. And so we now have, you know, 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 you know, it's hard to lose with that kind of thing and as long as you can take advantage of it.

And how's the treasury department structured in your organization Alert?

Yeah, so we, yeah so so we, it's really treasury and risk and so we sort of conflate to risk being the traditional insurance type of risk. But when I say complaint, we have a lot of cross, 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, so 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 electronic automation. Any of those kinds of things that we can do that we can, we, we do.

And when you say that 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 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 spreadsheet. A lot of this stuff. And, but, but 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.

And 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.

Yeah.

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 it a better treasury and the offering to the business? Or do you work closely or what's the solution?

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 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 pnl. And so, so these are all things that we can, we can talk to. And then there's a whole bunch of, you know, I spent a lot of time with, with, with my CSO 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? That's 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, that is the concept.

And you've been 20 years plus in treasury, just like I've been with 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, we sisters like this. And we talked the other day with the treasurer and they were 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? The, 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 had been become much more of 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 and integrity. Obviously my view is I can teach you anything, though 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, you know, come on, do some squat thrusts, you know, come on in and show us your.

You know, you know, you can tell in the interview, how. How engaged people are. Right. 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 solved the problem. Yeah, right.

How would you.

How would you approach this problem?

Yes.

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

Good way to get your money's worth as well. So.

Well, you know, and it's. So, you know, it's a whiteboard until 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 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 trying to. Have you seen the candidate pool change or have you seen differences internationally or what. What have been your thoughts?

No, I don't think things have changed that much. I mean, you know, recruiting. You 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 candidate, and because we recruited good candidates, we were able to recruit more good candidates. So generally recruiting them right out of business schools, where they were sort of a cliche of paper and we could teach them and that. 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. 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, but 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. That's the way I think.

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 going to be more in 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 think, and 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 kind of gotten the basic concept, but that again seeks 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 the thing. Right. Number one. Number two is artificial intelligence. I'm. 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 code that write 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 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 that can't. I mean if you think about artificial intelligence, that kind of what that is, right? Yeah. It's a lot of aggregation of past experiences, holding it much faster and it never forgets anything.

Yeah.

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.

Well, I 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, you know, 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 a treasurer. And 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 at the line down. Treasurers.

Yeah. But I, I tend to think that it's always been that way. When I was at Holstrom, the thing that we would try to encourage was, you know, say you were evaluating a $10 million piece of equipment.

Yeah.

You know, at a plant. And so, you know, the manufacturing guys would say, oh, yeah, this is going to do, it's going to increase production by 30% and all of those kind of things. Right. So, so one of the things that, you know, in our evaluation of it, you go through the standard, you know, NPV types of calculation, which is, you know, anybody can do that. But, but the, 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 what you, you have to then translate that back into manufacturing metrics to say, okay, if you're, you're saying you're going to get X, but you really going to get, let's say you only get x minus 2, are you willing to take your bonus on?

Yeah.

And that's, that's where the rubber hits the road. Because the manufacturing guy, they won't understand the immediate. And you wouldn't expect anybody to understand, 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 are translating it into financial numbers and then you are translating it back. And so essentially you are 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 does it give us? What's the benefit to us in the.

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

Yes. 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've looked, you looked at the, 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, we spoke before and Chedish has very kindly said that if people do want to connect with him or, you know, hear more and things like that, he's, 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, Shamish'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 doesn't, you know, what would, what advice would you offer or give them?

So I can say this now because.

I'm old, we learned about it, don't worry.

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. I think there's a famous quote from Clausewitz which is all battle plans are obsolete the minute the first bullet is fired. And I, I, that that's true. I mean, so you know, I never plan in fact. So I'll give you an example. I, I, so I was born in India. I came to the States when I was less than a year old. So I, I grew up in the States and I, 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, now as I think about it, you know, both professionally and personally, you know, for professional growth, personal growth. My family, you know, my, my kids more or less grew up overseas. They are different people because of that. You know, it just made our lives as a family much richer. It makes, it's made my professional life much richer. And none of that was planned. Right. And so I, I, 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 that's something that you can then talk about. You can, you can take somewhere else. As long as you're learning, you it been a lost opportunity and you never really know what you're going to learn until you do it. And so that would Be 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 Trey'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. Shayla, many thanks for your time today.

