Episode 28 with Gert-Jan van den Akker

Welkom bij de Strong Source Commodatief-prokast. We are your host, Martijn Bon en Alexander. Welkom bij een andere Strong Source Commodatief-prokast. En vandaag hebben we een heel speciale gast. Dat is Gertjand van de Akker. Gertjand van de Akker has een heel veel karreer in de Commodatiefsindustrie. En als een businessleider. Hij startde in 1987 een trainier in Cargel. En hij leefde in 2020 gewoon voor. Kovid Het, als hij was een executive vice-president. En dat was een part van de borst van Cargel. Nou, ik heb in de jaar dat ik met Cargel meer dan 25 jaar werkd. Ik heb nooit direct gezegd met Gertjand. Maar ik weet het wel, want hij was zo zo. Een informantie, een figure. In de Cargel, in Cargel. En speciaal de laatste een keer als hij het trainier was. Dus een andere way of hoe Cargel was bekend aan het trainier. Ik was heel veel. Ja, inderdaad. En je weet dat het trainier zou zijn, want ik was. Global Head of Coca-training. Dus wat hij kwam op was, was heel belangrijk om me. Ik heb een goede geval van GJ, dat was heel goed respect. Ik heb echt alleen geval van het trainier. Dat is heel erg belangrijk, want in Cargel, je hebt veel grote e-gots. En een opinionatie die mensen, die heel erg bijna. En ik heb echt een geval van mensen die een geval van GJ. Dus ik ben heel glad dat hij is wanneer hij te bijna te hebben. Dus ik heb echt een geval van GJ, een geval van GJ. Dus ik heb een geval van GJ, een geval van GJ, een geval van GJ, een geval van GJ. En ik heb een geval van GJ, een geval van GJ, een geval van GJ, een geval van GJ, een geval van GJ, een geval van GJ. Ja, ik heb heel veel aan het verkeerde. Dus je zit op deze company op de top. Dus hoe gaat je daar, wat moet je doen? En wat is nu, de dingen die je doet op de top, of de traininghaar. Je stelde nu nog een beetje van. Alvian en Joel, het raarwank. Wat is de dingen die je daar discusseert? En wat was het jaar dat je het al dat expereens beeld hebt? Dat was dat uisvol in de eindeers. En wat was meer van? De jonge jaren waar je er op de top en we het al hebben. Dus welkom. Welkom, Please introduce yourself en tell me about your years before. Oké, well, first of all, thank you very much for having me here. I've listened to quite a few of the podcasts that you've had here before, with a lot of legends, I would say. Enjoy to listen to them, enjoy to your, the discussions that you had. So if you want it to be in that, to be put into that role. My bad first of all, my name is Hetyon van den Alker, which is for the Dutch people, very quickly after I joined Cardinal 1987. Actually, I think it was day one. I changed my name from Hetyon to GJ. We used the initials, it was an American company. So that was people we used to that. And ever since I'm known as GJ, at least for the English speaking people. So my background is, I was born in 1959 in Bangkok in Thailand. My father was an expat, sent out by a company called Phillips in Einthoven to Thailand in the 50s, mid-50s, and I was born there. Then we lived there five years, went to Hong Kong. I lived there six years. I was 12 before I came to Holland. Did my schooling in Holland, university in Holland. One year economics, and then I switched to law. Graduated in '87, joined Cardinal 1987. Personally, I'm married to Matil and my wife. I've got three lovely children. Since November, I have a granddaughter called Thessper. No way. Yes, absolutely. No, yeah. That's a new, that's. I thought you would like that. That's an amazing news. Yeah. Well, I'm Thessper, but actually, I call her Thessby, but her whole name is Thessper. So that's me, personally. Nowadays, I'm living in Italy. We moved from Geneva in 19. or 2023 to Italy. And we've been living there. We live in Tuscany. About half an hour away from Aretzo. But I come to the Netherlands regularly, because three children living there are now granddaughter. So I come here on a very regular basis. And try to enjoy life, business-wise. After I retired from Cargill, I took on a few board works. We may get to that in a second. And today, because I do want to enjoy retired life, I've kept one, which is Alvian, the sugar business, where I'm on the board. And otherwise, I enjoy life, and trade options for my own account. Oh, look at that. So you keep on trading. Can you tell us a bit about the products that you traded? When you were a trader, because I think that's how you started at Cargill, was products that you traded, how it was back in the years. Okay. Yeah. I mean, very, very different world, right? I mean, let me paint the picture a little bit for what it was like when I joined Cargill. We're talking 1987. If you remember '87, there was no internet. Well, internet existed, but only for, I think, for the Army, US Army, and a few other people. But business was without internet. Life was without internet. Life was without mobile phones. The way we communicated was through tailics around the world. So we had this piping system in our offices in Amsterdam, and it's where I started. So we would write on a piece of paper, we would write our tailics messages that would go around the world, and we put the message into a pipe, and it would be blown through a pipe system to 10 ladies who would be sitting there typing this into a tailics machine. So I'm not very efficient from today's perspective, but that was the reality. That was the world. And I joined there as a management trainee. You know, it was probably coincidental, just like I think many of your other people that you've had here. How do you get into the commodity world? For me, it was also coincidence, because I didn't necessarily have a business background, and I actually came with a law graduation. But I had one thing which was going for me and got me into trading was in mid '80s, in 1984, my father passed away and left a little bit of money. And I realized with that money that there was a few things I could do, I wanted to buy a house, so that's the first thing I did at Board of House in Amsterdam. The second thing was I got excited about the European Option Exchange, which was in Amsterdam. But again, no internet. You couldn't put orders through a computer or anything. What I would do is I would be sitting in the library preparing for my exams. I would go to the telephone with a bunch of coins, and I would be listening to the voice messages, which would announce what the prices were of the individual stocks. And then I would decide I would do something on options and I would call my bank. In me time, I had learned about options, calls, puts, what it was to sell or calls or sell puts, and what it was to buy and the differences, the Greeks. I was very interested in that. And as I was getting towards the end of my study in law, I realized that maybe I should not continue in the law scene, but I wasn't sure. So I went in the summer for a summer, two months, worked for a law firm, and I realized that was not for me. When I thought what do I do, I got to try to find a job in trading. I applied with the Aben Emerald Bank Forum Exchange currency trader. I basically was accepting the job. I got hired, but just before I accepted the job, I went to the ISIC, which ISIC organized these company days. And being a law student, not being an economic student, I was not first choice. So I had to go to the companies which were left over. And one of those companies was Cargill. And as I went to the presentation, and there was a gentleman there giving a presentation on the commodity business, he was in the meat businesses, and he gave a presentation about the commodity markets, and I thought, "Hmm, that's interesting." Well, commodity is much more broader than just for an exchange. That's an interesting company. So I went to the HR manager, and I said, "Look, this is the case. I'm about to accept a job as a currency trade, but I actually think commodities could be more interesting. Can I apply for a job?" He said, "Yes, you can." And I said, "But I've got to go fast, because I've got to go back to the bank in about a week." So he said, "Okay, come to give me a call this afternoon." I gave him a call, he says, "Okay, come tomorrow." So I came the next day for an interview with two gentlemen, and it was an interesting interview, and obviously the first question was, "You studied law, what are you doing in this world?" I said, "Well, I'm fascinated by training." He said, "Well, what do you know about trading?" So I explained him that I was trading options, and in those days, he couldn't believe that I traded options, because it was relatively new. Today, it's nothing new, everybody trades options. But he thought that was quite impressive. So I got to the second round, another day of interviews, got a job offer, and then I started to work in Cargill a few months later, in what was called the NGVI Businesses. And the NGVI Businesses is, as Martijn knows, it very well. Basically, the feed ingredient businesses, which were being imported from all over the world into Europe, because grain prices were too high. So, the feed industry needed other products, cheaper products to be able to feed the animals. So, I started in the Pong Kunal Expeller Business, which I found interesting because I had an Asian background that was fascinated by Asia. And also I had a dream to be able to go to Asia one day. And so, I thought, "Well, that's interesting, and maybe the stepping stone to be able to go to Asia." And because we originated the products in Asia, I