Training Agile & Flexible Treasury Teams with Marc Vandiepenbeeck

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Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers, talk to them about how they got started in treasury, where they are now in their careers, and where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going next. In this week's show, I'm delighted to be joined by Mark Van Diepenbeck, Vice President and Assistant Treasurer at Johnson Controls. Johnson Controls International are a multinational conglomerate originally headquartered in the US but now they're headquartered over in Ireland. As a group they produce automotive parts such as batteries, electronics, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, equipment for buildings. Group is truly multinational, employing 120,000 plus serving a wide range of customers in over 150 companies. In 2016 the company merged, joining American company Johnson Controls as it were with Tyco International. Mark joined Johnson controls back in 2005. The company manages the group's capital markets, liquidity, asset management, wide range of capital markets operations and treasury operations. In his role, he supports the treasury centers in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, the lot. Basically. Prior to this role, Mark has worked within regional centers. We'll discuss this within Hong Kong, Brussels, and now over in Milwaukee. Mark, you originally from Belgium, you completed your degrees there, then led you in a sales role before moving into your finance management career. Can you perhaps talk us through the early part of your career and then we sort of go into Johnson Controls over to you?

Yeah, I started sales jobs in college actually, and I naturally continued after I graduated. That period of my career was really key. I learned so many skills during that time that I'm still employing today. Most people don't realize it, but sales is one of the most important skills you need to build up and it's also one that is harder to learn, at least harder than you might think. And we are constantly selling, right? Whether you're trying to present a new project to your boss, defending your budget for the year, making a presentation to a board or to your team, somewhere there's a message you're trying to push or sell. And having that skill has helped me my entire career. But I realized that sales wasn't going to be fulfilling long term for me. So I joined a medical startup company and I did all kind of work to help them get off the ground together with the founding team there. But at some point, the CEO of that company gave me great advice and told me, you know, if I wanted to broaden my horizon, I kind of needed to go work for either the big five at the time or one of the management consulting companies. And that's what led me to change career a little bit.

So you joined PwC, you know, what role, you know, within that role, what did it give you in terms of career development from a sales role to PwC and auditing. So a bit of a move, bit of a shift.

Yeah, Completely different environment. So from like startup world and sales to really like the structure of a large auditing consulting firm. What it gave me is really a breadth of experience that would have taken decades to accumulate otherwise. And it's as simple as that. When I joined PwC, I was lucky enough to work with a partner that allowed me to work for different kind of assignments from small local bank to large multinational bank. I also worked on real estate transactions, industrial companies, MA type of activity. And I also worked on treasury centers. When I saw something interesting there, it was a good combination of capital markets, corporate finance and then strategic role in M and A that I really enjoyed when I was at PwC. So that's where I started thinking about Treasury.

And then you heard how did you hear about Johnson Controls or you were in Belgium, did just hear about it locally or what happened?

Well, JCI was one of my customers, Jean Philippe, that you know well, the regional treasurer at the time and still the regional treasurer for us at jci was one of my client and. And GCI was going through a transformative acquisition, at least for Europe, and a massive amount of integration work was ahead of the company. And Jean Philippe kept on asking me whether I was willing to join and I felt like I had gone through everything I needed from a learning experience at PwC and took on the job.

And so you joined as treasury manager and you've been in the group ever since, actually moving through roles in Belgium, us, Hong Kong, and then background to the US as we go through Your career has grown, you know, for the past. Since 2005. You're looking at 14, 15 years. You know, how has your career grown with the focus on perhaps the international experiences, first of all, obviously in your home territory, but then to the US and then the Far east, perhaps talk us through how you've grown within your career.

So I started, as I said, like in the Europe, Middle east and Africa regional Treasury Center. Great experience. We worked on integrating that acquisition, and after that was complete, I was invited to join the team here in the US In Milwaukee. I was told at the time just a couple of years, but I ended up staying for six. I covered many different aspects of the treasury role from the U.S. treasury Management, corporate finance work, debt, capital market, investment management. All aspects really of a real global corporate treasury role. I was lucky enough to work during the financial crisis, which was very interesting to be working for a US at the time, mostly automotive company, exposed to a lot of volatility, a lot of stress, and I learned a ton, especially from a capital market standpoint. And we got to issue things like convertible notes that under normal circumstances, kind of an investment grade company of our type wouldn't be showing. And then at the end of 2011, the regional job for Asia Pacific opened up and I moved to Hong Kong and led that team for a few years. It was an extremely exciting time in Asia for gci as we were expanding massively with acquisition, joint venture, a lot of organic investments in China. The pace was backbreaking, but the work was also very rewarding, exciting. And I kind of missed that time actually in Asia.