Thank you, Mike.

So I hope you enjoyed that episode that was with Shailesh way back when crumbs in 2019 and how the world has changed ever since.

What has happened?

Pandemic, everything else ways of working have changed. We talked to Shadish before about how recruiting good treasury candidates was a key thing and some of the bits.

But the world of work has changed.

Everything else and treasury has moved on. We're catching up with the story now four years later. Shad, I'm going to pass back to you. Bring us up to date, if you would. You're still at Mohawk, which is obviously Fortune 500 manufacturer, distributor of floor products, but in floor covering products. But we've already heard that in the previous episode. But now, sir, we're catching up the conversation four years later. What happened next?

Good to talk to you again, Mike. You know what's so interesting to me, just as an aside you talk about this was back in 2019 and for me, I think for a lot of people, I think it sounds like last year because Covid has had that effect of compressing time. When I say last year, I really mean 20.

Yeah.

So there's that. But yeah, there's lots of stuff that happened.

Right.

Obviously with COVID just a Treasury space, just general company space. A whole bunch of companies did what we did, which was go out to the capital markets and borrow because, you know, early, especially early in the pandemic, nobody really knew what we're dealing with. Nobody really knew where the bottom was. And so the whole idea was to go out and get as much or more than you thought you needed liquidity. And that's what we all did. And then of course the central bank stepped in pretty quickly and everything rebounded. Central bank stepped in, government stepped in.

So even though people, a lot of.

People were, most people I would say, were working from home early on the white collar side. They also weren't spending. They weren't nobody was going on holiday, nobody was going to eat out, to go to movie Theaters, whatever.

Right.

Nobody was doing any of that. So in that way, that Mohawk actually did quite well because what people were spending on was improving their home. Right? They were. You think about it, right?

You're in your house a whole day.

With your spouse and your children, maybe your adult children, small children, lots of children in the house, lots of people.

In the house, I would say.

And you're looking at that ugly carpet that you've got. So, yeah, I'd like to go ahead.

Get rid of that.

You saw a lot of this, right, where people were upgrading both inside and outside the house.

And there was. There was a major push towards that. And then you also saw things like.

Housing prices go up and so a number of very sort of anomalous things that were always going to be temporary, but. And then that kicked in inflation, the supply chain, things like that. So you had some sort of weirdness going on. And see, we seem to be coming out of that now. Obviously, you've still got things like the Ukraine, Russia war, which put pressure on energy prices, particularly last year in Europe and so forth. So there's some anomalous weirdness going on, but. And then that's likely not going to end. It'll just be different. Yeah, but these are all things that you have to lock a deal.

And what's that been like for treasury? If we hone it into you guys and things?

What.

What's it been like for you? What's happened? Going to remote working and everything else?

How did it affect yourselves?

It was very interesting. We were generally, I'll tell you, I worked at home a grand total of about six weeks. That was it. We. We had some sort of unique issues here, but. But we weren't really at home that long now. Not that matters so much, but that's the fact now. I think the changes that show up are where things were maybe a little bit more stable in terms of being able to recruit people, things like that. That's a little bit more challenging now because people did get used to working remotely. People are less willing to do a commute. Like we're a bit outside of Atlanta, maybe farther than people want to go. Generally speaking, that's a little bit more challenging. And because the paradigm has changed in terms of remote, because people know they can do it and it's just harder to get people that. That's, I would say, has been the biggest single shift. And where.

You. Treasury wise did. Treasury was resilient enough. I know a lot of people actually said there was emergency plans in place and everything else and they actually worked out rather well.

And that's not to take it.

We had, we, when the pandemic, we had always worked on that because my, my, my feeling always has been, look, if the building blows up, we still need to be able to, you know, move money.

Just basic blocking and tackling.

Yeah, we still need to be able to do that. So I've always had that in mind. But when in the early days of the pandemic, like January, before people really knew it was a thing, we tested it all out with things like Zoom, which nobody had heard of Zoom those days and now we can't stand it because we're too used to it. But it's. Yeah, we had tested it all out. So when we pulled the trigger, which was probably in early March, late February, we were ready to go and things worked out pretty well.

Yeah.

