How Saying Yes Built a 30-Year Career in Treasury

Mike Richards, CEO, 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 joined by Tom Hendry, the Senior Vice President and treasurer for New York Life Insurance Company. New York Life is a mutual life insurance company and the largest in the United States for 180 years. Plus, they have been putting policy owners at the center of everything they do by offering a wide range of insurance, investment products and services, including life insurance, annuities, investment management.

Mike Richards: Company known for its strong financial stability and high credit ratings, but we’re gonna get into that later on in the show and Tom can explain a bit more. But Tom, if you would take us back to the beginning of your career and how you first got started in treasury. Over to

Tom Hendry, Senior Vice President and Treasurer at New York Life Insurance Company: you,

Mike Richards: sir.

Tom Hendry: Good morning, Mike.

Tom Hendry: I’m really delighted to be here and talk to your podcast audience. I have had a bit of a long career that’s taken a lot of twists and turns along the way. When coming out of undergraduate school, I went to work for an investment banking firm that’s no longer in existence called Drexel Burnham and Bear, where I started off in a kind of a trade operations role in support of the bank.

Tom Hendry: I got a dose of reality because Drexel Burn for those who have been around long enough. Went bankrupt back during the Michael Milken days and big insider trading on Wall Street. So I was there and they shut the doors after I was on sort of on the ground just for two years. Tossed out to the street looking for another job.

Tom Hendry: I’ve had two different careers at Prudential Financial. One right after Drexel Burnham, limb bearer supporting the investment management business. I had an opportunity to go into the asset liability management side of Prudential, where they’re trying to put an investment portfolio to defeat the liabilities that they’re underwriting, and it was great experience for me.

Tom Hendry: From there, I went on to the commercial mortgage lending business at Prudential, and again, fortuitous timing. I went into the commercial mortgage lending that is. Think it always gonna do loan originations, but the real estate market, especially in New York in the early nineties, collapsed.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Tom Hendry: So I found myself doing workouts as opposed to working out, which is, to be honest with you, one of the messages I want to get to some point is you learn the most when you’re working in stressful environments in times of not smooth economic conditions, but turbulence.

Mike Richards: Yeah. Just on that, what, so I know what a workout is. Can you explain for the audience there might some will not understand, some might not. What’s a workout?

Tom Hendry: Sure. So I’ll start with, you’ve got the company at that time, Prudential Financial, made a mortgage loan on a commercial office property, let’s say in Manhattan.

Tom Hendry: Yeah. And it goes into workout because let’s say the building isn’t fully leased, so they, the borrower can no longer service the debt. So Prudential goes in, tries to work with the borrower. It doesn’t wanna necessarily foreclose on the property. It wants to work something out where you extend or restructure the loan.

Tom Hendry: Worst case scenario, if you have to as a bar, as a lender, you will take possession of the property and it becomes an asset and then you liquidate it in order to satisfy the debt. So that, that’s what a work out. Yeah. And you’re working with the lawyers and bankers. The borrower. It’s a lot of, like I said, good, real good experience.

Tom Hendry: At that point, I’d made a decision. I wanted to go back and get my graduate degree. Um, so I went back to NYU here in the city and got a degree in finance because I wanted to make a career in financial services and I wanted to get my MBA. Interesting. As part of that journey, I came out and I really didn’t want to go back into hardcore investment banking.

Tom Hendry: I ended up going into consulting and it was really a, I worked for PWC, which they had a program where I spent half my time doing consulting work and half my time doing what’s called the audit or assurance practice.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Tom Hendry: I’ll say the most interesting aspect of the consulting, I was on the financial side.

Tom Hendry: Where we were advisors on m and a transactions, and I’d be specialized in company valuations. Spent a few years doing that, but consulting is really tough on a family life, so we made the sort of a family based decision to go back into the private sector. And I found myself going back to Prudential Financial because at that time they were taking the company public.

Tom Hendry: They had a brand new CEO and I was like, wow, that could be a lot of fun. Take a $30 billion mutual insurance company to the public sector. And that was great experience. And while I was at Prudential, I had the opportunity to move around. I went back into the A LM business. Our asset liability management.

