How to Be a Successful Treasurer in 2024 – 2024 Outlook Series with Lee-Ann Perkins

Announcer  00:04

Welcome to the Treasury Update Podcast presented by Strategic Treasurer, your source for interesting treasury news, analysis, and insights in your car, at the gym, or wherever you decide to tune in.

 

Craig Jeffery  00:18

Welcome to the Treasury Update Podcast. This is Craig Jeffery, your host today. I am joined once again by Lee-Ann Perkins, the passionate treasurer. We’ve spoken. I think this is our fifth podcast over five years. Welcome to the podcast, Lee-Ann.

 

Lee-Ann Perkins  00:33

Thank you, Craig, I love coming back. And thank you for always giving me the opportunity to talk treasury and specifically to talk with you and your audience.

 

Craig Jeffery  00:43

Our episode, which is part of the 2024 outlook series is how to be a successful treasurer in 2024. Now, this would apply if you’re listening to this, and it’s well into 2024. And you’re thinking about 2025, there’s probably quite a bit that can be applied there as well. But this is how to be a successful treasurer in 2024. I thought before we get into a lot of the conversations that you’ve been having with people over the years, maybe just provide some context for, you know, what are some of the challenges to being a successful treasurer, maybe some of the background of the issues if you could just lay some of that out for us.

 

Lee-Ann Perkins  01:21

What was top of mind this past year is going to be impactful over the next few years and items that treasurer’s are going to have to concentrate on, you know, what we do today manifests itself tomorrow, in either a good or a negative way. So we have to start thinking about the plans we’re going to make and what we can control, we know there’s always going to be uncontrollables that come our way, particularly in the field of Treasury. But I’ve broken it down for the three things that were impactful to me this year that I think are going to continue into the next year and the upcoming years after that. So I have three areas, the economic landscape, the banks and their agendas, what’s really important is staffing needs to give some background, you know, what the economic landscape, it really feels like this year. And as we plan for next year, there are so many things that are out of our control, the economy has been, as we all know, unpredictable. And working in the treasury finance will, in some ways it feels is unexplainable. It’s hard to really know how to manage all of these things that are coming at us. And I think treasures in 2024 are going to once again focus on navigating complex and potentially volatile economic landscapes here at home and abroad. There also comes a slew of changes in regulatory compliance with the banks and different governments, we also have to continue to manage technology, cybersecurity risks their their increase seeing in in scale, and complexity. And then all of that, you know, culminates in how we align our financial strategies with the broader organizational goals, from my experiences and talking with others around me, we’re going to have to start thinking about areas that we may not have focused on as much this year and in the past, top of mind, for me is sustainability and ESG considerations. And then the one that I find really fascinating and exciting for our world is AI and its use in companies. I’ve always worked in global companies. And you know, from my perspective, we have to manage a lot of unknowns, a lot of stresses and pressures that weren’t expected. And this past year has been a lot of those combined. You know, we’ve already had two major wars abroad. We are all facing rising inflation, rising interest rates. And then we’ve had these other issues domestically, such as union strikes, which obviously impact unemployment. We’ve had these housing anomalies we’ve had the usual political challenges. And now we’re also facing yet again, a potential government shutdown, additional political divides, the rating agencies are changing in the US. So I think for us as treasurer is, all of those are not just bullet points in a financial report that we read every day. They are the realities that shape our daily professional lives. So that’s the economic landscape and background. And this past year, you know, treasurer’s have been particularly impacted by the banks as our major partners and the banks have not made it easy for us in the past few years and I say Partly in jest. I mean, I know that our banks are some of our most important partners, and it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. But banks have had their own struggles. And they face liquidity issues, they face funding issues, they face regulatory issues. And they also struggle to get the information from the companies that they need to set up bank accounts or past compliance, just as much as we on the Treasury side, feel bogged down by these administrative burdens of compliance needs and requests. I would have hoped in this day and age we live in that we would have gotten past all these difficult administrative tasks, but they they really seem to become more burdensome for companies as we try to grow into different geographies, and it just becomes difficult to open accounts. On top of that, you know, this year has been particularly difficult for the banks of the as they have had many different crises. And we all know by now about Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse issues. And then we also face you know, changing portfolios, because of those, we’ve experienced that banks, we’ve had relationships for many years, for whatever reason, have been told to move out of some markets or to change who they’re providing services to. And when that happens, and banks withdraw from your industry, it really adds additional burdens to companies. But we know these these things happen, but it is definitely a difficulty for treasurers. And I think, as the economy struggles globally and abroad, we’re going to face more of these challenges. And we don’t want in our companies to be left without the banks and partners that we need. So it would be great if we could come to a global resolution of how to make these things work out for both sides.

