Published: September 01, 2021
Patrick Kunz is an interim treasury and finance consultant. With experience in abundance to share with his clients, he understands that adaptability, a passion for learning, an orderly mind, and boundless energy keep the work flowing in. Here, the self-confessed ‘extroverted nerd’ shares his pathway to success.
The life of an interim treasurer can be unpredictable. For many a professional, not knowing what’s around the corner can feel somewhat uncomfortable. But moving from one job to the next as an external treasury consultant – an interim treasurer – provides the level of variety and excitement that Patrick Kunz is not about to relinquish. As he says himself: “I love it!”
With a string of successful interim assignments over his seven-year career, Kunz has plenty to look back on with pride. Most recent duties have included setting up a treasury function from scratch at Takeaway.com, where on only the third day the world went into lockdown as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many would panic but it’s a mark of Kunz’s professionalism that he was able to deliver.
Having successfully built and handed over the basis of a new treasury regime to the incoming team at the international online food delivery marketplace, he took on a treasury manager position with global engineering consultancy Arcadis. This was a part-time role that ran alongside an ongoing treasury consultancy assignment with Dutch domestic retail car marketplace CarNext.com.
The latter role briefly saw him take on its Head of Treasury responsibilities, running the department while preparing to hand over the reins to the firm’s newly appointed permanent incumbent. This was not before picking up an interim treasury post at cold storage specialist NewCold, helping bring the finances into line for a business experiencing strong growth across Europe, the US and Australia.
The life of the interim treasurer can be somewhat breathless, moving swiftly from one task to another. It demands commitment. “It’s definitely not a nine-to-five job,” notes Kunz. It’s also definitely not a job for those who seek comfort in the familiar.
Indeed, it can be a rather precarious lifestyle, especially in the early stages. Even once established, the timing and selection of new assignments exists in delicate equilibrium. “Of course, every assignment is always critical to the company so it’s important that I try to make myself available for them.”
Of course, delivering ‘on demand’ is not always possible. But then not all assignments are as critical as they are portrayed. Part of the skill of the interim is in assessing the client’s needs and finding a balance between practical availability, project urgency, and even personal reputation. It can be stressful, admits Kunz, adding that “planning for the longer term is rarely feasible”.
The capacity to meet the needs of clients in this way is not something everyone can offer. Kunz has worked hard over the years, drawing on many scenarios, building the necessary knowledge, skills, and professionalism to get him through many corporate doors.
The journey towards his successful interim career started with extensive post-university travelling. “Immediately after studying, I had to choose career or travel,” recalls Kunz. “I knew that once I was focused on my career, the travel would become harder to do.”
Following graduation he flew to New Zealand, “because this was the furthest possible destination and I could make my way back to the Netherlands from there, changing plans as I went”. His original year out turned into an 18-month back-packing odyssey across 18 countries. “It was a great time for fun and experiences, but also for building cultural awareness and negotiation skills – in Southeast Asia this saved a lot of money,” he recalls.
During his first professional engagement, as a financial analyst at Xerox, Kunz confirmed to himself that a career in accountancy was not for him. However, his next appointment, at Metro Group, the German holding company for several major wholesale and retail brands across 18 countries, opened his eyes to treasury – “the heart of the organisation” – as his calling.
Favouring the cut and thrust of dealing with “real cash” over the accountant’s often more abstract view, he says he learnt a huge amount during his four years with Metro, even alerting him to some interesting differences between “real-life treasury and text-book treasury”, especially around foreign exchange (FX) rate volatility.
Indeed, Metro Group pulled him into a very broad spectrum of work, from daily cash management to FX trading (“very old school, with three screens and phones”) and a wide range of projects, all with worldwide exposure from the outset.
From Metro Group Kunz took up the position of Group Treasurer at Wonen Limburg, a major Dutch housing corporation. After one year, professional wanderlust struck and he jumped headlong into the world of interim treasury. He has not looked back.
The thrill of the new has remained a feature of Kunz’s professional life. He has adopted a sustaining mantra: “If you only ever do what you know, you will never learn anything new.” Of course, it’s the refrain that ultimately set him on course for interim assignments, but he believes that continuous learning remains key to improving in his work and keeping up with the rapidly changing environments of businesses and the economy.
“As an interim, often you are only as good as your last assignment,” explains Kunz. “Some roles are filled via HR or recruiters who don’t know much about treasury; they tick boxes of requirements, so it’s necessary not only to have the knowledge to do the job, but also to be able to connect with the hiring manager and the cultural fit of the company.”
