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

Mike Richards, CEO, The Treasury Recruitment Company: This week’s guest is Bert Jameson, Vice President and Corporate Treasurer, Ingersoll Rand. Before we get into the full interview, here’s a couple of short clips that give you a flavor of what we covered in today’s podcast.

Bert Jameson, Vice President and Corporate Treasurer at Ingersoll Rand: I asked him if I would have an opportunity to apply for that. Most of the people in this position have 10 years of experience.

Bert Jameson: They have an MBA, and while I think you’re a great person, you don’t quite have the qualifications yet, and so it was. Hard for me to hear that, but I think it was great for me to hear that as well because it gave me a path forward on what I needed to do. I always like to tell my team that, look, funding an m and a deal at closing is a little bit of a thankless job.

Bert Jameson: I’m gonna thank you and I’m gonna tell you I really appreciate it. But it’s one of these things that if everything goes well, no one knows if, if something goes wrong. Everybody knows, and it goes all the way to the CO of the company. So we have to be 100% correct every single time. We can’t get that loan.

Bert Jameson: And so that’s one of the other parts. So the playbook on there that we talk about is just, look, our ability to execute at a high level is absolutely critical in all those different ways.

Mike Richards: 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 Bert Jameson, the Vice President and Corporate Treasurer at Ingersoll Rand.  Ingersoll Rand are a global provider of a mission critical flow creation and life science and industrial solutions driven by an entrepreneurial spirit and ownership mindset. They’re dedicated to making life better for their employees, customers, shareholders, and the planet.

Mike Richards: But I’m gonna get Bert to explain a little bit more about the company later on in the show. Bert, if you would, we were just talking before the show. Take us through your career, how you first started finance, then treasury, and obviously, well, you looked at tax, but then you came back out of that Bert to you.

Bert Jameson: Thank you, Mike. Pleasure. Yeah, so I started my career in accounting, as you mentioned, and kind of specifically in the tax area, and spent quite a few years in that accounting and tax area. And, but I kinda recognized early on that I had a passion for financial markets. At first, I thought I wanted to be a trader and actually get on a trading desk.

Bert Jameson: But I’ll talk about that later, that I realized after getting a little bit of taste of that, that I was not trader material, but I recognized that I wanted to get into financial markets. And at the time I was very young, early in my career, worked at Cargill, actually got on the phone and called the assistant treasurer of Cargill.

Bert Jameson: Didn’t really have any sort of sense of any hierarchy or anything like that. Yeah, he’s very gracious to have lunch with me. We had a really great discussion. He actually had an opening in his area, which was select group of advisors that worked with the treasurer and the CFO of Cargill, and I asked him if I would have an opportunity to apply for that.

Bert Jameson: Most of the people in this position have 10 years of experience. They have an MBA, and while I think you’re a great person, you don’t quite have the qualifications yet. And so it was. Hard for me to hear that, but I think it was great for me to hear that as well, because it gave me a path forward on what I needed to do.

Bert Jameson: So I went back to school, went back to grad school, and got my MBA, eventually got an opportunity to work in treasury in the accounting area. But it got my foot in the door and worked in the accounting area for a couple of years, and after those couple of years, they, and

Mike Richards: this, can you explain who Cargill are for?

Mike Richards: This is, most people know, but in case they don’t. Yeah. Global. Yeah.

Bert Jameson: Cargill is one of the largest could. I mean, they kind of flip flop between being the largest and second largest in the world. They are really. A company that, I won’t even say it’s an egg company because it’s so much more than that. They essentially are involved in anything that kind of gets the kitchen table.

Bert Jameson: To give a simple example, if you sat down to a dinner table with your family and you looked on there, almost everything on that table, cargo probably touched, whether it was the vegetables that you have on there or the corn syrup that goes into any of the sodas. Or anything else that you’d have on the table, your meat that you have on the table.

Bert Jameson: And so Cargill is a extremely large global private company. At the time I was there, they had about 70 business units. I’m not sure how many business units they have now. Just in a lot of different businesses, whether it’s food businesses or great origination or trading businesses or risk management businesses, they were involved in a lot of different areas, which for somebody like me being young.

Bert Jameson: Great opportunity to be able to move around within Cargill to a lot of different areas and get

Mike Richards: some great exposure. And you came in for accounting there, but you then got into treasury, given it was a global company. What was that like for you? Again, relatively early in your career, but you were supervising a couple of accountants.

