Fix the Now, Plan for Next: Scaling a Treasury Function at Toast

Mike Richards, CEO, The Treasury Recruitment Company: This week’s show on joined by Michael Scott, Senior Director of Treasury at Toast. We spoke about what senior treasury leaders really look for. What treasury responsibility feels like when the stakes are high. Here’s a short extract from our conversation.

Michael Scott, Senior Director of Treasury at Toast: So I would say the, certainly the pandemic, the COVID impact just professionally, that was probably the most intense period of my career, and we were working 24 7 for perhaps six months or more during that year when global travel came to a halt liquidity.

Michael Scott: Became the number one priority for the business. So our team embarked on an effort to rebuild the cash forecast from the ground up and worked really hard with finance, senior leadership, other stakeholders to navigate that uncertainty. And the work that we did ultimately enabled to Expedia to raise nearly $4 billion in capital and weather the storm, and was pretty remarkable to see how treasury directly contributed to the resilience of the company.

Michael Scott: As you’re going through resumes and looking at their skills and experience a resume that highlights accomplishments and what they’ve done and quantifying the impact stands out over a resume that looks more like a rewritten job description. That’s just more gonna, here’s what I did day to day. And so that tells me a lot.

Michael Scott: If I can see what an individual’s accomplished and achieved, and then when I’m speaking with ’em, I’m gonna ask them. Questions that probe a little bit to, to really test for their thinking processing, and I have them prove back to me. What’s the analysis that you did to get here and how did you test your assumptions?

Mike Richards: Welcome to this week’s Treasury Career Corner podcast, where Into your 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: this week’s show. Delighted to be joined by Michael Scott, the senior Director of Treasury at Toast, where he leads global liquidity, capital markets, investments, and risk management. Now, toast, uh, as you may know, but in, and you may see it when you go to your local restaurant, they empower restaurants of all sizes to build great teams, increase revenue, improve operations, and delight guests all the way through.

Mike Richards: They pair their deep understanding of the restaurant industry with powerful cloud-based software and restaurant grade hardware. So right the way through, all the way to digital audit. We’ll get into that a little bit later on in the show, but Michael, if you like, we were just talking before the show.

Mike Richards: Michael’s actually been on the radio before, so I’m actually the. I’m talking to an expert here, so hopefully we’ll be, this will be a good show. So talk me through, if you would, how your first start your career and maybe your radio days as well. Let us cover that, but over to you sir. How did it first start?

Michael Scott: Mike, it is a pleasure to be on with you. Yes, I did get an early start years ago back in radio. I was a radio TV film major in, in college at the outset. Produced a sports talk show on local radio station in Austin, Texas. We were the flagship station for University of Texas Sports. I didn’t. Love that enough to stick with it.

Michael Scott: Long term was tremendous fun and just an amazing experience, but I feel like I’ve found my home here in Treasury and I don’t regret any of that experience. It was part of that journey and part of the steps all along the way.

Mike Richards: And how did you then discover Treasury, then? How did it, you did that radio and the media and things like that.

Mike Richards: How did you then discover finance and treasury?

Michael Scott: I’ve always had a real strong interest in finance markets economics, but I’d say my MBA experience, rice University, is really what helped me to clarify that career path and where I wanted to go. Really enjoyed all the courses around corporate finance and multinational finance and economics.

Michael Scott: So after graduating from that program, I made the move Dell. And at Dell I had a really good opportunity to rotate across finance roles. And after making the move to treasury, it just, it really clicked. It stopped, got a role in a cash management role, first, managing cash for the us. And then an opportunity to cover cash management for the EMEA region.

Michael Scott: And so just learning everything about just the, about banking and payments and just really digging into that role, there was a lot of time that we invested in. How do we set our cash position faster? How are we more effective about concentrating cash? And so just really learned a ton.

Mike Richards: And when you were at Dell, I’ve seen it both sides actually.

Mike Richards: You’re in the technology company. Were they leading on the technology side or were they catching up, or what was their sort of attitude towards that when it came to treasury terms?

Michael Scott: So Dell really positioned itself as a leader with regard to treasury technology. So we were, we had implemented a treasury management system that, that we use across the house for treasury that supported all of our operations from cash to.

