Treasury Strategies in the Consultancy Market with Tony Carfang

Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Every week I talk to treasurers about how they built their careers, where they are now, and they see where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next this week's show. Delighted to be joined by a good friend of mine, Tony Carl Fang, the managing director of the Carfang Group. Now, Tony's got a distinguished background in consulting, writing, speaking, and for many years actually led and founded the Treasury Strategies consultancy. Now, as I say on the podcast a number of weeks, I'm not going to get into too much of that detail. Let Tony do the talking, as it were, and actually just delighted. Tony's in one of my favorite places in the world, in Naples in Florida. We're doing it on video, but we'll just give you guys the benefit of the audio because I've got a face for radio. I can't speak for Tony. Tony, take us back to the beginning as we just talked about before the show. You originally started, well studied it or say about you did your degree, then you went to Northwestern for a period and then actually went into banking. So give us a kickoff from the start. We'll talk about how you did many years within consulting and how that transitioned sort of thing so over to you.

Okay, well, thanks, Mike. Delighted to be here. In the beginning, I did my bachelor's degree in finance at Duquesne University. I'd always been interested in business and the stock market, corporate finance at the time. And after my bachelor's degree, I went out and earned my MBA at Northwestern University, where I actually did a significant amount of research in options pricing theory, which is fascinating because it brings you into the securities markets, into finance and into an emerging area of finance at that time. I actually did my master's thesis before the Chicago Options Exchange first started trading options. So we were real pioneers there. That got me even more jazzed about finance. From Northwestern, I started out as an analyst at the First national bank of Chicago. I worked in systems and I was working on programs to do things like figuring out how much float to charge to a customer's account or how much hold time delay to put on the clearing of a wire transfer or whatever. We were doing a lot of quantitative analysis that to basically figure out things like float and collected balances and things of that nature. And that took me directly into the bank's cash management department. This was the very early days of cash management. This is where a treasurer would make a wire transfer and hope that within A few days it got to where it was going. Literally. This is before balance reporting, as a matter of fact. I remember participating in debates about whether or not as a bank, we should tell our clients what their balances are, because if they knew, they might take them somewhere else. And we literally debated for a couple of years about whether or not to report balances to our customers in between their monthly statements because it wasn't reconciled.

Accurately or you were concerned about it, or what was the reason?

Well, there was a lot of float, a lot of time delay. And so if we showed a customer's balance of X and they had a balance of. Of Y, and there was a huge gap, you're spending all day doing customer service to explain that. Well, the wire transfer from XYZ company didn't come in yet, and your check over there cleared. And obviously things have progressed. Yeah, lightning speed, orders of magnitude. Beyond that, we put together a consulting group at First Chicago, and it was one of the first of its kind where we're helping our corporate customers figure out how to use our operating services. Things like lockboxes, things like advanced check clearing or control disbursement services, things like automated account reconciliation services. We were helping our clients basically put in place their first treasury management system. We were doing it based on First Chicago's products and services. Now, my clientele was the large corporate multinational marketplace and became very clear that our clients had issues at all of their banks, not just First Chicago. And there's no way that a global multinational was going to put 100% of their business in First Chicago. So we saw a big gap in the marketplace and in January of 1982, formed Treasury Strategies. We left First Chicago. We knew that if we knew, based on the work that we were doing in First Chicago, that clients, General Motors, Diageo, whomever had issues at a number of banks. And we could, we, we could help them at all of their banks and not just for Chicago.

When you say we, you know, you, you, you had this consulting team or group. How many of you were there? Was it you and a couple of other people, or was it a team or, you know, how many of you first started up?

Well, we actually had about 30 people in our consulting group with First Chicago, which, you know, back in the 1970s, early 80s, that's a huge group. Myself and Kathy Gregg left to form Treasury Strategies. It was just the two of us. And I remember this clearly. You're taking a big risk. In fact, to this day, my father still believes I was fired from Perth Chicago because nobody Leaves a job as good as the job I had. I was 29 years old. I was a vice president. Life was good. Way beyond anything I expected to be by the time I was 30. And you just don't leave a job like that. So we had a list of 14 companies that. 14 large multinationals that we knew from our work at first Chicago had issues that they needed help with at other banks. So we went out on our very first day, we got on a plane, we went to New York City, and we went to the pay phones used to put dimes in at the time to make calls. We started calling 14 treasurers at these 14 companies. And we came back with our first two clients, Merrill lynch and Combustion Engineering, on our very first business trip.

