Mike Richards, CEO of Treasury Recruitment, explains why treasury professionals should actively manage their careers instead of waiting for opportunities to come. He shares practical advice on setting goals, evaluating your current role, and taking control of your own advancement.
For those of you that don't know me, as Yanmata very kindly said, I'm the CEO and founder of the Treasury Recruitment company. We specialize in recruiting corporate treasury professionals. Basically you guys for leading businesses around the world. And I've been doing this since 2002 alongside my day job. I'm an active blogger podcaster, had the lovely Ann Martin Neufahr on the podcast show recently so you can listen to that and a regular speaker at a number of conferences around the world discussing variety of topics treasury and treasury recruitment related so today I'm talking about investing in your treasury career. Why now? Based on the current state of the treasury recruitment market, the this is more important to you guys than ever before. In your roles as treasury professionals, you spend your entire days analysing the return on your company's investments, assessing and hedging the risks, developing future strategies. But are you taking the same amount of care over yourselves and your careers? I suspect not. I hear it so often when I ask a candidate, what are your goals for the next few years? What does your ideal role look like? What are you looking to achieve next in your from your next position, as it were. And I get this. Not quite sure Mike, they've not given it any thought or the alternative. I get the rehearsed robotic in five years I'll be a treasurer. Five years from that I'll be a cfo. Robotic. Not really genuine, but I do actually come across some people that have got a definite career path and they're saying in two years I want to be in this position. Five years here, 10 years there. But when I ask them how are you going to get there? Their faces turn blank and they haven't got a clue. And there are lots of buzz phrases career investment plan, personal development plan. But all of these are relying on your companies, not yourselves. And it's your treasury career. So today I'm going to be talking about five areas that we see as being key to career success. Does work Excellent. First, stepping stone career planning, defining your goals. Now, I'm sure you all know the phrase fail to plan, plan to fail. Without a plan, you've got no career. How can you achieve what you want if you don't know what you want it to be? Now, I see incredible value that a lot of companies are putting in investing in people. But this isn't enough. It's your responsibility to make a proactive choice about your career investment plan. It'll give you a sense of purpose, added side effect of fulfilment and happiness. So I was with my colleague called Craig Martin in the US last week speaking at the AFP conference and we were asked on the AFP podcast, they said, when do you think someone should start looking for a job? When should they start planning their next role? Simple answer now, not straight to, you know, not when you're coasting along, top of your career, nice and relaxed. Plans change tomorrow. Your company gets bought, you're looking for a job. What if you were already doing that before? You need to take charge of your career in your present role. So you need to decide on some of these things, decide on what your goal role is. What's that? Well, again, that's looking at not where you see yourself, perhaps at the end of a happy treasury career in retirement, that's much more realistic. Planning stage, maybe looking at three to five years as a job title. You might want size and company that you want to be working for. What roles are you going to enable you to achieve that? Stepping stones, if you like, or do your research. How are you going to do that? This is where that little known tool, LinkedIn comes in. Maybe check out the LinkedIn profiles of some of the people you want to copy, you want to emulate. Look at their careers and what steps did they take? What career choices did they make? How long did they remain in each of their roles before they moved on? So then you go on to assessing your current role. You're doing a great job, got some great current responsibilities, strengths are going well, everything else doesn't matter. What are your weaknesses? What's holding you back? If you do want to make that next move, do you need to expand your experience further than other areas? Are you going to need additional training? So when I started my business a number of years ago now, before I did that, I actually did my research and looked at other recruitment directors, successful ones and some unsuccessful. What was their background? What did they have that I didn't have? And I realised that in order to work at the top end and recruit treasurers and things like that, at the top end, I'd need to work and have recruited at that level. So I actually chose to join an executive search firm before starting up myself because I thought, actually, I've got a gap there and if someone says, well, how many treasurers you've recruited? None. I thought, it's not going to be the most impressive sales line, is it? It's not about me going on about it, but it's about more reviewing your progress. Are you on track? Do you need to modify another bit? So I started the business 2002. I knew that I wanted to expand our international footprint, so I decided to go out of my comfort zone. I know it might seem unusual, but I don't enjoy speaking. It's a learned skill. I don't wake up and go, oh, do you know I want to do another speech today. No, believe me. Because this all relates back to Euro finance, Paris to 2004. God, I was bad. So bad. All I did was, unlike today, I read from the slides, just literally just verbatim. After 10 minutes, people's eyes were glazing over. Some people, like Andreas over here, were looking at their phones already watching, yeah, I'm watching. Just catching up on their email. I thought, how do I recover from this? I know I've got a way to get through this. I'll go straight to Q and A. Quite early in the session, question and answer, hand shot up in the middle. I say, yes, Simon Bullock, at the time, a friend of mine, no longer anymore, CFO of CNBC Europe. I said, simon, Simon, you've got a question. What's your question? He asked his question and I then said the immortal words, simon, that's not the question we rehearsed. It was a really bad day, but I decided to review. I practiced and I keep getting on stage and I keep dodging the tomatoes. I've spoken at Chicago Summit five years in a row, four international conferences, AFP last week, Chicago for the second time. I'm not saying it's all, look at me, da, da, da. That's not it. It's to demonstrate to you guys that your goals and you need to push yourselves out of your comfort zone. If you got weaknesses, build up on them, get rid of them. You need to demonstrate that you need to evolve over time and need to stretch you. And it's your responsibility. As I've said, these choices aren't accidents. You need a positive mental attitude. And the key thing I talk about, and one of the other bits we'll do another speech, is that you need to be the driver of your career, not just the passenger. Going along as your company takes you along and says, oh, yeah, make the next move. And that's what we're thinking about for you.
