What It Takes to Run Treasury for One of the World’s Most Acquisitive Manufacturers

This week's guest is Bert Jamieson, Vice President and Corporate Treasurer, Ingersoll Rand. Before we get into the full interview, here's a couple of short clips that give you a flavor of what we covered in today's podcast.

I asked him if I would have an opportunity to apply for that. Most of the people in this position have 10 years of experience. They have an MBA. And while I think you're a great person, you don't quite have the qualifications yet. And so it was hard for me to hear that, but I think it was great for me to hear that as well because it gave me a path forward on what I need to do. I always like to tell my team that, look, funding an M and a deal at closing is a little bit of a thankless job. I'm going to thank you and I'm going to tell you I really appreciate it, but it's one of these things that if everything goes well, no one knows. If, if something goes wrong, everybody knows and it goes all the way to the CEO of the company. So we have to be 100% correct every single time. We can't get that wrong. And so that's one of the other parts of the playbook on there that we talk about is just, look, our ability to execute at a high level is absolutely critical in all those different areas.

Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I talk to treasurers about how they build their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next. Let's get on with the show. In this week's show, joined by Bert Jamison, the Vice President and Corporate Treasurer, Ingersoll Round. Ingersoll Rand are a global provider of mission critical flow creation and life science and industrial solutions. Driven by an entrepreneurial spirit and ownership mindset. They're dedicated to making life better for their employees, customers, shareholders and the planet. But I'm going to get Bert to explain a little bit more about the company later on in the show. Bert, if you would. We were just talking before the show. Take us through your career, how you first started finance, then treasury, and obviously, well, you looked at tax, but then you came back out of that. Back to you, sir.

Yeah, no, thank you, Mike. Yeah, so I started my career in accounting, as you mentioned, and kind of specifically in the tax area and spent quite a few years in that accounting and tax area. But I kind of recognized early on that I had a passion for financial markets. At first I thought I wanted to be a trader, actually get on a trading desk, but I'll talk about that later. That I realized after getting a little bit of taste of that that I was not trader material. But I recognized that I wanted to get into financial markets. And at the time I was very young, early in my career, worked at Cargill. Actually got on the phone and called the assistant treasurer of lev. Cargill didn't really have any sort of sense of any hierarchy or anything like that. He's very gracious to have lunch with me and we had a really great discussion. He actually had an opening in his area, which was select group of advisors that work with the treasurer and CFO of Cargill. And I asked him if I would have an opportunity to apply for that. Most of the people in this position have 10 years of experience. They have an MBA. And while I think you're a great person, you don't quite have the qualifications yet. And so it was hard for me to hear that, but I think it was great for me to hear that as well because it gave me a path forward on what I needed to do. So I went back to school, went back to grad school and got my mba. Eventually got an opportunity to work in treasury in the accounting area. But it got my foot in the door and worked in the accounting area for a couple of years. And after those couple of years there and this.

Can you explain who Cargill are? This is. Most people know, but in case they don't.

Yeah, globally, Cargill is one of the largest.

Could.

I mean they kind of flip flop between being the largest and second largest in the world. They are really company that. I won't even say it's an egg company because it's so much more than that. They essentially are involved in anything that kind of hits the kitchen table. To give a simple example, if you sat down to a dinner table with your family and you looked on there almost everything on that table cargo probably touched, whether it was the vegetables that you have on there or the corn syrup that goes into any of the sodas or anything else that you'd have on the table. Your meat that you have on the table. And so Cargill is a extremely large global private company. At the time I was there, they had about 70 business units. I'm not sure how many business units they have now, just in a lot of different businesses, whether it's food businesses or Great Origination or trading businesses or risk management businesses. They were involved in a lot of different areas which for somebody like me being Young, great opportunity to be able to move around within Cargill to a lot of different areas and get some great exposure.

And you came in for accounting there, but you then got into treasury, given it was a global company. What was that like for you? Again, relatively early in your career, but you were supervising couple of accountants, truly diverse. Global company was quite unusual as well, quite early on in your career.