When you say you came back to, was it just an office, the two of you, and you'd started out in Chicago and all was being based in Chicago or.

Yeah, so. So we were based in Chicago. We specifically wanted to have an office rather than working out of our homes. We thought the discipline of getting on the train in the morning, going down to the office, you know, at that time, putting on a necktie, which. Which I haven't put on in months, but. Except I was going to say making.

Kathy wear a necktie, that's. That's a bit rude.

Well, back then, women wore bow ties. Yeah. Oh, jokers.

That was the gnome.

That was banker attire there. Absolutely. And we started out, we shared a desk on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays of even numbered weeks. She got to sit in the desk chair and I sat on the side chair. And on alternate days, I had the desk and she had the side chair. Fortunately, very long business grew.

You were able to buy a second desk.

Yes, and a more comfortable chair and a second telephone. And it's kind of. The rest is history.

Well, you say it's history. So you started off, the two of you. When did it start to, you know, you both chosen to be in Treasury Consulting? Why was that a passion for both of you? Why not, as you say, listen to your dad's advice, stay. We were. Solid job. Oh, I know. Let's take a risk. Let's just go alone and just choose the life of an entrepreneur. And, you know, certainly, okay, you had some good clients, were lucky to get them. But why did you feel that was your drive and passion?

Personally, I'm a risk taker and I have ambition and I have a view of myself that says I can do it or I can figure out how to do it. It's a combination of grit and Self confidence and whatever. And I had just been promoted to vice president at First Chicago. I was 29 years old, and I was one of the youngest vice presidents at the time. Mike, they're paying me a lot of money.

None of this is saying to me, none of this is saying to me, I know, let's go off. I'm being paid really well.

Yeah, Well, I said to myself, I am going to move into a lifestyle that will not allow me to ever leave and take risk. I said, if I don't leave now, I'm going to be so darn comfortable in this job that I will never leave. You know, because, you know, I bought a bigger car, I'd have joined the country club, I'd have done that. And I have an expense structure that would make it impossible to leave, say, five years later.

And you, but you had a passion, you know, when you say, right, let's do a consulting career, do you think, actually, I want to grow a big consulting firm? Or what was your driver behind it? Was it to help your clients and then see where it went from there? Or what were your. What did the business plan look like for you and Cathy, as it were?

So back at First Chicago, our clients really respected the work that we were doing. This is the First national bank of Chicago. And our competitors were things like Chase Manhattan Bank, First National Citibank of New York, which is now Citibank, JP Morgan, Chemical bank, the bank of America. And we were holding our own. As a matter of fact, we were doing more than holding our own. We were doing a lot of public speaking and writing and getting great feedback on that. And it just looked like the success factors were falling into place. And we said, we can do this and let's see how far we can take it. We saw business, the treasury business at that time, the banking business was very opaque. No one knew what the fees were because you could take lifting fees or you could delay a transaction and get interest income on that. So you had all of that stuff going on. And at the same time, you had the secular rise in interest rates where the prime rate in the United States got into the mid teens. I remember being in the office of the treasurer of Merrill lynch on the day that the Fed Funds rate was higher than the New York State usury ceiling, which meant that institutional investors could arbitrage Merrill until the Fed said, enough.

You can't do it.

It's fascinating. And so the value. There's a strong value proposition there. We can help a corporate treasurer accelerate cash flow by three days on $100 million in a 15% interest rate market. We can make a darn good living that way.

