How To Build and Scale Treasury to Support Growth and Gain Stakeholder Buy-In

Mike Richards, CEO & Founder, The Treasury Recruitment Company: Welcome to this week’s Treasury Career Corner podcast, where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week, I’ll 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.

Mike Richards: In this week’s show, I’m drawn by Mike Ackley. Until recently, he was a group treasurer at Harbor Energy. Harbor Energy are the largest London listed independent oil and gas company with significant positions in Norway, uk, Germany, Argentina, Mexico, north Africa, and Southeast Asia. The companies has four strategic pillars.

Mike Richards: Which include financial strength, commodity price cycles. I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna get Mike to go through that a little bit more and explain a bit more about Harbor Energy. Mike, if you would, how did you first get started in Treasury Finance, really? And then commit to treasury? I know you and I have talked about this, but just for the listeners, they don’t know yet.

Mike Richards: Over to you, sir. Hey Mike.

Mike Tackley: Thanks for the question. How, how did I get into treasury as a young sort of 18, 19-year-old? If you’d asked me that question then I think becoming a group treasurer of an oil and gas company wouldn’t have been the answer that I’d given you. The reality is, as with anybody that’s young, I thought I’d the dream of a career of being a footballer that never quite came to fruition, and when the realization of me not kicking a ball around the park was, it was gonna get me the money and the success that I needed, I thought the most.

Mike Tackley: Obvious thing to do was to train to become an accountant. So I ended up going to night school. I didn’t go to university. That was through my choice ’cause I thought I’d be a sportsman, but ended up going to night school and I did the AT qualification. Which got me a role as, uh, as an auditor when I moved back home.

Mike Tackley: I lived in Yorkshire for a few years and, and then when I moved home, it got me a job as an auditor in a top 40 or audit practice, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I had the, uh, the brown paper bags with the plumbers and the electricians and the trades people coming in, dumped them on the desk and saying, here’s my accounts.

Mike Tackley: Yeah, absolutely. A thousand receipts for various bits and pieces and teas and coffees and, and make something out of that basically, which was. For me, really interesting because it started at real grassroots level and then as I progressed, I went on and studied for my professional accountancy exams. I then was given the opportunity to move to Grant Thornton based in London, which furthered my career from Nordic perspective.

Mike Tackley: But I think it also. Reinforced my thought processes that being an auditor for the rest of my life was a definite no-no. But actually training and the knowledge and being able to pull together a set of accounts and really dissect a set of accounts was fundamental for me. I can remember I spoke to my managing partner at the time at Grant Thornton and said, look, where should I go to next?

Mike Tackley: Because. Whilst I could stay at Grant Thornton and try and become a partner, it was never really something that resonated with me. And he said, look, go out into the corporate world. Go and be a financial controller. Go and see really how businesses are run. You’ve got a good underpinning knowledge of the theories of how business has been run.

Mike Tackley: He said, but go out into the big bad world and see how you go. And I did. I ended up working for. A small car parking company and look it, it was good fun. I think in that short tenure that I was there just over 15 months, I was the commercial accountant and then UK had a finance. It gave me that sort of first exposure to m and a activity.

Mike Tackley: There was an effort by the then chief exec to try and buy the company off of its US parent. And between us and the CEO, the CFO and myself, we pulled together a financing package with a couple of banks. We put a proposal to them for around about a hundred million sterling to buy off of the US parent.

Mike Tackley: Subsequently, that wasn’t accepted and I didn’t think it was enough money, but it really wetted my appetite as to, rather than looking at historic numbers, looking at cashflow forecast liquidity. How businesses can grow and be scaled up. So I then took the decision really to leave and go to BG Group.

Mike Tackley: Obviously it was the darling of the FSE FSE 50 back in the day in 2005, post its D merger, and it was going places and you had the CEO and A CFO that really understood fundamentally the in gas sector and it could do no wrong. And I can remember when I joined it back in 2005, I literally went in as a. An internal control specialist.

Mike Tackley: It was a large, proper global sort of blue chip corporate. That really opened my eyes up because there’s so many areas of a corporate business that I’d never seen and never understood before. So going in as internal control specialist allowed me to sit over the top of all those businesses that principally it was to go in and set up the Sarbanes Oxy compliance processes and documentation with my finance background and the work that I’d done at Grant Thornton.