Yeah, yeah, it was. And to be honest, it's a little overwhelming too, because you think of something that's global and it's just this massive open space that you have and it can be a little bit overwhelming. But I had some great mentors and coaches within the team that, that helped me in my career. And the controller at the time, she really viewed the treasury accounting team as a true global team and wanted people to go and travel to other locations to be able to experience that. And so we had hubs in Minneapolis, we had hub in Singapore, we had a hub in Cobham, England. And so I got an opportunity to go over to Cobham for a week a couple of different times, to really just sit with the team and to just understand because each one of the teams did something a little bit different. The long term debt was kind of managed in the us. The short term debt and commercial paper program was managed more in AMEA and Cobham. And so getting a chance to go over there and just meet with the team, sit with them and really understand what they do helped me understand what we do globally as a team versus just kind of what I was doing specifically in the us and then you.

Your career cargo, which a lot of people stay in accounting for a number of years and do that, but you then, you know, actually physically moved it into corporate treasury advisory and then talk us through that. Because again, you and I spoke about the ge, for instance, when you go to ge, you tend to move around a lot. You said geography wise you didn't move so much, but you certainly moved up elevated roles. So talk us through that and how that came about.

Yeah, and so the role that I got to out of accounting was, yeah, kind of that corporate treasury advisory role. And that was something that I talked about, the assistant treasurer about a while ago. Went back to school, did my mba and then there was an opening in that group. And so I was fortunate to get an opportunity to be a part of that group. And for me, it was something that I had been really looking forward to for a long time. Because in that team, you know, you worked on complex topics like weighted average cost of capital. You looked at different Financing arrangements for the businesses. And so, like one example, one of our businesses, we're looking at barges and they're trying to decide, should we buy our fleet of barges, should we lease our fleet of barges, should we do synthetic leases, Just how should we finance this group of barges? And so we would work. There's one example of us working with the business unit president and the finance leaders to be able to help them manage their fleet. Another part of the team we were looking at was our salt business. They were potentially looking at buying and building a pipeline to go from where they were mining themselves to where it was eventually going to be used. And did it make sense to buy, build, lease this pipeline? And so doing all the analysis there and working with the businesses. And then the other thing that we did is the valuation cargo is a private company, but we still did the valuation for the esop. And so that was a really fun and exciting experience. And just how to value a company. Like, how do you look at it? Whether you're doing a discounted cash flow, whether you're looking at it from a multiples analysis, but really kind of doing more of an investment banker type approach with doing valuation work. And then the other big thing that we did is just the back office kind of documentation work for all the bond issuances. So at this time in my career, I hadn't done a bond issuance, but I got an opportunity to essentially learn the backbone of it. How you do the documentation, how you put it together, how you do the scheduling and the timing from when you start to when you actually do the bond issuance. There's about a four to six week, you know, lead time before you can actually do the bond issuance. And so it was a great experience there, really learning more about that.

And when you did that, you achieved like record low coupons and you got recognition within the company. What were the biggest challenges, maybe behind the scenes or what did that teach you about the strategy of funding and stuff? Because again, you've come from accounting through to this. Now you're more, as you say, funding corporate financing. That's quite a shift as well.

Yeah, it is. And I'd say, honestly, at that point, I wasn't getting as involved in the strategy part of funding at that point yet. But what it did help me really understand is just what you need to do to get yourself prepared as a company to be able to do a debt issuance from when you do build your strategy and you decide, all right, we're going to go either refinance a piece of debt or we're going to put a new piece of debt on. You have to then get everything coordinated to understand who your bankers are going to be, your leads are going to be, and kind of looking at your league tables and your relationship banks that you have and who's going to participate in there. And then once you decide that, you got to get your lawyers together and get everybody on the kickoff calls and then get the documentation going and everything's kind of moves forward from there. But it gave me an opportunity to really understand that process in detail, which then prepared me for my next role where I did actually sit on the funding desk and did issue some long term debt and be able to get involved in some of the derivatives trading that the team was doing, which is where I kind of said earlier in the podcast here that I thought I wanted to be a trader and then I got to do a little bit of the trading there and realized that don't quite have the stomach for it. It was a great opportunity for me to learn, which is one of the things I would say Carvel was great for was learning, teaching, coaching. If you had the desire and you had the capabilities and the skill set, Cargill gave you that opportunity. And they definitely gave it to me.

And on the other podcast, I've sometimes talked about treasurers trying to get closer to the business. And I know that you and I have spoken, I've spoken to other people that I've known a guy, but you really, treasury really is part of the business there already from day one. How does, where does that ethos come from? Or is it something you guys still had to work for? Or was it actually you're part of that team from day one?