And then as you grew the firm, or as I say, going back to that business plan, you wanted to take it as far as you could take it, what were the steps you were going to take? Because there might be people listening. And as I said to you before the show, that a number of our listeners are treasury analysts, managers, some of them thinking about maybe do some stuff in consulting. A lot of them then go consulting and then jump back into a corporate treasury career. But it obviously the bug bit with you and you were 34 years in there. But you know, talk me through how you then grew. What was it the fascination for you?

Okay, so I think one of the most important things we did from day one was we didn't want to waste time and energy questioning our decision to start Treasury Strategies. We made a pact with each other that said that on such and such a date, nine months into the future, if our revenues aren't X and if our margin isn't Y, we're simply going to stop on that day and shut it up. And if they were, we were going to go forward, but in the meantime, we weren't going to revisit that decision at all. Because you can spend nine months second guessing and whatever and burning a lot of energy or you can get to the nine month mark and not be at that goal and say, oh, but the next client is right around the corner. And then for the next 30 years, the next client is right around the.

Corner just chasing your tail.

That's not a pretty picture. So we set that goal. We easily blew by that. So at that point we started hiring people and expanding the firm. Our original purpose in starting Treasury Strategies was to serve corporate treasurers. We were involved directly. We were at the table as corporate treasurers are dealing with their banks. One thing that happened that was not part of our business plan was bankers started contacting us, saying, you seem to understand what our clients need. Can you consult to us to help us understand? As it turned out, that ultimately became 60% of our practice.

Was that educating the banks about what corporate treasurers needed or was that more giving them product advice, saying, actually your product needs to look like this. This is what the clients are wanting to buy. What was the ethos there?

Well, it gets back to helping the bank understand the voice of the customer. Banks get information about the marketplace through filters. A calling officer is calling on a corporate treasurer, gets information and brings it back. That information, by definition then is secondhand by the time it starts to get processed. And you combine that with other secondhand information and the senior executives sometimes weren't getting a clear picture of what was going on in the client's office. We would see corporate treasurers moving a piece of business from Bank A to Bank B. For example, Bank A loses the business. The treasurer gives the account officer an explanation on why bank A lost the business, and the account officer takes it back, and Bank A builds that into planning. Well, what the corporate treasurer told account officer at Bank a was like 90% of why they lost the business, but not 100%. And what the officer at Bank A told his or her manager at Bank a was about 90% of what they heard. And the information at the most senior levels of the bank was either incomplete or jaded in some way. And we were able to help the senior executives bridge that gap.

And working in consulting, obviously, naturally, very competitive field, you know, coming up through this and, you know, for those guys listening, you did it for 34 years, so you're all the way through when you continue, you know, talking and stuff and, you know, speaking of various things and consulting. But we'll come back to that. But you're in a competitive landscape. You're looking at you and you know, say the big four consultancies at the time, it was actually the big six, and, and then smaller and smaller. But how. Why would bother? Why choose Treasury Strategies, this niche little consultancy, niche recruiter like us?

Well, it's a very specific decision on our part. We got the positioning right from day one. We were subject matter expertise. We knew the subject matter inside out. Yes, PwC can run circles around us on subject matter, but that's embodied in hundreds of different people around the world. And what is the Probability of you, Mr. Treasurer, getting the right person assigned to your project? Zero.

That was it. And you just sold on that. And things as you grew the firm, you were just saying, we're the treasury people to go to.

Exactly. Actually our tagline was get it right the first time.

And where did you focus? Where was the main focus of the business? You know, predominantly in and around Chicago, New York, or did he cover the US or. Because then you. A later stage, and we'll come to this, you then bought by Novantis or we talk about that. But as you grew the firm, you know, where did you grow it?

Well, it's interesting because, you know, you start out and you're a small firm, so everybody thinks you're doing business with small companies, you know, down the street we were in business for seven years before we did our first project within the city of Chicago.

Oh, wow. So where was all the business coming from then?

Well, New York, Boston, Philadelphia.

Just got on a plane and did it.

It was the biggest multinationals or the mutual funds and the financial institutions there, and then London.

And you just. As long as it was a Treasury project, you go there from Chicago to wherever it was, it was.