Tom Hendry: I went to then from there to their what’s now called PGM, which is their global investment management business. Then had an opportunity to work on a big m and a trade for Prudential, bought Cigna’s retirement services business, and as a result of that, I joined that business. And began to specialize in what’s now called pension risk transfer.

Tom Hendry: So Mike, it was interesting while I was in that business, so I was no longer in finance, I went into the business, we did what were called longevity swap trades with firms in the uk, right? So the UK A was going through a, what I’ll call privatization of the pension businesses that were on public balance sheets.

Tom Hendry: And the way they approached it were they looked for an investment solution and then somebody to take the longevity risk associated with pension plans. So we underwrote those types of trades while while, as well as focusing on the US market, which was a little different. So that was really fascinating.

Tom Hendry: Then I made the career decision to get back into finance, right, and join Prudential’s treasurer department. I became the treasurer of their life insurance businesses doing capital related transactions, as well as partnering with the business on trying to improve the return on equity associated with their operations.

Mike Richards: You touched on the fact you said, now I understand this. Some of the first roles I ever recruited when I got into. Treasury recruitment was right. We need a head of a LM Asset liability management, which is the internal resources of a bank of group risk. And you’re looking at that bank or insurers company.

Mike Richards: And then, so that’s like the treasury department. And then people said, do you do banking? We do. I do some A LM and group treasurers. But you’d gone into the group treasury of the life insurance or the insurance group. What was that like for you? That was your first mainstream treasury role as such. What was it like then?

Tom Hendry: It was really great. Like they brought me in to again, sort of look at the balance sheet and the capital position and say, we’re try because the business is trying to increase their return on capital, right? Yeah. So is there a way you could free up capital or look at reinsurance transactions or other types of structures that get capital relief, um, and transfer some of that risk?

Tom Hendry: So I spent a lot of time looking at opportunities, partnering with banks and structuring deals to, to do that aspect of it. Um,

Mike Richards: what was treasury like at the time? Was there, were they well established or were you new or what was it like?

Tom Hendry: Yeah, it was, well, Prudential was stolen. Its early years of sort of being a public company and attacking the capital and the balance sheet from an efficiency perspective.

Tom Hendry: So they brought in some people like myself. Yeah. To really be creative. To think outside of the box. He wanted to go beyond what would, what had been traditionally treasury operations and the mainstream cash movement, negotiating lending facilities and the like to doing something a little bit more creative and bring in new ideas and a willingness to partner.

Tom Hendry: So it it, it really evolved from. I’ll say a cost center to what we we’d call a profit center.

Mike Richards: Yeah,

Tom Hendry: you brought in a commercial orientation, Mike, is some of the terms I like to use as opposed to an internal orientation. Yeah,

Mike Richards: making profit in that way. And as you say, it’s a commercial operation rather than just Right.

Mike Richards: Save cash, hand the money off to treasury, they invest it. Thanks very much. And that’s it. Fire and forget is that? Yeah. And then how did your role then evolve? ’cause again, when I looked at my notes, it sort of, it did change. It wasn’t just do treasury. That’s it.

Tom Hendry: So I had the opportunity then to come to New York Life.

Tom Hendry: Yeah. To be the treasurer of the entire enterprise. And the role, at least here at New York Life was much more expansive. Yes, you were the treasurer of the company. We’re a mutual company, so we don’t have a traditional investor relations group. A public company has when you deal with analysts, right? So the treasurer here, we also had an IR hat for investor relations.

Tom Hendry: I ran the company’s corporate financial planning and strategy teams in addition to the treasury operations. So it was a really fulsome job that had, quite frankly, over my close to 13 years here, Mike has continued to change. Like I just recently in the last. 18 months picked up the asset liability management function as well.

Tom Hendry: Yeah. Which used to be kind of a separate and distinct, but there’s a natural home under the treasurer’s organization to do all of those things, so it’s really been a very enriching job

Mike Richards: then you, part of that role, as you and I talked about in our pre-call, is handling relationships, just as you say, with rating agencies, with regulators.