Mike Richards: Truly diverse global company. It was quite unusual as well, quite early on in your career.

Bert Jameson: Yeah, it was. And to be honest, it’s a little overwhelming too because you think of something that’s global and it’s just this massive open space that you have, and it can be a little bit overwhelming. But I had some great mentors and coaches within the team that.

Bert Jameson: That helped me in my career. And the controller at the time, she really viewed the treasury accounting team as a true global team and wanted people to go and travel to other locations, uh, to be able to experience that. And so we had hubs in Minneapolis, we had HUB in Singapore. We had a hub in Cobham, England.

Bert Jameson: And so I got an opportunity to go over to Cobham for a week, a couple of different times. To really just sit with the team and to just understand because each one of the teams did something a little bit different. The long-term debt was kind of managed in the us The short-term debt and commercial paper program was managed more in, in amea, in Colum.

Bert Jameson: And so getting a chance to go over there and just meet with the team, sit with them and really understand what they do, help me understand what we do globally as a team versus just kind of what I was doing specifically in the us.

Mike Richards: Then you, your career at Cargill, which a lot of people stay in accounting for a number of years and do that, but you then, you know, actually physically moved it into corporate treasury advisory, and then talk us through that.

Mike Richards: Because again, you and I spoke about the GE for instance, when you go to GE, you tend to move around a lot. You said geography wise, you didn’t move so much, but you certainly moved up elevated roles. So talk us through that and how that came about.

Bert Jameson: Yeah. And so the role that I got to out of accounting was, yeah, kind of that corporate treasury advisory role, and that was something that I talked about, the assistant treasurer about a while ago, went back to school, did my MBA, and then there was an opening in that group.

Bert Jameson: And so I was fortunate to get an opportunity to be a part of that group. And for me, it was something that I had been really looking forward to for a long time because in that team. You worked on complex topics like weighted average cost capital. You looked at different financing arrangements for the businesses, and so like one example, one of our businesses were looking at barges and they were trying to decide should we buy our fleet of barges?

Bert Jameson: Should we lease our fleet of barges? Should we do synthetic leases? Just how should we finance this group of barges? And so we would work. That’s one example of us working with the business unit president and the finance leaders. To be able to help them manage their fleet. Another part of the team we were looking at was our salt business.

Bert Jameson: They were potentially looking at buying and building a pipeline to go from where they were mining themselves to where it was eventually going to be used, and did it make sense to buy, build, lease this pipeline. And so doing all the analysis there and working with the businesses. And then the other thing that we did is the valuation cargo’s a private company, but yeah, we still did the valuation for the esop, and so that was a really fun and exciting experience and just how to value a company, like how do you look at it, whether you’re doing it discounting cash flow, whether you’re looking at it through a multiples analysis, but really kind of doing kind of more of an investment banker type approach with doing valuation work.

Bert Jameson: Then the other big thing that we did is just the back office kind of documentation work for all the bond issuances. So at this time in my career, I hadn’t done a bond issuance, but I got an opportunity to essentially learn the backbone of it, how you do the documentation, how you put it together, how you do the scheduling and the timing from when you start to, when you actually do the bond issuance, there’s about a four to six week, you know, lead time before you can actually do the bond issuance.

Bert Jameson: And so it was a. Great experience there, really learning more about that.

Mike Richards: And when you did that, you achieved like record low coupons and you got recognition within the company. What were the biggest challenges, maybe behind the scenes or what did that teach you about the strategy of funding and stuff?

Mike Richards: Because again, you’ve come from accounting through to this, now you’re more, as you say, funding, corporate financing. That’s quite a shift as well.

Bert Jameson: Yeah, it is. And I’d say honestly at that point I wasn’t getting as involved in the strategy part of funding at that point yet. But what it did help me really understand is just what you need to do to get yourself prepared as a company to be able to do a dement from.

Bert Jameson: When you do build your strategy and you decide, alright, we’re gonna go either refinance a piece of debt, or we’re gonna put a new piece of debt on. You have to then get everything coordinated to understand who your bankers are gonna be, who your leads are gonna be, and kind of looking at your lead tables, and I’m sure relationship banks that you have and who’s gonna participate in there.

Bert Jameson: And then once you decide that you got to get your lawyers together and get everybody on the kick-off calls and then get the documentation going, and then everything’s kind of moves forward from there. But it gave me an opportunity to really understand that process in detail, which then prepared me for.

