Leelyn Smith

08/27/2026

We are excited to share that John Renaldi has joined Leelyn Smith as our first Chief AI Officer, a role built to give our integrated practice the infrastructure it needs to go further.

Before John joined our team, he was a client, working with us through the sale of his own company and bringing the same technical rigor to that relationship that later defined roles at Google, Motorola, and his own venture, Jiobit, acquired by Life360 in 2021. That relationship, and his understanding of what makes Leelyn Smith different, is what eventually brought him inside the firm.

Most firms in our industry do not have tax, wealth management, financial planning, and accounting under the same roof, which is a large part of why true integration is so difficult to deliver. It is not simply a matter of connecting a few systems together. It requires building a firm structured for it from the ground up, and then continuing to invest in the harder work of making every piece of that structure function as one. We believe that structure is what serves clients best, and John's role reflects how far we are willing to go to make it work the way it should for the people we serve. He is building the infrastructure that lets a decision made in one conversation carry forward into every other part of a client's relationship with us, rather than staying locked in a single department.

Many of us have known John for years now, long before this role existed. And what has always stood out, beyond his technology accolades and expertise, is how much he cares about getting it right for the people on the other end of it. That is so important to us, and we could not be happier to have him doing that work from the inside.

Learn more here: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/leelyn-smith-names-john-renaldi-chief-ai-officer-302861833.html?tc=eml_cleartime

08/20/2026

Markets rarely move for just one reason. Interest rate decisions, corporate earnings, geopolitical developments, and shifts in inflation all interact with each other, often in ways that are not obvious until well after the fact. That is why we believe staying informed on the bigger economic picture matters just as much as watching any single headline. Understanding how these forces connect helps us make more thoughtful, less reactive decisions on behalf of our clients.

One development worth watching right now is happening in Japan. Central banks around the world have been shifting from years of easy monetary policy toward tightening in response to inflation, and Japan's 10-year government bond yield has climbed faster than any other developed economy, recently touching a 30-year high. The Bank of Japan may raise rates again as soon as next month to help stabilize a weak yen, and that shift is putting pressure on investors who borrowed cheaply in yen to fund positions elsewhere. Some worry this could spark broader instability, and we see it as a dynamic worth monitoring closely.

This is exactly the kind of connection our Chief Investment Officer, Brian Dorn, AIF®, walks through in our Market Outlook video series. In case you missed our last update, it is still a timely, grounded look at the forces shaping markets, from Fed leadership to AI's ripple effects across industries, and a good reminder of why the broad view matters.

Watch it here: https://www.leelynsmith.com/insights/video/2026-q3-mid-year-review/

08/19/2026

At Leelyn Smith, we believe that caring for families extends beyond financial plans and portfolios. It means showing up for the community we are part of, in the same way we show up for the clients who trust us with their futures.

That belief is at the heart of our Every Family Matters Initiative, and it is why our team came together last week for our Annual Day of Service.

We spent the day supporting two organizations doing meaningful work for families across our region.

Northern Illinois Food Bank
Our team helped provide 5,238 meals to families across the 13-county Northern Illinois area, a region where food is moving through the food bank faster than it has in six years. Every meal matters, and we were glad to add capacity at a moment when the need is growing.

Cardz For Kidz
Our team handwrote 120 cards for hospitalized pediatric patients and others in need of encouragement, small reminders that someone is thinking of them during a difficult time.

Leelyn Smith also made monetary donations to both organizations, because we believe that showing up in person and investing financially go hand in hand.

Days like this reflect what we hope clients feel in every interaction with our team: that they are known, cared for, and never just a number. Thank you to everyone who gave their time yesterday. It is a privilege to work alongside people who care this much.

08/11/2026

What are wealthy families actually afraid of? It is rarely the tax bill.

In his latest article, Daniel Coman explores what really keeps families up at night when it comes to generational wealth transfer. With an estimated $124 trillion expected to change hands by 2048, the technical side (trusts, tax planning, legal documents) matters, but it is rarely what makes or breaks a family's plan.

The deeper fear is what wealth might do to the next generation. Will it remove a child's motivation? Will values get lost along the way? Dan draws on decades of experience to show how trusts and structures can be built not just to protect assets, but to carry a family's values forward, and why this only works as an ongoing conversation rather than a one time set of documents.

Read the full article: What Wealthy Families Are Really Afraid to Talk About

https://www.leelynsmith.com/insights/article/what-wealthy-families-are-really-afraid-to-talk-about/

07/30/2026

We are proud to share that Drew Grider, CFA, President of Leelyn Smith, has been named to the Forbes Best-In-State Wealth Advisors 2026 list, ranking No. 26 out of 270 advisors evaluated in the Chicago suburbs category by Forbes and SHOOK Research.

What Leelyn Smith looks like today grew out of paying attention to what clients actually needed. Over time, that meant bringing wealth management, tax strategy, financial planning, and accounting together as one coordinated practice instead of a set of disconnected relationships. That approach now serves more than 900 families across 31 states, and it remains the standard our entire team holds itself to every day.