Michael Scott: Foreign exchange and long all the way through on the accounting side. So it was really embedded. That in combination with some homegrown tools that we had developed. We were an early mover with Swift implementation as as well, and so that made it a great environment to be in, just as there was always an interest in being on the leading edge and really driving and looking to be world class.

Mike Richards: And you were there for quite a period of time sort of thing, so you were. What, 10 years. Any parts of that sort of stand out to you think they’ve influenced you now? I know we, we gave some briefing notes before, but maybe reflecting back on that time, anything that stands out.

Michael Scott: Sure. So I think there was, certainly within the Dell Treasury program, I’d say one, there was a very strong.

Michael Scott: Sense of mentorship among the treasury leaders there. So a big effort to really expose junior and intermediate staff to different facets of treasury and to help just to build up the expertise and the knowledge of the staff. That’s something that certainly stuck with me, and I look to pay that forward as I’ve kinda grown in my career and managed others on the teams.

Michael Scott: And there was also a real emphasis on rotation. So within that period of nine years or so that I was there on the team, had a chance to rotate through cash management, as I talked about foreign exchange risk management, and stood up an m and a team within the treasury function. And so had a chance to just see, to see quite a bit, each of which stretched me and grew in my just expertise and.

Michael Scott: Knowledge in different ways, but I, one of those that really stood out would be the m and a role, which was a newly formed position at the time. This was at a point where in Dell’s evolution, when the company was becoming much more acquisitive. And so over a period of just a couple years, I oversaw integration of well over a dozen.

Michael Scott: Transactions, total value of several billion dollars and expanded the team along the way to really support that increased deal volume. Yeah, so just going through that experience really helped me to learn how to build strong cross-functional relationships, how to lead through ambiguity. Experience taught me how to build playbooks, right?

Michael Scott: We built very detailed due diligence, playbook and integration playbook that included. Milestones writer, what do we want to have accomplished? 30 days post deal. Close 90 days, six months. How to scale teams quickly. When it started, it was just myself, and by the end of that two year period, there were four of us in total managing all these projects.

Michael Scott: So quite a bit of, quite a bit of change and really learned how to follow a test and learn approach. So after each transaction we do a retrospective and think about, well, what do we learn from this transaction? What do we wanna do differently around our playbook? And integrate that into our plans. Really bringing structure to complexity.

Michael Scott: And those are skills that I feel like I’ve relied on in, in every subsequent role.

Mike Richards: And Dell was obviously a big team, and then you joined HomeAway. Can you talk us through that move and, ’cause you were the first hire there, so you’ve gone from massive. How many were in the team in total to Dell? It was massive at the time,

Michael Scott: wasn’t it?

Michael Scott: Roughly 40 at the time? Yeah.

Mike Richards: Yeah,

Michael Scott: put, and then home away. It was, I was treasury, the first full-time treasury hire. Right? And so in that case, the biggest challenge coming into that situation is just around prioritization, right? When you’re the first, everything’s a blank slate, whether it’s cash, visibility, banking, structure, fx, the whole list.

Michael Scott: There’s a phrase that I picked up from a peer that I really like, which is fix the now. Plan for next, which is this idea that by solving immediate pain points, solving immediate pain points, you’d then yeah, build credibility and leverage that credibility, that success, to then lay out a roadmap. Yeah. For building a strategic treasury program.

Michael Scott: And in this case, coming to HomeAway, that immediate pain point was around FX exposure, right? So I prioritized design and implementation of a balance sheet hedge program to to mitigate some of the FX gain loss impact that the company had been. Had been experiencing on the income statement. So from there

Mike Richards: and de I was gonna say, sorry, Dell, obviously technologies, people know Dell, probably on a Dell PC a lot of the time and things.

Mike Richards: But then HomeAway, who were they? I know them ’cause obviously we’ve done the briefing, but can you just explain for the audience and maybe that then also explain some of the challenges they faced.

Michael Scott: Of course, the HomeAway is, HomeAway was an online vacation rental company and so you may see the name HomeAway, vrbo, VRBO, which is now part of Expedia group.

Mike Richards: Yeah. And then, so when you were the first hire there, as you say, foreign exchange, and that wasn’t being handled or were you were there, they just threw it at you said, good luck.

Michael Scott: Oh, the company had grown quite a bit internationally through acquisition and so I think, so part of the challenge was in both identifying FX exposures and then mitigating and managing that risk appropriately.