 

Craig Jeffery  06:58

Lee-Ann, your your comments about access to capital is particularly challenging for maybe not the largest organizations, but downstream, and that’s having a broader impact. You had a few things to say about staff as well for the context.

 

Lee-Ann Perkins  07:15

Yeah, so this one is top of mind. It’s becoming more challenging in this what we’re calling now post COVID era we’re seeing from the research, but I think we’re also feeling it in our companies that interpersonal connectedness is at an all time low. And they are seismic shifts in the way we have to do our work in this new environment. We’re still grappling and even at AFP. This year, we had presentations on remote versus hybrid versus in office challenges. You know, we’re still talking about that. We’re talking about now, how do we attract the best talent? How do we retain them? Most importantly, and then how do we train them? And how do we empower our employees for success? And I was interested to learn that this is the first time now we have four generations in the workforce. So we have the boomers, the Gen X, the millennials, and the Gen Z. And this is taking a really unique approach as we manage such a diverse workforce. And if you think about it, you know, with with that greater generational gap, we have so many needs, in terms of skills of what employees are valuing what they need. And what’s funny, to me is the way we communicate, I am Gen X. So I’m used to business writing, and I’m used to presentations that are of a you know, business level, and I’m used to podcasts and presentations. But now we’re having communications on WhatsApp media, we’re having it with emojis or GIFs, or you know, whatever else is coming at us. So we have to work together in this business environment, to all collaborate to meet the end goal. So it really can be tiring stuff on top of what we’re trying to accomplish. On the technical side, we have this, you know, different challenge on the staffing side. But you know, we can’t fight it, things change. generations change and in our teams and our leaders just have to work out how to manage it and how to get the best out of all our employees. And I think it just comes down to training. It comes down to training your management, your leaders and your employees to know how we best work together and collaborate. And so those are the three areas of concern for me was the the economy the banks, and the staffing and this you know, foundational planning is it’s not new, it’s stresses that we we face Every year as we plan for our companies, but it just seems to me like the risks we’re dealing with now are different in this post COVID area. They just present themselves in different formats as we prepare for next year. It’s just about ensuring that we anticipate change. We acknowledge that we live in an uncertain world that is full of disruption.

 

Craig Jeffery  10:24

Headwinds, cross winds, sometimes tail winds, and fluctuating, right. It’s not always a storm. It’s not always calm, it’s kind of they’re changing, you’ve had as the passionate treasure, and we’ve had the dialogue over multiple years, but you’ve had a ongoing dialogue with many people in finance, what in particular, are some of the things that you’ve learned from your conversations with Treasury people, finance people of late.

 