realized that if I wanted to have an opportunity to go there, I better excel in this business and try to see if I can get the job on the other side of the world. And so be it. After two years, there was an opportunity to move to Asia, to move to Kuala Lumpur. And I spent two years there on the origination side for the Pong Kunal Expeller Business and Koper Expeller Business. It was fascinating, enjoyed it, talking to the local people there, basically all Chinese, small millers. You go to these tiny offices all over Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, and trade and do businesses. And I wrote a lot actually in the personal relationships. How do you develop relationships with supplies, with customers? After two years, one of the big cheese, his name has come by a few times from the ex-Cardel people, but who's fearings came by at some point in Kuala Lumpur. And he said, "You know, you've been here in our two years. I heard you're doing a good job, but you need to be tested. And the only way you can be tested is you have to come to Geneva." So anyways, so be it. So I came to Geneva, but the expectation was I would spend some time first in Japan, because Kuala Lumpur had a problem in Japan. We could not really break through into the Japanese market. A difficult market, pretty much controlled by the Japanese trading houses. Kuala Lumpur had a small domestic business in Japan that we kind of inherited, but it was extremely small. But the business was good and was healthy, and obviously where the business healthy, you want to grow. But it was difficult to grow in that business, and Kuala Lumpur didn't really understand why we could not grow that business. I was sent there to do a study of four or five months, or how we could actually break through. I won't share with you the results, because it's too long. But then I ended up coming to Geneva four months later in back of 1992 and joined the corn desk. Spent basically a year on the corn desk, and then spent a year on the soybean desk until 1994 I actually made a switch to ocean transportation. It was actually not an easy decision to make. In hindsight, it was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. But I didn't realize it at that point in time. Why was it one of the best decisions? One of the best decisions, because in all honesty, I wasn't one of the best traders there on the floor. I think you've gone through, you've had people here, actually. People like Fausto Fulicci was there with Paul Marland. Robert Gosman came later. It was kind of junior, actually, at that point in time. But big talent, I will say big talent. But also the training was very particular type of trading. You're sitting there on a desk. You have the physical business on the one hand, and then you've got the future business on the other hand. Physical business was done basically through the external cargo offices. So you pretty much depended on your origination offices on prices, and you depended on selling on the destinations all through your other offices. And you were stuck in between, but always had to lower your pants to get to the price levels that were needed. So you were selling below replacement. Always struggling, always fighting was a brutal mentality amongst the teams. And then there was a screen trading part, the future trading. And I actually had a background in the NGFI. There was no future. So I didn't really have a futures background. So when I came on the corn desk with no futures, I had to learn what the futures mark was like, and how do you play that, and how it worked between the converging between futures and cash markets, etc. All that stuff I had to learn. So I was kind of a beginner. But I also felt that most of the time when I was training the screens, you were always behind. You just basically second guessing, whatever happened on that screen. And I didn't really get a lot of excitement on top. The way the culture was at that point in time, and the way the structures were and the managerial structures, you always had somebody there second guessing you, and challenging you. You had the desk head itself, then you had the desk head, then the group head, and then your experience from time to time would also work by probably once a day, and you would come by the desk and they would ask questions, etc. So there was a lot of challenging. The way that was challenging was not necessarily my way of challenging. A lot was fear-based type of challenging. So I kind of struggled with the culture, and I wasn't really having fun. And at that point in time, I realized, you know what, I can't continue in an environment where I'm not having fun. I remember having a discussion after year two with one of the key managers there doing my performance review at the end of the year, and I had a good performance review. And then the bonus discussions came. And the discussions started that there was good news and there was bad news. And the good news is you still have a job. The bad news is this is your bonus, which is obviously your low bonus. And so I said, "Okay, that's interesting, but do you have any comments on it?" He said, "No, I don't have a comment, so that's it." He said, "Okay, I have no discussions." I had to leave, and I felt, you know, that's when I started to doubt whether I would really survive in that type of environment. That evening, I got into the elevator, and clearly I had shown my dissatisfaction of the way things were. You also have to remember my personal situation at that point in time. I had a wife at home, we had two small children at that point in time. I was working from early in the morning to late in the evenings. You have some expectations. You do it, and you see it as an investment. But you also have to see at some point in time it's leading to something. And I lost it. Somehow I felt, you know, I'm not going to be able to let alone thrive in this type of environment. You know, I was an ambitious young man at that point in time. And you know, I was dreaming that I would be able to get to the top at some point in time. But I realized in that environment I wasn't going to succeed. I got into the elevator. Mr. Hoop Spearings, and he told me, "Look, I understand you were not happy." I said, "No, I'm not happy." He said, "Okay, come to me and talk to me tomorrow." I came to him the next day, he said, "Okay, I thought about this." He said, "I think you're worthwhile for us to keep here." But you probably shouldn't be in this environment, but I have another job for you, which was in the freight. And this is when I was, this is where the doubt came. You have to realize that if you, in cargo, pretty much if you want to, the Martinez referred to it under his time in Geneva, that's where you get tested. And I kind of felt, I probably failed in this environment. So, you know, and failing in that environment, how do you ever get to top if you're ambitious? And freight, at that point in time, was not mainstream business. It had a small owning business, very small chartering business, or it's very small trading business, and a very large chartering business, a service department, if you like. But Hoop said, "Look, there's this particular area. It's a parceling business. We had a parceling business going into Amsterdam. The gentleman who leads it, was a guy called, a gentleman called Floor's Billus. He's leaving, he's going into another role. That job is open. I think there would be very suitable for you. And you can do that role out of Geneva. I said, "Okay, let me think about it." I thought about it, and again, it was, I was pulled on the one hand by, you know, by feeling, "Okay, I'm moving out of the mainstream. How do I ever get back?" Because if I wanted to get to top, I got to get back into the mainstream. And realizing that actually, that business was a fun business, or looked like a fun business. It was your own little area. You didn't have people overlooking you. You had a lot of freedom. And so I thought, you know what, I've got nothing to lose. Let me do it. And from there, I started my career in the ocean transportation, which lasted for more than 20 years. And we had a tremendous ride. I mean, you know, now looking back, that's why I say it's the best decision I've ever made, because those 20 years formed me. It was the most fun part of my career in all honesty. I mean, I wouldn't say it's the best part of my career, not necessarily. I've had a lot of interesting and challenging jobs. And also my last job, a very large job. But it was really fun, partly because we were able to transform the freight industry as it was. We were able to transform the freight business within Cargill by doing a few things and changing a few things, which we can talk about if you like. But also, don't forget, and I haven't heard this mentioned before. But, you know, from 2000 to 2010, we had the super cycle. I mean, the commodity super cycle. China sucking in any kind of commodity that was there and needed it because they were expanding like crazy, including freight. So we had a huge bull market in freight from 2000 to 2010. And, you know, if you were in trading, you know, bull markets are probably the easiest markets to trade. But, you know, because it lasted also so long, there were so many opportunities that developed in those markets. And we were at the top of the game in dry freight trading at some point in time in Cargill. And we were able to really benefit from that and make tremendous