Bert Jameson: My next role where I did actually sit on. At the farming desk and did issue some long-term debt and be able to get involved in some of the derivatives trading that the team was doing, which is where I kind of said earlier in the podcast here that I thought I wanted to be a trader and then I got to do a little bit of the trading there and realize that don’t quite have the stomach for it.

Bert Jameson: It was great, great opportunity for me to learn, which is one of the things I would say cargo was great for was learning, teaching, coaching. If you had the desire. You had the capabilities and the skillset. Cargo gave you that opportunity and they definitely gave it to me.

Mike Richards: And on the other podcasts, I’ve sometimes talked about treasurers trying to get closer to the business.

Mike Richards: And I know that you and I have spoken, I’ve spoken to other people that I’ve never got. But you really, treasury really is part of the business there already from day one. How, where does that ethos come from? Or is it something you guys still had to work for, or was it actually you’re part of that team from day one?

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

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

Bert Jameson: Yeah, so on the trading desk I got an opportunity.

Bert Jameson: There was somebody that was on maternity loom, so I got an opportunity to. Be able to sit on the desk. These treasury individuals would go out and actually start working on the strategy. If you’re gonna have your debt portfolio. Taking a look at ED average maturity and understanding, are you gonna issue short-term debt?

Bert Jameson: You issue long-term debt, fixed floating US dollar, non-US dollar, and does it qualify for net investment, hedge accounting, and really kind of getting into all of that. Different type of activity than I had done previously, which for me, it was exciting, eye-opening, nerve wracking because when you’re actually issuing the long-term debt, you’re in the market.

Bert Jameson: And even though I wasn’t the leader at that time, we had managers, so I was just an analyst on the team with the managers that were kind of leading in. And so I was participating in it. But we all wanted to be successful. We wanted to have Cargill be out in the market and have successful issuances because that was Cargill treasury team.

Bert Jameson: I still think this today, I’m probably biased, but they were the gold standard. Yeah. And I was really fortunate to be a part of a lot of different teams and their, and just their approach to how you do a debt issuance. Their approach to how you manage the debt portfolio with derivative overlays to be able to swap your debt from fixed to floating or floating to fixed.

Bert Jameson: Or to be able to do cross currency swaps if you’re not doing a natural issuance in a currency or direct issuance in a currency, who I am today and the treasurer that I am today. And so it was a great opportunity for me to really dive head first and to really learn a lot of complex topics. We, at the time, we did a debt exchange, which is different than just doing a normal ion.

Bert Jameson: You’re essentially exchanging. Debt that’s out in the market for new debt. And so going through the tender process that we did and actually doing a new debt issue at the same time was really fun and exciting analysis. Something new that I learned with working with the banks. And it was at the time of the largest offering that Cargill had done cause it was, I think it was with over a billion dollars.

Bert Jameson: So there was a significant activity that we did and it was just fun to be a part of it.

Mike Richards: And then you moved through these sort of strategy m and a roles, and then you knew, so you were in finance and then you came back to treasury, maybe talk us through that.

Bert Jameson: Yeah, so got an opportunity within Cargill as well, left treasury and went into the enterprise business development team.

Bert Jameson: And in that team they were. I’ll call it investment bankers for the food businesses. And so Cargill had a bigger group called SBD or a strategy business development group, and they did it kind of for all the big acquisition deals and for some of the other businesses that Cargill had. But this enterprise development team was specifically for the food businesses.

Bert Jameson: So I’ve got an opportunity there to work on strategy and acquisitions. And so our team would work with the businesses if they wanted to develop a new product or if they wanted to go into new, a new part of the world, new region in the world, we would work with them on the strategy to understand, okay, what?

Bert Jameson: What is their business today? What do they want their business to be in the future? Looking at the total addressable market, looking at kinda the opportunity that they potentially have there, doing all the analysis around it, and what that did is really helped Cargill leadership. Has the business earned the right to grow or to take on this new strategy?

Bert Jameson: And so it was a fantastic opportunity for me to really get into the strategy side of things because I hadn’t had any experience prior to that. The team also worked on acquisitions, and so we, again, acting as kind of like the investment bank. We did everything. So we helped the business do either a letter of intent or a memo of understanding with the target to be able to say, Hey, we want to engage in a transaction with you.