Mike Tackley: I spent an awful lot of time talking to the treasury guys around treasury and all things financing and cash, and to me, it felt like a home that I’d been longing for in my career. And I moved into the treasury function to set up the middle office because obviously my key strengths that the then deputy group treasurer had realized was compliance and risk management.

Mike Tackley: And from there I headed up the middle office and I was able to move. From there into the back office function to do the sort of more operational side of the business, and then laterally exposure in the front office. And then more recently I ended up as the uh, deputy head for group credit. So I was at BG for around about 11 years.

Mike Richards: Just to jump in, so you and I know BG for our US listeners who are bg, what’s the sort of scale of those guys in the FSE and everything else?

Mike Tackley: Look, BG Group. PLC was a global oil and gas producer. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange. Turned over around about $19 billion and around about 5,200 employees at its sort of peak.

Mike Tackley: And then in April, 2016, a BG Group was purchased by Shell for $70 billion. So yeah, it was a considerable size on the London Stock Exchange.

Mike Richards: Can you just give us a quick, you gave us a quick whistle stop, but you started off in the sort of middle office and a lot of people know that, but you went middle then bit front, or how did it work?

Mike Richards: You know what? Middle, back,

Mike Tackley: and front.

Mike Richards: Talk us through that.

Mike Tackley: You know what Sarbanes actually sought to do? For the listeners that aren’t aware it, it was really to improve the internal controls over financial reporting. That was the fundamental piece, and you’d had various things. Certainly back in my Grant Thornton days, people remember the likes of Palmat where there was an awful lot of financial accounting that was off balance sheet, and a lot of these companies got themselves into some real financial distress, and Sarbanes-Oxley was fundamentally introduced to put the onus onto the senior members of the leadership team, the CFO principally.

Mike Tackley: To ensure that the processes that were in place in the finance functions and the Sarbanes Oxley piece really highlighted from a BG middle office perspective. There wasn’t one. There was nobody actually in. Doing the checks and balances on a front office individual being able to execute a trade without any approvals.

Mike Tackley: There were no approval limits. In, for instance, if they wanted to, a trader could go and execute a money market deposit for an unlimited amount, and what we realized is that we needed some checks and balances, and you needed limits against the counterparties even. Although back then, when the banks were all AAA rated, we needed to ensure that there was some credit limits allocated by middle office.

Mike Tackley: And you actually checked whether those limits on a monthly basis, et cetera. And then obviously you had your mark to market exposures as well with the derivatives and the hedging. We did a lot of hedging from a BG perspective. So I spent a few years setting up middle office function, checking accounting entries, your month end accounting.

Mike Tackley: Nobody was checking any of the journals that were getting put into the ERP, which was SAP, and set up that sort of compliance function effectively. And then I had a couple of people finally came and worked for me in that area. And then I saw an opportunity to. Head up the back office. For a while there we didn’t have a back office manager, so I ended up covering that role for a short period of time.

Mike Tackley: The payment side of the business, getting the money to deals ready in the morning so that you can invest any surplus US dollars or sterling or Euros, and then getting the checks and balances, making sure that we’ve got cash coming in and coming out from the bank accounts and the sort of processing the payments.

Mike Tackley: I was always interested in the front office stuff because that was actually dealing with third parties and banks, and you were going out and you were doing bonds and you were doing FX trays. You’re doing interest rate fixings and swaps. And that really opened my eyes to this is fundamentally what Treasury does for a corporate of that size.

Mike Tackley: You are responsible for all the cash moving through the business and the risk management. And then the last piece for me really was specializing in the credit area. Which worked out very well because obviously we had the financial crisis back in oh nine and 10, and we became the sort of central focal point from the CFO and the CEO because at the time we had well over $4 billion invested in money market funds and a lot of those money market funds, people were drawing the cash pretty quickly and it got to the point where the funds were in desperate need that they actually closed the funds and we managed to withdraw all the cash literally the day before the funds were closing.