Mike Richards: Coming at it from different angles as much as anything that’s how do you approach those? Let’s separate them for a moment. What are your conversations like with, I know the rating agents might watch this, so we’ve gotta be careful, we would regulate, but you know, how do you approach those conversations when the market’s going all over the place and everything else?

Mike Richards: And then we’ll do the regulator bit as well, which, whichever order you want to take in.

Tom Hendry: Sure. There, there are some similar themes, Mike, in sort of answering that question. And quite frankly, it even extends to businesses. It’s just, it is managing like a good open lines of communication, right? Do you, you really gotta establish trust with these partners, whether it’s the regulators, the rating agencies, the banks, or anybody else.

Tom Hendry: Each one’s got a different orientation, so you really just need to understand where they’re coming from. What they’re interested in, what their role is, and it’s engaging them proactively, right? Nobody wants regulators and rating agencies don’t want to be surprised.

Mike Richards: No surprise, they’re

Tom Hendry: considered insiders, so you can share material, non-public information.

Tom Hendry: With these groups. Right. So establishing deep relationships, always picking up the phone. They’ll pick up the phone when I call them, and I always make a a point of picking up the phone when they call me. Right. Because it’s great. It’s easy when times are smooth dealing with both those. But when you’re in turbulent markets, they’ve got a lot of questions.

Tom Hendry: Right, because they’re concerned about your rating. Yeah. So we want to be able to engage proactively. I’ll, I’ll lay whatever concerns that they might have regarding our balance sheet or our business operating model and how we’re sort of working. That is the key to managing those two relationships. And on the flip side, oh, go ahead.

Tom Hendry: You go ahead. Oh, no go. No, you go ahead. I was gonna say, on the flip side, dealing with the banks is a little bit different, right? They’re there to help us, but they’re also trying to make profits at the same time. Yeah. But again, we have a need to engage. They extend credit to us. Which is very important.

Tom Hendry: And then they bring certain expertise when we’re looking to do certain types of transactions.

Mike Richards: And going back to that conversation piece with the regulators with ratings and stuff, someone’s new to their role, they’ve walked in the door, they’re like, they’re just being handled. Maybe they’ve handled it at previous companies and things like that.

Mike Richards: What questions do you need to prepare for? What’s your checklist, if you like, of Right. This is what they’re gonna ask first, is it liquidity? I know that you, you’re talking about that later on today, but what are you getting ready for?

Tom Hendry: Yeah. Usually it does come down to what, I’ll use a banking term. Yep.

Tom Hendry: They’re concerned about safety and soundness, right. Of the insurance industry. Having dealt with the regulators for a long time, had an idea of what sort of. Their hot points are, they wanna make sure that we have a strong balance sheet, that we are gonna be there comfortably to be able to make good on the promises that we’re underwriting both in the near term and in the long term.

Tom Hendry: And that we have sufficient for the regulators, that we have sufficient reserves and reserves in an insurance company are, are the liabilities on the balance sheet that are sufficient to back the obligation that I’m making ’cause. Just again, for your audience, we are writing promises, some that are three and five year in nature, but some of them are 30 and 40 years out into the future.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Tom Hendry: Right. And we want to, they wanna make sure we’re gonna be around to make that payment in 40 years. So it’s liquidity, it’s capital adequacy. It’s what’s going on in my investment portfolio. What sort of risks are you taking? How are you mitigating those risks? Those are the things that they’ll engage on.

Tom Hendry: And then they’re gonna ask questions about, do you stress your balance sheet to ensure that you can survive certain scenarios? And that’s one of the critical underpinnings. Of some of our risk managements, and that’s what they’re interested in. And quite frankly, the regulators as well as the rating agencies are both interested in those two types of things.