Bert Jameson: We would do prelim due diligence, detailed due diligence, critical issues list. We do the valuation work. On the particular target to understand what we see the value is and how much we should purchase the company for, put together the negotiation strategy. What is your walkaway? Price or walkaway considerations that you have for this particular acquisition, all the way to closing.

Bert Jameson: And so it was another fantastic opportunity that I got to be able to see something that not a lot of people get to see unless you go work in an investment bank to be able to see an acquisition start to finish.

Mike Richards: It’s un unusual as you say. It sort of, when I’ve talked to people like that, they’ve as exactly as you say, you’ve gone treasury, oh, I’m gonna work for an investment bank.

Mike Richards: See a lot of the deals, and you get that a lot. When I talk to treasurers, sometimes in Europe in particular, maybe they’ve started in banking, gone into treasury, gone back into banking, and then they bounced back after they’ve done this. But you’re under that Cargill banner, but you did a number of years at Cargill and then what came next?

Mike Richards: Or talk us through the next moves.

Bert Jameson: Yeah, so after Cargill got an opportunity to go work for a brand that I actually personally enjoyed, Buffalo Wild News, I love it too, wing, and they’ll watch sporting events and have some wins. And so had met with the CFO at the time and they were looking for someone to kind of come in and do kinda more cash management.

Bert Jameson: And I told them that if you want somebody that can come in. Really kind of build a treasury organization. Because at the time they had a few people, a few accountants that were doing cash management work, but there wasn’t a treasury team. Yeah. And I told them, I said, look. If you gimme a chance, I will build you a treasury team

Mike Richards: ethos.

Bert Jameson: Exactly. So my three pillars of treasury, which is cash management and treasury operations is one funding and how you fund the organization is the other. And then the corporate finance is the third pillar. Corporate finance is really just in my opinion, how are you gonna help the organization best spend their next incremental dollar?

Bert Jameson: And so that’s where Ultimate brought me on the organization. And at the time, Buffalo Wild Wings had no debt on the books and so. What I really spent a lot of my time in the beginning on was just really putting together a capital structure because they were a public company. They were doing no dividends, no shared purchase, no debt on the books.

Bert Jameson: Activist investor can see that and see that’s a really good target for financial engineering. We spent the time that I had over there really putting together evolving credit facility to be able to go out, do some shared purchase and really get the capital structure right size. And it was a great opportunity on just really building the treasury organization from the ground up, starting from scratch.

Bert Jameson: And again, it was. Scary. A little overwhelming because you’re building something from nothing. But it was a

Mike Richards: fantastic experience. So you’ve been in food businesses and obviously Cargill over all of that and things gone into Buffalo Wild Wings and then Winnebagos, and talk us through that. What was the shift like for you again in terms of industry maybe as well, different drivers, did you think?

Bert Jameson: Yeah, it was very interesting being in the restaurant business at Buffalo Wild Wings. It was discretionary spend. But it wasn’t as discretionary as RVs and Winnebago. Right. Because when I started there, they had kinda told me that, look, in our industry, there isn’t a gradual decline. It’s either the economy is doing well and people are buying RVs, or the economy isn’t doing well and people just stop buying RVs.

Bert Jameson: And it was a new experience for me and it was one that was very unique in the sense that when I came there, I took on the role of treasurer, but I also had the responsibility for the tax team at Winnebago. And so when I started as the treasurer, pretty much within like the first week, I also got an opportunity to look at the pitch book for Chris Craft.

Bert Jameson: And so I was responsible for treasury, I was responsible for tax. Then they found out that I had this strategy and m and a background from Cargill and that I basically was the investment banker kind of with doing all the valuation work and stuff. So they handed me the pitch book and said, Hey, in addition to your roles that you have, how about you do the valuation work on Chris Craft?

Bert Jameson: Give it back to C-F-O-C-E-O. It’s presented to the board and let’s try to figure out if this is something we wanna go after and go buy Winne Beg ultimately did buy Chris Graft. It was a unique opportunity for me because I was able to leverage the experiences that I had in the strategy and m and a area, which I knew were gonna be valuable.

Bert Jameson: I just didn’t know when and now was that opportunity. The thing that really brought me to Winnebago was when I first interviewed with them, they had said, look, we’re a motor home company here in Forest City, Iowa. We just got done doing an acquisition of a company called Brand Design. In Indiana, who does towables?

