The Importance of Team Balance in Treasury with Steven Krippner

Foreign.

So, welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast, where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week, I talk to treasurers about how they built their careers, where they are now, and where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next in this week's show. Delighted to be joined by Steve Krippner, the Vice President and treasurer, Baker Hughes. Baker Hughes is an energy technology company providing solutions for energy and industrial customers worldwide. Century of experience conducting business over 120 countries, innovative technology services, moving energy forward and everything else you can read on their website. I'm going to get Steve to actually explain exactly what his role as Treasurer, VP Treasurer, is like a baker used later on in the show. But as always, we're going to start with the early stages of his career, how we eventually got to this. And for you listeners out there today, to give you some of the tips. If you're listening today, you're a Treasury assistant analyst thinking, right, what should I do? What are the choices I should be making? I know that this show is going to definitely help me. So, Steve, as always, I'll hand over the microphone to you. Over to you. So how did you first get started in finance and then Treasury?

Well, on the finance side, I mean, that was pretty traditional, right? I graduated out of University of Auckland and pursued joining what was then, I think the Big eight. You know, one of the Big eight accounting firms joined Pricewaterhouse. No massive logic as to why I joined Pricewaterhouse versus another firm. I got offers actually, from all eight. So I was pretty pleased with that. Joined Pricewaterhouse, got the charter's accountancy, it takes three years. With really the view that I was always going to travel as soon as I got qualified, and then started thinking about how I get over to London, which is the sort of classic destination for a Kiwi who wants to check out the rest of the world. And I was really fortunate. I actually had a friend who was English at University of Auckland, and he went over to London before me, about a year or so before me, and he'd gotten himself involved in consulting work at Pricewaterhouse, as it was known, and was working in the treasury practice. And how he gone into that, I've got absolutely no idea. And I was just keeping in touch with him and he said, listen, why don't you come on over? It's really quite a good gig. And so he gave me the name of a partner called Chris Jones. He was really starting up a pretty fledgling treasury advisory and audit practice. And I literally just Sent him an email, said Chris, can I have a job? Here I am, I'm a pretty junior auditor, don't really know anything, would you hire me? And I guess to my surprise he said, yeah, sure. Here's the HR contact, I'll see you in a few months. And that was it. And that's how I got into Treasury. It wasn't a lot of thought about it to be fair, but I loved it. It was great.

When you got off the plane, you were thrown in the deep end of some amazing London based Treasuries and actually that is when I first started my treasury recruitment career doing stuff actually for PwC back in the day. What was it like for you, a great practice to be part of? What was that like?

Oh, it was a lot of fun, right, because it was a new practice. Chris was a, he was a great leader. We had some pretty interesting people in the practice, as I'm sure we know and you know, it was very entrepreneurial. We sort of went out and did stuff. We just made stuff up quite frankly and built a practice and it was quite nice to be part of that. I think when I joined it's pretty small, we were more than 10 people have managed and by the end of it, you know, it was quite a large practice. And then the New York practice got developed and we set up a practice in Brussels and Switzerland and so forth and it was great, it was great to be part of, really enjoyed it.

In consultancy you sometimes do get pushed maybe towards doing more of the sales and as you grow within the practice, did you find that happen before you then made the move to GE or how did it develop for you? Because you were there what, 12 years?

Yeah, I was there for 12 years. I was Auckland three years, London practice for three, four years. The sales piece of it wasn't too critical really. We were generally brought in. You'd have a relationship partner or an account exec and we tended to be brought in, we weren't doing, I think direct sales. There was some problem or some issue that needed resolving at a client and we were tended to be brought in. It was very much what they call the hub and spoke model where the hub was set up by some very senior partner, had a very senior relationship across the C suite and if they needed something, identified it and we were the spokes that they brought in to deliver a solution to a problem. And so sales wasn't really a huge deal. I mean it was really all about okay, what's the scope of the work? How do we deliver against that scope and how do we price it?

You've done a number of years there. How come the move?

What happened? I'd been around treasury for quite a few years. Right. I ended up being a director in the New York office and seeing a lot of huge companies and treasury functions, from Ford to Walt Disney to anything, you name it. IBM. I think there was a little bit of a feeling of being a little bit of a fraud, because here I am advising and supporting treasury functions. But I was never a practitioner. No, I'd never really done it.

Yeah.