Tom Hendry: And

Mike Richards: has that been the, this was going nicely segues into, has that been the biggest learning for yourself or what’s been the learning curve? ’cause you had this experience, you went out, then you came back in and you were given the number one. What’s been the learning curve for you? Again, someone’s listening today, their experienced treasurer.

Mike Richards: Strap yourself in. This is the stuff you’ve gotta get ready for.

Tom Hendry: So Mike, I would say over my 30 plus year career. Yeah. The first 20 of it were related to investments, right? So when I started covering Prudential, the insurance businesses, Mike, I had to learn what these insurance products were and learn sort of the reserves.

Tom Hendry: So, so Mike, I spent a ton of time with the actuaries who really understand these types of things. To understand what are the features that we were writing? How do these things play out in the long term? But fundamentally, one of the things that’s helped is with that investment career, everything can be boiled down to a series of cash flows.

Tom Hendry: My and understanding the cash flows and the variability of these cash flows really help you understand the business. The liabilities. But to May, maybe to put a finer point on the question yet, you have to spend time learning it. You have to go to school on the subject matter.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Tom Hendry: And then once you learn it, you can engage fluently on the topic.

Tom Hendry: But that takes time and energy and effort. Right. Which is kind At some point we’ll talk about sort of. Words of advice or career type things, orientation, but that that lifelong learning approach, intellectual curiosity, are some of the things that I think separate individuals, a successful career trajectory.

Tom Hendry: I. Versus ones that don’t.

Mike Richards: Back to that. Does that answer

Tom Hendry: your question?

Mike Richards: It’s brilliant answer. That’s what I’m seeing here and absorbing it. That’s why I’ve done 370 of these things. Each one has been different, but also every time you walk away with nuggets, just with little bits of gold from different treasures.

Mike Richards: Now with yourself as well, this is one of the things. And we had Dana La hold on the show, great treasurer from nasdaq, and I remember she has a number of coaches that help her and she’s talked about openly on the show. Then she was in New York where we did our live event a year and a half ago or whatever, and, and been back.

Mike Richards: One of the key things she talked about was managing upwards and herself and how she presents herself for, as you say, to different parties with yourself. How has that been? Because you, you are an, as you say, you are an experienced treasury. You are used to a lot of these things. But again, for someone else that’s perhaps not, what should they prepare for or what are the tips you give there?

Tom Hendry: Sure. I would start with always with saying, know your audience. Right? Right. So whether you’re dealing with the board of directors or one of the subcommittees that you might have to report to, or the senior management of the firm understand what their sort of. As it relates to the board, what’s their fiduciary obligation?

Tom Hendry: How are they gonna approach this? What do you need to tell them in order for them to be able to do their job effectively? You approach the C-suite the exact same way, right? And then you approach, I approach my peers, CFOs of the businesses in a similar way. Know the audience. What are they interested in?

Tom Hendry: How can you help them? And then how do you manage the organization writ large? Your direct reports down into the organization and you have to tailor your, I’m not gonna say communication style, but you have to tailor the level of content and how you’re delivering the message differently. Sometimes with the board, you’re in education mode because Right, you’ve got a group of individuals who are in.

Tom Hendry: They’re engaging with the company six times a year versus the C-suite who really know the business.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Tom Hendry: And then if you have to toggle down, whereas part of your role as leader is teacher, you have to educate your organization on certain things and bring them along. So, so before you walk into those forms, knowing that audience makes all the difference.

Tom Hendry: And without, are there any missteps or any places

Mike Richards: you’ve not gone wrong, but you’ve gone a direction and then thought afterwards, oh yeah, I should have gone this way, or that would’ve been better?

Tom Hendry: Yeah, I, listen, I’ve had times where I’ve thought there was a general level of understanding of a subject matter and gone too fast.

Tom Hendry: Yeah. But you know, you can, I’m not gonna say as a, uh, someone delivering a message, there’s two forms of feedback. And there’s the overt feedback where someone stops you and tells you like, listen, Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re stogging, gimme the 1 0 1.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Tom Hendry: Or you’re looking at them and their eyes are just, they’re lost.

