Treasury Round Tables: Real Conversations, Real Challenges, Now Expanded

He said, Mike, your Treasury Career Corner live events are great, but they're not that good. Hang on, Brian, you're meant to be my business coach. What are you saying? He said, they could be much better. I said, okay, why don't you do some round tables? Okay, get some treasurers in the room, get them talking to each other. I was like, okay, that's pretty good. Talk about their challenges. I got asked by actually someone And one of the associations said, what did the sponsors choose? I said, there were no sponsors. They said, what? I said, no, I just had, as it was, 24 treasurers sharing their challenges and they chose the topics and you guys will choose the topics. So we'll come back to that as well. You were learning from each other. You came in, what we did was we asked the group, said, come in with your biggest challenge. And actually the sessions we ran were about technology, unsurprisingly, we're at People, and they're about debt capital raising. So we went round the groups and each person said, this is my biggest challenge. And then the group decided, they voted for that person's biggest challenge. And they, as a group, they then answered it. So it wasn't, it was Chatham House rules. Everyone got in there and everyone said it was amazing value. We did it in London and then we repeated it in New York recently. We had 36 treasurers in the room and the feedback was incredible. Although one of the stories actually I keep regaling, telling people about was One of the treasurers said, how was it? He said, Mike, that was terrible. Okay. And he said at the same time, it was brilliant. Oh, why? He said, we were about to make a decision on a treasury system, but being in that room made me realize we need to go back a stage, not all the way back to the beginning, but we could have made a mistake or I could have made a mistake. What I need to do is reassess. I've met all these other treasurers. I'm going to talk to them a little bit more and actually find out exactly what we should be doing. And then we might still end up with the same system. But it might be different and you've helped me not make that mistake. So thank you very much. I was like, okay, well, pretty pleased with myself. So next stop, New York. We did it. 36 treasurers in the room around in the round tables. Then we had over 100 in the evening. Incredible energy, amazing conversations. And then that was the moment where I was looking there. I've been getting emails throughout the day saying, oh, sprained my toe, don't get my homework, can't be in the room. And I was like, for a moment I was like fixated on that empty chair. Then I looked at the 4, the 44, the 50, 100-odd chairs that were full, and people's beaming faces, and that everyone was happy. And I suddenly thought to myself, hang on, don't worry about that, think about these guys. And that's what stuck in my head. So then a couple days later, getting on the plane, heading home, I'm thinking right there, 30 treasurers in a room. 100 in the evening. What's better than 30? 60. What? So that's what we're doing. We're trying to scale this up and we're going to do it with your help and support. We do a great job and we do a great job of helping those experienced treasury professionals. I'm going to come back to that in a moment. But basically what I'm looking to do is I want to, and we're working with Herbert Smith, the law firm, and they're supporting us in this. And what we're doing is doing these amazing sessions. We've had the round tables before. So that happens. We did it 4 till 6 in London. This time we actually, and actually the other feedback was we want more time together. So we're just extending it a little bit. We did 3 till 6 PM, 3 round tables over the course of 3 hours in New York. And everyone came out. That was amazing. Thank you very much. I said, oh, okay, great. So we're going to do a similar thing in London and we're going to carry it on for New York as well. So that was fantastic.