Mike Tackley: We ended up with a huge amount of cash. And we had to invest that somewhere and we ended up adding more banks in, for instance and so forth. At the time of my career through BG stood me in pretty good stead when you see some of these huge economic events

Mike Richards: and you also had responsibility. I know this is something that I kept feedback from, Candice say, oh, you have responsibility for external ratings and some of the relationships there.

Mike Richards: How did you manage those? How did you manage those relationships effectively in that time, or again, for someone listening today, very much learning and stuff like that. People are like, oh God, how do I approach this? What was your ethos?

Mike Tackley: Look, so credit rating agencies obviously have your assigned credit analyst.

Mike Tackley: To a particular sector. So for us it was your and gas sector, and you would have maybe two or three analysts that would focus on a particular set of names. You’d have analysts that would focus on sub investment grade IE, those entities that would only have a credit rating of double B plus or below, or even not rated.

Mike Tackley: And then you’d have another set of analysts that would focus on investment grade triple B minus upwards for the bigger corporates. So your interaction with the analyst is incredibly limited. Your main interaction really where you pick up the phone and if it’s a standard and balls or Moody’s or Fitch, I’ll get all three in there.

Mike Tackley: So I don’t upset any of them. They will have a a point of contact who is your relationship director or manager. You could go to the pub with them, sit down, have a chat, say, look, this is us. This is what we want to do. We wanna get a credit rates thing. You can have a discussion with those guys, but that’s where the Chinese walls exist.

Mike Tackley: Yeah, you can’t do that with an analyst. It’s much more formal than an analyst. They obviously will look over your financial accounts. You will pull together a sort of presentation deck of the business and you, you’ll show some your historic results today, but their real focus is in the sort of next two or three year forward looking window.

Mike Tackley: What size is the business gonna be? What do your production profiles look like? What’s your revenue look like? And you will have a much more formal, either face-to-face or post covid. Nowadays, everybody’s happy to jump on a teams or a zoomed call to go through that, so they have a much more hands-off approach and you’ll end up just sharing information.

Mike Tackley: They’ll come back with various bits of q and a, and then they’ll go away. And they all have ratings methodologies anyway within the three ratings agencies. A rating that you can either share publicly or you can retain it privately. The re relationship directors are the ones that you engage with at at the first point, and then they would then hand over to the analysts to do the more formal from there in the detail assessments.

Mike Tackley: And then what happened next? Well, it’s kept secret on the, I think BG finally bought out by Shell. I think we were sat on an awful lot of cash. We looked at. Various strategies to go and buy things in Australia, and that had simply really not happened. We got to a point as a business where we were the largest sort of mid-cap oil and gas company globally, but we didn’t really know what the next steps were.

Mike Tackley: The stock had come down a little bit as well, and I think shell finally thought there’s an awful lot to be had by buying out BG because we were the largest operator of the LNG. Down in, down in Asia and they saw an opportunity and ended up buying us out. So subsequently for me, I was offered a couple of roles with within Shell, but Shell in itself compared to bg, it was like David and Goliath type stuff.

Mike Tackley: Yeah. And, and from my perspective, I always refer to people as cogs and wheels and I’m quite happy being a wheel. Others are quite happy to be a cog as part of the bigger process and for Shell. I didn’t feel that that move for my career was right because I’d end up being a cog on a wheel and I enjoyed being a wheel and an opportunity came up through.

Mike Tackley: An old work colleague of mine at BG who had worked in the legal department had recently taken on a new role in the startup business of a company called Crystal. He asked what I was up to and I said, look, I’m just walking the boys to school. What are you doing these days? And he said, look, I’ve just joined a startup business and we need, I.

Mike Tackley: Someone to set up the treasury function and so I said, look, sounds good. It’s oil and gas. Again. Interestingly enough, Chris had just got an equity slug from EIG in the US for a billion dollars and it was given the brief to go and acquire assets in the North Sea. I think because of the recent sale of BG shall have come out and said that they needed to divest around about 33 billion of their portfolio.

Mike Tackley: It was a really great opportunity for 12 of us or 13 of us. It was at the time, sat around a table. Some of these guys had crystal running for three or four years before. Myself and Howard are now Legal General Counsel had joined and it was a fabulous opportunity that we were able to take a portion of some legacy BG assets and we acquired them off a shell in January 17.

