Mike Richards discusses why coffee chats matter for building internal networks in treasury roles, and shares updates from the 2025 Treasury Salary Survey. He covers hybrid work trends and upcoming industry events for treasury professionals.
So welcome to week two of our blog. Deirdre made me do this. We know this. But hopefully I'm going to give you some more value this week and some more insights. And that's what we're going to call it. As Alex said the other day, I had a long title, Mike's Insights. It rhymes. Yeah, it works. So each week, again, a comment on the newsletter we did earlier this week, on Tuesday this week, which was entitled About Drinking More Coffee. So thank you for, first of all, for your reactions to last week. Amazing stuff, especially seeing so many people looking at the video. Who would have thought, some people love video, some people love newsletter. You can do both. I don't mind. So last week's focus was on remote and hybrid working. This week, as I say, with Mike's Insights, we talked about the advice being drink more coffee. That wasn't really the we. We love coffee and we're trying to support that industry, but in actual fact, it wasn't about the caffeine hit. It was about meeting people and it was about how you need to build your own internal network as well as having an external network. When you go to conferences, it's great to meet all these people, but you can also strengthen your network internally. I was talking about a junior guy that had been referred to me, if you like, and I'd heard about through one of my previous podcast guests, the guy was a junior treasury analyst, rather, and he went to the senior guy, the treasurer, said, look, I need to build up my network. What do I do? And the story was about how go and drink more coffee. Okay? Said, no, what you do is every week, actually go every week and try and meet people for coffee. Now, he took some of that on board and he did a really good job when it started to meet some internal people, started to meet them for coffee once a week. He had some time and went and did that. After about a couple of months, he said, oh, I'm not really learning as much. I've still got my treasury studies. That's going well. But actually drink more coffee. How many times have you been out? And over the past two months, I think he'd. He said something. He'd been out three or four meetings. He said, meet someone every single week and commit. That can be your commitment. That was. The guy rapidly became the best internally networked person within Treasury. People were coming to the treasury team saying, oh, yeah, can I speak to James, please? And they were like, yeah, James, our Treasury analyst. Yeah, because he knows the answer. Or he made himself invaluable in actual fact, what happened? He then got fast tracked. He got the notice of the to the notice of the CFO who said do you know what? This guy knows stuff. This guy is ambitious. He wants to get on in the company and actually said we're going to put you on the fast track program. That's what they actually did. Ultimately got headhunted for another role outside of treasury. But really that's where he wanted to go. I think it was corporate finance, investor relations and used all his treasury skills and things like that. So take away from that, your internal network needs to be a strong if not stronger than your external network. There you go. Nice little takeaway. On the podcast front, we also then talked about having Frank Trish and David from on our Treasury Career Corner live in New York. It was back in September, an amazing evening. 70, 60, 70 odd treasurers in a room, me interviewing the three of them. It was really great. In Times Square we're going to repeat do the same event in March. We're just working out the final dates and location so you can find that on the podcast channel. So treasurycareercorner.com there were some comments about hybrid working. Someone was saying, oh, with hybrid it's harder. People should be in the office more. I like being in the office, but the fact is if I didn't embrace hybrid working, I wouldn't have a team. The fact is we actually work a lot of our time remote. We do meet up on quite a few occasions. Both Katie, myself, Joe, my guy in America, which we come on to and Carly. So we do work and we. But we work in on a hybrid basis. It success depends on that. If you're a hybrid building those relationships, it can be harder but you don't have to be in the office five days a week. But treasury itself is collaborative. Talk about that in a future newsletter. Anyway, other things that we've done before we get on to the Christmas wishes and things. So salary survey. I've moved the dates of it a little bit so we were running it quarterly. That was too much. We do it with over 1200 people, treasury professionals. In fact I relaunched it just this week. Past couple of days we're now approaching 1300 was 1200 but nearly 100 take part in two, three days. It's crazy. I want to go to 1500. If you are a Treasury professional watching this and you don't take part treasurysalary go there. It's easy and it's free and for that what you will be receiving. We were as I say running it quarterly and then started run it at the end of Q1. So in March, April time and then we were running it in September. October didn't really help with a lot of people's pay reviews. So now we're moving it shifting a little bit to January. So I'm going to produce a set of results in mid Jan and do the same in mid July so you can have a snapshot of your salary twice a year. So it's free to take part. If you need individual advice. A couple of people saying actually about oh it'd be great if you did about bonuses and executive compensation. That's not the scope of the survey. We do include about bonuses but if you're looking at long term incentive plans and everything else, I can give you personal advice about that. Or there are actual payroll companies, salary survey companies that do that. What the scope of ours is treasury analyst, the global treasurer, average salaries, ranges. It's incredible as I say. But if you need individual advice, just reach out treasury recruitment.com mike@treasuryrecruitment.com so take part in the survey. Other final bits Merry Christmas to you guys out there. Thank you very much for your support from me to the amazing Joe Grabowski who leads our U.S. operations. We've recently recruited a treasurer that we're going to announce beginning of the new year in New York. Great placement. Thank you very much Joe. That was great to work on with you and a few others that we've done this year. So it's been yeah, busy old year but bit tough and we actually talk about that in this week's podcast. It's like I plan this stuff, we talk about it. So it's myself, Katie and then Joe on this week's podcast. We round up the year 2024 comes out to you, our gift to you on Christmas Eve and then we'll be back in the new year. But this is the podcast. The three of us talk about what's happened in 2024, the outlook for 2025, what you guys should be doing as well. Other things just predictions we've got there. Yeah, the shout outs. So we got some nice shout outs for Alex who helped me Mike's insights, that's what we're going to call it. Some other lovely people that were commenting on that. Joe Scattergood, thank you very much for your cheeky comment. Thanks Joe. Do feel free to read the newsletter, make any comments, any insights. I appreciate it. It's good to know you're there and you can do that with this as well, if you've got comments about this, what you'd like me to cover on the blog, let me know. Doing this every week now. And I'm doing In Portrait as well. You know, narrow myself up as well. No, the Shout out. So Katie Hardy, been an absolute legend this year. Thank you very much for your support, Katie and Carly Larenburgs. A couple of my clients have said you couldn't do it. I said, no, I know I couldn't do it without Carly. So she's helped it. So. And to all you guys, clients and candidates, if you need to recruit treasury professionals, come to us. If you need your new role, you need to benchmark your salary, come to us. It's simple. So until next, the next one, I'll do another blog doing Christmas New Year. So enjoy that and I'll keep on doing this weekly. Hope you enjoy it. Give us a thumbs up and everything else and see you soon. Cheers. Thank you.