They talk about a prophet never gets respect in his homeland. Well, people in Chicago who knew us from First Chicago said, oh, I remember you. You were the guy that came along with the vice president when he was making the. And didn't see us in the same context or the same light as somebody who didn't know us. We did much more business with people who did not know us from our days at First Chicago, except by representation.

They were fresh to you and they looked to your niche and they loved it. Yeah.

Yes.

And you grew. And so how did you see it changing over time? You know, what was the evolution of the firm? And you started. It was two of you by the time. And when did Novantis buy you guys? Was that in 2016, 2016. So in that period from when it was just you and Cathy to 2016, how did you see the firm evolve and how did you see perhaps the treasury market evolve as well?

Obviously a lot of changes over that period. Let's start with the second part of that first. The treasury market. When we started, and this predates you, Mike, just a corporate treasurer was in a career terminal position. People didn't get promoted into anything else. You were appointed treasurer kind of as a reward for being a loyal employee for 30 years. So you had all the institutional history of the firm. Therefore you can go out and have dinners with your bankers and do all the relationship kinds of things, and that's your reward until the day you retire. The treasurer wasn't somebody who necessarily came up through finance. No one else in that treasurer's department could see any light at the end of the tunnel for promotion until the treasurer retired. There's a way of doing business there. And it was fine at that point because the business was so opaque anyway. You wouldn't be analyzing bank service charges. You'd never take on a project like that because the bank service charges were never disclosed. You wouldn't be managing daily liquidity and doing your one, three and five day cash forecast because you wouldn't know for five days what your balances were five days ago. For treasury strategies coming in with some subject matter and some analytics, it was like a knife through soft butter. We were bringing an awful lot of subject matter and analytics into a situation that was really fertile. So as banking services evolved and transparency around those services happened, the need for the analytics increased. So there was a lot more that we could apply our analytics on and we could help a corporate treasurer in many more ways. Through cash forecasting or cash transfer timing or lockbox location analysis, we were able to add staff to do those kinds of things. But then we got to a point where the treasury really transformed and became a profession and became deeply analytical. The treasurer was no longer a terminal position. The treasurer was somebody who wanted to be CFO or wanted to be CEO at some time. So it was a very different kind of thing. So if you can imagine consulting to a treasurer who is coasting into retirement and then the change over say 15 years to a treasurer who wants to be three years and then get on to the next higher job, so you had three years to perform and turn the ship around. There was a lot more need for our services to help somebody, brand new treasurer hit the ground running, zoom through what they wanted to do and then move on.

And when you talk about that opacity, that opaqueness, and I totally understand that actually when I first started in my career in treasury recruiting end of the 90s and moved into, well, the dot com and everything else, boom and bust with that opacity, as it were, of hateness, when did you start to see that change? When did that start? You know, obviously there was an evolution of technology around that, but when did you see that really come into effect, would you say?

You know, I think around in the late 80s or early 90s, there seemed to be more transparency about, about service charges, for example. There was much more disclosure about rates and the basis for the application of those rates, much more visibility of balances. But even up through the financial crisis in 2008, a corporate treasurer would feel that he or she was doing a good job if they Knew what say 80% of companies global balances were on a next day basis. Well, in the last 10 years you now want 99% on the same day basis.

You're just there and it's moved through and driving that change as well. One of the things I noticed that when I first started treasury was more siloed and it certainly was a specialist area. And now I think it's very much more outward focused. I think certainly when I got into it, treasury recruiting, a lot of the treasurers at the time use that specialism as a reason to get A pay rise, which is great. So they got paid for their specialist knowledge and brilliant and wow. But at the same time, I think it became a double issue because then they became slightly isolated from the business or standalone. And then ever since I've been doing it, I've seen everyone getting, you know, it's taken 20 years for them to get back close to the business. Really. Have you seen a similar thing or would you say?