So GE was my biggest client and when they offered me a role to switch to the other side, I was quite keen to do that. I wanted to actually experience practitioning as opposed to pontificating, if you like, how things should be done better. And that was great. It was a great opportunity. And I also. I was living in New York City, starting to get a little bit tired of city life. And it was an opportunity to move out to the burbs, to be honest. Yep. We had a super young family and I thought that was a great opportunity as well.

And ge, back in the day, it was a massive client of mine. Previously you were in that transitional period, looking at the dates as well, when GE capital, now with GE's industrial services, that's what it was. But back in those days, GE Capital was bigger than GE itself, the ex industrial sector. What was it like for you, being there at that period of time? What was it like?

It was just amazing. I mean, at its absolute peak, the GE corporate function was a thousand people. Yeah, it was a bank at its peak. I think we had about $700 billion of debt, a trillion dollars of derivatives. It was vast. It was vastly complicated. You did things that other corporate treasury functions don't really get to do. You have tremendous influence over your banks because your wallet is so massive.

You're bigger than some of the wallet shares. Incredible.

It was just incredible. And so the opportunities were amazing. I'll never forget was running a program to simplify our debt and derivatives stack of technology and processes. And the budgets that were thrown around to do that were just enormous. I think my first budget was $25 million. And most people don't spend $25 million on a Treasury project. And so it was fantastic opportunity, it really was. But the one thing I would say about GE and that experience was fantastic in terms of learning the markets, having a finger in every single pie you could possibly think of, getting a view on financial services and G Capital and how to fund that asset liability. Management, all these other experiences which are brilliant, which a lot of more sort of industrial, commercially orientated treasury and functions don't do. But you didn't necessarily focus commercially. You were a bank, you were an in house bank and that means sometimes you didn't build what I would call that kind of business acumen, that commercial acumen. And that's something I've experienced later on, but it was a tremendous opportunity. My interview was with the CFO of the company. You're walking into these plush executive suites. It's quite overwhelming. The corporate head office was truly impressive and you're dealing with somebody who's, who's on the Wall Street Journal all the time, on CNBC all the time and it's incredible. You've got senators who come out and visit your treasurer. It's not usual.

And so from there you decided to move across the fence as it were and move into banking. What was that like?

Yeah, well that was.

Well you were semi in banking already really.

Yeah, I was and I'd run some really big programs at ge, really complicated programs, multi year and I just thought well that's pretty good experience and it's probably pretty relevant to banking as well. I'd been in the US for about nine years, three children and we were starting to think how are we going to live in the US for good? You know. Yes. My wife's English.

I'm sorry?

My wife's English. We didn't. Yeah, exactly. We didn't have.

As an Englishman, I'm saying that before.

This was start we didn't have a lot of family to support us. Right. And so we thought well maybe, maybe I should head back down south if you like. Yeah. A little bit closer to my family in New Zealand. I had some family in Sydney improved and so I thought well maybe that makes sense. So you know, the Macquarie opportunity came along and it was very much more of a lifestyle decision versus a career decision.

Yeah.

In all honesty I thought well let's have the children experience what it's like being in Tippities, I guess. Yeah, beach lifestyle and all that. We did everything like that. Moved into Sydney, went to the eastern suburbs, had a place right by the beach, went out to the beach every day, kind of worked out. Within about six months my wife didn't really like the beach. It all started folding in on itself a little bit but you know, that was really it. And so we joined Macquarie bank which was considered at the time the Goldman Sachs, if you like Australia, it was the millionaire factory as was also known. That was A really unusual experience because I'd been working in, I guess, an American culture and a British culture and it's real different. And you kind of think that operating in Australia is no different than operating in your house. Well, that's just wrong. It really is. Different attitudes are different, values are different, ways of doing things are different. And it was actually a bit of a culture shock and I wasn't expecting that.

So then the move. Yeah, did that. Bit of a culture shock and then credit.

Well, yeah, I mean really, we decided quite quickly, unfortunately, that we didn't want to be there. Right. And so that was a bit of a disaster because I'm like, I've just moved my entire family off the world, Australia, around the world. And so we're like, well, we need a path back to the UK because that's the only other obvious destination for us. Yeah. Given my wife being in Shinhoo family. And so I started scrambling a little bit and going, okay, what can we do? Reached out to a network and was really fortunate through that to find a role with Credit Suisse. And the deal was basically go to Singapore, do a couple of years and we'll move you back to the London office.

Yeah.

And so I was like, great. I've always wanted to travel around Asia. I think this is still good. It's still doing big change, finance change. It's in banking. It's not necessarily treasury later at all. But yeah, let's do it. And so we did.