Lee-Ann Perkins  10:50

You know, by now how much I love talking about Treasury as a career, I’m such an advocate for this function. And I just love to help people through their treasury careers, or just their careers in general, these type of conversations just became more frequent during COVID. Because I realized that they were so many people coming to me and asking for advice and craving guidance on their careers and their development. And also at the same time, how do they manage the changing workforce that they’re in? And COVID was a tough time for many people in in many ways, and impacted us all in one way or another. But, you know, I heard from a lot of people from different stages of their careers, how are they going to manage these interpersonal connectedness? How do they manage their growth? And, you know, I did get questions on functional or technical expertise. But most of the conversations were about career guidance. And I mentioned earlier, we have these four generations in the workforce now, and we all act differently. And we all value different facets of work and career. But at the end of the day, I think everyone in the working world wants to add value, and they want to be valuable. So those were a lot of very interesting conversations on how to help people in a very practical way to grow their careers, and some even just to start their careers, as I’ve been helped so much in my career over the past 20 years, you know, with mentorship and coaching, I wanted to help people and to give back in this way. So that’s really why I started talking to people about their finance careers, and, you know, more of a dialogue in a practical way. And some of the things that that really came up was, you know, and I think these a lot of these come up from from COVID, as well as, how do you set boundaries in your working life. And we all know, in the first year or two of COVID, we felt like we worked longer hours, we worked harder, we had more demand set on us. So you know, one of the most important things I believe, for all of us in the working force is to set your boundaries early on, you know, you got to set those realistic deadlines. And you got to allow your team and your management to know that you have boundaries in your life as well, you’re going to work hard at work, you’re going to put everything into it. But at the same time, you also need rest. And you also need a life. And I think the way you you manage those additional resources is to embrace technology. And we have technology out there. And we should all be curious on how we can use it to do our jobs better and to do our jobs faster. You also need to set time on your calendar for for thinking time, and one of my mentors gave me this great advice. And she said if you don’t put that time in your calendar, when you need alone time, you need time to concentrate and to think it’s going to get run over by other meetings during the day. So put that time in your calendar for, for thinking for exercise for lunch. And even for vacations. We’re all allowed to take vacations, believe it or not. The one thing that came up from from the younger generation that I saw a lot was multitasking. When I was growing up in my career. I got the impression that multitasking was a great skill that you should all do it. You should be able to do five things at the same time and get your work done and just be you know, go go go. But now we’re seeing maybe it’s not such a great skill and research is showing that if you don’t concentrate on one thing specifically, you’re probably not going to get the most out of your time. The newer generation who grew up with, you know, cell phones and the internet and everything coming at them from social media at the same time. I think multitasking and being distracted is what’s They struggle for them in the workforce. So it’s been interesting to talk to different generations on the things that are the most difficult for them just in, you know, how they get their jobs done.

 

Craig Jeffery  15:12

I think you know, one of those things, when you’re talking about that, it’s, you’re basically saying something that, I think is that there’s no such thing as multitasking, there’s distraction. But if you’re working on multiple things, it’s, it can be a skill, if you can switch and focus, you might have to switch and focus on different things quickly. But you have to focus if you’re just poking six things along, there is no focus, and there’s no value. Thanks for mentioning that we think we can multitask, but we can’t, we can, we can learn to switch quickly, maybe. But the focus is to focus is a superpower, right?

 

Lee-Ann Perkins  15:47

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And then, you know, specifically in Treasury, what we talk about in careers is what interests you. And I still feel like an icon, believe I’ve been in Treasury for 20 years. And we’re still trying to get people to understand what Treasury Departments are and the value that we bring. So that’s why I’m such a huge advocate for the Treasury function. And I’m so glad we have people like you and your podcast and your huge network that are still trying to get the word out about the importance and the ability that treasurer’s have in a company to help a company meet its goals. And, you know, we’re so much more than cash management, which I think that’s what we’re still stuck in, in many ways is that’s what people think we do, we we manage the cash. And we have a love for all things, banking, which we do. But you know, we’re also visionaries who can use our strategic and operational experiences to help their company. So I say all that because there’s so many facets of treasury that I didn’t know, when I first came into treasury, I only learned about this probably 1215 years into my career, that there is five specific areas of Treasury, you know, depends on what your interests are as to what you want to do with your treasury career. Some people are very good at a specific area, and they want to concentrate on one area. And others, like myself, like to be more of a deep generalist like to have an understanding of all areas of treasury so that I can figure out how best to use my skills for my company. And those five areas I’ll just quickly touch on is liquidity management, its operational management, its capital markets, I think that’s the fun one, when you go out and raise funds in the external markets, you do IPOs, bonds, things like that. There’s financial management, which is more of the budgeting and investing side. And then there’s risk management, which is coming into its own. And it’s becoming more important in companies in various areas. And we spoke earlier today about, you know, just the financial risks, the interest rate risks and the access to capital. So that’s a very specialist area as well. So I like to tell people, especially if they’re new in their careers, that you should try to look for a company that can provide some sort of rotational training. So you can see the different areas of treasury that different companies have and to figure out where it is you want to be and what’s going to make your job interesting to you and how you’re going to make Treasury a career.

 

Craig Jeffery  18:30

Lee-Ann, thanks for your comments on the the value of Treasury and the fact that so many organizations or senior leaders don’t understand the value, what’s a general approach that that you recommend for managing what’s done areas to focus on tying things into the corporate goals, right?