And now we've come back into the office and we're looking at the future and things. What do you. We just spoke before the show about world events, everything else, everything seemed to get back to a sort of a steady state, as it were. What are you facing now treasury wise and how are you seeing it for the future sort of thing? What are the things that other people should be thinking about?

Do you see and you're planning for?

First of all, I would not agree that everybody is back into the office, Right. So here at Mohawk, we're back in the office, but a lot of people are not. I look at my children, they are still working from home, they're in tech, but they're still working from home where they are. And they've been told they're going to work from home forever. Now to my mind, forever is a long time, so you never really know, but they've been told that. I guess my point there is as long as a significant number of people have shifted that paradigm, it's going to affect everybody whether you're in the office or. Yeah, you're going to have to adapt to that new workforce and that that's key as we want to either add or more likely replace people. Now we have specifically, we have always been highly automated. We did this when I came in 13 years ago now we started automating pretty significantly, taking out a lot of the manual processes. So, and you know, something as simple as a Treasury workstation, which takes out a lot of, a lot of those sort of manual, very tedious kinds of day to day things. And, and that allows us to work at a relatively lean, with a relatively lean structure. And so that, that helps and that's going to happen, I think more and more just because you're not going to be able to get people and there are fewer people in the workplace. So you've got. So I think automation, I think AI is going to be a thing that's going to. That's going to be a big play. And so I think you can see.

A lot of just touching on that with AI. You and I had spoken about it.

Before but that you.

We'd both agreed at the time that things like blockchain AI will impact. But I did a post the other day and I was just talking to people that it's going to impact but not wipe out. It's going to reduce manual processes. And actually for me as a recruiter, if we can embrace AI, it's going to mean I can spend more time talking to clients like yourself. And it takes away the close ended task, but not the open ended tasks. It means I can spend more time talking to candidates about themselves. And yes, there's some stuff you can get, but in actual fact it frees me up to do the interesting activities personally. Do you see similar yourself or what are your thoughts?

I think it depends on your timeframe. I think that. So with AI, right, Everybody gets focused on the big horror stories, right? We're gonna get enslaved by. By server someplace.

Yeah.

We just went to see the new Mission Impossible yesterday, which was a whole AI thing. You know, it's fun movie, but yeah, so it seems fantastic.

At the same time, I don't think.

It is longer term. So we talk about the more interesting things. But if you think about what, let's say a treasurer. Why do you hire a treasurer? You hire a treasurer mainly for accumulated experience and therefore the judgment. Right. That's the idea that you could think your way through situations. Now that is a function of. Okay, I've seen several movies before, I know how they turn out. So I tried that. That doesn't work. Let me do something different. And so over the years you pick these things up. Now take that as AI, where it's not just a single person's experience, it's the whole thing and it accumulates fast and you can run multiple scenarios. There's nothing that we do that is rocket science. There's. I see no reason why it wouldn't eventually wipe it out. That sounds dystopian, but I really believe that.

No, I think it's great.

And wrapping up today because you gave us. You were very kind with your time last time. Any nuggets, any pieces of advice you just give to the treasury folks out there if they're thinking about their careers or thinking about what they should be doing next. What are your sort of takeaways from this updated show four years later? It's crazy, four years later, but I.

Don'T actually remember if I said this back then, but they would certainly hold. Which is. Or treasury people in particular because treasury is somewhat, let's say long lost function.

Not unlike tax for.

Yeah, but I think it's much more important to get into the business and to really understand the business that you're dealing with because that, because otherwise you're just. What you're really doing is somewhat manual.

Right.

You don't have a full understanding of what's going on in the business. And so I think to a large extent, if you can really get into the business and honestly, if you're, let's say you're lower down in the treasury space, let's say you're a Treasury manager, for example, it's not a bad thing for your next assignment to be in the business. So doing something else, you can always come back. But doing something else and broadening that, broadening that experience base I think is not just important, I think it's actually necessary and that's the kind of thing that folks will be looking for later.

Fantastic.

Thank you, sir. You've been very kind. Again, looking forward to seeing you later on this year hopefully and, or soon. And thanks very much for sharing some of your insights and onwards and upwards, sir.

Yes. Yeah. Good to talk to you again, Mike.

Thank you.

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