Bert Jameson: Now we’re in the motor home and towables business. Yeah. But you know, we’re not gonna stop there. We wanna get into the marine industry, we wanna do more acquisitions, we wanna grow. And for me, that really is what sold me. Yeah. Because I thought, hey, I can now become treasurer of this public company, get some exposure to tax and leading tax.

Bert Jameson: I can also leverage my strategy and m and a background. And over the years that I was there, Winnebago did do multiple acquisitions. They not only acquired Chris Craft, they acquired a company called Newmar, which is a luxury RV business. They acquired a company called Barletta, which was a luxury kind of pontoon business.

Bert Jameson: So we did a lot in a short period of time. And the one thing I would say about a company, so Winnebago was non-investment grade, very cyclical company, very highly discretionary. And the one thing I had to learn, ’cause at Cargill, if you wanted to go to a debt insurance, you would, you’d have to decide, like I said before, long term fixed flow, but you never had to ask.

Bert Jameson: Can I go to the market? ’cause the market would always be there for you because your Cargill, your investment grade investors will always be one to give you funds. If you’re not investment grade and you’re a smaller public company, the first question you often have to ask is, can I go to the market?

Bert Jameson: Because the high yield market is not always there for you. And so being thoughtful and strategic about, alright, if I can’t go to the high yield market, what are my other options? Is the convert market open? Is the TUR loan market open? Making sure that you always have plenty of liquidity and access to liquidity.

Bert Jameson: To be able to help a company like Winnebago Go was something I learned very quickly.

Mike Richards: Okay, and so you did Winnebago and then Ingersoll Rand, so you joined Ingersol. Talk us through, if you would, whoing yourself round art because they’ve got so many different businesses, very diverse and everything else.

Mike Richards: Big role. Been, they’ve been part of KKR and everything else, or give it, where were they in that journey when you joined as treasurer? How did that come about? Maybe just give us that overview.

Bert Jameson: Yeah, so in Ingersoll Rand, as you kind of mentioned earlier in the podcast, mission critical flow technology. So I think of like gases, liquids, anything in the manufacturing business.

Bert Jameson: Think of us as a critical part of the manufacturing process where if you need to move. Gas or air or liquid or any sort of product throughout the manufacturing process that is either blowing it across the manufacturing floor, pulling it through, purifying the air or drying the air if you have moisture in there, and so you know.

Bert Jameson: Our type of products in there is not something that a lot of people are maybe gonna know of, but the people that are actually in the manufacturing floor know our products very well. Because if our products go down, the whole manufacturing facility usually goes down, and that’s why we call it mission Critical Flow Technology, because it is mission critical.

Bert Jameson: We go down, everything goes down. Our products are in a lot of different areas, whether it’s life sciences, which is one of our big businesses, or in typical industrial manufacturing processes. And so for me it was a new industry, new products. I’m still learning. I would not say that I’m an expert in all of our products, especially since we are as acquisitive as we are.

Bert Jameson: But you know, when I started in November, 2022, we were just. Two years kind of post a large merger that happened. And so Ingersoll ran at the time split off from some of its businesses. So the industrial part of Ingersoll ran, got split off from kind of trained technology, which is now its own. A public company and Ingersoll Rand, the industrial side.

Bert Jameson: Then when they split off, then they merged with another company called Gardner Denver, and when they merged, they kept the name Ingersoll Rand. But you know, Gardner, Denver and Ingersoll Rand were two or couple of the top players in the industry. So it made us top players once we did the merger. And so when I came in, it was just two years after that.

Bert Jameson: And so we were still kind of trying to, from a function perspective, build up those functions back up after the merger. But from a business perspective, the business had been doing phenomenal and continue to do really well and. You know what, one of the things that makes us different is we call ourselves a compounder, meaning that we are out doing acquisitions on a regular basis.

Bert Jameson: So 18 plus acquisitions in a year is not uncommon. On a monthly basis, we could be closing two, three different acquisitions and they’re all different parts of the world, and so that. Creates some complexity from a treasury perspective, right? Because you’re constantly looking at sources and uses. Where are you sourcing the cash?

Bert Jameson: Where do you need to use the cash? And so we spend a lot of time on the treasury side of things, really trying to make sure that we are positioning our funding appropriately so that we can obviously then execute on those acquisitions.

Mike Richards: Henry, you and I talked before, it’s not just the funding. Uh, we’d had no salt vet from Lyme, but in one of his previous roles, API, he was going through a similar thing with actually a smaller team.