So about 15 years ago, we did an engagement for a significant global multinational whose business line took them everywhere from global business to global business, all the way down to retail outlets to consumers, and basically every payment type in between. They put the question to us. And this was actually originated in the company's marketing department, not Treasury. And the treasurer found out about it later. They were actually about to award the contract to some marketing firm and the treasurer, like at the 11th hour, said, you need a proposal from Treasury Strategies. We went in, dazzled the heck out of them. But the assignment was, how can we use payments and the way we conduct payments to build customer affinity? And the web was just evolving then, and electronic payments and recurring payments and giving the customer a lot more control, or if you can, organize the timing of shipments with the timing of payments and the customer can see it on their screen. And that was a real manifestation to us that there was a lot more than just finance. The Treasury.

The treasure can become a bit of the star of the show rather than just waiting in the wings all the time. It's not the dress rehearsal, it's the real thing.

Right. And I think around that time, in general, treasury went from being reactive to.

Proactive over the past 10 years. Is it technology that you've seen as the biggest driver of change within Treasury? I sometimes talk. People spoke last week, a couple of weeks ago in the Windy City Summit, and people say, treasury technology, is it going to replace people? And that's you. One of the key things, the key findings we found through the podcast is treasury technology replaces process, not people. And it frees up people to do more interesting jobs and actually leverage the technology. So actually, it means you don't have to just stand there turning the handle. It does it itself, and you get onto the interesting stuff. Is that the thing that you've noticed through your consulting career? Certainly in the past 2015, 10 years as we come up to date? So I think.

Let me say, yes.

Okay, go for it.

So, yes. So actually going back 20 or 25 years, technology really began to impact the business, and it impacts at an accelerating rate and at a Operates on more dimensions now. So technology to allow you to manipulate your balances and meet your short term liquidity then evolves into technology that will also help you manage your risk. That transforms into technology that will also inform marketing decisions or credit decisions. The technology not only lets you do the traditional things better or more efficiently, but it lets you do more things. The other big impact, though, in addition to technology, is regulation, financial regulation of all types, because it really has changed the dynamics between a financial institution and the corporate customer worldwide. The regulatory environment has become some people would call burdensome, I call it very intrusive. And a financial institution is no longer permitted to make a mistake. And in many jurisdictions around the world, the financial institutions have been deputized by their central governments to identify rather wrongdoing way beyond their charter. Okay, so a bank now must be very cautious about with whom it does business and the kinds of business it does. And even a well established client can't pick up the phone anymore and just presume that the next bump in the line of credit is going to happen automatically, which for 100 years was the case now. What do you mean I have to go to committee? Gee, did you see my balances here? Do you see my service charges? I got to go to committee. So I think that has put a real burden on treasurers to make sure that everything is buttoned up at every point in time. And you can't just assume that you're a phone call or a mouse click away from opening a new account in a new jurisdiction or augmenting a lot of credit.

Okay, so you, you ran treasury strategies for 34 and a half years as an independent group and everything else, and then come 2016, you then were joined or became part of Novantis. How, what, what prompted the takeover or what's the situation or how did, what happened from there?

We were really good at what we did and we grew. And we had about 50 some people in the firm. And Joe, it oscillate back and forth a little bit. The market was growing faster than we were able to grow. Treasury strategies have been 100% self funded for our entire existence, which I think was a good decision, but limits the speed of which we can grow. And when two or three or four of our clients merge into one institution and are now flowing four times bigger and they need a project that requires 50 consultants on the ground in 50 different cities worldwide to do something. Well, we couldn't do that. What we did, we did exceptionally well. But the mandates were becoming sort of broader in scope. And it was broadening faster than we.

Could, hitting not glass ceiling, but hitting a ceiling in terms of, as you say, that service and delivery. So then what? Novantis came along and offered a solution for that. Is that the right way?