returns. Because I think this is one question that I often hear is making that decision. What you've made from, in this case, mainstream core and soy towards something else. In this case, transport was a bit new, a bit different, maybe. And I think a lot of traders are struggling with that. You know, maybe, you know, whatever you do. you went from oil also to cocoa, et cetera, that decision. - What would your advice be to them, young people, how to approach that decision? What's the process that you think? Because you've been made a lot of right decisions in your life and that's why you've been also in these board rooms and so what would your approach be? What's your advice? What can you say about that? - Yeah, that's a good question, I thought about that 'cause I thought you were gonna ask that question, but I think that, you know, the most important thing to me is, as I just mentioned before, you gotta do what brings fun, what brings excitement to you. You know, that's why I didn't go into law firm but that's why I went into commodity business 'cause I thought that was more fun. Trading is more fun, it gave me a thrill, I enjoyed it. I liked the adrenaline that comes from trading. So I think it's important that you have to look where you can get excitement and where you can get fun because from my perspective, you know, assuming you have a certain amount of intelligence, where you have fun, you're probably good at and where you're good at, you'll have fun and that feeds itself. And that's why I'm saying, you know, even though I moved away from the mainstream, I go into an area where I had a lot of fun, I was actually also good at it. I really believe I was good at it and that's why I became also the head of ocean transportation business because everything that I had in me, the strength that I had in me, and the triggers that created fun in me, I could find that in the ocean transportation businesses. It was an area which was really starting to develop. Trading was not a main theme in the freight markets in those days but there was no futures market but we started to get swaps so we started to get financial instruments together with the physical businesses. It really also pushed your entrepreneurial capabilities and I had those entrepreneurial capabilities. It also there gave me excitement, gave me the huge satisfaction. And I realized I needed to be in those businesses where not only do you just trade behind a screen or trade financial markets, I need to be in environments where you have large physical businesses where you also depend on relationships. Relations that you develop with customers and with suppliers, where you can create alliances, internal, in cargo, external with customers and suppliers. And that created fun. Back to your question, the first and most important thing is, do where you create the most fun and excitement from. - I find it fascinating so far and also because the things you describe, I see the office and I see the floor, yeah? I see you working around, I see myself working around in the area. Now, what I would like to know is and you described by the floor engineer by where you have these trading desk, you can even trade corn, wheat, soy, whatever. And they're derivatives. And you have traders who are asked to join those desks and they get the divar, they get the money to trade. And that is what they do. And every year they get a budget or they get a target and that's their job. And a lot of people, they really enjoy that. They don't want nothing to do with strategy. They just want to trade, to give them in the screen. That's my job, yeah? What you did eventually is something very differently. You built a business and you said, when you went to OT, it wasn't something very big in cargo and the funny thing is Yon Dilaman, who was currently head of OT, he started, I think, two years after me and Amsterdam and he started also on NGFI. And fairly quickly he went to Geneva to OT and I recall myself thinking, what the hell is he gonna do at OT? Because everything we talked about was the mainstream commodities and crushing, grains and oil seed straining. And you were even, obviously, earlier than Yon going to OT when it really was nothing. So my question is, how do you build a business? What were the decisions that you took when after Hube and for the audience we talked about, Hube before, but there's a legendary trader. People have opinions about it, but I think what a shared opinion is that it was a brilliant mind, brilliant trader. Now, but after that conversation in the elevator, you took on that job. Now, can you describe the process of landing on that desk and sitting with almost like a blank piece of paper to how you built actually that thriving business, what it is now. And I believe Cargo is one of the best, the biggest freight traders in the world. How did you do that? - Yeah, that's not a simple question, I'll tell you. - Oh, but we're interested. - We may need more than just the hour to do that. But first of all, obviously it doesn't come by itself. So you need to understand the business first. I mean, you need to have understanding of the business. And obviously I came into that freight business and not understanding very much. So probably the first year, year and a half, I just spent learning and understanding the business. Like I said, I had a small type of business, but it was kind of fun. I had my own trading position. So for my trading position that I had in freight, I developed relationships with customers and went to visit the customers in South America. Most of those customers were sitting in South America. The interesting thing was most of our customers were actually Cargo competitors. So I had to convince Cargo competitors to business with Cargo, which was not necessarily an easy job. But because we were, obviously we had to be competitive. So we had to be cheaper than anybody else. And you had to work on the relationships. We were able to establish our business. But I also started to look at it from a training perspective. Having the background and that was very helpful. So those two years that I was in Geneva and being in the grain businesses, I also understood the value of a book. And understanding the value of the book and not having a very large book in the shipping businesses where we were, 'cause it was a small business, I realized I needed to do something to actually grow the book. This is where also then your entrepreneurial skills need to start working, because you need to then find out how do you actually build the book. On the one hand, obviously you build up more customers. Our customers were typical grain customers. We were partling out of Argentina, River Plate, and topping off in Brazil and then moving the goods to Amsterdam. But I also realized that there were opportunities to do other freight trading within that area. So I started to take, for instance, iron ore cargoes from Brazil into the River Plate, developed a relationship with the steel businesses in Argentina, which were on the River Plate. So you had paying cargoes for ships going into Argentina, and then you would be empty upriver, and then you'd be able to load the ships with grains. And that obviously was an economic plus. And I realized, wait a minute, there's opportunities around here that I started to do coal cargoes from South Africa into Brazil. And I started to do other types of cargo. So I realized that the freight businesses actually allowed you to develop a lot of physical trading opportunities. And as I mentioned before, also the derivatives of the swaps started to develop. So there were more and more trading tools that started to develop. As cargo, we were hugely in favor, and certainly I was hugely in favor in trying to develop those derivatives, because I realized that having that as an extra tool would allow you to substantially increase your trading abilities and capabilities. So the business started to grow and started to grow more and more. So at some point in time, I got so large in that parsley business, and having ships open that I also realized that I would also be able to re-lead some of those ships to cargo. So I became like an in-house freight supplier to the grain businesses in cargo. Now, that didn't always go down very well, because the grain people always thought that I was taking benefit from the fact that they had their grain cargo. So you had those internal struggles in those days, and you had to convince the people that you would be good for them and that you'd do that in a fair pricing, et cetera, et cetera. But anyway, I was able to make money by basically arbitrage in the internal cargo book. And realized that this is actually an interesting concept. Why can't we do that on a larger scale? And so be it, but what I needed to do, and that was actually a huge challenge, I needed, I understood that I needed to get control of the grain book. Cargill at that point in time did 60 million tons of grain, roughly more or less, if I remember correctly. And I saw the value of that grain book, 'cause it was all outbound, freight basically shipments from either US Gulf or South America, Europe to wherever. And I saw opportunities that you could actually trade around that book from a freight perspective. So I came up with this concept where I went to the grain people, was Emory at the time, plus all the desks, Paul Marland, Faustal was there, Dave Buchanan was there. And I had to convince them that if they would give