Baird 2024 Annual ReportSTABILITY.
CONSISTENCY.
STRENGTH.
Corporate Resource Groups
Our Corporate Resource Groups (CRGs) play a pivotal role in our firm, providing highly specialized expertise and services to our businesses and, by extension, our clients. Throughout 2024, our CRGs worked together to advance important projects and initiatives across Baird. Here are a few of many examples of their contributions to Baird’s success in 2024.
Being a privately held, employee-owned firm creates an ownership mindset that motivates us to provide the best possible advice and service to our colleagues and our clients. One example of this is our Operations team, which executes all aspects of our clients’ financial and investment transactions internally. Our commitment to being a self-clearing firm allows us to ensure the best client experience, leveraging our own internal expertise versus relying on third parties’ systems and processes.
Our culture of ownership also drives us to strategically invest in our technology. Our Information Technology team works with colleagues across the firm to advance key projects to support the clients we serve as well as our internal teams. We continued to invest in digital tools that deepen the financial and tax planning capabilities our Financial Advisors and their teams provide to our clients, who increasingly seek this type of expertise in today’s changing markets. We also continued to build out our clients’ digital experience through enhancements to tools such as our Baird Online app, which puts planning resources, market updates and our 360 Wealth tool in our clients’ hands.
Baird’s Corporate Resource Groups
Our five core businesses at Baird are supported by our best-in-class Corporate Resources Groups (CRGs), which provide the framework that allows us to offer the highest level of service to our clients.
- Baird Foundation
- Compliance
- Conference Services
- Corporate Events & Travel
- Corporate Real Estate & Workplace Solutions
- Culture
- Finance
- Hospitality
- Human Resources
- Information Technology
- Legal
- Marketing & Communications
- Operations
- Risk Management
- Strategic Change Office
In addition to investing in our technology, we also invested in our associates by enhancing our paid family leave policies, which help Baird attract, retain and support the talented professionals that support our clients. This effort stemmed from listening to our associates. We resolved to revisit our policies and revise them to reflect the increasing complexity of caring for loved ones. Our Human Resources team, in close partnership with Baird’s Executive Committee, worked to craft our revised policies, which we implemented in March 2024. Through this innovative approach, we increased parental bonding leave for primary and secondary caregivers, paid time off to care for loved ones and bereavement leave. We also added additional assistance with adoption and fertility treatments. These updates underscore our commitment to ensuring our associates have the resources and support they need in the moments that matter.
Finally, we celebrated the grand opening of the Baird Center in May 2024, marking the next phase of our naming rights partnership with the state-of-the-art convention center. We worked closely with the Wisconsin Center District (WCD) and the city of Milwaukee ahead of the event, which was an exciting capstone to the efforts of the CRG teams that came together to initiate the 15-year partnership, including Marketing & Communications, Corporate Events and Legal, as well as the firm’s senior leaders. We look forward to maximizing our shared partnership and ensuring that Baird’s investment in our hometown is impactful and meaningful.