 

Lee-Ann Perkins  18:50

A treasurer’s main job, is to safeguard the company’s financial assets, to control those associated risks, to protect return on financial assets and ensure funding for our company. So that at the end of the day, is what we have to accomplish in our goals to help meet the company’s goal of survival and thriving. And, you know, there’s there’s many things that a treasury professional does during the day, and a lot of it depends too on the size of your company. I have found that most companies when they’re more mature in their, their growth as a company, they have a Treasury Department. Newer companies don’t typically have a need, sometimes an understanding of why you need a Treasury Department. So there is an overlap between, you know, sometimes people in accounting or finance just doing the banking, but in a truly mature company, you get to bring in Treasury Departments that can do so much more than just cash. management, as I mentioned earlier, so generally the things that we have to do to make sure the company is compliant with their monthly reporting their quarterly reporting, depending on what type of company they are, but we just have to manage the day to day as well. And those are things like just general daily cash management, ensuring we’re helping accounting to close the books on time and accurately, we have a lot of payments that we make, it’s not just making the payment, ensuring that the vendor receives the funds or on the AR side that we as the customer receive the funds. But it’s also the process of protecting and securing all of those payments. And this in my experience has been something that we focus on a lot more during the day, we have to have heightened security and sensitivity to the payment arena. And we’re not just dealing with checks anymore, thank goodness, we are dealing with sophisticated ways of payments, these are electronic payments. So along with that comes cybersecurity concerns. And as leaders of our companies have to make sure we have the procedures in place. And we have the repetitive training for our employees to make sure that they know what best practices are for payments. And I think one we forget to do a lot is training for disasters. And there are many examples of companies that have either been hit with with cybersecurity issues or actually have fallen for them. And there’s been an actual breach and loss of funds. So training for those disasters is something we need to start doing in our companies on a more frequent basis. And then we have to do the usual segregation of duties and have two eyes or four eyes sorry, on on all payments, then I think also another benefit of treasury is how collaborative we are as a department that we can interact with it and legal and all those other departments where, where there also have a heightened sensitivity to fraud, and cybersecurity and breaches. And I think we work really well with those departments to help us as a company, significantly reduce the risk of these threat actors that are coming into our financial landscape. There is also the general approach to what we do is ensuring we have good fraud training, like I said, but also things like you know, upskilling yourself in Excel, we all use Excel for 90 or more percent of our daily work, we’ll know from when we started with Excel, it was just a different platform to what it is now the things that you can use Excel for are really helpful and useful in a Treasury Department. So it’s advancing skills in that area. And perhaps even things like financial statement, understanding and reporting, because all of that impacts the Treasury Department in one way or another, then there’s also the, you know, skilling yourself with understanding what FP&A does, and what accounting does, because these departments all align with our function as we try to do our daily work. There’s, there’s two other areas what I spoke about earlier, you know, ESG, and keeping current on technology. So on the ESG side, it’s, it’s maybe not so well used and thought about in companies in the US, but it’s very far advanced in Europe and for global companies, you know, we have to be looking at, and understanding sustainable investing, how companies run out, run their buildings, how they work on reducing waste. And the thing that’s the most important to me is ethical governance. In my opinion, anyone who works on a treasury team has to be beyond reproach when it comes to being ethical. We are working with somebody else’s money, we’re working with personal information, we have to be trustworthy and trusted at all times. So to me, that’s just a general skill that a treasury person has to have. And then keeping current on technology I mentioned we, we use Excel for everything. But technical skills in Treasury are crucial. So even if we do have a treasury workstation, we still have some format or or output that’s XML based. We have a lot of financial software that we work with, and partner with FinTech company software’s as well. So I think we have to familiarize ourselves with these current technologies that we’re working on with the current information. There. were provided. And then there’s also areas depending on where you work, but there’s areas such as, you know, cash flow forecasting, hedging strategies, financial modeling, just you know, if you stay updated with these these latest technologies, I think you’ll find an enjoyable way to do your, your daily work that can keep the company meeting its goals. And just understanding that, you know, the Treasury landscape is constantly evolving. So, you know, these general skills have to be done, and have to be known. But there is, there’s more to it that we can provide as a treasury team. Just one more update quickly on the current technologies. And I think you’ve heard me say this before, and it’s this is my soapbox, we in Treasury teams need to move away from manual work, we have to take the robot out of the human let technology do that repetitive manual work for us, in the Treasury Department, if we want to become more valuable to accompany, we got to keep one eye on today, because that’s how we get our daily operations done. But we also have to have one eye on the future, you know, these are the strategic growth areas that we have to focus on in our company. And this is where we can be so valuable, we can help with ways that are future proofing our company with practical methods, we can use new technologies to get into different markets for global companies. And then we also want to stay up to date with what our competitors competitors are doing, we have to have that competitive advantage and protect ourselves from from the the outside influences. So we need to see what’s coming, what’s going to be needed for our company, and then make sure we have the skills to do that. If it’s if it’s necessary.