Michael Scott: And so part of the challenge was. Getting an established process to make sure we were one, tracking all the exposure exposures correctly, and then building a program to hedge and offset that risk.

Mike Richards: So I was gonna say, you came into that role and then later on you were acquired. What was that like for you as well?

Mike Richards: You come in, you set up your treasury and everything else, what happened?

Michael Scott: Sure. So the acquisition from Expedia Group, I worked very closely with that team now on the other side of m and a from what, where I was at Dell in leading as from the acquirer. But it was a good experience with the ex, ex Expedia team and managing that, that transaction and transition.

Michael Scott: And then, long story short, I ultimately ended up staying on with the treasury team there at Expedia and was a big transition point. Just for me personally too, ’cause I ended up making a move from Austin, Texas, up to Seattle, Washington.

Mike Richards: And what was that like for you by the weather? Because that’s quite a shift as well.

Mike Richards: I’m just thinking that you’ve gone through that transition. You’ve got Dell, massive corporate and everything else. You’ve gone into this role. HomeAway, you got acquired and then you said, and then they acquired you, and sometimes that leads to people transitioning out. But you joined the main group and you were.

Mike Richards: Back parts of a larger group. Did you prefer that or again, some of the listeners might be doing this, I’m thinking actually facing a similar challenge. How did you make the most of that? What? What was the thought process for you going through that?

Michael Scott: Sure. There were a number of different considerations in that transition back to a larger group ex.

Michael Scott: The Expedia team was not quite as large as Dell, maybe about 20, so about half the size, but still moving back into a larger. Organization. There was certainly a need to retain some of that knowledge of HomeAway, given that was a very different and unique business, the vacation rental, bus rental business, and the way that business operated very differently from traditional hotel, airline travel business.

Michael Scott: And so having that. Having that center of expertise, if you will, within the team was helpful. And so that was that. That was intriguing to me to bring that perspective. There were also some things that were attractive about coming back to a larger group at Expedia, given some of the opportunities there.

Michael Scott: So I had an opportunity to then play a bigger role in some of the capital markets transactions with the company given direction there, as well as leading. Overall efforts around liquidity and cash management. And so I saw it as a positive opportunity to then expand my experience and my portfolio given some of the unique op opportunities with Expedia Group that I hadn’t, that I hadn’t had in my career to that point.

Michael Scott: So ultimately it was a beneficial move.

Mike Richards: And you did these two, rob these roles within travel. And then we hit the buffers ’cause we came into COVID and everything else. I know you led the sort of liquidity planning and there was a lot of stuff talk. Talk us through that, if you would. And again, it’s still in memory, isn’t it?

Mike Richards: And now we’re moving past it. I think it’s hybrid working everything else. But what was it like?

Michael Scott: So I would say the, certainly the pandemic, the COVID impact just professionally, that was probably the most intense period of my career and we were working 24 7 for perhaps six months or more during that year when global travel.

Michael Scott: Came to a halt. Liquidity became the number one priority for the business. So our team embarked on an effort to rebuild the cash forecast from the ground up and worked really hard with finance, senior leadership, other stakeholders to navigate that uncertainty. And the work that we did ultimately enabled Expedia to raise nearly $4 billion in capital and weather the storm.

Michael Scott: And was just looking back on it. Pretty remarkable to see how. Treasury directly contributed to the resilience of the company. But in, in talking a little bit about the work we did, we quickly stood up a team to revamp our whole cash forecast process. So part of our business that’s always been critical, but we need to take a much more detailed view.

Michael Scott: How to manage cash. The existing cash forecasting model that Expedia ran at the time worked very effectively with standard travel seasonality. But now treasury needed to look at multiple drivers with just radically changed traveler behavior. Yeah, at the right, at the outset, there were ways of cancellations, of course, and then after a few months, his booking started to return.

Michael Scott: We saw just a very different traveler behavior, as I mentioned, where whereas in the past someone might book a trip 45 days out. Now we see bookings happening last minute, perhaps within a week or so, and that has a very different cashflow impact for the business. Yeah. So we need to get much more detailed and kinda driver based and looking at those dynamics as well as get a more granular view around AP receipts, collections, a whole host of other areas.

Michael Scott: What we did was just expand scenario planning and analysis so that we could model in a low, medium hive. Scenarios. There’s a lot of other corporates who were impacted by the pandemic had to do and stress test liquidity around those scenarios to see how they would play out. And ultimately that’s what informed our decision to do the capital raise we did.