"This recognition reflects the work of an exceptional team," Drew shared. "What we have built at Leelyn Smith is genuinely uncommon in this industry, and we are grateful to the clients who trust us with that responsibility every day."

Congratulations, Drew, and thank you to every client who has trusted us with their financial lives along the way.

Learn more here:

https://apnews.com/press-release/pr-newswire/press-release-570091477f4aa9bd54cf440d7cde65f3

06/23/2026

"Running a practice where tax strategy and wealth management operate as one coordinated team creates real operational complexity," said Drew Grider, CFA, President of Leelyn Smith.

"When a client experiences a liquidity event, a business transition, or a significant tax year, the response has to be coordinated in real time across disciplines."

Learn more about navigating growth and the complexities of building this kind of integrated firm in Accounting Today's article:

For the 2026 Top Firms by Assets Under Management, managing the growth of their own practices is as much a challenge as growing their clients' wealth.

06/16/2026

Research in behavioral finance has documented a consistent finding: investors, on average, underperform the very funds they invest in. The gap exists not because of bad products or poor market timing. It exists because of the decisions people make in response to how markets feel.

Loss aversion leads investors to sell during downturns, locking in losses that time would have recovered. Confirmation bias narrows the information we take seriously. Overconfidence produces concentration at exactly the wrong moments. These are not character flaws. They are well-documented features of human judgment that become liabilities in investing environments.

Understanding this shapes how we build portfolios and how we work with clients. We design portfolios intended to reduce the emotional volatility that drives poor decisions, not just financial volatility. And we maintain the kind of ongoing relationship where we can have direct conversations when the instinct to act is in tension with the plan.

Conviction in investing is not the absence of doubt. It is the practice of acting on what you know rather than what you feel in a difficult moment.

Follow along as we continue sharing the principles that guide how we invest.

And read our full Investment Ethos here:

https://www.leelynsmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/LS_Confidence_Driven_by_Conviction.pdf

05/29/2026

Research in behavioral finance has documented a consistent finding: investors, on average, underperform the very funds they invest in. The gap exists not because of bad products or poor market timing but because of the decisions people make in response to how markets feel.

Loss aversion leads investors to sell during downturns, locking in losses that time would have recovered. And overconfidence produces concentration at exactly the wrong moments. These are not character flaws but are instead well-documented features of human judgment that become liabilities in investing environments.

Understanding this shapes how we build portfolios and how we work with clients. We design portfolios intended to reduce the emotional volatility that drives poor decisions, not just financial volatility. And we maintain the kind of ongoing relationship where we can have direct conversations when the instinct to act is in tension with the plan.

To us, conviction in investing is not the absence of doubt. It is the practice of acting on what you know rather than what you feel in a difficult moment.

Learn more about our investment ethos here:

https://www.leelynsmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/LS_Confidence_Driven_by_Conviction.pdf

05/25/2026

In case you missed it, we recently launched a series exploring our investment ethos. Today's pillar is about how planning and investing create a positive feedback loop, especially since we have an in-house investment and portfolio team, led by our Chief Investment Officer Brian Dorn, AIF®.

At many firms, even if they do have portfolio management in-house, financial planning and portfolio management are handled by separate teams working off separate timelines. They may share updates periodically, but they are not operating from a shared understanding of each client's full picture.

We think this arrangement creates a structural gap. A well-designed financial plan, one that accounts for a client's risk tolerance, time horizon, and actual goals, should be the starting point for determining the right investment strategy. And the right investment strategy gives clients something equally important: the conviction to stay committed to the plan when markets create pressure to act.

This is the feedback loop that separates intentional investing from reactive investing. The plan informs the portfolio, and the portfolio supports the plan.

It is also why integration matters at a structural level. When your wealth manager, your tax advisor, and your financial planner are working as one coordinated team, every decision is made with the full picture in view.

Learn more about our full Investment Ethos here:

https://www.leelynsmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/LS_Confidence_Driven_by_Conviction.pdf

05/20/2026

Ethical pressure in professional relationships rarely announces itself clearly. It often arrives disguised as efficiency, agreement, or the quiet reward of being considered easy to work with. Over time, those small accommodations can gradually erode the independent judgment that professional relationships depend on.

Our CFO and Managing Director, Elizabeth Pittelkow Kittner, CPA, CITP, CGMA, DTM, writes about this tension in the spring issue of ICPAS Insight Magazine. Her argument is one we think about at Leelyn Smith: the professionals clients trust most are not the ones who always agree, but the ones whose judgment holds even when the relationship makes it easier not to push back.

Independent judgment is not a compliance requirement. It is the foundation of advice worth having in any professional relationship.

Read Elizabeth's full piece in the link below.

https://www.icpas.org/resources/publications/insight-magazine/article-search/detail/spring-2026/the-ethics-of-professional-relationships