Steve can jump it in there. I know Credit Suisse you do as well. Can you for the listeners, describe the size of it? And as you say, it was a global bank and you had global centers everywhere, didn't you?

Yeah. So Singapore was obviously the sort of main APAC hub and it was a pretty brim growth market. Right. On the private banking side, tremendous amounts of personal wealth there. Right. So they were obviously driving the private banking side and they also were building out a broker dealer business that was pretty big as well, serving the Asian market. So it was big. You know, Credit Suisse is a big organization. It was a big bank. It's obviously not quite what it was today, but it certainly was something and had a good reputation on the street. Certainly a big, a big player in the kind of equity brokerage. Maybe not quite top tier on the investment banking side when you compare say to a Goldman or Morgan Stanley, but still good reputation. So I was pleased to join it and really enjoyed Singapore. It was a really good experience. Kids loved it. Got to travel around Asia, which we loved. And it was great and we had an exit and I think that's important because I think you've got to have a clear plan, an entrance and an exit plan if you're going to go somewhere knowing that it's not a long term destination and how did you then.

Transition it through to the UK or how did that work? Again this is for the listeners. That's great advice from Steve there, have your interest but also know when you're exiting stage left, talk us through that.

Well, one was obviously I needed to make sure I was building relationships with the MDS in London that was really important so that ultimately I felt comfortable in finding a role for me in London. So that was a big focus, obviously had to deliver the scope in apac. I was effectively looking after all the kind of regulatory reporting change for the bank in apac but I needed to deliver that but at the same time build relationships in London so that I could get a role there. And really within a year I was working my out what my next role was and building a transition plan so that within that second year, you know, I had a clear path that was very important.

So you got yourself back to London. Were you then re tempted by corporate treasury or when you had this right, we'll get back to London, then I'll keep looking or was it. It came along. How, how did it occur?

I think, to be brutally honest, I just felt like my career was stalling a little bit. I'd achieved what I needed to achieve from a family perspective, a personal persp. We were finally in a country we were happy to be in that's quite bored.

Everyone settled, right?

Everyone's settled, family's well and that was my sort of number one goal. And that was kind of the first couple of years, if you like, in London and then yeah, absolutely. I thought, well, I've been in investment banking, broker dealer space for a few years. It's interesting, there's some good things about it. But ultimately when you're at a bank, that whole front to back office relationship is not something that I like. I want to be more commercially orientated. I want it to be more at the front and in a bank, very front to back. If you're in the back office in a finance role, you're in the back office. And what I noticed and observed was when I spoke to mds about the business, they didn't really talk about the business they talked about, well, here's the regulation I have to meet, here's the reporting requirement I have to meet. It didn't talk about the business, the strategy of the business and I didn't like not having that commercial alignment if you like. I really wanted to go back and do something in a non financial services space where I could get closer to the business strategy and something that was more commercially orientated and through my network at ge. The oil and gas division of GE had moved its headquarters to London. I knew the CFO from my time at corporate in Connecticut and reached out through that and got myself a role back at GE and I was really happy to do that and it was my first kind of real industrial role.

How did you frame yourself? I mean because you have gone from consultancy then. Yeah, it was great having that connection. But you were GE Capital as you say, high finance, everything else then Credit Suisse with bit Macquarie in there but you were banking regulatory and suddenly then you become the global treasurer of the GE oil and gas. There are people, in fact I spoke to someone just yesterday who was wanting to make that shift and probably hadn't planned it and now they're accidentally wanting to do it and they're not going to do it in this current market. I said look, try to walk in and go, yeah, but I can do this. I said, but there's going to be nine other people in that sitting next to you in the waiting room and they're currently doing this. You lasted it like nine years ago and you want to go back. You can't, not at the moment. He needs a bridging step. Whereas with yourself, you know, what was that like for you?

Well, I guess one of them I was a little bit treading on my brand if you like, that I built GE and the network and the fact that, hey, it's not a huge bet I can go and talk to other people at GE that's worked with Steve and they think he's great or whatever. I hope they said that. Who knows?

Yes, he got the job. So I think that.

Yeah, but that helped, you know, because it's like, well, it's not such a big bet, it's not such a big rip. This person's a known commodity if you like. And then secondly, because I'd done a lot of the advisory work and I'd seen a lot of different companies in different sectors, I could talk the talk. I was able to understand a little bit about an industrial company and the go to market strategy and how they operate and supply chains and working capital management. I had some ideas and so that was quite relevant. Yeah, I wasn't a super experienced practitioner in that space. But I touched it so often during my consulting times that I could have a conversation and I could show that I have a little bit of thought leadership and I could probably do something.