However, as an interim treasurer, sometimes securing an assignment is more about possessing the confidence and capacity to learn quickly. Having started his interim career at a relatively young age, and therefore with less experience than some of his peers, Kunz takes a steer from author Astrid Lindgren – “I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that”. As an interim manager, he knows he’s being hired because he can do what’s required. His confidence and passion for discovery means even if he does not have full knowledge of some aspect, he can learn quickly enough to help the client.
The interim life is by its very nature transient. As one who seeks out new experiences, this is its great appeal for Kunz: complete an assignment, move on. Of course, finding the first client can be the most difficult step. To overcome this hurdle, he joined the Dutch Association of Corporate Treasurers (DACT), attending many of its networking events. He also approached every treasury-focused recruitment agency, became a hyperactive LinkedIn user, and developed his own website. “The first year was challenging,” he recalls. “I had to do a lot of self-marketing to start building my reputation and letting the market know I was available.”
The first assignment, a straight treasury consultancy contract with global dairy supplier Interfood, was secured promptly. Without a treasury function in situ, the firm’s banking costs for international payments (around 20,000 transactions annually, mostly in USD) had got out of control and expert advice was sought. The quick win found by Kunz was a cool €300,000 saving in banking fees. But his analysis revealed other issues, alerting the CFO to the value of in-house treasury, which was duly formed. Interfood’s treasury remains a loyal client to Kunz.
It’s often the case that the work of a good interim will be worth considerably more than the fees levied, as was the case with Interfood. Achieving such a positive result so early in his career saw Kunz quickly picking up new assignments, each enhancing his reputation. As the workload escalated, so the need for marketing himself diminished. After the second year, he found himself having to deflect offers to avoid over-extending his time.
“I have the luxury now that I always have an assignment on the go; it enables me to take on the jobs that I love,” he comments. With a diversity of projects capable of sustaining his quest for the new and interesting, “a change of scenery”, courtesy of a wide range of companies and sectors, is assured. It’s safe to say now that the prospect of a long-haul treasury career with the same company has been eliminated from his agenda.
Today, Kunz has a broad sweep of assignments under his belt. Naturally some stand out as exceptional. Most recently he cites his work with Takeaway.com, delivering real-time cash flow forecasting to a greenfield treasury site as being particularly gratifying. “Starting from scratch, where there is no treasury, is the dream for every treasurer,” he comments. “It was challenging to take the elements of treasury that were there and build them into a professional function.”
Among the many requests for help he receives, Kunz cites treasury management system (TMS) implementations as being especially rewarding. “Within four to six months you can clearly see the change between old treasury versus new treasury. With a new TMS, treasury is usually far more efficient in terms of time and cost savings, and a lot more effective and in control because there is now so much more information available,” he says. “It’s great to make these improvements, leaving a company knowing it is happy.”
With almost every interim project there is something to learn. By engaging in so many assignments, each one different, it both demands and creates a broad skill set, some aspects transferring across all assignments.
At a technical level, the learning curve can be steep, the information not always being available in-house. In some TMS and payments hub implementations, for example, Kunz has found himself having to deep-dive into the client’s IT architecture far more than expected. Rapidly learning the nuances of particular databases, virtual certificates, and data security is a necessity just to be able to converse on an equal footing with the client’s banks and vendors. While not his core work, his accumulated IT knowledge has often been called upon for later implementations. “I can almost start selling myself as an IT project manager,” he jokes.
In addition to bringing technical know-how, the key to a successful assignment is fitting in with the organisation, notes Kunz. This dual-demand dovetails well with his self-confessed status as an “extroverted nerd”. He explains that in the first few weeks of every job it’s important to assimilate with the culture of the company, learning how decisions are made and by whom, both formally and informally. “I can’t be an introvert sitting in the corner of an office if I expect to get a project up and running. I need other people’s knowledge and information, so I must be able to talk to them, gain their confidence and ease their concerns.”
Kunz understands that engaging with this particular learning curve is especially important when managing change as an outsider. “For various reasons, there is nearly always someone who is against change or unwilling to help,” he notes.
Particularly with a big project, it’s common for affected employees to think they will be burdened with extra work, or even see their job disappear. Sometimes that will be the case, but rarely is resistance so ingrained that Kunz has to escalate his concerns to get the information.