Mike Richards: Yeah. That had his playbook. And is that essential to it? You’ve got your playbook and Right, this acquisition comes in, this is how we’re gonna do it. ’cause obviously each of those AC as you say, different part of the world, different size of company, different functionalities or different stages as well.

Mike Richards: What’s that like for you except for spinning your head all the time?

Bert Jameson: Yeah, I mean, the playbook is true, right? And so we didn’t have the playbook from the start when I started, but we quickly realized that the playbook is critical. So there was a certain number of things that we would always be looking at pre-closing, closing, and post-closing.

Bert Jameson: Right? So pre-closing, we were looking at do they have any debt on the book? Do they have any trade finance instruments? Do they have any derivatives that are on the books? What are their banks listing out all the different banks that they have, and are their banks integrated with their ERP systems? And so we said, right, let’s just get the playbook down.

Bert Jameson: Let’s get the checklist down to be able to say, alright, these are the things we’re gonna ask no matter what we’re required. Yeah. And we’re gonna do this pre-closing, we’re gonna do the same thing on closing, but it’s when you get your final funds flow, you’re going through and you’re making sure that you’re.

Bert Jameson: Doing verbal confirmations of all the different bank accounts. You know, looking at all the dollar, months and triple checking everything there. You making sure that you just have everything kind of in order and everything ties out. Because I always like to tell my team that, look, funding and m and a deal at closing is a little bit of a thankless job.

Bert Jameson: I’m gonna thank you and I’m gonna tell you I really appreciate it. But it’s one of these things that everything goes well. No one knows that if, if something goes wrong, everybody knows and it goes all the about the way to the CO of the company. So we have to be 100% correct every single time. We can’t get that one.

Bert Jameson: And so that’s one of the other parts. So the playbook on that we talk about is just look, our ability to execute at a high level is absolutely critical

Mike Richards: in all those different ways, is that. Most difficult challenge. Would you say certainly most recently, or is that just one of the challenges, do you think?

Bert Jameson: I mean, it’s definitely one of the biggest ones because you have to understand also, when we’re doing acquisitions, we don’t typically use investment banks to do acquisitions. When we acquire companies, we have a little bit of a unique m and a strategy where we have m and a leads out in the region. We have a corporate m and a leader, but she’s not dictating everything.

Bert Jameson: We have people that are out in the regions and they’re out there building relationships with different companies. And so a lot of the companies that we’re buying are mom and pop businesses that are not small. I mean, they’re 50 million, a hundred million dollars business, so they’re large businesses from a dollar perspective.

Bert Jameson: They may not have the sophistication around the accounting systems, the policies, the procedures, and everything else. And so when we’re out there developing these relationships, it’s first and foremost telling the target, Hey, we are gonna be a good steward for your brand. A lot of times people have spent their entire life building this, and this is their legacy.

Bert Jameson: They’re not gonna wanna sell it to some company that’s gonna just. Basically sell it to parts, right? And take it on, take on customer base, and then the brand goes away. We’re a good steward of that brand, and so we’re gonna take that brand on. But once we bring that business in from a treasury perspective, a lot of times it takes a lot of extra effort because they probably don’t have a treasury team, right?

Bert Jameson: So you’re going in there and you’re having to have these conversations to really understand. What do they have from a treasury perspective and what do we wanna change when it ultimately closes and gets integrated? Sometimes it’s pretty straightforward. Sometimes there’s a lot of cleanup activity that needs to happen.

Mike Richards: And I’ve talked to some of the treasurers before where they, there’s a couple of ones actually, when I was just looking back on some of this, that where they’ve gone in and as you say, they leave the local management, they said they’re the experts of it. We become. Central Bank, if you like. We become the central funder.

Mike Richards: We give them advice and we help them and we handhold them when they’ve got difficulties, but we leave them alone. Is that the kind of ethos with you guys or a little bit more hands-on or without, again, without going into pub. And is public detail I not one than that. Is that one of the reasons?

Bert Jameson: Yeah. So yeah, we, I mean our team.

Bert Jameson: Have a decent sized team on the treasury, but we don’t have an army of people. Right? Yeah. So, so we do have to rely on the businesses to really manage a lot of the day-to-day that they’re doing. What we will do is we will obviously get the account hooked up to our treasury management system. We’ll get it hooked up to the pools where, you know, if there’s a cash pool in that area to help them manage it from that perspective.