up their book and let the decision be made by us on how to manage that freight, instead of that they decided themselves. So in other words, they would sell, we would immediately take over the sale and the freight sale and take it into our own book and then we would manage it. We would make sure that one, they would not lose money on that particular sale. Secondly, we would take care of the positioning because the money was made in the positioning of freight, just like money's made in the grain businesses, in the positioning of the grain. But they didn't need to worry about it, we would take care of it. We spent weeks discussing this and it was all about trust. And I still thank every single one of these people for giving me the opportunity. and they said, "Okay, fine, we trust you. Let's do it." And they also realized that it was an experiment with something that needed to be done, and it was going to be good for cargo overall. And that's what we did. And so it changed that job. Well, it didn't change that job, because instead of part of it, it was only part of it. They didn't need to be afraid of it at all. They could just focus on being a CNF originator and CNF cellarol and freight cell. And we would take care of all the rest. Of all the freight, the logistics, we would take care of it. And it was a huge success, frankly, also because we went into this massive bull cycle. So they had freight opportunities with their, and obviously my task, in the meantime, I had become head of the Panamax desk in Geneva, global Panamax desk, because we ended up doing this for the global businesses. I also have two tasks. One is to make sure that the OTPNL was thriving and was successful. And secondly, I need to take care of those internal customers. So the grain business was our internal customers. They trusted us in managing the books. So I needed to make sure they were going to get a return. Well, here came the super cycle, right? So we had many, many successful years, in which we were able to position ourselves very strongly, very successfully in the freight markets. And we did exactly the same. And we duplicated basically our book also for the grain people. So they also were able to generate significant amounts of money of the positioning that we basically handled and managed for them. And they were able to take in the PNL. And they could really focus on the stuff that they were good at. And that was on originating grain and selling grain and trading futures. What I'd like to discuss related to this now, before the podcast, we had a brief chat about the dairy market. And how the dairy market has always been opaque. It's still quite opaque. And how Alex started his business by providing more analytics, more insights, more transparency. Now, you also told that when you were sitting at the corn desk, you were looking at the screen and you were seeing those numbers. And yeah, it wasn't making too much sense to you at the time. Now, I recall that when I started trading and I saw those numbers from CBOT, and I didn't tell me anything, it was just a number on the screen without any meaning. And I realized then that I forced, that I needed to force myself to actually go through the S&Ds. And Cargo at the time had a system which was called MacBeth. And there were all those S&Ds and I spent quite a lot of weekends alone in the port of Amsterdam just going through numbers and trying to make sense of them. Because I wanted to understand what that number on the screen, the thing in bushels, what it meant, how I could translate the number on the screen to something in real life, which could be a discussion with Mikael Nikazer doing a feed miller's recipe. That was critical to me. Now, how did you do that later in OT? Was it in the beginning also, like we said in the dairy market, a lot of sentiment trading with all kinds of carpentelists talking to buyers and sellers and feeling the sentiment and feeling that that was the super cycle? Or did you also start to develop really a strong fundamental analytical base so that you could have these debates with all the traders on the floor, about the fundamental reasons why freight will go up or down? No, good question, Martin. We've always had fundamental analysis also in freight, but it was really, really complex and difficult because you had a lot of different sizes, a lot of different commodities. We talk about the grain businesses, but grain is only a very small part of what goes on these dry box ships. We're talking about dry bulk, right? We were also doing tankers, which is a separable game altogether, but the dry bulk was the main businesses we were in in Cargill, and then obviously we were grain now, so we had the large grain, but its grain was only a very small part of the overall flows, right? I mean, the big flows were iron or coal. So you need to understand also what was going on with iron or coal, et cetera. So yeah, we realized that, you know, you needed to have a good understanding of those different businesses. So we were always working on SMDs, and the reason why was, you know, you could not make big trading decisions, you could not run big positions in Cargill without a fundamental justification, right? You know, I'm not sure what it is like today, but it's probably still the case today, right? I mean, if you want, yeah, you can have day trading positions or you can, you know, and that's always a little bit, when I was doing on the corn desk, when I started, you know, it was day trading, right? It was just, you know, looking at a chart is now time to buy and there was a time to sell it, that was it. But the big positioning was done through fundamental analysis, and, you know, you needed to have a fundamental basis to be able to run big positions, because if you didn't, if you did not have a good fundamental analysis, then you would get completely clothed. By management. Is that like a reprise, is that right? No, no, no. You've was one of them, but if you would not be able to justify from a fundamental perspective, why you were running some positions, then you would. You would be basically. You would probably. Now, if you were right, you were right, then that was fine, but if you obviously, if you were wrong, then you were wrong, right? And in those days, where management was done by fear, you made sure that you did your fundamental analysis. So, yes, we were always developing, Martijn, our fundamental analysis on freight. It's a very difficult task, and I'm sure that still today, they're still trying to refine the S&Ds, and you need a lot of different inputs. That was also why it was so important for us to do business, not only in the grain businesses, but in from a freight perspective. We were doing businesses with steel mills, with utilities, with bulk site suppliers. I mean, we were doing all kinds of businesses using the dry bulk freight, and, you know, connecting businesses. We had a massive time charter fleet, which we were running, and so we had a significant amount of our charge opportunities within physical businesses, but also between the swaps and the physical businesses, between sizes, very significant amount of different trading opportunities that we would have. But the big positioning was always done on a fundamental analysis, and that justified in running big positions. And we did run big positions. The biggest position we ever run was in, you know, somewhere around the financial crisis, right, in 2008, 2009, when, you know, we had Cape Markets, which were costing $200,000 a day, and from a time charter perspective, if you imagine that the running expenses on those vessels at the time were probably about $12,000 a day. You know, you made $180,000 per day profit on these ships. So these ships had a payback of six months. And, because, but that was what the bull markets created in those days. So you knew that that could not last. So by the time the financial crisis came, we were actually, we didn't obviously didn't realize that it was a black swan type of event, right? We didn't realize that we were going to get a crisis or a financial crisis. But we didn't know that freight levels were elevated and was not sustainable. So we had built up a substantial short position at that time. And then obviously the market collapsed, and we did very well in that whole collapse. Did you face defaults at the time? Yeah, it's a good question. It's probably one of the most challenging times I had in cargo in my career, frankly, overall. You've got to position, you've got to reflect on this. But, you know, again, we were limit, limit short at that point in time. Market collapsed. I mean, the K market basically dropped from $200,000 to $5,000 a day. And we were short all these ships. We had obviously, the market, we had the market positions and we had the market risk. But we also had the credit risk, right? And before the market collapsed, our credit exposure was towards the ship owners, right? Because the ship owners were where we had the ships on on time charter. That was our exposure. And obviously they had sold us ships cheap. Market was up. So the risk was that they were default. Now, ship owners never default. They don't default by definition. I've never seen, unless they go and actually belly up, they don't default. They don't renegotiate, they don't default. The risk is more on the customer side. And we noticed, so when the market collapsed and we had this massive downturn, our credit exposure went from $750 million