Yeah, I mean, I think it was really a credit to the treasurer and assistant treasurers at the time to really be a strategic thought partner. So you're not just somebody there that's cranking out transactions. You're not somebody there that's just aggregating data and then giving it to somebody else. You're actually being a strategic thought partner. So you're understanding what, what is the business need and how can I be helpful from a Treasury perspective to help that business be more successful?

And then so as you say, you moved into that sort of more trading role and then also then you moved into infrastructure and financing and talk us through the next bits because they were adjacent to treasury, as it were, or weren't direct Treasury. What happened next?

Yeah, so I'm a trading desk. I got an opportunity. There was somebody that Was on maternity loop. So I got an opportunity to be able to sit on the desk. These treasury individuals would go out and actually start working on the strategy. If you're going to have your debt portfolio taking a look at weighted average maturity and understanding, are you going to issue short term debt, even issue long term debt, fixed floating US dollar, non US dollar and does it qualify for net investment, hedge accounting? And really kind of getting into all of that different type of activity than I had done previously, which for me it was exciting, eye opening, nerve wracking because when you're actually issuing the long term debt, you're in the market. And even though I wasn't the leader at that time, we had managers, so I was just an analyst on the team with the managers that were kind of leading in. And so I was participating in it. But we all wanted to be successful. We wanted to have Cargill be out in the market and have successful issuances. Because that was Cargill treasury team. I still think this today. I'm probably biased, but they were the gold standard and I was really fortunate to be a part of a lot of different teams in there and just their approach to how you do a debt insurance, their approach to how you manage the debt portfolio with derivative overlays. To be able to swap your debt from fixed to floating or floating to fixed or to be able to do cross currency swaps if you're not doing a natural issuance in a currency or direct issuance in a currency. Who I am today and the treasurer that I am today. And so it was a great opportunity for me to really dive headfirst and to really learn a lot of complex topics. We at the time we did a debt exchange, which is different than just doing a normal debt issuance that you're essentially exchanging debt that's out in the market for new debt. And so going through the tender process that we did and actually doing a new debt issuance at the same time, it was really fun and exciting analysis. Something new that I learned with working with the banks. And it was at the time the largest offering that Cargill had done because it was, I think it was a little over a billion dollars. So it was a significant activity that we did and it was just fun to be a part of it.

And then you moved through these sort of strategy M and A roles and then you knew. So you were in finance and then you came back to treasury. Maybe talk us through that.

Yeah. So got an opportunity within Cargill as well, left treasury and went into the enterprise business development Team. And in that team, they were the, I'll call it, investment bankers for the food businesses. And so Cargill had a bigger group called sbd, or Strategy Business Development Group. And they did it kind of for all the big acquisition deals and for some of the other businesses that Cargo had. But this enterprise development team was specifically for the food businesses. So I got an opportunity there to work on strategy and acquisitions. And so our team would work with the businesses if they wanted to develop a new product or if they wanted to go into a new part of the world, new region in the world, we would work with them on the strategy to understand, okay, what is their business today, what do they want their business to be in the future? Looking at the total addressable market, looking at kind of the opportunity that they potentially have. They're doing all the analysis around it. And what that did is really helped Cargill leadership. Has the business earned the right to grow or to take on this new strategy? And so it was a fantastic opportunity for me to really get into the strategy side of things because I hadn't had any experience prior to that. The team also worked on acquisitions. And so we, again, acting as kind of like the investment bank, we did everything. So we helped the business do either a letter of intent or a memo of understanding with the target to be able to say, hey, we want to engage in a transaction with you. We would do prelim due diligence, detailed due diligence, critical issues list. We do the valuation work on the particular target to understand what we see the value is and how much we should purchase the company for, put together the negotiation strategy, what is your walkaway price or walk away considerations that you have for this particular acquisition all the way to closing. And so it was another fantastic opportunity that I got to be able to see something that not a lot of people get to see unless you go work in an investment bank. To be able to see an acquisition start to finish.

It's unusual, as you say. It's sort of when I've talked to people like that, they as exactly as you say, you've gone Treasury. Oh, I'm going to work for an investment bank. See a lot of the deals. And you get that a lot. When I talk to treasurers sometimes in Europe in particular, maybe they've started in banking, got into treasury, gone back into banking, and then they bounced back after they've done this. But you're under that Cargill banner. But you did a number of years at Cargill and then what came next? Or talk us through the Next move.