Actually, over the course of the last 10 years, frankly, somebody's been knocking on our door every quarter, some specialty. We had both a banking practice and a corporate practice. Banking practice was about 60% corporate practice, 40% and one of the big six or one of the big five or big four, depending on which week it was. What you're talking about is like interested in this practice but not that practice, or these people, but not those people. We'll take everybody and we'll buy the whole firm. But we're really interested. And you know, it's kind of interesting. Somebody wants to pay you a lot of money for something you built. Life is good. But we really wanted to keep as much intact as we could. And with Novantis, Navantis has major banking practice. And our banking practice brought in the corporate side of the bank where our reputation was just unparalleled. So that was a nice fit there. And then our corporate consulting practice that Navantis clearly understood provided credibility to the commercial banking practice at Treasury Strategies. We always said we have a 360 degree view of the treasury business, the providers, the consumers and the technology that makes it all happen. And Navantis understood that 360 degree view. Now, Navantis was about two and a half times our size. So it was something where don't get swallowed up like you might if you went to an Eye or Capgemini or somebody. So you have. We could maintain the things that made us what we were and then take advantage of the additional resources of the Vantas. So it made a lot of sense, made a lot of sense for everybody.

And then you did what, another two years there and then finished or how did it work?

I remained for two and a half years and during that time we did a couple things. We had to make sure the integration went smoothly. Then we also tried to take some of the subject matter that was kind of in our heads and turn it into technology that could be replicated in mass by others. So things like our account analysis software, standardization, some of our cash forecasting methodologies and templates. We tried to apply some really super technology. Navantis was just incredible at that to take subject matter and turn it into software and services.

So Tony, you exited stage left from what was Treasury Strategies. Now Navantis, time to move on. You then founded The Carfang Group tell us about that next stage in the journey, as it were.

Sure, Mike. So one of the things that we had been doing that, that didn't lend itself to systematizing or applying high doses of technology to and develop service and solutions were things like the regulatory advisory work that we were doing for our clients, the strategy work, the real advisory and insights that we had from consulting to the heads of transaction banking at the major global banks, the treasurers of major global corporations. A lot of that is in your head. And so with the Carfan Group, we want to continue to do our advisory, our senior level strategy work helping banks and corporations understand the future. So I incorporated the Carfan Group and took three months off to walk along the beach and think about the future of treasury and finance. And I actually authored a white paper, Megatrends in Treasury Money and banking that identified 11 key trends that we think are going to completely remake the financial services marketplace. That's the result of hundreds of engagements, several hundred conversations with some of the senior people who are shaping these trends and an ability to, with our 360 degree view that I mentioned, really connect the dots in ways that other people might not see who are in the business day to day. And so treasury strategy will be consulting and advocating around some of those trends.

And with that white. Is that a public white paper that people can see and things if they were interested in it?

Yes, it's on our website thecarfanggroup.com we have a section called Insights. There you can find our article Megatrends in Treasury, Money and Banking. I think if you just go into Google and Google Carfang and Megatrends, I hope it goes.

Don't worry what we'll do for listeners as well, we'll put it in the show notes with the show as well so people can look at that. So just going back to this, so you've, you know, over 35 years in consulting. So it was something that you, you chose or it chose you, as it were. Someone's listening today. I remember speaking to one of my clients, Chris Fulton, and he spent a period of time actually working with, I think it was ey. And he said quite early on his career went into consulting. He said, well where else would you. And that's one of our earlier podcasts. We'll put a link to that. And one of the key things he loved about it was the fact that he was relatively early in his career and suddenly he'd be thrown into a meeting with the CEO CFO of a global Group, and they said, right, tell us the answer. And he was like, I don't know, I've just got here, found out the answers and he got this amazing FaceTime and he gave him this amazing sort of exposure now. But you yourself, you ran a firm that did consulting, but why would someone, if they're listening today and they're thinking, actually, yeah, I might do consulting, what did it give you and what do you think it might give them? What's the sort of, what's the thing that grips people? Or you would say, well, the thing.

I find most exciting about consulting is every problem is a little bit different. Every company circumstances, every bank circumstances a little bit different. So you're never doing the. The exact same thing twice. There's always a new challenge, a different angle that needs to be solved. So every day you're at the cutting edge of something. I'm excited about getting up in the morning and thinking about, well, what's Brexit going to do to the relationship between the euro and the yen? And somebody's got to figure that out. And if it's us, do a lot of content.