And part of that you had. And throughout all of the roles you had, finance change and change management, which is the only constant, as we both know, and embracing that. And I noticed that there are some treasurers and some may be listening who still avoid that and think, oh, do we have to change? Do we have to do this? That's the only thing that if you don't, if you avoid it, get out.

Yeah.

If you had that, did you find that really was a good springboard as well?

Oh, I think so. Because when you drive change, so much of it is around scoped management, so much of it is around articulating the problem statement, what am I trying to solve, and coming up with decision frameworks or ways of going about executing. That's pretty structured in terms of your thinking. And I just think that's hugely relevant. And also, I think you also learn through that kind of consulting work a fair amount of agility. That's really important too. Fact that, hey, this worked this time, it's not working this time. Let's do something different. And they're quite comfortable with that. And I think that that comes through and I think that's really important, particularly in this kind of environment where just volatility is the norm now.

So you joined GE 2015 and they were all a gas business.

Yeah.

Can you take us through that journey and then into Baker Hughes and how it sort of all went through?

Initially I looked at it, I was like, wow, the scope of this is somewhat narrow. Right. Because it's a segment lead role. But a lot of the big treasury processes are sitting at corporate still. And so what you're actually doing is you're actually managing corporate. You're saying, corporate, here's my treasury requirements, here's what I needed to deliver. And because I knew how corporate operated, I knew how to sort of manage the big shared service center, because that's 50 what they were. They were just a gigantic center of excellence. And I could manage that quite well and I could fulfill requirements quite well. And that's good. And that was fine. And there were lots of business challenges and lots of learning about the business that were fantastic. The oil and gas industry is awesome. It's phenomenally interesting. It really is. It's just grand. So if you are curious about Nigeria or Mozambique, if you're curious about how on earth do you get oil out of the ground, if you're curious about the energy value chain and how does stuff get delivered, which is pretty much critical, as we all know now to our entire way of life. So it's just fantastic. But being a segment lead was probably not something that was going to initially thought, well, this will just be a stepping stone to get back into corporate. They had a presence in London as well, like Turo could have created that. But fortunately, GE's largest acquisition came along and that was to acquire a company called Bank Hughes Inc. Which was a large oilfield services client. GE was looking at how does it position these assets so they don't become stranded, if you like, and how can you position for those assets to potentially monetize in the future? And one way of doing that is to merge with a listed company and then over time you could sell down your stake marketplace and which is exactly what they did. So we merged with Baker usanc. It's a big company. Then quite quickly GE decided to sell down at stake. And so we carved out GE Oil and gas from ge. Phenomenally complicated thing to do in a very short space of time, execute the merger. And then with a year we were starting planning to separate from GE fully as they sold down their stake and stand up a new company in effect called Baker Hughes Co. And that was just a tremendous experience. That's just every corporate finance 101 thing that you do around setting up the capital structure, the dividend policy, the capital allocation policy, standing up an entirely new treasury function, the new technology stack. For me, it was like him, 20 years of experience and all the things that I'd done suddenly were coming to bear. It was brilliant.

It sounds like it was like that treasury handbook that you have with all the different pillars and all the different rights. So we're going to do the corporate finance buyback. We're going to do that. Okay. Did you sometimes maybe feel you're going through the content to go right? Yep, done that one.

Right next.

Sounds like you did everything well, it was interesting.

I'll never forget. You know, our CFO came to me and said, yeah, could you come up with a capital allocation policy? Could we discuss that tomorrow? I just had to think about it. Yeah. I mean, I've thought about this before. Let's just crank it out. But obviously doing it from scratch is interesting. Most people, when they come into companies are picking something up and then they're leveraging that and then they're evolving it. Well, this was just an opportunity to start from fresh and that was great.

If you've got that piece of blank paper in front of you because there will be other listeners that are similar situation. They come along and as you say, there's one bit of paper over there which got all the scribblings on how it was done and actually no, we're completely fresh and you're looking at this drawing your circle. Are you writing cash at the middle or where are your fundamentals? Again, for the listeners today, got to.