Bert Jameson: And then if they have questions with the banks, we work with them there. But otherwise, from a day-to-day perspective. We don’t

Mike Richards: interfere. We don’t at all. Yeah. Yeah. ’cause it was Declan Doley from DCC over in Dublin, and when he told me this, he said, oh yeah, we bought this company, we bought this, we bought them.

Mike Richards: He said, we leave them alone. He said, we help them then. Yes, and help them to just be more successful where they might be struggling, said, because they’re experts in what they do. It’s just there may be other things that we can do to help them. It sounded very similar to yourself sort of thing.

Bert Jameson: That’s that strategic thought partner that I talked about,

Mike Richards: which is

Bert Jameson: how do we help the business?

Bert Jameson: Be more successful. And so we are always that strategic thought partner with the business. We come in, we understand what sort of challenges that they may be facing and what can we do from a treasury perspective to help them be more successful.

Mike Richards: And we’re not too far off the end of the show. We’re not there yet.

Mike Richards: But what are the other challenges you think for treasury at the moment that are the biggest that are out there? What, for you as a treasurer, do you think people other treasurers should be thinking about?

Bert Jameson: Yeah, I think. That is one of the biggest challenges and one of the biggest opportunities, right? How can you leverage AI to be more successful, get more accurate cash flow forecasting, better analysis on.

Bert Jameson: Your historical free cash flow to help you inform on future free cash flow opportunities, any sort of cash conversion cycle opportunities there, and just better working capital management. I think all of that is huge. I think that there’s opportunities on just the basic administrative stuff. We have hundreds and hundreds of bank accounts all over the world, and as people need to just do something simple like update signers or get somebody access to a bank portal, if you have hundreds and hundreds of bank accounts, we don’t have.

Bert Jameson: Hundreds of people on the treasury team, right? So how do you leverage something like AI to be able to better manage that? But then the challenge that comes with that is then the security part of things. I think treasures are inherently risk averse, and so anytime you’re leveraging AI and it has access to all of your banking information, there’s just a lot of risk around there that I see that just hasn’t been.

Bert Jameson: Fleshed out yet. And so I think that before we really start to be able to leverage ai, there’s some things you can do right now just looking on spreadsheets and stuff that you can use AI to help optimize your data analysis and how you synthesize information. But I think the bigger opportunity that’s out there, it’s probably still gonna take a while.

Mike Richards: And you’ve made this shift if you like, from you’ve gone all the way from accounting, treasury advisor, if you like, at Cargill. What are the inflection points, if you like, when you were doing that? What’s accelerated your career? Or again, if someone’s listening, you said what? Wow. What were the things that you did?

Mike Richards: And again, if you were a listener today and you said, right, they listened to it, oh, I should do that. What sort of thing?

Bert Jameson: Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I’ll give an example of early on in my career. So I’ve always been very peer motivated and driven and focused. And I was a bit, kind of like a untamed wild Mustang, uh, early on.

Bert Jameson: I just knew what I wanted. But I didn’t know how to get there. Right. And, and luckily I had somebody that came and was a great mentor to me that basically said, look, you can have all this motivation and drive, but you have to be exceptional at what you do today to be able to get those opportunities in the future.

Bert Jameson: And so have an eye on the future of where you wanna go. But be exceptional at what you’re doing today, and then make very specific or thoughtful choices in your career to be able to get you to where you ultimately wanna go. If you’re making a career change, you should always ask yourself, is that going to further my chances of getting that ultimate dream that I have or not?

Bert Jameson: And if it’s not gonna do that, you just want to think critically about whether that’s the right choice for you. For me, that was great advice because I had all this wild energy and it just kind of concentrated it to say, I’m gonna be exceptional at what I’m doing here. Whatever my job role is, I’m gonna do even more than that and I’m gonna excel because I know if I do that, it’ll create new opportunities for me.

Bert Jameson: Ultimately, it did one of the biggest inflection points. For me was when I was in Cargill in that treasury accounting area and I got a chance to be on the corporate treasury team because that team was really small. There was three or four of us that were on that team. And to be able to get exposure to things that I got exposure to really kind of just for me, springboard of my career into the future, there isn’t a roadmap out there to be able to get to where you wanna go, unfortunately.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Bert Jameson: If you work and be exceptional at what you’re doing, you’re gonna get great opportunities. Just be thoughtful about when you do get those opportunities, what you ultimately choose.

