The Plan for 2026

This year marks the second year of our long-term strategic plan to Serve Clients More. Serve Clients More means delivering more personalized service, more often, in more innovative ways, with more expertise and in more places. The goal of our plan for 2026 is focused on taking another step forward towards this goal and built with input from every teammate in the company.

As many of you know, our annual strategic planning process starts with our strategic planning questionnaire where every teammate has the opportunity to provide their thoughts on how we can serve our clients better. Candor is essential and expected as I am the only one that reviews their responses. Themes are identified from their responses, which are then brought to division leaders to build plans around with their respective teams. Those divisional plans are then brought to our Advance.

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 scrutinized and challenged by each leader’s peers in an effort to create a cohesive organizational plan. Candor is again essential. Once an organizational plan is constructed, we review it with our board of directors and build our budget around it.

Our organizational plan for 2026 is focused on four key initiatives – Workplace Culture, Client Experience, Cultivation and Purposeful Growth.

Workplace Culture continues to be one of the most important reasons teammates join Greenleaf Trust and want to spend their careers here serving clients. We strive to hire talented diverse people and provide them with a work environment that challenges, supports, equips and multiplies their efforts through collaboration. The result is an engaged team that genuinely cares about clients and is inspired to do great work for them. In 2026, our focus will be on extending our talent continuum, training, inclusivity, succession planning and accountability.

We view each client’s experience with us through the lens of continuous improvement. How can we better serve them specifically? We ask every client this question and then listen. Through their individual responses, themes can often develop. The optimization of their online client portal was a theme we recently picked up on and are already working on improvements to make the interaction more intuitive while increasing the portal’s functionality. More broadly our Client Experience efforts will continue to involve investment in technology, innovative portfolio management strategies and both internal and external thought leadership to continuously improve our clients’ experience.

To cultivate means to develop or improve something through care and effort. Our Cultivation initiative is a reference to the symbol of our long-term strategy, a tree. The roots represent our core values, the tree our clients, with the branches representing our team that supports our clients and the leaves the initiatives to Serve Clients More. In 2026, our efforts here will focus on coordinating AI integration into operational systems, growing our fiduciary capabilities, ensuring information security and leveraging capabilities of existing systems.

In order to serve from generation to generation, it’s important that we continue to grow purposely. There are risks to growing too quickly and too slowly. Purposeful Growth involves growing deeper and broader in our capabilities at a designed fiscally responsible pace. In 2026, expanding our digital media footprint, launching new ways to serve retirement plan sponsors and growing our new Florida market in Naples will help us Serve Clients More. Longer term, our growth will continue to come from satisfied clients, deliberate geographic expansion and potential adjacent business acquisitions.

I appreciate the opportunity to share our 2026 plan with you. It was built for you.

I hope you had the happiest of holidays and cheers to 2026!