 

Craig Jeffery  26:57

Take the robot out of the person, if it would be kind of like, how do you make sure automation is done by machines? And then how do we how do we govern the robots and artificial intelligence, those are, those are some really good, good points. And I think each of those areas you mentioned, we could we could certainly talk about at some length, maybe shifting to some of the core skills and Treasury and how to be a successful treasurer in 2024. It’s going to be more than just a, you know, a single podcast to figure those things out. But maybe you can talk about some of those skills, too. So we’ve we’ve had the context and the guidance and wisdom of this overall approach.

 

Lee-Ann Perkins  27:36

So I think, you know, we have the core technical competency skills. And then we have the soft skills, which are over and above the technical competency skills, which I think we need in a Treasury Department. So we know that we have to keep the company running and close the box. And we have to do those operational aspects, we have to ensure we have efficiencies in our bank account management, we have to strengthen controls. So those are all existing areas that we know to do on a daily basis. And we’ve been trained on and it’s well understood in a Treasury Department. But then I think there’s new technical skills that we have to learn that are coming at us. And you know, depending on the company, sometimes you don’t see these for a couple of years. But these are skills that we’re seeing in the outside world, and we’re seeing in other companies that we need to gain for our own company. What’s important for Treasury leaders, though, is you can’t lead something that you don’t understand, this is not going to allow you or your team to be successful. So these technical competencies we have to have, but we also have to have that curious nature to know what else is out there. And how do we scale ourselves as leaders so we can help teach the other members of our teams and this is where I’m seeing it, particularly, you know, ESG, as I’ve spoken about, it’s the way you know, we manage our companies on the environmental side, the sustainability, and I spoke about the governance too. And that’s it. You know, it’s a very broad topic. There is a lot involved there. There is master’s courses in ESG. Now, so these are areas that companies have to help train us because it’s not something we’ve been doing for the last 20 years. And then areas like digital currency. And that’s, of course, not going to be in everybody’s company, but it came at me two years ago, and I didn’t know anything about digital currency in cooperation and how to implement it, how to ensure we had the compliance around it, how to ensure our auditors were okay with it. Our accounting department knew what to do and how did we transact in digital currency and the only way I figured it out, was to be curious about it, to go learn up on it and to use my networks to help me. So I think those are skills that as I did that project, I started learning or hearing from a lot of my network who suddenly had to do the same project and didn’t know where to start. So that’s another way that we can see these skills are going to be necessary in the future, because we’re seeing them pop up in, in large companies and smaller companies are just a subset of those large companies. So we’re know these skills need to be taught to US Treasury Department’s because at some point or another, we’re going to have to know how to do it. Like I alluded to earlier, we have artificial intelligence and machine learning. To me, this is a technical competency that we need to start understanding, it’s not going away, it’s only going to be there to help us do our jobs better. And it’s something that we need in our Treasury Departments to understand what it is the reasoning behind why we have to do it. And then how do we use it? In treasury,

 

Craig Jeffery  31:11

there’s so much development, AI and machine learning have been around for a while. And there’s now even generative AI and the accessibility is extremely good now, versus it was a little harder to put in play.