Mike Richards: How was treasury there? Evolved. You walked in day one, right? How are we gonna set up treasury? You’ve got this great track record if you like. What’s your checklist?

Mike Tackley: A blank spreadsheet, Mike, to be honest, you’ve got that experience from working for a bg, from a treasury perspective, you know where you need to get to it.

Mike Tackley: It’s just a case of, right, how do I get it there? It literally was just myself and a laptop, so outside the chief execs office, and I suddenly thought, number one, I’m gonna need some manpower and some support. It really was a sort of blank piece of paper for me to start filling in. What, what’s the low hanging fruit?

Mike Tackley: We’ve got the opportunity. Essentially, if I paint the picture a bit clearer that there was. 12, 13 of us that started at Chris off the back of the announcement of this suite of assets we were purchasing from Shell. You are growing the business to 80 to 90,000 barrels production a day and increasing your head count from 12 or 13 to around about 450 to 500 people overnight.

Mike Tackley: Effectively, there was a few bank accounts in place and a little bit of bank relationship that that the guys had done prior to me arriving. But you suddenly realize that you’re gonna have to suddenly create a treasury function that’s fit for purpose for the size of the business, and you know. What I think helped was the fact that we were getting nothing from Shell, and what I mean by that is, is that we weren’t getting any software infrastructure.

Mike Tackley: We weren’t getting a treasury management system or anything. So it really was sort of one way traffic for us. We just had to grow everything from scratch and look from day one. Did we have a treasury management system in place? No, we didn’t. We had an Excel spreadsheet. And I had a plan of how I was gonna develop the treasury team because I was aware this wasn’t gonna be the only deal that we wanted to grow the business considerably.

Mike Tackley: So I had a two year plan, I had a five year plan, and I had a seven year plan. And, and within those plans I wrote out what’s the business gonna need? I. What’s the quick wins? What’s gonna be the longer term stuff, and how did it impact all three of those plans? So it was a full walkthrough. And the one that impacted the plans the most was a treasury management system, unsurprisingly, because you could put one in from day one and it might be totally the wrong product after you’ve done another deal.

Mike Tackley: It was more about getting the right people in place with the right can do attitude. That the most important thing is from day one, is to get access to bank accounts and liquidity and cash. And we just signed a reserve based lending facility to help finance that initial deal, and that was $1.5 billion.

Mike Tackley: And that was the first RBL that had been signed in around about nine or 10 years in the North Sea. So it, it was great to get that over the line, but of course it came with all sorts of. Wants and needs and requirements from the banks, from a reporting and and regulatory process. So it’s making sure really the RBL became our Bible and, and within that, that helped structure what we needed to do from a treasury perspective.

Mike Tackley: And some of that stuff wasn’t your natural treasury operations and processes just because the size and scale that we were growing to. You may have captured some other bits and pieces within there, but I think the important thing for me was, is this new group treasurer. With a team of two, including myself, we needed to make sure we ticked all the boxes.

Mike Tackley: So again, we produced various spreadsheets with various reporting frequencies. And believe you me, there was over 50 or 60 different things we had to do on a monthly basis for the banks because they wanted to make sure we knew, you know, that they wanted to be covered from their perspective. But equally they wanted to make sure that we were organized.

Mike Tackley: Working with a financial controller at the time, who was also in situ it, it felt like a bit of a tick box exercise to start off with and then. Once you got that up and running, then you could take a step back and really have a look about, okay, what does the business need and, and how are we able to support the business?

Mike Tackley: Because all of a sudden you were going from 12 people sat around the table in Central London to probably about 200 people that were working offshore on top of the 250 people that were gonna be based in Aberdeen. There was various facets of, of the treasury function where you really were thinking outside the box on on a regular basis.

Mike Richards: With that you did a new TMS implementation cash flow. Key priorities. How did you operationalize it?

Mike Tackley: I think that working for a large corporate teaches you is a, a front and middle, and a back office thing is always end state, especially with a growth business. Yeah. To have that and have that sort of headcount within a business that’s still growing, number one, your CFO’s gonna say no.