Mike Richards: Yeah. And then so you’d been through that crisis sort of thing. What came next? Or how did it next evolve you and your career?

Michael Scott: So then I ultimately. Made a move away out of Expedia Group. I was a attracted to another opportunity to be treasury hire number one in this case, at a company called Fastly, which for those not familiar with, it is a Edge cloud platform company that helps that, that helps deliver secure websites and apps hosting on on the web and coming into.

Michael Scott: Fastly, another kind of high growth recently iPod company at the time, but just was somewhat similar to the environment at HomeAway and coming in first. But again, no two situations are alike, and it reinforced that notion that scaling best practices and treasury is not. Isn’t a copy and paste approach, right?

Michael Scott: A treasury leader needs to come in and match their operating model to the that company’s stage of maturity. Fastly was a different challenge ’cause the company was growing incredibly fast, but wasn’t quite as mature as HomeAway was in terms of systems and processes at that point in time. So recognizing that need, I acted quickly to hire a treasury manager to help oversee cash management and be an additional resource on the team.

Michael Scott: The company had just completed a more than $900 million convertible issuance. So now there was a substantial amount of cash on the balance sheet, particularly for a company that still hadn’t yet reached $400 million in, in, in annual revenue. So still relatively small. And so that meant billing and investment program was among the top priorities for fastly.

Michael Scott: So both balancing speed and governance, we worked to. Complete an RFP for the stand up portfolio manager for separately managed accounts. Implemented Clearwater to help us with investment reporting, compliance, accounting, to centralize all that in one place, work through investment policy with the audit committee, and manage that whole process in quick order to really stand up a robust.

Michael Scott: Investment program that at the same time would balance and work well for a company of that size.

Mike Richards: And was it similar to you remember what you said? You talked about similar situation, but you’ve been through it once and things was there on your checklist. Did it, how did it differ? Again, if someone’s in that situation, they go, oh wow, that sounds like me.

Mike Richards: You think any things that you think, yeah, don’t do this or Yeah, actually maybe do this, or any key things that stand out to you.

Michael Scott: It’s very situation. Dependent, as I would say, given the dynamics of the capital raise that Fastly had done, that made it just a different set of priorities than what I came into at HomeAway.

Michael Scott: Yeah, HomeAway was cashflow positive. Fastly was the opposite. It was cashflow negative, and so that, again, then again tilts your priorities, and so there was an additional emphasis there on. Implementing a treasury management system to help us get better visibility into cash and liquidity. That then again, just shifts one’s priorities in a fluid way.

Mike Richards: And then with yourself, you’ve moved on to, we are a customer of Dropbox and stuff, so we love Dropbox and it’s been very, how did that come about or talk us through the transitions, because obviously I don’t wanna, I wanna cover as well your current role with toast. So talk us through the next couple of moves and what happened.

Michael Scott: So at Dropbox, the. Treasury team there, as I had come into the company, had gone through pretty significant change,

Mike Richards: right?

Michael Scott: With some turnover that had happened at senior levels within the group. So different set of challenges coming in there for myself, and in this case, getting the right team in place was.

Michael Scott: A really important step. And fortunately I had a receptive and supportive executive sponsors and I worked closely with them on a planned up level. The team, the challenge there was I, in building the team, I needed to commit to some aggressive targets to deliver some value and savings and return for, in return for doing that, right?

Michael Scott: Yeah. So I had a number of ideas in my head. Others on the team contributed ideas, and we had a number of. Projects lined up around optimizing bank fees in certain cases and efficiencies with our insurance program. New strategies that headcount would enve it would enable around generating additional interest income and some other process improvements.

Michael Scott: Mm-hmm. So taking those in combination, we, we began working through the plan monitoring and reporting out using a savings tracker, and in the end we’re able to deliver about. $3 million in savings beat the target that we were given. And so it was really a successful build out. And so that moved and I felt went a long way toward addressing the challenge of restoring confidence on the team.

Michael Scott: And then from there and crossing that milestone, we could then pivot to focusing on, it was resetting expectations for treasury, establishing. Clear operating rhythms for the team and beginning to work on continuous improvement.

Mike Richards: And when you talked about those 3 million savings, was that driven by you or was that forced upon you think?