You get paper as well, you get paid to problem solve and actually have fun whilst doing it. And as we, you know, we're approaching the end of today's show and I know that, as I say, if you want to connect with Tony, we'll put it on in the show notes his LinkedIn profile, so, you know, people can connect with you and maybe engage with you as well. Who knows? Well, there you go, exactly. Just like this. And I'm sure, sure, you know, Tony's always open and been very kind with his time to me over the years and things like that. So. But as you look through someone looks through your profile, LinkedIn, which is very, you know, impressive, and you've got lots of things where you've talked to committees, you've been on TV shows and people really picking you up your expertise, but someone actually looks at that and goes, do you know what? I'd love to have a career like Tony did. And as he grew a firm and everything else, what's the one piece of advice, and this is a sort of closing question, what's one piece of advice you give to the listeners today? I say you've got people at early stages, mid late stages, their career, some are even treasurers and maybe still have a one or two new roles. And you think, actually, maybe I'll do that. What would you tell them? What's the one piece of advice you.

Give them back when I was in school. They talk about the phrase, it's not what you know, but who you know. No, it's not both. It's not what you know or who you know, it's both. You have to devour knowledge and understand it. Not just take it in, but understand it. Every news item of every day. How does this impact my world? How does this impact who wins, who loses? You know, there's a paper in the US called the American Banker, and it's a fairly light reader. It's about a 15 page, but it came every day and every morning I would read it front to back. But before I read it, I put, let's say JP Morgan was a client of mine. I would think about JP Morgan and all the issues that my clients there at JP Morgan do. And I would page through the American Banker with my JP Morgan hat. Then I turn it over and put myself in a PMC mind frame and I paged through the entire American and I could tell my clients before they got into the office what had happened that's going to impact them. And many times I'd shoot out an email and an hour later I'd get back from like the executive office. Tony, thanks so much for your email. Five minutes later, the CEO called and asked me how this is going to impact us. And Mike, it happened over and up. Thinking in other people's shoes gives you some of the what you know at a really substantive level. And then in terms of the who you know, network, I mean, and you know, Treasury Strategies. And at Navantis, I spent a lot of time trying to teach people how to network and the importance of networking because you want to be one phone call or one email away from getting to the right answer on anything. You want your name to come up in a conversation. When two strangers are meeting and talking and your name comes up, the other person. Oh, yeah, I know Treasury Strategies or I know Tony or whatever. That's really important. I'm amazed at the number of people that only have one or 200 LinkedIn connections. For example, LinkedIn caps you at 30,000 connections. So every couple of months I have to go through and delete about 1,000 contacts to make room for fresh, newer contacts that are coming in. I find that really important. And I'll post something on my LinkedIn status or if I have a question or client has a question, I post it on my LinkedIn status and I can get a hundred responses inside of a couple hours. That really has me bringing value to my clients that wouldn't have been possible without my number.

I think that's essential, actually. One of the things I've always noticed you've done extremely effectively is, as you say, the summary I would give to perhaps the listeners is be that first person that people think of when they need that advice, when they help, and that they know that you're the trusted advisor to turn to. You're the person that they go, actually, well, Tony will know the answer or be able to give me advice. And that wins you the work as much as anything.

Oh, exactly. In fact, I can't tell you how many times I would get a call from somebody I didn't know who said we were a meeting and our executive vice president said, call Tony or call Treasury Strategies to see if they have any thoughts on this, to just be in that position.

Wow. Amazing. As always, great words from Tony. I say we'll put in all the show notes, all the connections to Tony, his LinkedIn profile, the link to megatrends. Also, he's a voracious LinkedIn group manager. And then you've got some great groups in there which. Okay, you know, hopefully I don't get cold. Bring me a thousand contacts or the 30,000amonth. I'll stay in a good group. But as I say, it's a great way to consume a lot of the great knowledge that Tony imparts to all you guys out there. And all that remains for me to say today is, Tony, thank you for your time. Continue to enjoy Naples, you lucky man out there. One of my favorite places to say and thanks very much for your time today.

Well, thank you, Mike. I enjoyed participating and to to you and all your constituents, I wish the very best.

Many thank.

You.