So, yeah, so after Cargill got an opportunity to go work for a brand that I actually personally enjoyed. Buffalo outings.

I love it, too.

And they'll watch sporting events and have some wings. And so had met with the CFO at the time, and they were looking for someone to kind of come in and do kind of more cash management. And I told them that if you want somebody that can come in and really kind of build a Treasury organization, because at the time they had a few people, a few accountants that were doing cash management work, but there wasn't a Treasury team.

Yeah.

And I told them, I said, look, if you give me a chance, I will build you a Treasury team ethos. Exactly. So my three pillars of treasury, which is cash management, treasury operations is one, funding, and how you fund the organization is the other. And then the corporate finance is the third pillar. Corporate finance is really just, in my opinion, how are you going to help the organization best spend their next incremental dollar? And so that's where ultimately brought me on the organization. And at the time, Buffalo Wild Wings had no debt on the books. And so what I really spent a lot of my time in the beginning on was just really putting together a capital structure. Because they were a public company, they were doing no dividends, no share repurchase, no debt on the books. Activist investor can see that and see that's a really good target for financial engineering. I spent the time that I had over there really putting together revolving credit facility to be able to go out, do some share repurchase, and really get the capital structure right size. And it was a great opportunity on just really building a Treasury organization from the ground up, starting from scratch. And again, it was a little scary, a little overwhelming because you're building something, nothing. But it was a fantastic experience.

So you've been in food businesses and obviously Cargill over all of that. And things gone into Buffalo Wild Wings and then Winnebago's and talk us through that. What was the shift like for you again, in terms of industry? Maybe as well, different drivers, did you think?

Yeah, it was very interesting being in the restaurant business. At Buffalo Wild Wings, it was discretionary spending, but it wasn't as discretionary as RVs and Winnebago. Right. Because when I started there, they had kind of told me that, look, in our industry, there isn't a gradual decline. It's either the economy is doing well and people are buying RVs, or economy isn't doing well and people just stop buying RVs. And it was a New experience for me. And it was one that was very unique in the sense that when I came there, I took on the role of treasurer, but I also have the responsibility for the tax team at Winnebago. And so when I started as the treasurer, pretty much within like the first week, I also got an opportunity to look at the pitchbook for Chris Graf. And so I was responsible for treasury, responsible for tax. But then they found out that I had this strategy and M and a background from Cargill, and that I basically was the investment banker kind of with doing all the valuation and stuff. So they handed me the pitchbook and said, hey, in addition to your roles that you have, how about you do the valuation work on Chris Craft, Give it back to cfo, CEO, let's present it to the board, and let's try to figure out if this is something we want to go after and go by. Winnebago ultimately did buy Chris Craft. It was a unique opportunity for me because I was able to leverage the experiences that I had in the strategy and M and A area, which I knew we're going to be valuable. I just didn't know when and now was that opportunity. The thing that really brought me to Winnebago was when I first interviewed with them, they had said, look, we're a motorhome company here in Forest City, Iowa. We just got done doing an acquisition of a company called Grand Design in Indiana who does towables. So now we're in the motorhome and towables business. But, you know, we're not going to stop there. We want to get in the marine industry, we want to do more acquisition, we want to grow. And for me, that really is what sold me, because I thought, hey, I can now become treasurer of this public company, get some exposure to tax and leading tax, but I can also leverage my strategy and M and a background. And over the years that I was there, Winnebago did do multiple acquisitions. They not only acquired Chris Craft, they acquired a company called Newmar, which is a luxury RV business. They acquired a company called Barletta, which was a luxury kind of pontoon business. And so we did a lot in a short period of time. And the one thing I would say about a company, so Winnebago was non investment grade, very cyclical company, very highly discretionary. And the one thing I had to learn, because at Cargill, if you wanted to go do a debt insurance, you would. You'd have to decide, like I said before, short term, long term, fixed float. But you never had to ask, can I go? Because the market would always be there for you because your cargo, your investment grade investors will always be willing to give you funds. If you're not investment grade and you're a smaller public company, the first question you often have to ask is, can I go to the market? Because the high yield market is not always there for you. And so being thoughtful and strategic about, all right, if I can't go to the high yield market, what are my other options? Is the convert market open? Is the terminal market open? Making sure that you always have plenty of liquidity and access to liquidity to be able to help a company like Winnebago go was something I learned very quickly.