of credit exposure that we had towards owners to $1.3 billion of credit exposure that we had with counterparts, steel mills, other grain houses. You name it. Swaps. We had exposure with where they were. OTC. Swaps. So we had significant amounts of exposure. And that was when I started to sweat. And that was the most challenging time. What we did was we created a crisis team within OT. I had become the head of OT at that point in time. And we created a crisis team and realized that this was, we needed to really, really focus on this. Because on paper we had this P&L, but we could wiped out the P&L. In fact, our risk was that we would turn into a massive, massive loss if we would get all these defaults on a customer side. Well, then the party started. We had one after the other come to us and visit all the customers because they want to renegotiate the contracts. And so for probably about six months to one year, we had one steel mill after the other steel mill after utility come by our offices and asking if they would want to renegotiate, if we could renegotiate the contracts. And we realized we had to say no. Obviously, there are different ways to say no, but we were able to say no. In some cases, we were able to restructure contracts. So it was possible. In other cases, you could simply, could not restructure the contract. So you would just simply have to say no. But we're talking about substantial. companies. Ah, it wasn't just small companies. These were large companies that were coming to hoping that they were able to renegotiate the contracts. And then there was also the famous, I remember very well, we had a famous conference that was set up by some ship progress in London, where we were all invited because we had an industry problem, right, that the market had collapsed so what were we going to do. And so we went to this famous ship conference. There were 250 people there from all over the world, people, customers, chargers, ship owners, everybody. Everybody had an interest to listen to what was going on. Everybody hoped to do a goal stage and say, we will renegotiate every contract. Well, good point. Well, actually, at some point in time, I went into this meeting thinking, okay, you know, this is an opportunity to actually voice ourselves as cargo and to state our opinion. And I got the opportunity was handed to me because at some point in time, somebody stood up and said, you know, what we should do, we should just have an industry wipe out. All contracts that were created before X-Day, our wiped out doesn't exist anymore, and we start all over again. And, you know, it was silent in the room. It was 250 people that was completely silent. And I stood up and said, general ladies, that's not going to work. You know, you can imagine what will happen if we if we do this and what the consequences is for you can't oversee what the consequences is for everybody. We're all in strings. We're all connected. You can't do that on an industry wide. Let me tell you something else. As cargo, we have very significant amounts of commitments towards ship owners. The market has collapsed. I can guarantee you, and I will say here to everyone, we all honor every single one of our contracts. Every single one of our contracts, we will honor. We are not going to renegotiate into the contracts. You know what? We're expecting that everybody will do the same. That's our standpoint as cargo. And everybody, you know, started to clap and said, okay, fine. And that was it. You know, it was silence was broken. And people realized, you know, that is, you know, that's what's needed. And that's what should happen, right? The obviously when companies are in trouble and you have good relationship, you try to help. So we, you know, there are cases that we tried out. Anyway, long story. And again, we could talk for this for hours. But at the end of the day, we had to go through this whole process. Our exposure, as time went by, obviously started to drop. And at the end of the day, I think we had to take a right off of 10 to 20 million dollars of the 1.3 billion exposure. But it took about one half to two years to unwind all those different contracts to execute in the contracts. But it was, it was probably one of the biggest success, personal successes. I think I had being able to manage that exposure in a successful way. And probably was the base for me to step up in my career in cargo. I think it was generally recognized. And from then on, I created a brand within the, within the management of cargo. And they realized that I had certain capabilities that was useful for cargo. And as well said, and you said that earlier, you were sent at a young age to Japan to solve a problem. And that's also what I, what I've thought about when I looked at people who became really successful in cargo. They were always put in difficult places or in places where there was a problem. For example, Jan Delemann in in Houston, right? When the thing I blew up over there. And if you successfully resolve it, you get the design of approval. And then you have obviously an enormous capability because you have problems all the time, right? And you can also motivate and teach, you know, people who work for you how to resolve these things. And indeed, it's a good time bridge to the next phase in your career. Because after that in in 2011, and you made a, you made a promotion promotion and you became platform leader of a new business in cargo. And it was called ATM energy, transportation and metals in Singapore. Can you, can you tell us about that? Yeah, I mean, it was, it was a difficult time in cargo I found. Because we, you know, we, we had gone through different types of strategic processes and reviews and, and the structures were made and we, they came up with this, I think it was McKinsey actually, we came up with this structure of having businesses and they were put into platforms. And if you would become a platform leader, you did not have business responsibility. And it was very clearly stated, you know, the BU leaders responsible for the businesses, you were coaches. You know, that's a difficult task. And I, I struggled initially with this concept of not being able to be hands-on in businesses because I was a BU leader before. But, but actually being a coach. But I took it on and I realized, after a while that actually I could do it. We moved to Singapore, which I thought was really interesting. I always had an ambition to go back to Asia again. And the opportunity was there because we were three platform leaders sitting in Geneva and, and because the growth of the businesses in energy, transportation, metals in Asia, we all realized, all three leaders that one of us would probably be best suited to go to Asia. And obviously, I put up my hand, love to go. I had a wife and a daughter at that point in time who were also interested to move to Singapore. So we moved to Singapore. And, and you know, I was responsible for the ETM businesses run, run out of Singapore. It was the, it was a structure of the platform we had to coach. Martin, you probably remember in those days also, you know, we, Cargo was going through this whole process review. We had talked that through the company needed to move away from being just strictly commercial and entrepreneurial into being a process driven company because we needed to have the systems. And to be able to have the appropriate systems, Cargo had grown so much. And which is, which is true. And we had data all over the place, unstructured. And we just could not continue to grow without addressing our requirements on processes and systems. So we needed to become much more process driven organization. And that had an impact on us as commercial leaders. It had an impact on the way that we looked at people. It had impact on behaviors. It had impact on the culture in the company. We moved away from being a culture where you would be at liberty to challenge at any point in time. In a constructive manner, mind you, you always had to be constructive in the challenging, but you could challenge. In all of a sudden, we weren't allowed challenge anymore because we had to fit into this box of processes. It was tough. And it had an impact on the culture. Anyway, I tried to find my way until at some point in time in 2013. I realized that, you know, I came to a point where, you know, I struggled in the Cargo culture and the way it was at that point in time. I struggled with the fact that I believe there wasn't enough accountability going in the company. There were probably too many people in the wrong positions in the company. Drifers was very keen to take me in. I had to think about it for a long time, but finally decided, you know, I've been in a cargo for so long. I need a change. I'm going to do it. So I decided to leave Cargo and join Drifers. What is the difference in culture between Drifers and Cargo? What was your role in Drifers? I came in. At that point in time, I had a matrix organization. We used to have matrix organizations in Cargo and we realized matrix organizations don't work very well. So it was interesting that I came into that organization being in charge of one part of the matrix, which is the regions. You had the businesses in Drifers and then you had the regions and I was responsible for the regions. Now, the interesting part of that job was also that all the assets that Drifers had was it was sat within the region. So I had, you know, I moved away from having