And how was it different? So you'd made the. You were in Europe Treasury. A lot of our listeners are within Europe. Then the transition to the US and then the forest. How was it different? You say the pace was different from the sounds of it, or what were the other things that stood out to you at the time?

The difference between Europe and the Americas was not as big as what I would say, like the Western world, U.S. europe versus Asia. And when I say Asia, there's really many different business cultural differences. If you think China or Korea or Japan or Southeast Asia, a great example is particularly the Japanese culture. We worked on a large transaction with another Japanese multinational company, and my counterpart had a lot of things to work on with me and we had a lot to agree on. But clearly language was a barrier. So I started with phone call, but that led nowhere because of translation and talking over each other. So I ended up meeting a dozen of them with him, with translators in the room and we got a lot of work done and it worked, but it was all in person and it worked well. That process took years actually. And I got to know that gentleman very well. And one night after a long day of meeting, we're having dinner in Tokyo and I realized he speaks perfectly English. And I was taken a bit by surprise. We had known each other by then, probably two or three years. Thinking about him, talking to him about it, I understood where he was coming from. Like Japanese people are extremely proud and extremely respectful people. And he assumed that his level of English was not sufficient to conduct business with me. Like me, the French sounding, not native English speaker person. But anyway, now that we knew each other well, he was comfortable enough to talk with me without being concerned that it would somehow offend me. And that was a real interesting thing. But if you go through the rest of Asia, the cultural differences are my fake US versus Europe, you know, besides, you know, your traditional cultural differences. I think it's from a Treasury management standpoint, it's pretty similar and I don't think anybody would find a lot of differences there.

And in terms of management, you've obviously had teams working with you and under you and things, you know, is that different within the areas or not?

Not so much. But I think it's also how GCI is organized. We have regional treasury centers that generally cover like the full fledged services you would from a Treasury Department. And it's organized regionally. So each region really has all of the capabilities if you like. So moving from the European team to the US team, with the exception of the purely corporate aspects of it like share repurchase and larger capital market transaction and maybe the M and A aspects of it, but still you get some of that in the regions as well. The rest of the all of the treasury centers are very similar and we organized in a very centralized from a Treasury function standpoint, but decentralized from a regional treasury function standpoint, if you see what I mean.

And as I said, you've spent 14 years with one company. Often we've used the rule of thumb. The first year you're learning a role, the second year you're doing the role and improving things, iteration and everything else. The third year, you know, this is the second or third time you've done it. So you sort of start to tire of a role. Now you've made these moves internationally and move progression within the career, but still 14 years has made you stay. That's quite unusual. What's kept you, what's kept your interest?

Would you Say, well, first of all, JCI is a fantastic company. I was lucky enough to work on very different project and different parts of the world as you said. And that kept things very interesting at least for me. And 14 years seems like a long time. But for the, the rest of the treasury leadership team, they have at least that many years with the company. So it's not abnormal. And we have the ability to grow and build people in their role. To be honest, we've had a lot of big strategic changes at JCI over the past five or six years and that has also kept my job extremely interesting and kept me engaged and kept changing the actual underlying job itself.

And you say they obviously you divested with Adient, which is your automotive seating business. Then shortly after that did you know, did the Tyco acquisition and the merger, what difference as you say, you allude to it, but what it's made to you and to your position, is it a different scale of things or looks? You know, there was a lot of changes there but you know, how has it evolved and changed?

