This is a YouTube video titled "Variety in Treasury Careers with Richard Luke" containing a detailed monologue or interview segment from June 2023. The speaker, presumably Richard Luke, discusses his career experiences in treasury roles across various industries, including mergers and acquisitions, cash management, and team leadership. The content focuses on the adaptability required in treasury careers, lessons learned from large acquisitions, and insights into recruitment and team dynamics. There is only one speaker present, and the format is not conversational.
The benefit of Treasury, I think is that you, it can apply to different sectors. It's not so industry specific. So you can get experience in different sectors and like you say, telcos, pharmaceuticals, for a long time, I'll come on to that. Some of the heavy industries, heavy building materials and now energy sector. And it doesn't really matter to an extent. There are specifics in some of these industries, specific financing arrangements. You can get where I am now and in different industries, but generally, as long as you understand the supply chain of the company, you can adapt. The theme of my career, Mike, and I think a lot of treasury careers is that treasury is the first thing to disappear when a company gets taken over. So there's a lot of demergers and mergers and treasury is the new company wants to take over the cash, wants to take over the debt and the risk management. That's kind of at the forefront of their mind when they're coming in. Yeah. So following the demerger there was a merger. So six months down the line or a year down the line it might have been. Tarmac was small enough to be kind of snapped up by someone else. So I at that stage realized there was limited future because of what I said. Treasury's first to go Tarmac. And I looked elsewhere and that's where I found the role at Vodafone. So I moved from the Midlands down to down south on my own and moved to the first role in cash management of Vodafone. So that was a, a great career move for myself. Acquisition are quite good fun for Treasury. I think everyone probably knows in the treasury world in that you get involved in probably the merger agreement up front, then the financing, the bridge financing potentially then the taking out the bridge financing, the hedging interest rate stuff, the FX exposures. So it's completely all encompassing an acquisition itself. And even following the acquisition, there's the natural merger of their teams into your team and systems into your team and processes into your team. So it's a fun, full and all encompassing time I spent at Shire and. Yeah, but very valuable. It was difficult to plan, to be honest, because there was so many things in the pot at the same time and you weren't controlling the timeline, you know, the BD team were controlling the timeline. So you just need to try and get a hold of the timeline and get a plan. So a lot of my role was planning kind of, you know, building up a project plan, allocating time and people and, you know, with the teams to it. And then, you know, every week I'd throw away the plan, say, okay, I need to change the plan to this and this is what we need to focus on. So it was, yeah, it was really, really varied and yeah, really stretched the kind of, you know, the mental and the kind of, I guess the thought processes and to make sure that you didn't drop the ball anyway, because that would be the worst scenario. But yeah, we never dropped a ball and everything went through fine. And ultimately we made a 32 billion dollar acquisition and financed that with the biggest bond issued by UK corporate at the time, a $12 billion bond which we won prize it. We won the deal of the year at the act and my team got commended as well and the corporate finance award. So that's where we ultimately ended up. I guess the lesson that I learned through that was you need to be pragmatic and just adapt, I think is the main thing, and just be on your toes at all times. I think I'm personally not a great one for a specific mentor, but I think there is some value in recognizing traits of people you respect and drawing on them. I think that's quite important. So it might be four or five different people recognizing the valuable traits and applying them to yourself. I think that's something to consider and also make sure you're fortunate. I don't know how you do that exactly, but you do need to kind of get, position yourself correctly. But in the end, there's a lot of fortune in the game being in the right place at the right time. And I think when I recruit, it's getting people on the same wavelength as you. You know, you can have a variety of different people with different perspectives, different skills, different backgrounds completely. But you need to have some way to communicate with them and some kind of wavelength that you can both recognize. That's, I think, the main thing. And I think that is undervalued when people recruit. I think a lot of companies look at testing psychometric tests and doing the days and whatever they do, monitoring people over a day and how they react in different situations, that's all great. But in the end you want someone who's smart, who knows what they're doing, qualified and can communicate. And that's a wavelength thing. If you get someone the same wavelength, it's so much more valuable for the short term, medium and long term than any of the other things you can recognize in a psychometric test. That's, that's probably what I would say.