a training type of responsibility into having more of a managerial type of responsibility and overseeing all the assets and the regions and trying to manage and trying to make the matrix work. Well, that was a challenge. I mean, you know, I mean, what's the difference between Drifers and Cargo? I would say, first of all, they are very similar in many, many ways. Just like I think there's a lot of similarities with a company like Bungie. We're all in the same businesses, right? There's a lot of interchangeability between the different people. Some people from Drifers come from Cargo or vice versa. And so, you know, their approach towards market is very similar. You always have cash businesses. You have futures. You have positioning on the way you make the money. You're all in these businesses where you have to trade below replacement. You have to trade your way out to make money, etc. So it's very similar in many ways. But Cargo was a company which had a very strong Anglo-Saxon. Maybe I'm biased, but I would say also a bit of adult Dutch influence in the culture. And where Drifers was really a Latino type of company with a Latino type of culture. And so the approach is different. Probably more hierarchical. A hierarchy was more important in Drifers. But it also meant that, you know, if you were sitting at the top of the house, and I was part of the their executive team at that point in time, you were less approachable. People didn't feel that they could approach people that were sitting at the top of the house. That was very different than in, for instance, the cargo where I always felt, you know, the people at the top of the house were very approachable. I could approach people at the top of the house. But I also felt that me being in the top of the house in Cargo or being a platform leader at the time, I needed to be approachable. And I never felt that people had a fear to come to me and talk about issues or positive things. So whatever, in drivers, that was different. It was much more of a political type of organization. Now where I thought at some point in time, when I joined drivers, I thought, okay, this is, you know, last step in my career, I'm gonna finish here, I'm gonna stop, that's it. But during my first year, as I stayed there, again, I wasn't having so much fun. And then the fun factor comes back again. - Yeah. - And, you know, if you don't have much fun, the motivation goes down, and I realized I can't work somewhere, I'm not gonna sit here. I had another five years, six years of work to do, at least. And I thought, you know, I'm not gonna be able to survive in this for six years, let alone be successful if I'm not motivated and not having fun. And within that year, I got approached by another company. Kafka at the time was Kafka International was set up, and they were looking for a CEO, and I was interviewed to go and to become the potential CEO in Kafka, but I was still in contact with Kario, still in contact with Dave Matleinen, who had a very strong relationship with, who was very upset when I left at the time. We'd always stayed in contact, and before I actually left, and physically left, because I resigned to him when he came to Singapore back in November 2013. He was in Singapore, and I resigned, and he had just turned, he had just been announced, and he would become the new CEO, and I told him that I was going to resign, and he was very upset with me. But he said, you were gonna come back one day, and guess what, so here we are. When I told him I was going to leave drivers, and I was in the process of going to work somewhere else, he said, no, no, let's talk. And so he was in the middle of reorganizing Kario, Kario results were not very good at that point in time, and he was under massive pressure from the board to improve the results, and realize that he need to take some drastic measures in the Kario organization, and also needed some new people to sit at the top of the house, and he thought I was the right person to bring back, and be put into that position. So very honored, very, very honored, to first of all, to be allowed to come back to Kario, which had never happened before. Obviously, at that point in time, that somebody left to go to a competitor, and then was allowed to come back. But secondly, also giving basically the biggest business in Kario, which is the agricultural supply chain business, and taking it over from big, big legends of people, like Emory, I took over from Emory Kronik, stepping literally in big shoes, but also figuratively, and then taking over the businesses, but then also trying to reshape the businesses and work on getting a higher performance out of the businesses, which again, we're underperforming at that point in time. But giving that task to do together with the new executive team that came into cargo. - What would be, what's so different when you're at that stage, right? And you've been, what are the things that you are doing on a daily basis, because then you're not trading anymore. You're not, you know, basically probably with your position, et cetera, you've got good, amazing traders for that. So what is your time spent on that stage? - Yeah, again, a good question or something. I would say, you know, most certainly at that point in time, again, the expectation was that we needed to improve the performance of the business, right? I mean, and what I realized, you know, coming back into cargo and being given, you know, this opportunity, this business, right? I mean, you're talking about an enormous amount of assets, right? I mean, you know, 30 billion plus assets, thousands and thousands of people, you know, it's very significant and complex organization. You know, that needed to improve the performance. So, you know, how do you go about that? And, you know, and, you know, the first thing you need to do is obviously develop a strategy, right? And how do you develop a good strategy? And I remember going through this in my own mind, I said, how do, you know, what's the best approach in this? I started to read books about strategy, et cetera, and then I thought, you know, I mean, you know, if you read books in general, but how do you actually deploy that into this specific business? And I developed my own process in that, in that respect. And I realized that the first thing I needed to do is to look at the external world and see where were we at that point in time? What does the external world look like? And what does, what does Cargill's role need to be? And certainly the Cargill Agricultural Supplying businesses need to be in that, what can we be? And certainly, where can we actually make money? Where do we have competitive edge? What does the competitive landscape look like? So you need to do a lot of external seeking first of your own organization and where you sit in the external world and where the opportunities are going to be. And we realized that still the biggest opportunities were going to be in Asia. So you need to have a very strong Asia type of focus. So you needed to make sure that your organization was set up for growth. So we need to grow the opportunities. And let's be clear, I mean, we'll talk about, you know, the growth was going to be there. Why is because, you know, the global population, I think at that point was seven billion today. I think we're eight billion. But we all know that the world population grew over 10 billion. We need more calories. We need more food. We need more food ingredients. So the agricultural businesses are not going to die and fall off and they're going to continue to grow. So there is growth opportunities, but what is your edge and where do you grow and how do you grow? So you need to go through that process first. Now, when you identify, you know, where your edges and where you need to grow, then you need to go through the process of identifying, okay, so what does that mean to the asset that you have? Your asset base, you know, what is your asset base today? And is it the right asset base to be able to play into that growth? You need to look at the culture in your organization. Is the culture in the organization the right culture for you to thrive and to be able to grow the businesses in a successful manner and to reap the fruits of the efforts that you put into it? You need to look at the talent. Do you have the right talent in place? Do you have the right people to be able to benefit from this? Do you have the right bums in the right seats? And then you need to look at the structures. You know, are the structures that you have in your organization appropriate for you to be efficient, effective, to be able to be quick in your decision making processes? So you look at all those different aspects and that was my primary task at that point in time. Is to look at all those different elements. Obviously it's not just something you do by yourself and we looked at it within our own management team. We had endless amounts of discussions. We came up with a strategy and then we came up with, okay, so how does the organization need to look at? And for instance, we need to look at our asset portfolio. I remember one of the things that came out of this was that, you know, where our asset base was certainly on the soil crust was not the ideal portfolio. You know, we had a large base in Europe. We had an obviously large base in the US, which was fine. We had a large base in South America, which was good, but you know, that was continued growth opportunities