Well, you changed my position, but it also changed, I think the entire treasury team and the way we operate kind of first it created an ability for the whole team to become more nimble, more flexible, more agile I would say because changes was happening very fast and on a very large scale. We sold our facilities management business to cbre. That was a five to six billion dollars top line business. We sold our electronics business. We spun up, as you mentioned, our automotive seating business. We did very large joint ventures on the automotive interior side and as well on the H Vac side with Hitachi in Asia. So really large transforming stuff that culminated with the merger with Tyco. And then we've now announced the sale of our battery business to a private equity firm and that's expected to close within the next few months. And different divestiture, acquisition, merger really forced us to rethink the way we operate. Of course there was a tremendous amount of transition work required and to be honest, the team has become quite an expert in that domain, which is great. But in essence there was never a time when it was more important for us to be very close to the business to help them support their operation and go through that chain, but also sometimes have to explain why some of the changes are happening. Because when you sell a piece of the business, it sometimes from a Treasury management standpoint, impact other aspects of the business that remain with the company. And that's been quite a challenge for us to manage over the past few years.

You talk about Your team there, you currently manage a team within your area of 10 people. What are you like as a boss? What's your ethos?

My ethos, I like that in a nutshell, over communication. I've evolved over time like anybody, but the fact that I've managed so many different teams in so many different cultural background and shapes, and that has shaped, I would say, the way I operate. There are obviously certain things that you can't or shouldn't communicate about, but outside of these.

Over.

Communicate. Over. Communicate about expectation. Over. Communicate about your goals, about their goals. Over. Communicate about issues.

Over.

Communicate about successes. Over. Communicate. Over. Communicate. That's very rarely hurt me and I think it helps everybody in the team understanding where we're going, why we need to get there and what sort of effort that's going to take us there. And the challenge is that you also need to leave room for people to fail and learn and grow from those failures. So it's a bit of a balancing act. But if there was one ethos is over communication.

And with those guys coming into treasury, maybe you got different levels within the treasury team. Quite flat structure.

No, we have a traditional hierarchical structure where we allow people to really grow through the treasury career. So it started at the analyst level, senior analysts, we have managers, then directors, generally regional people, and then the regional treasurer and then assistant treasurer, treasurer type of organization. So kind of a. I wouldn't call it like a pyramid because, you know, treasury team are always rather small. But there's kind of a good delineation between the different role and there's always a way for the team to look up and know that there's a. At least understand that there's a career path ahead of them.

So when you are recruiting those people within whatever levels, you know, obviously as they get more senior, you might be looking more specifically for certain skill sets. We've spoken about this, you and I, in the past and, you know, certainly when we've been recruited for you guys in Europe in particular, as well as what is the us, but what makes a candidate stand out to you from the others? You've got a series of guys you're interviewing. There's one person sitting there, that's the person. What are you looking for? Is it personality, is it qualification, is it a combination of both? Or what's the big standout factor for you? As in Mark going, right, yeah, that's someone I want on my team.

For me personally, I want somebody that's hungry, that wants to learn. You could be super quiet, qualified, but tired of what you're doing or not have the energy that's required to do the job. And just like any Treasury Department, we have had a small team for the amount of work that needs to be done. And so you need very good performers, people that are really excited about the job because there's going to be a lot of work ahead of you and it gets tiring. And if you don't have that excitement and if you don't have that. That hunger in you, at the end of the day, you're gonna grow tired of it and we either gonna lose you or your performance is gonna become a challenge. And nobody wants to lead down that path.

Yeah. And when you're looking, you know, more at the physical qualification, are you looking for things like a good MBA from a good school or afp, the treasury qualification in the US or any of the above, or there any other things that you think actually that's. That ticks the boxes for us?

Well, it depends on the level. If you're looking for somebody with some experience, obviously you're just judging on their background and where you went to school 15, 25 years ago. Not that it doesn't matter, but it has much less importance. The younger team, clearly looking at generally the right school. If you have a Treasury certification, that tells me one thing, not so much that you know more or less the treasury role and what it entails that you've decided to make Treasury a career. You see what I mean? You've made a commitment. It takes time to go through that process and effort. And if you've gone through that, that means you probably have decided treasury is the kind of thing I want to do. You meet a lot of people in the treasury world that have not yet decided whether that's for them or not. And some of them end up staying in treasury because of just not willing to be moving out of it. And some stay in treasury because that's what they want to. Treasury certification kind of shows that you really want to do it. Outside of that, I think if you're a good manager, you can provide sufficient training for all your team to know 99% of what a certification can tell you. So I'm not saying it's a must, but it's a good indication.

Do you ever struggle to sort of attract or recruit staff yourselves? If so, where do you struggle? Is it people that are coming in perhaps with a more open mind, or that aren't quite right for yourselves or wherever you. Where's it gone wrong, if you like, or is it a flip side I.