 

Lee-Ann Perkins  31:25

And it’s such a big field. And it’s, you know, there is so much to it. And I was lucky enough to be in a company that was curious, curious enough to start using it in daily tasks. And what I learned is that artificial intelligence is not new. It’s something that was coined in the 1950s. I believe, what we all used to see and understand as artificial intelligence is now pedestrian to us, it’s in our everyday lives, whether we know it or not, it’s gotten so much better over time, as you just said, and it’s now available to everybody, you know it with the advent of chat GPT, we all now are talking about AI and machine learning and how we can use it to better ourselves to make our daily lives easier. And then now it’s coming slowly into corporations as well. But just as a context, for AI, it’s just a computer software that mirrors the way humans think, to perform complex tasks, things like analyzing reasoning and learning. And then machine learning is what I think we’re seeing in our corporations is just a subset of AI. But it’s using algorithms that’s trained on various pieces of data to produce models that can then perform those complex tasks for us. Like I said, it’s been used for a long time in areas like medicine is one area, the automotive industry. We all know, Elon Musk has been working on that for a while it’s been used in the construction area, and it’s just gotten better over the time, to a point where we’re even using it at home, you know, personal digital assistants such as Siri, or just what we see in the movies, you know, science fiction like Terminator, so it’s a, I think, becoming more understandable to the average person now as well. When I started learning more about machine learning, I see it now how it’s in our everyday lives. And it’s things like you know, when you’re texting, it’s using predictive text. So it’s helping to fill in what we are going to say, on our cell phone in quick short texts, or even in emails. I mean, you see, at work, when you write an email, you start with a general prompt, and it’s pretty much done the rest of the sentence for you, including the spelling, so that’s great. On the Treasury side, where I found it to be most interesting is in the back office of credit card transactions. And that’s way the systems that these credit card companies are using are using millions of data points to determine, you know, when we swipe our credit card, if that transaction appears normal for our individual profile, or perhaps it’s fraudulent and requires further human intervention to say whether it’s a valid transaction or not. So you know, there’s many use cases. It’s very interesting, and I think we’re seeing it in our daily lives. But then I got to thinking, you know, when I was working on these projects is why do we have to do it? Why do we have to have AI and its subset machine learning in our daily lives and in our working lives, just outside of the area of creating efficiencies for us and being fun to you? is in a creative way, I really think that it is of strategic importance to companies. It’s allowing the companies we’re working in, to be agile. And in the times we’re living in now we have to be agile in the economic and global disruptive world we’re living in, it’s helping to reduce the cost of labor overheads. And what’s really nice for us is it’s helping to free us up as workers in our companies from all that, you know, repetitive and labor intensive tasks. So once again, taking the robot out of the human, it’s also helping us keep an eye on competition, maybe not so much only in our own field, that it’s, it’s further reaching, like, what are other countries doing, you know, they already have these, these skills training in place. And I’m seeing as I research further, that, there’s other companies and a lot of them, where tech skills are, are taught at earlier ages. So these are things that are going to become a competitive advantage for, for countries and companies that implement this into their sphere of influence. And then, for me, particularly, I like to feel like we have to do it for the reasons of mastery, you know, all employees want to be fulfilled. And like I said earlier, we want to be valuable to accompany and we also want to add value for companies that don’t provide these skills, training or, or tools, I think you you’re doing a disservice not only to your company, but to your employees who are very curious or ambitious, and they want to chase their dreams, they all want to do things better, and they want to use the technologies that are available for them. So I think this is part of just keeping your workforce curious, keeping them engaged, and giving them the tools that they need to master their profession. So you know, with this machine learning, there’s a lot of use cases for it in Treasury. And we know that there’s a lot of FinTech companies out there, that have machine learning in their their tools available to us. So I’ve seen it used in investment research in researching foreign exchange markets and the daily cash positioning forecasting. And what I really like too, is just quick updates to policies and procedures and desktop manuals and bank fee analysis, I think they’re great tools for productivity. But at the end of the day, you know, we still need humans to review and understand the output, we got to we got to know that it’s still garbage in, garbage out. So we’re not going to necessarily lose our jobs from Ai. But our know that our jobs are going to change and we have to have the skills to to understand the output that the the system tools are giving us.

 

Craig Jeffery  38:02

One key area for being successful treasures is related to communication. And you had mentioned earlier how many organizations don’t know about treasure if people don’t understand what Treasury’s doing this idea and necessity of communication is vital. Any any thoughts on what to do to be successful? In this next year on the in the area of communication.