Rarer still is the client that decides to row back on some proposed changes or adopt a less-effective compromise solution to avoid too much of a turnaround, but it happens. It’s the client’s prerogative of course, but for the interim it can be frustrating. To overcome resistance it is a matter of adapting to the circumstances “and trying to find the win-win for all parties,” he states. “Getting the job done is essential, but I feel like I’ve won the World Cup if I do that and make every stakeholder happy and satisfied with my effort.”
In the past seven years, Kunz has not been without an assignment. When he first formalised his interim service through the company he calls Pecunia (Latin for ‘money’), he was taking on mostly full-time assignments, alongside some project-based work. The rise in the past few years of digitisation in treasury has seen the focus shift towards managing technological changes – TMS implementations, payment hubs and other cloud-based platforms – while budgetary constraints in treasury have led to more part-time assignments.
While Kunz considers working for several clients simultaneously to be “more diverse and fun”, doing so has revealed a new opportunity. For companies that have significant treasury flows, yet believe themselves to be too small to appoint their own treasurer, he founded TreasuryAbonnement.
Described as a ‘treasury-as-a-service’ subscription package, he explains that it is aimed squarely at smaller firms, particularly those with sizeable FX exposures and those in growth mode seeking better cash management. To these he offers both treasury expertise (including a free FX rate analysis) and access to a ‘lite’ cloud-based TMS platform.
With innovative offers such as his ‘no-win, no-fee’ model, where a percentage fee is applicable only to savings made, it’s a side of his business that Kunz is keen to develop. But he admits that with his regular interim work currently demanding most of his time, it is difficult to reach out to the network of CFOs, FDs and controllers who typically take on treasury duties in the smaller business. While bringing on board a junior consultant would be a great help, this person absolutely must be the right fit, and thus he is in no rush. “After all, it’s my reputation at stake.”
Despite his busy schedule, Kunz has always found time to give something back to the community. He is a voluntary board member and treasurer for his local outdoor swimming pool. “I had great times at this pool when I was a kid. The municipality decided to close the pool due to costs unless volunteers stepped up to run it,” he explains. Today, with around 80 volunteers running the pool throughout the summer months, it is even making a small profit.
As a volunteer business coach and guest lecturer for Qredits, a private microfinancing and crowdfunding organisation in the Netherlands, he shares his considerable knowledge of business and corporate finance with budding entrepreneurs during their start-up phase. Through this, he also gives guest lectures at high schools and universities, helping potential student start-ups by adding a measure of real-world insight to their academic studies.
The student work is very much a two-way street, with Kunz gaining valuable exposure to generational changes in attitude, especially in the way people collaborate and communicate. “I make time for these initiatives not only because I think it’s important to give back to the community but also because it’s great fun and it broadens my own business network and understanding.”
As part of his professional voluntary effort, he helped start, and now runs, DACT’s sub-group platform for its 40 or so interim treasurer members, most using it as a means of networking and sharing experiences and knowledge. “We’re competitors but we do help each other,” comments Kunz. The platform also attracts occasional guest expert speakers on matters such as personal taxation, insurance and business law, as well as topics of interest to the wider DACT membership.
DACT’s technical committee is also on Kunz’s volunteer agenda, enabling him to monitor and evaluate new developments in treasury coming from bodies such as the European Banking Authority (EBA) and EU. “It combines well with my interim work as it keeps me up to date with every current treasury development while connecting me with my fellow treasurers.”
To anyone contemplating the interim way of life, Kunz stresses the need for it to fit the individual’s personality. “Anyone considering it must bear in mind that you have to deal with uncertainty and a lot of change,” he cautions.
There are practical issues (“sometimes I have to travel more and further then I would like”), and matters of job satisfaction (“some assignments are great fun, others are not”). And of course, many projects are by nature concerned with solving serious problems, often against tight deadlines, which can raise the stress factor. To this can be added the almost constant need to keep up with the trends and changes in the treasury space, and the demands of professional networking and marketing to keep the work coming in.
On the latter, while clients are often grateful to access the expertise of the interim, Kunz says some larger multinationals apply stringent HR policies that can add a layer of complexity to a contract. What’s more, with some HR departments placing assignments on their general recruitment boards, it inevitably attracts treasury recruitment agencies. “I can have multiple calls on the same day for the same interim assignment,” he notes.
But these are minor issues compared with the freedom offered by Kunz’s chosen pathway. By stepping headlong into the world of interim treasury, it not only offers him bountiful opportunities to keep learning and doing what he loves, it also assures plenty of scope for experiencing the thrill of the new, and a guaranteed “change of scenery” whenever he wants it.
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