Tom Hendry: So you’ve gotta be able to read those cues. So listen, I’ve, everybody sort of made those mistakes. I’ve made those. And, uh, as well as sort of, uh, same thing as I’m sort of educating people. But you try to pick up on it. And if you don’t, you try to invite those questions along the way. So,

Mike Richards: and we’ll soon we’ll get to the future Treasury, but I don’t want to do go there yet.

Mike Richards: What I wanna do is go back to. Think back over your treasury career, how has it evolved sort of thing. And certainly for me, when I first started in treasury, I think was its own worst one stage pushed itself in the corner. Look, we’re the specialist, look at us. And then it’s like been battling its way back out.

Mike Richards: And I’ve talked about that a number of times. It’s like wanna be part of the mainstream of finance, which I think it’s done now and it’s certainly much better than it used to be. What have you seen over your time?

Tom Hendry: Yeah, my, that’s exactly what I have seen. It has gone from. An area that had been at times thought about more as a back office type operation necessary to a value added business partner for the enterprise.

Tom Hendry: Part of the strategic conversation, which is we’re required a retooling of some of the skill sets associated with it. And quite frankly, that journey, Mike has made it a much. More enriching job and role and invited a whole host of new people into the career who probably never thought of it that way, and that’s just what I’ll call the approach to treasury.

Tom Hendry: Then if you overlay that technology advancements right? The capital market solutions, right? Sophisticated solutions which have, which again, have added value, but have required a stepping up of the, of the skill sets of the treasurer of the company and the treasurer staff that operates the function on behalf of the company.

Tom Hendry: And I don’t see that slowing down at all. Which is one of the reasons why people have to keep up to what’s going on in the world, in the industry, right? Because there’s a couple functions. While I focused a lot on the value add and strategic aspect of treasury, there is also a very important, what I, I’ll call stewardship or risk manage role that you have on behalf of if you’re at a public companies, your shareholders.

Tom Hendry: Or afraid in mutual companies like ours are policy holders. They’re counting on me to execute my job in a prudent fashion where we’re not taking undue risks.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Tom Hendry: Yeah.

Mike Richards: And with skill sets as well. Where have you seen the evolution of that? I just wanted to hone in. Again, I’ve seen it firsthand when I’m recruiting, when I’m hiring, and the things I’m asked for now are very different to like, well, five years ago, but how have you seen that from your position as the trader?

Tom Hendry: Yeah. We’re looking for talent that can do multiple things. Right. I’m gonna come back to, do people have a good understanding of business, right? Are they commercial, commercially oriented? Are they capable of doing a bunch of different things and learning? Those are the foundational skills that we are looking for when we’re hiring into organization.

Tom Hendry: I don’t want somebody who’s just coming in to do wire transfers or reconcile bank accounts, Mike. We can do a lot of that in an automated fashion these days and much more of it’s getting automated as we go further, I want people who can learn to read a balance sheet that, but they can do lots of different things, right?

Tom Hendry: So multiple tools. Willing to learn things, but again, partner and then the ability to work with others and partner Mike is a really important skill. Yeah. So,

Mike Richards: and you and I spoke just briefly before, and we talked about it the other day, that technology marches and it doesn’t slow down if anything accelerates.

Mike Richards: And you’re probably getting even yourself, I’m getting deluged with ai, this ai, this technology, this machine learning this, all the different areas. People talk about, it’s how you use them, not actually not gonna be replaced by them. Although some of the processes will be replaced by that. You touched on it before that when people are hiring, they need to think about this.

Mike Richards: How are you guys doing it and what are you thinking externally as well?

Tom Hendry: Yeah, so New York Life, like a lot of companies, were trying to figure this out, right? It is. We know. It is going to be very impactful and work five years from now is gonna be dramatically different than it is today. So we’re in, I’m gonna say we’re embracing AI as opposed to, we’re not trying to be scared of it.

Tom Hendry: Right? And we’re trying to figure out good use cases for it. And we’re, and as a result of that, we’re saying I wanna empower all levels of the organization, including myself to come in. And try to do things every day that I didn’t do with AI before. Can I do it with AI today? Right. But Mike, exploration and giving people time, space, and training to do that.