there. So we needed to continue growing. But in Europe, you know, it wasn't, there was no growth in Europe. We also had a crushing plant in Amsterdam and, you know, being Dutch, I remember having a lot of a pressure from getting a lot of phone calls from people from the past, why we decided to sell a crushing plant in Amsterdam, but it was a decision we had to make. And the answer was quite simple. I said, you know, we have somebody who actually will pay a good price for it, which is Bungie, who had a different view than we did about opportunities clearly. But they were prepared to give us a good price, and we were able to use that money that we got from the crushing plant to build new crushing plants in China, which were we sold an opportunity and were we sold the growth. So essentially, we wanted to grow in China, we wanted to grow in South America, and we wanted to grow in US, where we saw also certain possibilities in biodiesel growth, et cetera, and crushed opportunities. We wanted to grow in Canada. So the plenty of growth opportunities, but it had to be in the right place. But in some areas, we had to actually divest. We had to become smaller. One of those places was Europe. Same thing we had to do in Africa. We had to, you know, close down unfortunately, some of the businesses, even though, you know, there were growth opportunities in Africa, and still today, the growth opportunities, but it was a very difficult business for us to manage. - In these things, like you describe it now, I can understand that from what they call holistic, sort of like a helicopter kind of view. But at the end of the day, it needs to be a numbers based decision. - Great. - Now, can you share with us a bit on, were you going through spreadsheets yourself or did you had like a dedicated research team who needed to come up with the analytics to actually confirm or maybe, and the gate, what you guys came up with from holistic point of view? - Yeah, I did it work. - Yeah, luckily my time, I didn't know I have to do with myself. So obviously, you know, we had, I mean, that's the good thing about, you know, critical and I'm sure larger corporations have that. They have significant support teams, right? So yeah, we had a significant amount of people that were involved in number crunching, putting all the numbers together. And then, yeah, obviously we needed to discuss them, right? So I didn't need to put the numbers together, but yeah, I do need to go through the analysis together with the rest of the management team and we needed to draw conclusions from what was there. And then make decisions because there was a lot at stake, I mean, you know, one of the things that we, that we had to work on Matayn and Alexander, which I think is an important point. And I've brought a lot of that to, I think to the businesses, of the point about accountability and personal accountability for, for results. One of the reasons, and I mentioned that before, for I left calculus, I felt there wasn't strong enough accountability and accountability is really that people are held responsible for the results and very well rewarded if it goes well, but also, you know, if it doesn't go well, are held accountable and if it doesn't work, you know, they either need to leave one, find another opportunity or another job, right? And it's, you know, you don't need to be emotional about it, be very rational. And I've always taken a very rational approach about it and I felt that that we needed more of that rationality coming through. So one of the things I did when I came back to Cargill and was put into that role, one of the first presentations I gave to the board, the non-executive board in Cargill, this pitch on accountability. And I said, you know, we need to change the culture of accountability, we need to change the mindset and I need to lead by example. So this is, you know, we've gone through the strategy, this is what I think we can achieve within the next two or three years. If we don't achieve this and this within the next two years, you don't need to ask me to leave. I will leave by myself. And that was unheard of and it was a bit, it was quiet. My colleagues didn't necessarily take that, take that very well because they realized, wait a minute. It also means, right? So we had a long discussion about this and everybody agreed that that was the right thing to do. And we were all held accountable. But it was a good way to, and the same thing happened within the CASCO organization, exactly the same approach. And I told these people the same thing. I said, we're all in this together. We need to achieve this. If we don't achieve this, I will step down. But if I step down, I can guarantee you're the future for any of you individuals. It puts a lot of pressure on the system, but we had to because we had to get the performance back up. I recall the strategy was successful. I mean, this corporate trading strategy, I mean, after it was implemented, Cargill's BNL's shut up quite dramatically, right? Yeah. In all fairness, Mateo, I mean, the trading strategy, I think Cargill's probably still working today on developing the trading strategy and looking at the trading organization. You know, the difficulty in Cargill organization and where we dealt with them, we were talking about the trading strategy is, you know, we had so many books, I mean, so many people were trading. And one of the things that I was trying to achieve was to make sure that, you know, even though I don't necessarily believe with a complete centralized organization, because you need to have good training talent spread out across the world. Don't just have it in one center of expertise and centralize trading, but you do need to have clear roles and responsibilities. And what we're trying to do is to make sure that the House of Cargill was much more taking a common approach. There was more centralization than what we had before because we were all over the place. We need to make sure that we're sharing practices and we're sharing the experiences. And, you know, what I explained to you before about, you know, what we were able to do in OT and managing the free book for somebody else. Could we do that also on the largest scale in a different areas within Cargill? That was what the trading strategy was about is to make sure that we would actually become better traders. Now, after I left, the trading results of Cargill did improve tremendously. And actually, it's one of the sad things I actually had is the year before I left, actually, we had a tough year in trading. And all of you, then you get the questions, you know, do we still have an edge trading as changed? Can we still have large trading positions, et cetera, said to all those questions came up. You know, they were all addressed by myself and by the people who succeeded me. And the reality was, no, you know, these things are cyclical, right? But, you know, we needed to remind also the upper house and our non-executive board that although we did have a lot of support particularly from the family around trading and support that know nothing has changed, I mean, yes, we had a tough year. You know, it's a bad cycle in trading. Overall, all the competitors were having a tough time. But things will get better again. And things did get better. So after, you know, by the time I retired after 2020, Cardinal had tremendous years in trading because we had the right structure, right people, right set up. And we had a good cycle in trading with enough volatility that allowed good trading positions to be run. Hey, we're running a bit out of time, but I have two questions. I, sure. I like to go for it. Please, because one thing is, can you share with us what it is like to, and to work at the absolute top of the house. So share a bit of a sentiment. What it is like to have, you know, these sessions with the CEO and your peers, which are all, you know, the top of huge businesses. And for people, people who don't know, Cargo, 160,000 employees, rather, big, complex businesses. I suppose all the names, right? But what is it like to sit in that, you know, that board meeting room? Is it, is it sometimes a kabuki theater where everyone is doing their own shop? Or is it, is it, is it real where people are personal and, and share their doubts and whatever? You know, can you give us an idea what it is like on that level? Yeah. You know, good question, Matan. I mean, let's put it this way. The risk is that it can be lonely at the top, right? So I think one of the challenges and I give a lot of credit to, to DMACC, Dave McClanan, for, for his leadership in, in that is what he ensured was when I came back and we basically had a complete new team at the executive team. Remember, we used to have the corporate leadership team. Well, when I rejoined, we were still corporate leadership team, but very quickly, we, we moved to the executive team. So we got rid of all the platform leaders and we created a larger executive team. He realized that for us to be successful, that the top of the house needed to be really working very closely together. We also needed to address the issues between functions and businesses. We had massive issues between functions and, and business not working very well together, where, you know, the functions thought, all the, the traders in the business who are arrogant would listen to the functions. And where the, you know, the, the business people thought that all the functions were costly