Mike Tackley: Given what I’ve done in BG personally, I’ve covered all areas of treasury. I, I wanted a similar. Person in a mold that they were all around us and it wasn’t just a case that you can dive deep and just have cash management specialists, but that’s no good to you if you are growing a business and you need three or four other boxes ticked at the same time.

Mike Tackley: So I’d worked with my deputy treasurer for some 11 or 12 years at BG and he knew exactly how I thought, um, what sort of things we needed to do and he was laterally, he headed up the back office. From a BG perspective, when I was in, in the credit side of the business at bg, that made sense to bring somebody in with the operational expertise that I could just leave him to set up the bank accounts, liaise with the banks, go out to the Aberdeen assets and start talking about, this is what I want you to fill out.

Mike Tackley: Yes, it’s another spreadsheet, right from day one, but for your cashflow forecasting model. And you are able to use a lot of the things, a lot of the tools that you had at bg. But the biggest challenge really was the TMS. I think that the driver for that is, at the time we’d grown this business massively.

Mike Tackley: You could have operated, you could have stayed at the size and scale of that initial transaction that Chris all grew to, but of course you had all these hedges in place as well, and we were required to hedge by the banks under the RBL facility. On a 50, 40, 30 on years one, two, and three of your production, you had to hedge that production of your crude.

Mike Tackley: And we suddenly realized, crikey, spreadsheet’s not gonna do that for us. We’re going to need a platform to help us do that. And, and we looked at several TMSs and the only really one out there that that sort of we knew could be right upon by auditors as well as treasurers, was, if I’m being honest with reval, because of their market to market portfolio that they had, and we knew that.

Mike Tackley: The big four accountants were using it, and so it was a safe haven for us.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Mike Tackley: We knew it was a treasury management system that was very adaptable and we took that on board. Our auditors were very happy that we were using it, but did the job for us. It allowed us to start moving things away from spreadsheets,

Mike Richards: in terms tool and everything else.

Mike Richards: Yeah, and you’ve taught, we’ve gone down that treasury rabbit hole. How did you make sure that you’ve got a set up treasury? You’ve gotta get your fundamentals, but then at the same time you are the treasurer? How did you make sure that your treasury team is working within the broader business? You and I have just seen the evolution of treasury, either from this corner office treasury, but now you’re back in with a broader business, but obviously you’ve been pushed to make sure get treasury right.

Mike Richards: And then how did you integrate with the rest of the business, would you say?

Mike Tackley: Yeah. Luckily for us, a lot of the personnel that came across Michelle were legacy BG people. Yeah. So they knew us and that opened a lot of doors for us quite easily. We were able to go in and sit down with the guys in commercial, the guys in legal that were based up in Aberdeen and the finance teams and.

Mike Tackley: We did. We went up and we did a presentation. This is treasury. This is what we do for the business. This is how we can help you. This is how the business is financed. This is what we need to do from a banking perspective. And we spent at least an hour going around every function explaining this is what Treasury does.

Mike Tackley: It’s really important, I think, to get the treasury profile. Out to the business so they can, ’cause a lot of them said, I didn’t realize that you did that. Our previous treasury that I’ve worked out, we didn’t know that was what you guys do, what you can offer. And that was so valuable because for us, suddenly then people were reaching out to treasury saying, we need your help with this.

Mike Tackley: What do you think about this? Look, what that does for us is, of course, we were very lucky. Our biggest exposure really from an FX perspective was Sterling and US Dollar. You had oil receipts coming in, in dollars, and you had gas receipts coming in in Sterling. Luckily for us, we had this natural hedge that the sterling receipts covered most of our UK OPEX costs.

Mike Tackley: Which was lovely, but every now and again, we’d have to go and do some FX trays just to sell some dollars to buy some Sterling. As you got out to the business, what the business doesn’t realize is that by you communicating with the business, it allows treasury to be more effective on what it does, which is risk management.

Mike Tackley: Yeah. Cash and FX and interest rates, and then suddenly they’re reaching out to you saying, oh, we’ve got this contract coming up and it’s in Euros and it’s for 4 million euros. What do you think? I’m thinking of actually, yeah, we might wanna actually head, we might wanna fix some of the euros on this. Yeah.