Think it's different when you look at the different region we're in. Right. And I had the chance to work in one of them. So if you think about Asia, our biggest challenge was not recruiting people, but retaining them. We are very large in Asia, we are in every country. So it's a great experience for people that want to work in treasury to come and work with us, learn how a Treasury team operates and then what often happens is after two to five years they can take that experience and go in either a local company or a different team and move up from there. Chasing that kind of trend is very difficult and it creates a bit of an attrition challenge, particularly in Asia when the market's good. Obviously when the market softens a little bit, you see that less. But people see working at JCI or any other large global multinational treasury center in Shanghai or, or Singapore, Hong Kong as a great learning experience. And it is in Europe and us. It's kind of the same issue. It's finding the people with the right profile and that right appetite I was talking about. And I think that's the challenge we've had as a company. We've gone through a massive amount of change over the last five to six years with all the disposition, acquisition and separation we talked about and, and that level of change scared some people, let's be honest, and created a bit of a challenge. I think we're more, we're looking forward, we're going to be more stable and there's going to be less dramatic change I would call it within the organization. But that was part a bit of.

The challenge we've had and looking towards that future as things develop following these change at Johnson Controls, where do you see the future developments for the group? What are the, you know, combining that, you know, if it's appropriate with the, you know, when I spoke to Jean Philippe, one of the key things he always talks about is systems. You know, that's a key thing and you know, you guys doing more of the strategic work and you know, the day to day processing, you can systematize a lot of that. Is that a key thing you're seeing or are there other areas you think that are coming as future challenges potentially for the group or for treasury on as a whole? You know, perhaps when those are two separate areas.

No systems clearly has helped us tremendously operate through those changes without inflating the size of the treasury team too much. So it's really been a process, streamlining and improvement kind of tool and then it allows us to Operate pretty stable, even though we had quite a bit of attrition, at least on the junior level side of things. And if you roll back the clock, six years ago, we were truly diversified industrial companies, as you mentioned, with independent business and automot electronics facilities management and our building technologies businesses. We now have refocused the operation to become a pure building player. But that means we also need to simplify a bit our organization. But we need to try and do that without losing that agility I was talking about that we've built up over the past five years. I think that's really going to be the challenge over the next 12 to 18 months, is that as we consolidate and streamline up the organization, being able to maintain that agility that we've, that we've managed to acquire through those transformations.

And retaining those people you want and you know, they can see that career success going forward sort of thing.

That's right. That's right.

So looking at your career so far, you had some great experiences all the way through. You did your sales role into jobs and controls and everything else. How would you say, you know, if someone's looking and they said, look at your LinkedIn profile and we said to, to people at the end that they can perhaps connect to you via LinkedIn, you're happy to do that. But then when they read through your, which I would say is very good LinkedIn profile for anyone looking out there, look at marks and then try and copy it with not all the same words. But you know, there's a lot of good stuff in there explaining what he does and how he's progressed. But you know, if someone wants to have a career that matches yourself, what advice do you give either to your team or someone externally? And saying, this is what you need to think about two things.

When you're giving opportunities that you feel are going to be a stretch or a challenge, say yes, it's a learning experience and if you fail in working in the right organization, people will understand and help you grow from it. And if you are feeling that you're not given the opportunities, just ask people get busy and are focused on a lot of things and sometimes forget to think about your career development or don't realize you've run out of things to do. Just sit with your manager, with the leader of your team and tell them, this is great. I like what I do, but I want to do something different next time, something open. Think about me. These are the type of things I want to do. Be open. And that allowed me to learn a lot you're going to have to be flexible by doing things you may might not be thinking you'd ever do, but you will grow a lot from it. And I don't think you'll ever regret taking on a new opportunity. I think you'll very often regret not taking a chance, at least if you roll back the clock a few minutes in the future.

I thought that was great. I'd just like to thank Mark today. If you guys, as I say, want to connect with him, feel free to reach out. We'll put his LinkedIn profile in the the in the show notes for me today. Mark, thank you very much for a really great description. I think, as you say, being open. Everyone that's just listen to the interview and see what you think of Mark's career and see if you can match it.

Thanks, Mike, and thanks for your kind words.

Many thanks.