Successfully Transitioning Through Treasury Roles with Summa Simmons

So I did feel like I certainly was in a smaller role, but I felt like I had access to so much more. Even though I was coming from a mom and pop shop, it felt like I had access to so much more by way of the Internet, so I could navigate the company essentially virtually and understand the remit. I think when my eyes really opened, Mike, was when I moved from the retail side of Morgan Stanley to the institutional side. Retail is small in the grand scheme of things. At an investment bank, once you get on the institutional platform and you have access to this broader view and all of the different products and services and ways in which the company shows up, that's when I feel like the real transition happened. Like that first step felt like a. It was like a half step and something that I was anticipating. Switching over to the institutional side, where I stepped into more of the unique disciplines of finance and accounting, is really when my eyes opened up and I thought, wow, from a professional experience, I had no idea that these were options for roles. And I'll talk a little bit about what those roles entailed and then from a service provider and what Morgan Stanley offers the globe, I couldn't appreciate it. Being on the retail side, even navigating the organization through its intranet. There's a separate intranet for the institutional side of the. So I started working on things like parent company accounting, where you are responsible for managing investment in sub and equity at the subsidiary level. That then nicely dovetailed into a role in Treasury Controllers, which admittedly, I didn't love that role. It was probably one of my least favorite from a work experience perspective. I didn't feel like I understood the why behind what I was doing and the timing behind that was really interesting as well. We were unbeknownst to the world. We were about to step into a financial crisis and I had what felt like an incredibly mechanical and mundane job that I just couldn't wait for my next rotation and I made the best of it. I didn't necessarily understand the why, as I mentioned, and so it was important for me to, while I spent time in that space, to go ahead and engage with the folks that we were supporting in the role. So I reached out to our traders and got a better appreciation for why what we did mattered and how it impacted their day job. And that was incredibly helpful in shifting how I thought about the role. Therein lies the importance of relationship. And the relationship was not about teeing up our banking partners to make sure that they extended our daylight overdraft. It was about establishing a relationship to each of our treasurers at the business to help them understand what lack of forecasting looks like, what the implications are for the company, but more importantly, helping them to understand what we do and that we're here to support them. So I want to be one of your first conversations when you're thinking about your next big cash transaction. I want to be so ingrained in your mind that I'm probably the second or third phone call after discussing a deal. And that really helped Mike. Like, it absolutely transformed how chaotic this role could have otherwise been to how relational and interpersonal it became, and, quite frankly, educational. So instead of just picking up the phone and saying, I'm going to need $500 million tomorrow, it was, hey, so these 15 steps have occurred as it pertains to getting this engine ready. And these are the things that are variable in whether or not we'll be ready to release the engine. And this is what we need in the timing around it. And I won't know up until this very moment. So there was more context, and that certainly helped for me to be more thoughtful in my forecasting, as well as for me to have more contingency planning around it.