Okay. And so you did Winnebago and then Ingersoll Rand. So you joined Ingersoll. Talk us through, if you would, who Ingersoll Rand are, because they've got so many different businesses, very diverse and everything else big roll. You've been. They've been part of KKR and everything else or give it. Where were they in that journey when you joined as treasurer? How did that come about? Maybe just give us an overview.

Yeah, so I think you're so Rand, as you kind of mentioned earlier in the podcast, mission critical flow technology. So think of like gases, liquids, anything in the manufacturing business, think of us as a critical part of the manufacturing process where if you need to move gas or air or liquid or any sort of product throughout the manufacturing process that is either blowing it across the manufacturing floor, pulling it through, purifying the air, or drying the air if you have moisture in there. And so, you know, our type of products in there is not something that a lot of people are maybe going to know of. But the people that are actually in the manufacturing floor know our products very well, because if our products go down, the whole manufacturing facility usually goes down. And that's why we call it mission critical flow technology, because it is mission critical. We go down, everything goes down. Our products are in a lot of different areas, whether it's life sciences, which is one of our big businesses, or in typical industrial manufacturing processes. And so for me, it was a new industry, new products. I'm still learning. I would not say that I'm an expert in all of our products, especially since we are as acquisitive as we are. But, you know, when I started in November 2022, we were just two years kind of post a large merger that happened. And so Ingersoll Rand at the time split up from some of its businesses. So the industrial part of Ingersoll Rand got split off from kind of training technology, which is now its own public company, and Ingersoll Rand, the industrial side. Then when they split off, then they merged with another company called Gardner Denver. And when they merged, they kept the name Ingersoll Rand. But you know, Gardner Denver and Ingersoll Rand were two or a couple of the top players in the industry. And so it made us top players once we did the merger. And so when I came in was just two years after that. And so we were still kind of trying to, from a function perspective, build up those functions back up after the merger. But from a business perspective, the business has been doing phenomenal and continued to do really well. And you know what, one of the things that makes us different is we call ourselves a compounder, meaning that we are out doing acquisitions on a lego basis. So 18 plus acquisitions in a year is not uncommon. On a monthly basis, we could be closing two, three different acquisitions. And they're all different parts of the world. And so that creates some complexity from a Treasury perspective. Right, because you're constantly looking at sources and uses where you source in the cash, where do you need to use the cash? And so we spend a lot of time on the treasury side of things, really trying to make sure that we are positioning our funding appropriately so that we can obviously then execute on those acquisitions.

And you and I talked before, it's not just the funding. We'd had Nolan Saltvet from Lime, but in one of his previous roles, API, he was going through a similar thing with actually a smaller team, but had his playbook. And is that essential to it? You've got your playbook and right. This acquisition comes in, this is how we're going to do it. Because obviously each of those, as you say, different part of the world, different size of company, different functionalities or different stages as well. What's that like for you, except for your head all the time?

Yeah, I mean, the playbook is crude. Right. And so we didn't have the playbook from the start when I started. But we quickly realized that the playbook is critical. So there was a certain number of things that we would always be looking at pre closing, closing and post closing. Right. So pre closing, we were looking at, do they have any debt on the book? Do they have any trade finance instruments? Do they have any derivatives that are on the books? What are their banks listing out, all the different banks that they have, and are there banks integrated with their ERP systems? And so we said, right, let's just get the playbook down. Let's get the checklist down to be able to say, all right, these are the things we're going to ask no matter what we're requiring. And we're going to do this pre closing. We're going to do the same thing at closing, but it's when you get your final funds flow, you're going to and you're making sure that you're doing verbal confirmations of all the different bank accounts. You're looking at all the dollar amounts and triple checking everything there. You're making sure that you just have everything kind of in order and everything ties out. Because I always like to tell my team that, look, funding an M and A deal at closing is a little bit of a thankless job. I'm going to thank you and I'm going to tell you I really appreciate it, but it's one of these things that if everything goes well, no one knows. But if something goes wrong, everybody knows and it goes on to the CEO of the company. So we have to be 100% correct every single time. We can't get that wrong. And so that's one of the other parts of the playbook on there that we talk about is just look, our ability to execute at a high level is absolutely critical in all those different things.

Is that the most difficult challenge, would you say, certainly most recently, or is that just one of the challenges, do you think?

