Happy New Year and our deepest appreciation for another year of serving our amazing clients.
As we begin a new year, it’s the perfect time to set the stage for financial success. This year, we’re excited to highlight Baird Trust—a cornerstone of comprehensive wealth management and estate planning. In this issue, we’ll explore Mike & I’s time at Baird Trust University learning how our Baird Trust team can help you protect and grow your legacy, provide peace of mind for your family, and align your financial plan with your long-term goals.
Baird Trust: A Partner for Your Legacy Planning
For more than 40 years, Baird Trust has been a trusted partner in providing comprehensive trustee services, estate settlement, and investment management. As one of Kentucky’s largest trust companies, Baird Trust oversees more than $20 billion in client assets as of June 30, 2024, delivering personalized solutions and peace of mind to generations of families across the country.
Baird Trust University (BTU): A Unique Learning Experience
Mike and I recently had the privilege of taking advantage of a unique opportunity within Baird to attend Baird Trust University (BTU)—an educational initiative designed to deepen knowledge and enhance skills around trust services and asset management.
BTU provides valuable insights and training to help us better serve high-net-worth and institutional clients. The program emphasizes proactive legacy planning and reinforces the importance of trust education as a meaningful value-add for clients.
We’re excited to bring what we’ve learned back to our team and clients, ensuring we continue to deliver exceptional service and guidance. Below I have highlighted the services Baird Trust offers, just scratching the surface of everything we learned firsthand.
Baird Trust: Comprehensive Services for Your Legacy
At Baird Trust, we provide a full suite of services designed to help high-net-worth individuals and families manage wealth and preserve legacies. Here’s an overview of what we offer
1. Trust Administration and Fiduciary Services: Baird Trust can serve as your fiduciary trustee now, can be named as a co-trustee to work alongside you or be named as successor trustee to ensure that your trusts are followed and the beneficiaries are supported.
- Revocable Trusts: Funding a revocable trust now allows your assets to avoid probate, maintain privacy, ensure smooth management during incapacity, and streamline your legacy goals. There may come a time when you need a co-pilot to provide professional expertise, impartial decision making, and long-term continuity for managing the assets. When appropriate Baird Trust can operate as your Co-Trustee to fulfil this need.
- Irrevocable Trusts: Whether after death or to complete a gift during your lifetime an Irrevocable Trust can provide protections for your legacy while benefiting those important to you. Baird trust would bring professional expertise, impartial decision-making, and long-term stability to manage the trust effectively and ensure compliance with complex rules of irrevocable trusts.
2. Investment Management: Baird Trust emphasizes long-term ownership of high-quality investments, aiming to lower volatility and enhance returns. Their Large Cap Equity Strategy has consistently outperformed benchmarks over multiple time periods. They combine the expertise of their equity portfolios with a fixed income team to provide a customized approach to investing your wealth. See below resources fact sheets on a few of their investment options.
3. Estate Settlement Services: Settling the estate of someone who has passed is an emotional, and vulnerable period of your family’s life, a time when discretion and patience are vital. Baird Trusts estate settlement team can take on the administrative burdens, so your family has time to grieve while maintaining your legacy and the future they deserve.
- Securing and inventorying assets.
- Coordinating with legal and financial representatives.
- Preparing and filing tax returns.
4. Charitable Solutions: Giving back to our communities is so important to many of our clients. Partnering with the Baird Trust Charitable Solutions Group provides resources to help you support what is most important to you and maximize tax advantage.
Baird Trust Resources:
- Baird Trust Observer: Q3 2025
- Comprehensive Trust Services: Trust Services
- Large Cap Equity Portfolio: LCE Sept 2025
- Core + Satellite Portfolio: 70/30 Portfolio
Let’s make 2026 a year of clarity, confidence, and smart planning!
Client Spotlight: CollaborationOS Consulting
To support our clients and contacts who are building small and growing businesses, we highlight them periodically in our newsletter. This spotlight features a newer venture focused on a challenge that affects organizations of all kinds: how people work together when the stakes are high.
Founder Marcus Doshi brings an uncommon combination of experience to CollaborationOS Consulting. He is a tenured university professor at Northwestern University, a professional lighting designer for large-scale theatrical productions, and a technical scuba diver trained for environments where mistakes carry real consequences. Across education, performance, and high-risk operations, success depends less on individual brilliance than on preparation, trust, and precise communication.
CollaborationOS grew out of an applied research question that emerged during Marcus’s work at Northwestern University: how could the principles he had studied and taught for years in design and ensemble practice be translated into a practical framework for how teams function in complex, high-stakes environments outside the performing arts? That inquiry was shaped by both his academic work and his parallel study of human factors, process design, and operational standards through rigorous technical and cave diving training—fields where teams do not improvise their way to success, but train deliberately for it.
As Marcus explored this question across different organizations, a consistent pattern emerged. Technical expertise was rarely the weakest link. When problems occurred, they were more often rooted in how people coordinated work, made decisions, and understood ownership—especially under pressure. Teams were expected to “just figure it out,” even though collaboration itself had never been explicitly designed or practiced.
This insight sits at the core of CollaborationOS’s approach. The firm distinguishes between teamwork (groups executing assigned tasks) and collaboration, which adds shared problem-solving and collective ownership. When ideas are generated by the team itself, they are more likely to be trusted, acted on, and sustained. In this sense, collaboration functions as a team’s safety system: when it is aligned, teams perform under the toughest circumstances; when it is not, dysfunction is tolerated until failure becomes inevitable.
Now operating as a startup consultancy, CollaborationOS partners with organizations to strengthen collaboration before problems arise. Through workshops, coaching, and focused engagements, the firm delivers bespoke solutions centered on practical collaboration infrastructure—clarifying roles, improving handoffs, and establishing shared ways of working. Clients work directly with the founder, ensuring a high-touch, tailored approach rather than off-the-shelf programs.
To learn more about CollaborationOS Consulting, visit their website below, or our team would be happy to provide an introduction.
www.collaborationos.consulting
Strategas: 2026 Market & Policy Outlook
Going into a new year it is important that we look forward to our expectations for the year. Strategas president and head of portfolio strategy Nicholas Bohnsack talks us through Bairds outlook for 2026: Here.