Mike Richards: Did you go right, I’m the treasurer. These are the process improvements I can make guys, and this is what I’m gonna do with my saying to the CFO. Let me go at this. I can do this. Or was it very much more? Because I know this is where treasurers like yourself can make a real impact. But you go, give that to me.

Mike Richards: I’ll be, I’ll guide us to this. Just let me get on and do my job. Is that the way it

Michael Scott: was? That was a little bit of give and take where I had, I had a list of some of these initiatives that I wanted to accomplish and some savings tied to those, and then there was then a challenge from the other side of, to really.

Michael Scott: To really press on that aggressively and say, can you hit this more ambitious target? And so it was a bit of a risk, but we felt like it was achievable in the end. We were able to do it.

Mike Richards: Cool. And then bring us up to date. ’cause again, when originally you and I spoke, I said, and I’ve gotta say to the listeners, Michael’s been very busy and I’ve seen him a few times at conferences.

Mike Richards: We go, when are you on the podcast when you, because it has been. Throughout when my trips around the US and some of my trips in the UK as well. Every time I’ve gone to pay my bill at a restaurant or bar and it says toast, I’m like, when’s he on the podcast? And I’ve made a note to myself. So I do apologize to Michael for doing this, but at the end of the day, it was worthwhile.

Mike Richards: I’ve got you on today. So talk us through the company. I gave a bit of a headline at the bit, but who are they? What are they, how they been going and things like that in your role.

Michael Scott: Sure. So I’ve been at Toasts for just over a year now. Yeah. And so toasts for a little bit of background is an all-in-one platform that helps restaurants run and grow their business.

Michael Scott: So it’s right from point of sale payments to ordering, delivery, marketing, team management. Yeah. So runs runs across a broad range there. To take a step back, I guess for a second, one of one of my core tenants in. Building teams is combining operational execution with strategic insight, right? So I’m looking for talent who can contribute to building that right balance of operations and strategy.

Michael Scott: And another element that I’m. Always thinking of and building the right team is hiring for scale, right? Yeah. So people who’ve built before, not just those who can run today’s processes. And so the, these was the framing as I’m coming in here to toast and looking to grow the team, I. In, in, in joining had one of the initial things that, that I did was looking at both our resources and talent assessment and within treasury and determining where we needed to go and quickly identified a need to really grow and scale the team and begin working on that hiring process.

Mike Richards: And how do you set, sorry. How do you set jumping in there with when you are. Trying to look at new hires when and your current team and things, how do you assess those people? We just had it this week’s newsletter I was talking about recently. I spoke at last year’s tpo, or this year’s Tepo actually, in Houston.

Mike Richards: And I said How many people there were going, oh. They put AI in their job description and loads of people hands went. I went, fantastic. Who here has got two years experience that you are asking for of AI that you are and can assess it really well, and all the hands slowly went down? They went. There you go.

Mike Richards: So don’t ask for what you can’t assess with you. When you are assessing people, you’ve obviously had this fast growth ethos in your background. How are you doing that for applicants and things like that? What are you looking for?

Michael Scott: Sure. Within assessing applicants and one when it’s gonna depend on the role.

Michael Scott: Yeah. But one of, one of the, say a couple things. So one of the things I’ve found to be true. In my career in building teams is at it’s best to hire for senior roles. Right? And so that’s very much where I started first, right? Yeah. In looking to attract two individuals who’ve come on board in senior manager roles, right, who have broad treasury experience, who can not just operate today’s processes and see around corners that gonna think forward.

Michael Scott: And so I think that’s. One is gonna go in, in the right place to start. And so in that case, I am looking for individuals who’ve got experience. It could be from large mid-size companies, but who have built for scale, who have built scale, developed, and have a really. Strong drive to do that. And so looking for that kind of dynamic experience is a big part of that.

Michael Scott: And then for the more analysts to senior analysts type roles, I’m looking for certainly good alignment from an experience standpoint in terms of whether it’s a capital markets role or whether it’s a cash management role, but also a real desire to learn. And it’s, I think it’s perhaps a little bit different in a.

Michael Scott: A growth technology company like ours and maybe a more well established company where we’re still very much in build mode. And so as I am recruiting folks and looking to attract the right talent, I’m very upfront in conversations with candidates that joining our team means helping shape how we work, not just following a script.