Mike Tackley: But they’re coming to you and that really helped. And of course if, if I move on to the second deal where we did the ConocoPhillips acquisition in 2019. We went from 452 personnel to 1,800, which is a huge scale up. And then you’ve gone from 80 to 90,000 barrels a day to touching on a hundred from times to around about 180, 190,000 barrels a day.

Mike Tackley: So you’ve grown the business to twice the size. Now, the personnel that we took on in, in the UK based in up in Aberdeen, they were a subsidiary of Conoco Phillips us. So they never saw a treasury function. All they saw was they just reached out to treasury and they would send them cash. That was it. That was their relationship.

Mike Tackley: And then all of a sudden you’ve got two or three guys turning up on their doorstep saying, this is treasury. This is what we do. And they didn’t have a clue. They’ve gone from an investment grade double A minus credit to a company called Chris, all that they’ve never heard of before. That seems to have.

Mike Tackley: Leveraged itself up in debt pretty quickly. You wanna dispel some of those theories and those fears and go and sit down and talk to each of these functions and make sure that they’re suddenly on onboard on a cashflow. But none of these finance guys have ever been asked to do a cashflow forecast before.

Mike Tackley: We gave them the spreadsheet that we put in place at the time and filled this out. Doesn’t matter what the accuracy looks like, but you’ll get the hang of it before you know it. The interaction is there and it really helped communication for me, I think is the word I’m looking for. If you can get out and you can talk to them.

Mike Tackley: It really does help the treasury function.

Mike Richards: I think it wins hearts and minds, doesn’t it? It was in New Yorker a few weeks ago and we had our panel session and Summer Simmons from Victoria’s Secret. She, they did a similar thing to you, but they did a mini roadshow and they called it their Corporate Treasury 1 0 1 Road Show.

Mike Richards: And what they did was they went round the businesses and they went and explained what Treasury was about and did these sort of, this is within Victoria’s Secret, I think. Big corporate. Exactly As you say, people just didn’t know, and they did this and everything else. She was sitting there next to Sandra, the treasurer of Bristol Myers Squibb, and Frank as well, and they were just, the both of them were like, we’re gonna take that idea if that’s okay, and we’re gonna run with it, we’re gonna copy you.

Mike Richards: The more that you communicate outward, the more that it came back as well.

Mike Tackley: And look, I think what really helped is the fact that I had a solid number two that I could. Leave to get on with a day job in inverted commerce because a lot of my role as the group treasurer was working with the CFO and the CEO on getting the next deal done, laterally changing in April 21 post the, the premier rule reverse listing and takeover to more recently the windshield dare deal in which was announced in December 23.

Mike Tackley: And so a lot of my time really is half an hour on a day job and the other half an hour really on the growth of the business and can we get the financing put in place to continue to grow the business and. Reality was, if you’d asked me this question when I first joined tour in 2017, we may have got two deals done in five or 10 years.

Mike Tackley: That the concept of if he said to you, we’re gonna do four deals in, in just over seven and a half years, I think we would’ve laughed at you. Yeah. The reality was, Mike, we ended up in a position that the timing is everything and, and we were very fortunate. There was lots of deals that we looked at that we didn’t end up pursuing, but we managed to land some very solid deals at Primary Oil.

Mike Tackley: Deal was done during Covid, and I was thinking about it this morning before I got on a call with you and it, look, it, it’s been a whirlwind time, but crikey, I, I forget having spent so much time that someone says to you, you’re gonna do a reverse takeover of, of a London Stock Exchange listed business, and we’re gonna do it all by teams, and you are all working from home during covid, I, I would’ve said you were mad but.

Mike Tackley: I’d grown the sort of treasury function by then. We’ve got a treasury analyst coming to help with my deputy treasurer on the day job, but she was also, I got her involved in a lot of the credit related stuff where we suddenly, we inherited counterparty risk as well, and that fell under my remit. I was able to recruit an insurance manager that I worked with from BG as well, and he knew the assets inside out, which was an absolute blessing for me because he and I could just sit down and talk about policy costs rather than the coverage.

Mike Tackley: So look, a slice of luck from a timing perspective, but yeah, grew that as we kept acquiring. Very fortunate that two of the deals came with no treasury function at all. The Premier Oil did come in another treasury function, and it came with a treasury management system as well. And we ended up with Cooper and Reval run side by side.