Start back with what's the equity story and what's the credit story of the company? And based on that, what is a capital allocation policy that aligns to that? What is going to be our return to shareholders? What are we, Are we a company that generates margins and cash? Are we a growth company and just going through all those basic corporate finance frameworks and then on the how are you going to do stuff as a consultant, they're obviously very familiar with the concept of operating models. The target operating model. Pull out the consulting handbook, right, that I've gone through many, many times and go, okay, well where is our operating and what is our target remote are going to look like? You know, what is our technology stack going to look like, what's our organization going to look like? What's our policies going to be? Well, there's going to be our risk management appetite and attitude to FX risk, to interest rate risk, to commodity price risk. Lay it all out. That was, I just absolutely noticed, you know, because I could just do the whole thing and I didn't have to enhance something that already existed. I just started it from scratch.

Alongside that we joked before the show, I was just saying to Steve that there's all these trophies in the cabinet, there's all these awards and is that you and the team, you brought on new members of the team and them saying, oh, we should go for this, or is that you pushing them or is it your partner saying, oh, you should put yourselves up for this? What's, what's the driver? There are some great recognitions, like rightly so, where does that come from? Why is it important?

I mean it's personally not important to me, I'll be honest. That's right. I thought it was a nice way of recognizing the team and obviously our various bank partners and system vendor partners. I mean when we work with FIS on putting in Quantum and Track and the like, they loved working with us. They loved the partnership. Think about how different it is to work with basically a pretty experienced consultant being the treasurer of a company. That's different. I understand what a vendor needs to do I understand how they go about it, I understand their business model, I understand their operating approach. So I could talk their talk and we could get to decisions and approaches fast and rapid. And so we did things that I'd never done as quickly as I've ever done. And it was just a wonderful case story for them. So they loved it.

Yeah.

Worked out really well and really enjoyed it and they wanted obviously to celebrate their success and so I was obviously very supportive. But for me personally, you've certainly been there, done that.

You already got.

Yeah, I mean, I did about external.

Recognition and going to be at various conferences coming up and you know, we're all getting back into the real world and actually seeing each other.

Yeah.

When you're on panels, when you're being invited, what are you interested in learning from other businesses and. Or what are you in interested in imparting to them, you know, through your story? Again, this is, this is part of that. You're going to be on a panel. I get invited on some of them and happy to talk about HR issues, which I think is one of the key things. But for you, what are you seeing as the bumps in the road come along? What are the things you think?

Right.

We should be talking about this, guys.

I'm very focused on the team and leadership and what is the leadership and how do you establish a high performance team. So I'm always interested in talking about.

That kind of stuff.

Yeah, I'll be honest, I'm much less interested in talking about technical stuff. I do enjoy economics, so, you know, I did a degree in economics, so I'm always interested in macroeconomic discussions, discussions around how you operate in different jurisdictions and things like that. If I really get back to what kind of gets me interested, I always love it when someone talks about leadership and experiences and behaviors and how people operate and how people thoughtfully build a team and maintain a team in terms of its performance. I find that stuff really interesting. So if anyone talks about those subjects, I'm always keen to hear them.

It's funny, I was invited by Euro Finance. We're both going to be at the conference in a week or so. But I went to, they did a session with a load of senior of Penny Hill park and they had all these tables and they were all going to go around and one, as you say, was the technology table and one was the straight through processing table. There were all these. And I looked at this massive big round table. I said, do you know what? You are afraid?

And they were like, what?

I said, no, no. If you put on there the sort of talent table and the leadership. And I said I would happily run that table. But I said the thing is, everyone else would get frustrated because everyone would be at my table because none of the things that you guys are talking about on any of those tables would actually happen without you guys in this room. And guys and girls, I'm using both, I'm the generic term. But I said, at the end of the day, you make it happen as people. And I think that's so underestimated. And I've grown this over 200 plus podcasts where I've talked to treasurers like yourself is so underestimated. The talent aspect, the leadership that without someone getting up and going into work and doing their job in treasury, there is no Treasury.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Oh, it's everything. My bugbear basically is when people set up a process and they operate it and they don't change it until there's a crisis, until something comes along and forces them to change because they're not intellectually curious, they're not self aware, they're not constantly challenging, why do I do what I do and how is that aligned to some business objective? And it's very easy in treasury. Sometimes I would say this is the biggest challenge with Treasury. It's kind of easy to get into that ivory tower and get pretty comfortable. That's my bugbear. And I really constantly look for people in a team that want to challenge stuff and go, well, why do I do that? Why am I doing it the way I'm doing it? How do I do that better? And am I even if I stop doing what I do, would anyone notice?

How often should people be reviewing that iteration? How often should people be questioning, is it daily, is it weekly, or because otherwise they've got a day job to do? How do you encourage that yourself?