I mean, it's definitely one of the biggest ones. Because you have to understand also when we're doing acquisitions, we don't typically use investment banks to do acquisitions. When we acquire companies, we have a little bit of a unique M and A strategy where we have M and A leads out in the region. So we have a corporate M and A leader, but she's not dictating everything. We have people that are out in the regions and they're out there building relationships with different companies. And so a lot of the companies that we're buying are mom and pop businesses that are not small. I mean, they're 50 million, $100 million, they're large businesses from a dollar perspective, but they may not have the sophistication around the accounting systems, the policies, the procedures and everything else. And so when we're out there developing these relationships, it's first and foremost telling the target, hey, we are going to be a good steward for your brand. A lot of times people have spent their entire life building this, and this is their legacy. They're not going to want to sell it to some company that's going to just basically sell it the parts. Right. And take it on and take on the customer base and then the brand goes away. We're a good steward of that brand and so we're going to take that brand on. But once we bring that business in from a Treasury perspective, a lot of times it takes a lot of extra effort because they probably don't have a Treasury team. Right. So you're going in there and you're having to have these conversations to really understand what do they have from a Treasury perspective and what do we want to change when it ultimately closes and gets integrated. Sometimes it's pretty straightforward. Sometimes there's a lot of cleanup activity that needs to happen.

And I've talked to some of the treasurers before where they. There's a couple of ones actually when I was just looking back on some of this, that where they've gone in and as you say, they leave the local management, they said they're the experts of it. We become their central bank, if you like. We become the central funder, we give them advice and we help them and we handhold them when they've got difficulties, but we leave them alone. Is that the kind of ethos for you guys or a little bit more hands on or without? Again, without going into public and it is public detail no. 1 that. Is that one of the reasons?

Yeah, so yeah, we, I mean our team have a decent sized team on the treasury but we don't have an army of people. Right. So. So we do have to rely on the businesses to really manage a lot of the day to day that they're doing. What we will do is we will obviously get the account hooked up to our treasury management system. We'll get it hooked up to the pools where, you know, if there's a cash pool in that area to help them manage it from that perspective and then if they have questions with the banks, we work with them there. Otherwise, from a day to day perspective, we don't interfere.

Yeah, yeah, because it was Declan Dorley from DCC over in Dublin and when he told me this, he said, oh yeah, we bought this company, we bought this, we bought them. He said we leave them alone. He said we help them then and help them to just be more successful where they might be struggling, he said, because they're experts in what they do. It's just there may be other things that we can do to help them. It sounded very similar to yourself sort of thing.

That's that strategic thought partner that I talked about, which is how do we help the business be more successful. And so we are always that strategic thought partner with the business. We come in, we understand what sort of challenges that they may be facing and what can we do from a Treasury perspective to help them be more successful.

And we're not too far off the end of the show. We're not there yet. But what are the other challenges you think for treasury at the moment that are the biggest that are out there? What for you as a Treasury, do you think people, other treasurers should be thinking about?

Yeah, I think that is one of the biggest challenges and one of the biggest opportunities. How can you leverage AI to be more successful? Get more accurate cash flow forecasting, better analysis on your historical free cash flow to help you inform on future free cash flow opportunities, any sort of cash conversion cycle opportunities there, and just better working capital management. I think all of that is huge. I think that there's opportunities on just the basic administrative stuff. We have hundreds and hundreds of bank accounts all over the world and as people need to just do something simple like update signers or get somebody access to a bank portal. If you have hundreds and hundreds of bank accounts, we don't have hundreds of people on the treasury team. Right. So how do you leverage something like AI to be able to better manage that? But then the challenge that comes with that is then the security part of things. I think treasures are inherently risk averse. And so anytime you're leveraging AI and it has access to all of your banking information, there's just a lot of risk around there that I see that just hasn't been fleshed out yet. And so I think that before we really start to be able to leverage AI, there's some things you can do right now just working on spreadsheets and stuff that you can use AI to help optimize your data analysis and how you synthesize information. But I think the bigger opportunity that's out there is probably still going to take a while.

And you've made this shift, if you like from, you've gone all the way from accounting, treasury advisor, if you like at Cargill. What are the inflection points? If you like when you were doing that, what's accelerated your career? Or again, if someone's listening said, wow, what were the things that you did? And again, if you're a listener today and you said, right, they listened to, oh, I should do that. What sort of thing?