Mike Tackley: But because the international assets that we’d acquired from the Premier deal be an Indonesia, Vietnam. And Mexico, they all had interfaces already into Cooper. Cooper’s probably better for the business. And we then said, let’s get away from reval. We can get that done, mark to market stuff done via Bloomberg nowadays, and we’ll move across to Cooper.

Mike Tackley: And that that’s subsequently what we did from a treasury management system perspective. And at the same time, we’d suddenly gone from 18 bank accounts to around about 60 or 70 bank accounts. And then you’re thinking, I’m gonna need somebody. And you’ve got international exposure. Now we’ve got more FX risk, we’ve got more.

Mike Tackley: Volatility on track cash coming into the business now as well, and then you realize that you probably need a cash management expert to start to come in, but equally still looking for all rounders, not a front and middle and a back office perspective because we weren’t at the size and scale that we needed.

Mike Tackley: And then of course the one that’s always overlooked is the treasury accountant. I was recruiting for 18 months to get the right person into that role. She had absolute superb experience. Patience is a virtue as they say, and I think I got the right person into the role that understood what was a very, I.

Mike Tackley: Busy time. It wasn’t a settled treasury function. There’s always something going on that you have four or five bulls in the air every single day looking for that right sort of person with a can-do attitude, I think from a broader treasury perspective and taking your time over hiring because you can hire the wrong person.

Mike Tackley: Yeah. And regret it. And then later re regret it. If I’m being honest, Mike, we decided to get a grad in because we thought a grad, that’d be a really good opportunity. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out and it was the one and only hire. Failing that I had interviewed very well, tick to the boxes. And you realized after two or three weeks that you know this isn’t the right person, you’re spending too much time.

Mike Tackley: With them because they’re not genuinely interested in what they want to do. And subsequently I think there’s a recognition from that individual that they’re in the wrong career. And that was really good because I sat down and we had a very frank discussion and they did an and they left with literal regret.

Mike Tackley: But other than I. I’ve had a go. It’s not for me, and I want to move into something else, and I just thought, okay, who’s next? Let’s get somebody else in with that sort of desire and drive that we want. Look, we got there and I finally ended up growing the team to about 11 people covering both credit risk insurance.

Mike Tackley: I headed up the pensions piece. Finally, if I bring us through to. 2023, that was the wind shore dare deal, and it was at that point, the business then is turning over 6 billion a year. You have huge international presence in Norway, and as you’ve said, e, E Egypt and Argentina and in the North Sea still, you know, that’s the point really then where you’re looking at that more traditional front, middle back office where you can get to size and scale that your controls.

Mike Tackley: For risk management purposes really de

Mike Richards: you. You came from middle office to group treasurer, FS E 100. So what do you think the biggest factors in your career growth have been? What would you say?

Mike Tackley: I think the key one really for me, Mike, is going back to the grassroots days that I did from my very early accountancy training, and that’s rolling your sleeves up with some brown paper bags and various receipts and that really is.

Mike Tackley: But when you move that into treasury world, it’s really getting into the detail and understand exactly what we’re trying to achieve here. When I first sat down on a crystal meeting, we had various people from the operations perspective, and we had a guy from IT and the CFO and myself and general council.

Mike Tackley: I. One thing that was very clear was the strategy of the business. And without a clear and concise strategy, you, you’re not gonna get anywhere. It’s gonna fail. But it’s having the ability to stress test and look at that strategy, and if it’s not working, change it. And, and I think that’s what we did very well.

Mike Tackley: And I think for me personally, I. Having a strategy was I always wanted to get to be a group treasurer. Opportunities at large corporates like BG for instance, you can hit that glass ceiling. That happened to me and I recognized that and I thought, what else can I do that’s gonna be complimentary to me becoming a group treasurer?

Mike Tackley: Deliver too many people ahead of me with much more experience. But moving into the credit space was fundamental for me because it really added another string to my bow. Understanding how rating analysts would work. Obviously you get your bond rated and then you’ve gotta go for whether you go for public or a private rating on the entity itself.