Tom Hendry: And if we talk in a year from now, I bet you I would’ve a bunch of test cases where we’re seeing good use for it, right.

Mike Richards: And it’s also, it was, it was only what, two, three years old? It was like, yeah, it appeared and it was like suddenly everyone’s doing it. And then I did an episode for an association where we took lots of the AI snippets from lots of previous podcasts, and it was, it was becoming more and more prevalent, and now we talk about it on every episode.

Mike Richards: But we just, it’s not the be all and end all. It’s an element just as it has been with treasures and exposure management and all the other things. But when we did this session, and I, the funny bit was there was one of the guys there who said, I don’t believe in it. I think this is it. And I’m thinking, good luck with that.

Mike Richards: Yeah. And actually I was thinking if you are just gonna be a naysayer that you’ve gotta, but treasurers generally like yourself are great translators and users of these tools. And it seems like, as you say, you are definitely seeing the benefit.

Tom Hendry: Yeah, I, one, one thing I will share though is like I am an optimist at heart.

Mike Richards: Yep.

Tom Hendry: So I’m looking for the positive in it. Right. And how can we use it being conscious of. Where can it be problematic? We know these things can hallucinate if you’re not doing it, but understanding the risks, but embracing the power of it. And Mike, I’ll tell you this, if, if you have to do that to survive because your peers are gonna go straight past you.

Tom Hendry: Yeah. If you just play the wait and see game, and that’s gonna be a bad place for some public to be because it’s gonna be hard to catch up.

Mike Richards: And you’ve touched on it a little bit overall, and I want to do this before we get towards the end of the show, but the skills that you had before and if you like, what do you think that you’ve seen a difference with tomorrow’s treasurer?

Mike Richards: That there weren’t even on the radar when you’ve started out, if you like, now you’re looking at this, we’ve touched on technology that’s obviously a key one. Other areas I’ve certainly seen that treasurers, it was never about communication. It was less of, are you technically strong and everything else.

Mike Richards: Now it’s moved further and further up the job description. Can you exactly as you said about, can you talk to your shareholders? Can you talk to the rating agencies that used to be about fifth on the list, and it was third, and now it’s usually first or second, but I’m recruiting at the senior level For yourself, what would you say?

Tom Hendry: Yeah, I, I, I think you are a hundred percent on point at the most senior office of the Treasury organization. I. Your ability to communicate effectively across lots of different audiences within the company. The other skill at Mike that I would put at a very high level, the key to success is your ability to partner right with business leaders and meet them where they are.

Tom Hendry: This is where if you’re gonna walk again, I’m gonna talk to the head of the insurance business, so the head of the annuities business. They wanna know that I know their business. I know how they make money, I know how they distribute their products. I know what their pain points are and how can treasury bring value to their organization?

Tom Hendry: How can it, how can we make their products more competitive in the marketplace Now I can’t make their operations and their servicing more competitive. But we can deliver things to their investment portfolio that help them win business every day. So that is another really critical function, and I’ll do that in conjunction with the business unit CFOs.

Tom Hendry: So communication, business understanding, and business partnership. If you want to be an effective treasurer at a Fortune 100 company. You have to have those in spades. Now, whether I have them or not is somebody else to decide, but

Mike Richards: I’ve gotta say, I think you’re doing pretty well. We’ve got it here on the, we’ve got it on tape, so I think you, yeah, you’re doing pretty well now, so it’s fine.

Mike Richards: So

Tom Hendry: thank you.

Mike Richards: That’s great. Okay, I know you’re off to speaking session soon. So what I wanted to do was, as I talked about, we’ll put your LinkedIn details on the show notes, but before we do that, so with yourself. Advice for those guys, and actually we’ll probably split up three ways. So junior guys, getting into this, we have those listeners that are getting their CTP credits and wanting to learn and things like that.