Yeah, I mean, so I'll give an example of early on in my career. So I've always been very career motivated. And driven and focused. And I was a bit kind of like a untamed wild mustang early on. I just knew what I wanted, but I didn't know how to get there. And luckily I had somebody that came and was a great mentor to me that basically said, look, you can have all this motivation and drive, but you have to be exceptional at what you do today to be able to get those opportunities in the future. And so have an eye on the future of where you want to go, but be exceptional at what you're doing today and then make very specific or thoughtful choices in your career to be able to get you to where you ultimately want to go. If you're making a career change, you should always ask yourself, is that going to further my chances of getting that ultimate dream that I have or not? And if it's not going to do that, you just want to think critically about whether that's the right choice for you. For me, that was great advice because I had all this wild energy and it just kind of concentrated it to say, I'm going to be exceptional at what I'm doing here. Whatever my job role is, I'm going to do even more than that, and I'm going to excel because I know if I do that, it'll create new opportunities for me. Ultimately, again, one of the biggest inflection points for me was when I was in Cargill in that treasury accounting area, and I got a chance to be on the corporate treasury team, because that team was really small. There was three or four of us that were on that team. And to be able to get exposure to the things that I got exposure to, really kind of just for me, springboard my career into the future. There isn't a roadmap out there to be able to get to where you want to go, unfortunately. Yeah. But if you work and be exceptional at what you're doing, you're going to get great opportunities. Just be thoughtful about when you do get those opportunities, what you ultimately choose.

Well, that's great. And actually, we say that I will dig it out. It was just really reminiscent of the podcast with Tony Massone from Amazon. And exactly as he said, you've got to get the basics right with yourself. And I'll actually listen back to that one and I'll put that in the show notes as well, because he made exactly the same comment, which means it's good the podcast is working. I remember him saying a lot of the very similar things. I mean, it's just you can't afford not to just have Those things as well. Okay, Any advice before we're not LinkedIn yet, what advice would you give to other treasury professionals? Getting the basics right. But you know, if there other things that you thought on that way to senior leadership because you did the Cargill experience, but then I'm recognizing Winnebago or World Wings, then Winnebago. So you've taken some deliberate choices. What other things would you say?

Yeah, one of the big things I would also say, and I tell anybody young person on my team, is don't let the job description define who you are, who you can become. And what I mean by that is I'm not saying go and do things that are way outside of your area of responsibility. If you have specific things that you're working on, especially early on in your career, you're going to have specific tasks that you are doing. Don't let that define who you are. Think about what that task is, why you're doing, and is there a better way to do it or is there a different way to do it or do we even need to be doing it at all? So don't let the job description define you in the sense that be thoughtful, be inquisitive and ask a lot of questions. Those are the times when you actually get really good experiences. You're going to learn things because the experiences are things that no one can take away from you. The more experiences you have, the more questions you ask, the better you're going to get with kind of building that base of basics that you kind of talked about.

That's gold. That's great. I mean. And so we will put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. So I know that all there'll be lots of reach outs and things like that, but takeaways from today's show and that again, as we address each week for more junior folks, maybe mid level, more senior, any those kind of different levels. Any advice you give those people?

Yeah, I would say for any of the managers or more senior folks, be a coach, be a mentor, be someone that can be impactful on someone's life. When I think about my career, I didn't go to a fancy university. I didn't get a lot of the doors open to me that I would have wanted to. I had to pound down doors to be able to get in versus having doors be open for me. And so I go out of my way to make sure that I meet with everybody on my team, whether it's manager down to analyst or director, it doesn't matter. I meet with Everybody, because I want to make sure that everybody gets an opportunity to be successful. And that's what I would really encourage managers and leaders is don't forget about when you were young and giving somebody the opportunity, because giving them five minutes, 10 minutes can be so impactful and so helpful in their career because your words matter and they're listening. And for younger people, I would say just seek out those opportunities, right? Seek out people that can help give you advice. When you're early on in your career, you're not expected to know a whole lot. So ask a lot of questions, seek out mentors, seek out people that have been there and done it and can give you advice. And a lot of times those people can really help you navigate your career. Because like I said, there's no right way, there's no wrong way to go through your career. There's no path. But having somebody there that can provide guidance and coaching can really be valuable.

Amazing, great takeaways. I'm going to leave it there because, yeah, that's podcast gold. Thank you very much. That's been lovely to catch up with you and looking forward to seeing you very soon in the future. Thank you very much.

Sounds good. Thanks, Matt.

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