Mike Tackley: But understanding that work process really paid dividends for me and I understood what these people were talking about, which would’ve never happened if I’d have just stayed doing the same job in middle office. It was an ambition. I went somewhere smaller. The growth story was absolutely superb. I’d like to call myself a change agent.

Mike Tackley: I love the carnage. Sometimes that comes to some businesses and, and from a treasury perspective that they’re the best times, that there’s challenges you need. All of your skill sets, whether you’re working with banks or whether you’re working with insurance companies, or whether you are working with equity guys, being able to communicate strongly, but having a clear strategy in the back of your mind I think is one of the keys to success.

Mike Richards: You know what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna put your linked in details in the show notes. If someone is earlier in their career listening or maybe mid-level, what bits of advice are you gonna give them if they’re. Building a successful treasury career like you have.

Mike Tackley: I think the obvious thing that I was always told is sometimes asking the darkest questions are the best ones, right?

Mike Tackley: Staying quiet about something you don’t fully understand isn’t gonna help your career and, and treasury people will know. We do love an acronym. Or you and peoples and some ESG. Yeah. You know, people don’t necessarily Oh, DCM, and then we’re in m and a and then we’re doing this, and then we’re doing that, and people sit there and nod their head like they’re talking.

Mike Tackley: And I actually look at ’em and say, you don’t understand what I’m talking about, do you? Yeah. And they’re like, no, not really. So my advice is ask that que sorry. What does it stand for? Yeah. I, I, I love explaining that to people. I think the real skill with, with treasury people is understanding whether people understand what you’re talking about.

Mike Tackley: And yes, you might have finance people and you can sit there and you can talk to an accountant. But look, they do numbers, right? They don’t do acronyms. So talk to them in a language that they’re gonna understand, and it’s really converting that sort of treasury world space. I’ve spoken to people in the past.

Mike Tackley: Oh yeah, I haven’t really understood that before. But the way you’ve explained it is really good amongst treasury personnel. Yes, we love the acronyms. We love the gobbledy goop that comes with treasury, but I think sometimes you have to realize who your audience is. And make sure that they understand what you’re talking about.

Mike Tackley: Key takeaway for me for those looking to develop their career, try and move yourself around. Sometimes you can do a treasury career. I’ve met people that have done letters of credit for 26 years. That’s all they’ve done. Yeah. That, that’s where they’re happy. I understand letters of credit and how they work.

Mike Tackley: But there’s also other facets to treasury that are also really interesting as well. So don’t be afraid to ask to see if you can move around or have the opportunity to go and spend a little bit of time working in something slightly different within that treasury space, because it really will help develop your career.

Mike Tackley: You’ve been in that seat. What are you thinking treasurers should be thinking about as well? I think for me personally, the the project and the strategy I think that we set back in the crystal days, I’ve ticked all of those boxes and harbor energy where it is today, the size and scale, it’s got about five, $6 billion of debt that’s gonna need to be refinanced on a very regular basis from a treasury perspective.

Mike Tackley: From where I’ve grown the business, that kind of becomes business as usual. And then I’m no doubt be looking for another deal to do. But I think for me personally, I recognize that I’ve probably extracted everything that I can out of the the Harbor story, and I think it’s a fabulous story and I hope it continues to develop going forward.

Mike Tackley: For me personally in my career, I. I’ve enjoyed the last eight years. I think it’s been fantastic. I’d love to do something similar or equally as chaotic, I think for other treasurers as well. It is taken a look at where you are and what do you want out of the role. There’s gonna be treasurers out there that are very happy I.

Mike Tackley: Doing the same thing, but there’s others that probably want the challenge and can really get their skillset sunk into something that needs a lot of work, needs a lot of development, whether it’s from a personnel perspective, from getting the business to a size and scale, or even reducing the size of a business.

Mike Tackley: You think that the most important thing is that there’s a recognition. At that C-suite level. Now that for good group treasurers who can really challenge and adapt and help on delivering the strategy is a must going forward. The skill sets of a really good treasurer that’s able to communicate well to the board and the senior executives is a must have.

Mike Richards: Thank you, sir. We’re gonna put your LinkedIn detail, the show notes and onwards and upwards, so thank you very much for today. My pleasure.