bureaucrats and midwits, you know, and we needed to change that. And so, and it needed to start at the top of the house. So DMACC took an approach where he ensured that, you know, at the top of the house, we also were very personal to each other. We had massive amounts of discussions to learn who we were individually. We had to share very personal elements of ourselves. We had very emotional sessions amongst ourselves. So he actually became very, you have to show your vulnerabilities. So he created a very strong sense of, of team play at the, at the top of the house. So, you know, that already ensured that you didn't feel lonely at the top because you had colleagues that you could talk to where you could have open discussions. You needed, you did not have to fear that you would get stabbed behind your back. And obviously we were in this together. So there was this, this effort of we need to work this out and we need to work this together. And it was our task to make sure that in our own areas of responsibility, for me, that was cask, you know, again, a business with, you know, 50,000 people, including, you know, a lot of plantation people, right, in the palm oil businesses, but nevertheless, also big asset businesses, large, complex organization, making sure that this would, this would trickle through through the whole organization. So yeah, you needed to work that out, you used each other. We needed to, you know, put our money where our mouth was. So we needed to show every time we were on stage and we were in public, at least in front of the cargo public, we needed to show that we were real team. And that we would listen to each other, that we would be, you know, we would prepare to challenge in a constructive manner. So we need to show all the right behaviors. So it was really important to work on the culture in, in cargo at that point in time, work on this point of accountability, you know, how do you deal with, you know, with underperformance, how do you deal with underperforming people, how do you give people a fair chance, but make sure that people are in the right roles at the right time. So significant amount of change that needed to be put through. So a lot of work at the top of the house, but to be honest, most of the work was really managing the organization below myself, right, this CASC organization, which we had a fantastic management team to do that. It wasn't just me, but it's obviously a full management team, and making sure that the whole management team would be able to spread out, you know, what we wanted to achieve and make sure that people were held accountable. And that's how we got to work. So I never felt it was lonely. I, you know, you learn obviously along the way how to play the, the first board meetings, you know, with the external board is always, is very interesting. I mean, these are very, very smart people at the top of the house, right? I mean, the external board meetings, they're all exeos. They've seen, they, they have massive amounts of experience, not necessarily all experience in the cargo businesses, but, you know, they were people coming from the airline businesses or hospitality businesses. I mean, they came from all over the place, you know, exeo of United Health was one of the board members, very smart people, and they were very sharp and they would always be able to ask the right questions. And I enjoyed it because, You know, it made sure that you always were very well prepared for boarding. meetings, always prepared for the sharpest questions, you're always on your toes, and you needed to make sure that you knew your stuff, and that you had your story ready. But if you had your stuff ready and you had your story ready, they would be very supportive, too. So it was the interaction on the one hand with the board, but obviously that was just on a quarterly basis, on a monthly basis within the executive team and anything else that came in between. And then most of the work was really just managing your own organization. And that was the right way you're looking at it. So, you know, probably 75% of my time was just actually spent on managing the businesses. Right. Now, thank you. My last question, and then there's a specific, specifically for a lot of youngsters that we have as get, as not as guest, but as listeners. What is it that you always looked for? What are some key capabilities or characteristics that you looked for in people joining your teams or people that were hired by you, or were hired by senior men as by you, where you had a say as well? What are the things you look for? Yeah, it really depends on Martin. And I think that's the first differentiation that you need to make, right? I mean, again, for what role are you talking about, right? Because for me, it's very different if you want to hire somebody who is going to be, again, financial instruments or whether it's somebody who's going to be responsible for big physical businesses or training physical businesses, right? Because when you trade the physical business, you need to have different types of capabilities than financial capabilities. In general, I would say one of the first things I always look at is, again, is the entrepreneurial skills, right? What do people have as a drive? What are they looking for? Are they analytical? You know, are they able to analyze the external world? Are they able to see where the opportunities may be? Are they able to ask the right questions, right? So, you know, one of the things I would always ask is, what questions do you have for me? Just to see whether they can position themselves and we were always taken by surprise and said, "Wait a minute. I thought you were going to ask the questions." No, I wanted to ask, to see what questions, and then I would see what type of questions they would come up with to see what their thinking processes are, right? It doesn't doesn't matter what they would ask. It's just the thinking processes in which they go through. So I think analytical skills, entrepreneurial skills, sharpness, you know, those are characteristics that I would look at overall intelligence, you know, but my assumption is that, you know, that screening has already been done by HR people before you actually get, because most of these people that you, that are going to be in those roles, have a pretty decent background and have proven some intellectual skills. Let's put it that way. But I look at intro, and last thing I would look at, which I think is very significant, certainly in the larger organizations, what are their behaviors like? I mean, if their behaviors are not good, that's for me as an absolute no-go. I mean, I've been in, you know, in the cargo of the '90s. I mean, we talked about the early '90s when I was there. I mean, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the 2000s in the '90s, it was, was a, was a polling. It would not be able to exist today, but, you know, you know, it was, it was managed by fear, it was brutal, it was very, uh, macho, uh, diversity and inclusion, nobody had ever heard of. You know, that's not a very good environment. I think overall to, to, at least for significant organizations to, to run businesses. So, you know, behaviors are very important. I've been very, very strict on behaviors. I think people need to challenge, and to be challenged and needed to allow to be challenged. I was always, I thought I was always, you know, open to be challenged. Um, and I think it was perfectly okay if people would be constructive in challenging, but to be able to, you know, to make people feel bad, to create fear, those types of behaviors that, um, was an absolute no-go for me. Um, and I would really step in, you know, when I had the managerial roles, I would always step in if I would see that those type of behaviors were, were there, and I wanted to have a culture where we'd have good behaviors. Thank you very much. I think, uh, GJ, that was, uh, amazing. And, um, I still have tons of questions for you, but, uh, another time, another moment. I really appreciate the time and, um, um, honestly, and I wrote down a whole bunch of things that I will take with me. And, um, I think the fun part, I relate to the most. So, thank you very much. You're more than welcome. And good luck with the broadcasts. I think you, uh, the broadcasts are fantastic. It's great initiative that you're doing, and, uh, bringing, bringing more people. I think Alex, I, I think that, that I have with the last podcast that we had every last one, I think this was the best. And I have, and I have it again now. It's, yeah, it's just, it was really fascinating. And I think what, what makes this one, so, so interesting, is the, the very good combination of being a trader and a business leader and a business builder. I mean, that, that, uh, that also explains why you had the career you had, and why you ended up at the top of the house. I think that's also very interesting for our people to, to hear that a lot of us in your own hands, you know, you're, no one is going to do it for you. If you have the ideas and you want to express your, and to put your real spirit, yeah, you have to do it and you have to take risk with good behavior. Uh, yeah. And I think that, that's fascinating about your, your, your career. So, thanks a lot for your, your mother's patient. And I'm, I'm sure that our listeners are going to love it. For sure. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you very much. And good luck to you.