 

Lee-Ann Perkins  38:25

Communication is a soft skill that is also needed in the Treasury Department to be successful. And these are things that I’ve learned and refined over the years. And I’ve labeled them into three S’s, we have storytelling, which is basically encompasses effective communication, we have stakeholder management, and this is important to allow other teams to know the benefits of treasury because we interface and collaborate with with various other teams. And then also steering our careers. You know, this is vital if you want a career in Treasury you want to grow and to become the best you can be in Treasury. You’ve got to have those deliberate conversations about where you want to go and how you want to get there. And that takes being a goal orientated person on the aspect of storytelling. You know, this is really important because we have to communicate with people outside of our own Treasury Department, can be C suites, you know, external debt holders, equity holders, rating agencies, but in Treasury, we have to give people information in a way that’s useful and valuable to them. It’s important as we’ve we’ve got these multi generational workforce teammates, they may not all have been exposed to C suites. They may be new in their careers when COVID started and didn’t really get the chance to learn how to be an effective communicator and tell the story that’s compelling. With treasury, you know, we talk about numbers a lot. And to be honest that it can be a bit dry and a tad boring. So we have to work on those practical ways that we can present information in a way that’s understandable. It’s useful, and it’s compelling to the the audience. And just one quick story at AFP. This year, I went to one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen, and it was on boardroom personalities. It was just talking about knowing yourself the way you communicate how you absorb information. And then knowing your audience, how do they want the presentation to be given to them? How do they learn? And how do they want to get the information, and I think you, you do yourself a real service. If you sit down, take the time to learn your communication style, and how you can relate to others. And things like using analogies using visualization, you know, graphical information, make sure your information is focused on logic, logical, and then be very engaging with questions. And I think these types of skills that you can learn can just put you just one step ahead of just being really good. Technically, you need to have a very comprehensive skill set to be a influential and great Treasury professional.

 

Craig Jeffery  41:39

And I really like your three S’s storytelling, communicate with people outside the department, stakeholder management, helping them know the benefits of Treasury and then steering their careers. I want to thank you so much for your time on this podcast, any final thoughts, any final words for how to be a successful treasurer in 2024?

 

Lee-Ann Perkins  41:59

I mentioned that I went to that presentation on boardroom personalities. And the thing that stuck out to me the most great storytelling often has an analogy related to it. So I’m going to I’m going to try this one on you. I’ve been trying to do that. And I’ve been learning a lot about and researching ESG. So I’m putting these two together. We all know that beekeeping is a central study for sustainability and in the acronym ESG. So when it’s done right, beekeeping enriches the local ecosystem for males. And we also know that the queen bee is essential for the thriving and survival and growth of her hive. And her presence is mandatory because it ensures the continuity and productivity of the colony. So I got me thinking that managing a company’s treasury department is really like the role of a queen and a beehive. Just as the Queen is central to the thriving of her hive. Cash flow is the queen of a business’s financial ecosystem and holds a similar sway in the business world. You know, cash influences your investment decisions, your operational strategies, risk management, and determines the health and hopefully prosperity of your company. Just as the hive revolves around the queen, she orchestrates its activities for well being so should a business orchestrate its operations around cash flow, it has to ensure it has enough cash and it’s able to strategically utilize the cache for the company’s success and longevity. So in this analogy, the pivotal and central role of cash flow in a business is being compared to the influential and critical role of a queen in her hive so it’s emphasizing the indispensable importance of guiding and sustaining the business so as Treasury manages the cash, we ensure the funding it should go without saying that Treasury Departments should be seen as essential and we should all work to uplift the value and importance of Treasury and accompany so I’m going to leave you with the saying no bees no honey no work no money.

 

Craig Jeffery  44:23

Yeah, so that so the honey is the honey is the money and the Queen builds the workers and and expands the producers of it and the the warriors and the ones that pollinate the flowers all work together. Say say that phrase one more time.

 

Lee-Ann Perkins  44:40

No bees, no honey. No work, no money. Feels like we could make a song out of that.

 

Craig Jeffery  44:49

I won’t be doing any singing on this podcast, but but Lee-Ann, thank you so much for all your comments today.

 

Lee-Ann Perkins  44:55

It was great. Thank you so much.

 

Announcer  45:01

You’ve reached the end of another episode of the Treasury Update Podcast.  Be sure to follow Strategic Treasurer on LinkedIn. Just search for Strategic Treasurer. This podcast is provided for informational purposes only, and statements made by Strategic Treasure LLC on this podcast are not intended as legal, business, consulting, or tax advice. For more information, visit and bookmark Strategic Treasurer.com.