Mike Richards: They’re the mid-levels and then the more senior, some of your peers, how would you give sort of advice to each of those groups, if you like, or how you’ve been thinking about a few days?

Tom Hendry: Yeah, let me sort of maybe just, I’m gonna bundle a little bit of the early career and mid career people today. I’m gonna start off.

Tom Hendry: And you shared something in a prior call, Mike, that really resonated with me. But it’s, you own your own career, right? You’ve gotta, you’ve gotta take it by the reins and manage it actively. No one’s gonna do it for you. Yeah, right. If you don’t do that, you’re just gonna meander through your career life, be open to doing different things in your career.

Tom Hendry: The treasury function for some deliver on some of the skills that I shared earlier. I worked in a lot of jobs in a lot of places. I pretty much, if somebody asked me to go do something, I said, yes. Yeah, right. And I looked for the good in those roles. Some of them weren’t the sexiest roles or the most exciting, but foundationally, they built a bet at rock that.

Tom Hendry: Has helped my career trajectory in the long run. So, and you’re in it for the long game. You’re not playing the short game, you’re playing the long game. Right? Keep those things in mind and it’ll help. Right. And then lastly, I would say bring a positive orientation to everything you do. People want to be around people with positive energy.

Tom Hendry: Not negative energy and solutions oriented, you problem solve, help people solve their problems as well as your own. That’s my advice, sort of for the entry and sort of mid-level. At the higher level, it’s investing. Be commercial, be business oriented. Do you work? Understand your audience. Understand what businesses your company is in.

Tom Hendry: How it makes money, how it distributes products, how it prices, products, how it manufactures its products. Know those things because then you can execute your job or your craft with much more authority and, and ultimately if you do those things, you’re gonna earn the respect of the business leaders.

Tom Hendry: Michael is, I’ll tell you a funny side story. I just, I was just out a meeting. I was in the room, and I’m gonna say the traditional finance people, the business unit, CFO or company CF, we were all sitting on one side of the table and the business guys were on the other side. And one of the business guys looked at me and said, Tom, what are you sitting over there for?

Tom Hendry: And the CFO of the business said, well, this Han’s part of the finance organization. He’s like, no, he is not. He’s part of the business. And I was like, wow, that, that just made me feel really good. Anyway, so if you can get somebody to say that on the business side. You’re doing okay. So, yeah,

Mike Richards: that’s the aim. I think that’s great and we’ll, we’re gonna put a link to Emily Howell in the show notes.

Mike Richards: Be the CEO of your own treasury career. I want to, I wanna own that myself. I wanna take it by Ka, you know, she, she did that as well. But no, as you say with your story, if you can be sitting, maybe if it’s a big table or that you are sitting at the end, not the chair members, but you know, between the two of them, you said, look, I’ll help you guys, let’s get you guys together.

Mike Richards: I. That’s a great place to be.

Tom Hendry: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, that’s where you add value, Mike,

Mike Richards: at the end of the day, Tom, amazing. Thank you. I knew it would be like this. Thank you very much for your time, sir. And again, you shouldn’t have addressed that for the show, but I’m glad I’m gonna make that address code for the future that people have to get a soon and tie on.

Mike Richards: I mean, that’s it. It’s great.

Tom Hendry: Let’s try to set a standard over here.

Mike Richards: Oh, exactly. I love it. Thank you very much, sir. Thanks. It’s been a wonderful experience. Thanks for your time. Thank you, sir. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode as much as I did Now, please make sure you are subscribed on Spotify, apple Podcast or wherever you listen, so you never miss an episode.

Mike Richards: If for on Apple Podcast, tap that five star review helps more treasury professionals find us than join the conversation. And maybe you’re thinking about studying a CTP or fp and a certification, but we partnered with a FP to offer $150 off both the study platform and the exam fee. You grab the codes@treasuryrecruitment.com slash partners, or there’s a link in the show notes.

Mike Richards: Oh, and if you’re heading to a FP in Boston this October, we’ve got $150 off your conference ticket, too. Same page. Treasure gruman.com/partners. That’s it for this week. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time.