Mike Richards: Well, that’s great. And actually we say that I, I will dig it out. It was just really reminiscent of the podcast with Tony Masson from Amazon and exactly as he said, you’ve got to get the basics right.

Mike Richards: With yourself. And I’ll actually listen back to that one and I’ll put that in the show notes as well, because he made exactly the same comment, which means it’s good. The podcast is working. I remember him saying a lot of the very similar things. I mean, it’s just you can’t afford not to just have those things as well.

Mike Richards: Okay. Any advice before we start, not LinkedIn yet, what advice would you give to other treasury professionals getting the basics right, but you know, if they’re. Other things that you thought on that way to senior leadership because you did the Cargill experience, but then I’m recognizing Winnebago or World Wings, then Winnebago.

Mike Richards: So you’ve taken some deliberate choices. What other things would you say?

Bert Jameson: Yeah, one of the big things I would also say, and I tell anybody, young person on on my team, is don’t let the job description define who you are of who you can become. What I mean by that is, I’m not saying go and do things that are way outside of your area of responsibility.

Bert Jameson: If you have specific things that you’re working on, especially early on in your career, you’re gonna have specific tasks that you are doing. Don’t let that define who you are. Think about what that task is, why you’re doing it, and is there a better way to do it, or is there a different way to do it, or do we even need to be doing it at all?

Bert Jameson: So don’t let the job description define you in the sense that, be thoughtful, be inquisitive, and ask a lot of questions. Those are the times when you actually get really good experiences. You’re gonna learn things. Because of the experiences are things that no one can take away from you. The more experiences you have, the more questions you ask, the better you’re gonna get with kind of building that base of basics that you kind of talked about.

Mike Richards: That’s gold. That’s great. I mean, and so we will put your LinkedIn details in the show notes, so I know that’ll, there’ll be lots of reach outs and things like that, but take aways from today’s show and that again, as we address each week to more junior folks. Maybe mid-level, more senior, any of those kind of different levels, any.

Mike Richards: Advice you give those people?

Bert Jameson: Yeah, I would say for any of the managers or more senior folks, be a coach, be a mentor, be someone that can be impactful on someone’s life. When I think about my career, I didn’t go to a fancy university. I didn’t get a lot of the doors open to me that I would’ve wanted to. I had to pound down doors to be able to get in versus having doors be open for me.

Bert Jameson: And so I go out of my way. To make sure that I meet with everybody on my team, whether it’s manager down to analyst or director, it doesn’t matter. I meet with everybody because I wanna make sure that everybody gets an opportunity to be successful. That’s what I would really encourage managers and leaders is don’t forget about when you were young and giving somebody the opportunity, because giving them five minutes, 10 minutes can be so impactful and so helpful in their career because your words matter in their listening.

Bert Jameson: And for younger people, I would say just. Seek out those opportunities, right? Seek out people that can help give you advice. When you’re early on in your career, you’re not expected to know a whole lot. So ask a lot of questions. Seek out mentors, seek out people that have been there and done it and can give you advice.

Bert Jameson: And a lot of times those people can really help you navigate your career. ’cause like I said, there’s no right way. There’s no wrong way to go through your career. There’s no path. But having somebody there that can provide guidance and coaching can really be valuable.

Mike Richards: Amazing. Great takeaways. I’m gonna leave it there ’cause yeah, that’s Podcast Gold.

Mike Richards: Thank you very much. That’s been lovely to catch up with you and looking forward to seeing you very soon in the future. Thank you very much. Sounds good. Thanks Matt.

Mike Richards: Before you finish today’s show, a quick reminder. You can earn CTP credits just by listening to the podcast. Listen to the show. Take a short online quiz, pass the quiz, got to do that, and then we’ll send you CTP credits. This means you can recertify, which I know you have to do every two years, and lots of people do it.

Mike Richards: It’s so convenient. They do it whilst they’re commuting. There might be at the gym walking the dog. We are there to help you. It’s designed to fit around you and your real treasury jobs. Not add more work to it. If you are already listening, you might as well get the credit for it. All you need to do head to the episode page, take the quiz, and as I say, as long as you pass, we will send you the CTP credits.

Mike Richards: I know it’s all part of the service. Thanks again for listening. We appreciate your support. I’ll see you soon. Thanks.