Collaborative Budgeting with a Purpose

This week our executive leaders will be gathering at the Shinola Hotel in Detroit, Michigan, for our annual Advance. For those new to Greenleaf, our Advance is an annual three-day meeting in October involving our entire Executive Leadership Team. The purpose of the Advance is to review and discuss divisional strategic plans for the upcoming year. We call it an Advance instead of a retreat because our plan is to move forward not backwards. Divisional plans are filtered through our long-term Serve Clients More strategy and challenged by each leader’s peers in an effort to create a cohesive organizational plan for the upcoming year. Candor is essential. Once an organizational plan is constructed, we review it with our board of directors and build our budget around it.

Our budget construction process is unique. It is both top-down and bottom-up. What does that mean? Simply, it starts with the Executive Council and me developing an initial organizational budget for the upcoming year prior to the Advance. Then, the organizational plan from the Advance is filtered through the first draft of the budget in order to accommodate the agreed upon investments in growth. Finally, every team member has the ability to provide input into their personal budgets within the organizational budget. The final organizational budget is then sent to the board of directors for approval.

Our budget process is also a part of our core values with the following commitments:

• It all starts with our clients. We are committed to the advancement of client-centered services that enhance our holistic wealth management capabilities, two-way communication with clients, and their access to information.
• We are committed to expanding the depth and breadth of how we serve our clients.
• We are committed to achieving enterprise-wide improvements through the implementation of continuous improvement by way of workgroup recommendations.
• We are committed to teammate growth, recruitment, retention, and development.
• We are committed to financial stewardship that increases capitalization so that we can serve from generation to generation.
• We are committed to strategic and purposeful growth.
• We are committed to holding ourselves accountable.

With all of the recent headlines around the passing (or not) of our federal government’s 2026 budget, I thought it would be timely to provide an overview of our process which we think is both collaborative and purposeful with a focus on what matters most to us – our clients.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not remind everyone that October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Please take a few minutes to read our Chief Information Officer’s article this month on staying safe in a digital world. It includes information on the latest cyber threats in 2025 and the simple steps we all can take to protect ourselves.