Michael Scott: And my goal is that we’re gonna operate with a continuous improvement mindset. Clear expectations and a real sense of purpose. And so I, my belief is that environment tends to attract people who want to grow quickly. Take ownership, make a real impact. And so that’s what we’re, that’s what we’re really looking to build.

Mike Richards: And when you’re looking at those individuals, are there any examples of where you’ve gone that’s blown the roof off? That’s brilliant. Or the flip side, again, this is an advice show as well when there are other treasurers may be listening and they’re going, oh yeah, actually. What advice would you give to those treasurers that helps them, that guides them, if you like, when they’re looking at a resume or when they’re looking, doing an interview.

Mike Richards: Things that you, ’cause you’ve been in this growth mode, as you say, for quite a lot and a lot of your career as well. So what’s your guide?

Michael Scott: So I think it’s really important to tease out in your review process and in, in speaking with candidates and looking at resumes, right? So you’re looking of course for that.

Michael Scott: Space, level of skills and experience for them. That’s, those are, that’s table stakes

Mike Richards: a given.

Michael Scott: Yeah. I am. I recommend one looking for is your, is you’re going through rec resumes and looking at their skills and experience a resume that highlights accomplishments. What they’ve done in quantifying the impact stands out over a resume that looks more like a rewritten job description.

Michael Scott: That’s just more gonna, here’s what I did day to day, and so that tells me a lot. If I can see what an individual’s accomplished and achieved, and then when I’m speaking with it, I’m gonna ask them. Questions that probe a little bit to, to really test for their thinking processing. And I have them prove back to me, what’s the analysis that you did to get here and how did you test your assumptions?

Michael Scott: And so I’m really looking for that extra because on, on a, in a. Growth technology environment when they come in, I phrase I use a lot is everybody’s got a chop wood, right? I need people who are coming in and I need them to be able to drive and manage projects and be able to work with a sense of independence where it’s just more difficult to lead someone step by step or provide a very specific, you’re gonna do step one, step two, step three, and follow that list.

Michael Scott: And so I’m very much look looking for that. Then maybe a second thing just to throw out there is looking at candidates with a demonstrated sense of curiosity, and that could be perhaps where they’ve learned a new skill or how they’ve gotten breadth in their career by exposing themselves to maybe something they didn’t learn.

Michael Scott: They didn’t have it in their toolkit before. So one, one of the folks that we hired on, on, on our team. Went to culinary school, took a career break, went to culinary school, and then came back as a treasurer. Through that experience, was willing to take a risk and kinda demonstrating that ability to learn and broaden their scope and so that those types of qualities I think can be really successful in.

Michael Scott: Dynamic environment like ours at a smaller company where things are changing fast, you’ve gotta have a growth mindset. You’ve gotta be willing to wear several different hats and adapt from day to day. ’cause there’s you no, no two days or alike. It’s certainly less routine.

Mike Richards: And it’s great. And actually, just going back to your, one of your previous points, you talk there about that where you see, as you say on a resume, a regurgitated job description from previous job and it’s, I did this, I don’t care what you did, and this is one of the things that I keep, this is we approaching the end of 2025.

Mike Richards: I keep getting all these people sending me their resume. What do you think? What do you think? And I’m, a lot of the time I say a good resume is never finished. It’s just like a good website. A website designer said it, show me what you’ve achieved. Show me how you took it from there to there. And sometimes the best treasury professionals stand out by doing that, just by showing how they, we were there.

Mike Richards: And then these are the steps I took. And we got to there. And this is exactly as you’ve done through 80. And that shows how someone then achieved success in treasury. And along the way, being curious, which again, that culinary score, that’s great. And wow. I mean the great thing is also if ever you need a great lunch, you know who to go to in your team, don’t you?

Mike Richards: So, exactly. And then bringing us more up to date, you’ve done all these different things throughout your career. Where do you see. The next challenges or what do you see for the market or what are you facing and thinking? Right? We’ve been through a turbulent year this year in 2025 with trade wars, tariffs, the lot and everything else, but got all that stuff.

Mike Richards: We’ve then got technology coming along. We’ve got what is top of mind for you?

Michael Scott: Top of mind for me now that we’ve completed. Our work to, to build the team. So and so I mentioned the motto I talked about before of fix the now and plan for next. So we’re solving some of those immediate pain points, right?

