Hello!

Our company’s founder, Mark Knackendoffel, has a favorite saying: “Not all of our friends are necessarily clients, but all of our clients are friends.”

We agree! We want everyone who comes into our office to feel as comfortable as they would visiting a trusted friend. After all, we are in the business of helping people achieve their financial goals and dreams. That’s a big responsibility, and we consider it a privilege.

As a Fiduciary, we provide the highest standard of care in the financial industry. In everything we do, our clients come first.

What We Do

In the simplest of terms, we manage other people’s money. Our clients include individuals, families, businesses and nonprofits. We manage investment portfolios, provide comprehensive financial planning, and administer employee retirement plans. We also specialize in trust administration, estate planning, foundation & nonprofit management, and charitable gift planning.

How We’re Different

The Trust Company has always been locally owned and operated, and as far as we’re concerned, always will be. Independence is the cornerstone of our business and cultural model. Put most simply, independence enables us to make decisions locally, align our interests with our clients’ interests, and to do so objectively. So, when we look at how independence influences our vision, we approach it from these three sources of independence.

Governance

Governance focuses on ownership and control—or who makes the decisions. We believe that it’s best to have those decisions made here, at The Trust Company, and also have those decisions made purely from the standpoint of the trust business and our trust clients.

Nobody else owns us—not a mutual fund company, not a bank, not a brokerage firm, not an insurance company. So, we’re not beholden to any of them. Our Board of Directors are all Stockholders, along with nearly all of our employees, and we all share this vision of independence. So our governance is guided by that commitment to independence.

Business Model and Client Services

We are independent in the sense that the only business we’re in is the business of serving our clients. We’re not in banking; we’re not in lending; we’re not in deposit services; we’re not in currency trading. To quote The Trust Company’s Mission Statement, we’re in this business “to create, preserve and enhance your financial peace of mind.”

In addition, we’re different because much of the financial services industry tends to be very capital-intensive, and people non-intensive.  But the trust business tends to be very people-intensive, and capital non-intensive. As a result, our people—our employees who are serving our clients—are our biggest assets.

Objectivity

We, as a fundamental company policy, avoid conflicts of interest. Many investment & financial advisors and broker-dealers are conflicted by financial incentives generated by products that they sell, the organization that they’re a part of, or the transactions that affect client accounts. As a fee-only advisor, we are compensated as a percentage of the value of our clients’ accounts, so our primary incentive is to both preserve and enhance the value of our clients’ accounts—which is exactly what our clients want.

As a result, we don’t accept any kind of financial incentives—commissions, sales loads, 12b-1 fees, bonus trips, kickbacks—from any type of investment product or company. We also have strong incentives to minimize investment and transaction costs – after all, we’re not paid from those investment products or transactions. Therefore, our independence aligns our interests with our clients’ interests and that  puts our clients and us on the same side of the table.

We welcome you to call or stop by our offices today to speak with one of our friendly, independent financial experts!