You've got to distinguish between your leaders and your operators a little bit. Right? Clearly you've got to have some operators and you've got to have that balance in your team. You've got to have people that are execution orientated, good operators, people that are very happy to work within the box that's been defined. But you've got to have people that will define the box, the leaders as well. And then nirvana is if you get somebody who does, who's comfortable with both. There's a person that can define something, define a problem, define a process, but also is a really good operator and effective at execution. I mean, that's just gold dust. And so I look for Those kind of talents and the balance across the team. And as soon as that balance is out of whack, you've got to change it. And that means you've got to keep revisiting your team. And the team can't be static. You've got to export and you've got to import, you've got to turn over the team. You can't have the same people in the same role doing the same thing year after year. And I'm sure things have changed now because, listen, I'm out of data, right? But the one thing I noticed and observed when I was a consultant was that all the treasury teams were quite static. I know it's really hard sometimes to move people along, but sometimes you just got to. It's not necessarily a bad thing for them.

Well, I think also Covid, we were just starting to see that sort of turnover from a lot of teams and that's in a positive way. And actually Covid came along and then people were saying, oh, you know, how's the talent pool after Covid? But it's not necessarily the talent pool itself. It's more this log jam of getting back to this general flow where there should be turnover in teams. Sometimes it's right for someone to move on, sometimes it's right for them to move on anyway. They need it, whether they want it or not. They've got to go somewhere else. He's a great guy. I was just talking to you this morning. But he's been with the same company for 15 years. He's done three different jobs, which is great. But he was like, I know, I need to break out of it. And they've been taken over. Agree. And actually I think they'll be in the making of it. But he's kind of like, oh, okay. It's a little bit of a nervousness thing.

I use the phrase, it's probably not the nicest phrase, but you can get institutionalized and that is a problem. And so it can be extremely difficult. It's a bit like when I go back to that earlier especially, and I said, I realized that my career was stalling. That's really hard to do. That's so hard to actually stare at this face of the mirror and go, you know what, you need to change. You got to do something different here. And you can't just keep plodding along. That's hard.

We keep our shows about half an hour, 40 minutes. We're up there now and I know that we could make this a two hour one about leadership, but You've got a job to do. What I'm going to do. We'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. Stephen, it'd be great for you to have the people in your network of these takeaways from today. You've given some buried within the show there. But as we wrap up today's show, what advice would you give, maybe to the different levels of treasury, you know, junior guys who just senior, what are their tips and takeaways from a treasurer such as yourself?

First thing I would say is don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid to take some time out from pretty senior people and say, hey, can I have a coffee with you? Can I have a chat with you? So I know it's really hard, it's so easy to say, people will say yes. Try to find that time, have a chat, be very open and ask what you think might be dumb questions. You'd be amazed where that goes, right? So just, hey, cfo, can I have a chat with you? Can you tell me a little bit about really what you do and what your priorities are and what you really focus on? And how do you think we're doing? Speak to the Treasury? Do you think we're operating that well? How do you think others think about the treasury function? How do other stakeholders view us? Go ask other stakeholders. Are we doing a good job? Am I doing a good job? What could we do differently? And just being open intellectually, Curiosity, having the confidence to go and have conversations with people, taking time out of people schedule. I just think it's huge. I just think you'll learn a hell of a lot. And I know it's really uncomfortable as it is, you know, doing that cold call, if you can do it, it's great. The other thing is be opportunistic. If you have a conversation with somebody, you get some commercial person calling you up, asking for something, hey, is this an to ask a couple of questions? So try to be opportunistic so that you keep learning. So if you can keep learning, if you keep connecting dots, drive insights, share, be confident enough to share your opinion and view on things. I just think it just opens up a lot of doors because ultimately you're not going to get a role if nobody knows who you are. They've got to know who you are.

Amazing advice. I love that. I mean, I was scribbling notes here, opportunistic question time. And buy them a coffee. You know, say like, I'll buy the first coffee, Mr. CFO. And if anyone did that today. And if you're listening today and you get to the office and as you say, one of the business calls in, just ask them a question as well. Or say, actually, can I understand your business a bit better? If you only did that listeners today, then your mission's done and our missions here done on the treasury career corner as well. So, Mr. Grip, amazing to chat. Thank you. Great value to all the listeners today. I know they're going to love it. You're going to search in your LinkedIn and look forward to seeing you soon in real life as well.

Absolutely look forward to it. I'll see you in Vienna.

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