Michael Scott: And doing that. And so now we’re shifting to a position of laying out a strategic roadmap for where we go from here. And one of the leadership challenges for me in this position that’s. A little bit unique and different from my prior roles is, right. So in many of those past instances, I’ve typically directly led many of the key projects that were part of transformation.

Michael Scott: Whether it’s a treasury management system, forecast models, investment management solutions, whatever. Those are where I’ve had a more, I’ve been more hands on and then kinda done those sequentially.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Michael Scott: What’s different now is that it’s really imperative that we move in parallel on many of these efforts.

Michael Scott: Toast is a company that has experienced tremendous growth and treasury needs to scale to support the business both operationally and strategically. So we’ve gotta move on these initiatives and the leadership challenge for me now is more. Having to work through others on the team to execute many of these.

Michael Scott: I’ll have a role certainly, but it’s gonna be up to us much more so as a group. And so what’s on our roadmap is very much heavily technology focused to to help us scale. Part of that is a treasury management system evaluation that we’re currently in the midst of and looking to do an implementation as we get into 2026.

Michael Scott: And similarly on, on the investment side, looking to implement tools to help us manage both our short term operating cash, so money market fund portal, along with tools to help us scale reporting, accounting, compliance with the investment portfolio. And again, with us being small team, small company, we’re looking to do that in a way that’s.

Michael Scott: Efficient and scalable, right? It’s gonna be a different approach than we might take at a larger company. So we’ve gotta think about how to organize it in a really structured and efficient way.

Mike Richards: Just jumping back in there, I don’t want to. Dive into you and I talked about before the show about treasury management systems and the technology that’s coming along.

Mike Richards: So we don’t need to name names, it’s okay. But we did an incredible round table recently with in London, and I got 24 treasurers, eight groups of eight, and we rotated round. And the success factor afterwards was the guy said. Next time we want more. I was like, what? And he said, we want it longer. We wanna spend more time talking.

Mike Richards: I actually got to, I was running the technology stream, just ended up like that. And one of the treasurers said to me, Mike, this session was brilliant. It was terrible. It was brilliant. I was like, okay, I’ll take that. I don’t quite know. And he said, brilliant. Great. Getting this advice from everyone. The terribleness was, he said, I’d got down to four potential.

Mike Richards: TMS is, this is what I was thinking and we’re going to the next stage. He said the terribleness was actually looking and talking to my peers. We’ve gotta step back again. He said, that gave me so much more to think about. I felt that I was being. Pushed a little bit by some of those guys to go down a certain direction and he said, actually getting this thinking time curious with other treasurers really helped him.

Mike Richards: But also it was awful ’cause not back to the drawing board, but I now need to redo this with yourself. And you are in, you’ve been through this a few times. Are there any tips for the top, for the other people, you’re going through this yourself, any things that stand out, particularly in this new evolving age with lots of technology being thrown at you.

Mike Richards: And lots of buzzwords.

Michael Scott: Sure. So couple things. Come to mind. So one, I would say certainly leverage your peers. I’d have conversations with your peers at similarly situated companies about the tools they’re using. Are they satisfied and happy and happy with how those are performing for them? And get that feedback and incorporate that into your considerations though, right?

Michael Scott: There’s nothing better than that firsthand feedback. The second is really think about what your priorities are with. The technology you’re looking to implement and, and what’s most important. That’s something we spent a lot of time upfront was scanning a list of different treasury systems providers, matching that up against our priority set and so we then kinda narrow down to a small group to then bring through and RFP so that we’re really focused in how we wanna approach this and consider third how and your appetite to really.

Michael Scott: Take this on, what your cross-functional partners are able to support here. I’m thinking about your IT partners in particular, right? In terms of their capacity. Certainly at a smaller company like ours that’s more limited than might. It would be for our friends at larger companies and so that, that’s a really important factor in our decisioning where to the extent that.

Michael Scott: Treasury can directly drive a lot of the implementation and maintenance. That’s a plus for us. And then also on the cross-functional side, it’s our friends on the accounting side. We’re trying to solve some pain points, eliminate manual processes for them, and so we’ve made it a point to bring them along in the consideration and review process so that we’re trying to solve for.

Michael Scott: Problems or you solve for solutions, right? That impact the company broadly, I’ve found in my past experience, right? That very much. It helps improve your chances of success to the extent, yeah, that there’s a broad, a broadly shared benefit across the organization.

Mike Richards: Yeah, it’s an interesting point actually, ’cause I sometimes hear that when treasurers get more involved with some of procurement guys or various commodities and that helping those guys say, Hey, get us in, involved in the process, we can help you.

Mike Richards: But this is the flip side as well, that you are doing it and going to the IT guys and saying, we are thinking about this. What are the considerations or being, get involved in this. ’cause then, ’cause they’re gonna help you implement it at the end of the day, or they’re gonna be the help desk when you’re going, this isn’t working help.

Mike Richards: Yeah. So what do we do? So I’m conscious of time, so we’re not that far off the end of the show, but we’re not quite there yet. But we talked through. Your distinguished career. It is amazing some of the companies you worked at and things. If you look back and reflecting on that, what advice would you give to yourself?

Mike Richards: I know we’re doing the takeaway advice, but people, but perhaps if someone is, again, you and I were talking before the show, that you very much want to take treasury out to the more junior folks and tell universities, and we’ve got Karima coming up on the show and various other bits. What advice would you give to.

Mike Richards: More junior finance people. And what about the world of treasury and things maybe?

Michael Scott: So there’s a couple points that I’d emphasize there. So where I’d begin it is invest your time in being really good at your job, wherever, whatever that position is, and where you find yourself in treasury and learn how.

Michael Scott: Your role intersects with other parts of the Treasury Department? So when I came into my first cash management role at Dell, in, in, in addition to really trying to dig into the details and master my position, I spent a lot of time talking with my partner’s over in. FX and in on the investment side so that I could learn and have a good understanding about all the intersection points between cash fx, and learned a little bit about each of their jobs.

Michael Scott: And so then I had a, a much better understanding for how all of the treasury operations came together. And I think that helped me a lot in, in, in my career and just in, in understanding all those dependencies. The second thing I’d emphasize is. Get broad exposure across all facets of treasury. And the earlier you do so the better.

Michael Scott: ’cause that was the point I was just making right, is a treasury is really interconnected and I think the best treasury leaders understand cash FX capital markets, investments and banking operations and are able to synthes. The third thing I’d highlight is build relationships with your business partners.

Michael Scott: Treasury leadership is as much about. Influence as the technical skills. And so I, if I think back to some of the projects that I’ve been part of, or things that I’ve accomplished in my career, the most meaningful and impactful ones were. Those that where I was partnering with, not just within the CFO org within accounting, but also with the product and engineering teams or just across, across the business.

Michael Scott: So I think don’t lose sight of that. And finally, stay curious, right? The, whether it’s just staying abreast of what’s happening in the economy and in financial markets. The, there’s the technology side as well, right? We’re automation, data analytics are. Reshaping treasury faster than ever. So that continuous learning’s really essential.

Mike Richards: Amazing. We will put your LinkedIn details in the show notes and so people can connect to you. And I think you’ve given actually the summary notes, all those things about being curious and everything else. Just closing words from you just for people out there except for they can connect to you, which would be great for the networking stuff, but any just close offs and things like that as we leave today’s show.

Michael Scott: Sure. So I welcome the opportunity to connect with folks and really appreciate the conversation, Mike, and the opportunity to spend the hour with you. Bye. Treasury career has provided just a lot of opportunity and to, to myself, and I’m certainly see myself in a position, you know now where I’m very interested in giving back and when looking to help others coming up in their treasury career.

Michael Scott: Folks that I’ve. I worked with other companies prior to coming to Toast. I’ve stayed in close contact with and continue to have mentoring relationships with them. And one of the things I’d emphasize to people is be sure to pay that back. So for those of you who have you wanna reach senior positions, it’s really important to to lend a hand up right to those other folks who are looking to build their careers here, but excited to see what’s ahead of us.

Mike Richards: Thank you, sir. And yeah, great to finally connect with you. And now it’s okay. When I’m going to a restaurant and I see that I’m not gonna. Phil. That’s all right. I’ve had Michael on the show. I’m okay now. I can relax. No, you’ve been a superstar. Thank you very much, sir, for your time today. It’s been great.

Mike Richards: Thank you.

Michael Scott: Thanks so much, Mike. I enjoyed it. Thanks.

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, gotta 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.