Welcome to the first Guild for Guilders Academy Program, which will be centered on how we can work together to win in our next era. Thank you for being here! 

Before we start the Program, let’s acknowledge something important: learning together takes time, attention, and energy, and none of those are limitless resources. At Guild, we are all part of a company committed to the value of personal and professional growth. If we believe that’s good for our members and customers, then we also have to believe that it’s good for us. The way we see those benefits is through each of us participating thoughtfully.

After all, transformation is the result of group effort. The Academy team has seen that proven time and time again through work with clients like AB InBev, Coca-Cola, Citi, and others. Organizational learning can transcend the box-ticking exercise it often is, but it doesn’t happen by accident. Thanks in advance for your time and attention.

But before we dive into the Program in earnest, you might be wondering why now, and why this? 

You already know the big picture: we are living through a massive, sustained moment of change. No country or company is immune. None of us, and certainly no organization with ambitions like ours, can insulate itself from the massive shifts going on. Our strategy is designed to help us find opportunities within this complexity and thrive, not simply survive.

At the same time, we are also facing a moment of introspection as a company. Our business context has changed, certainly, but so have we. To meet our potential, we face a pressing need to mature the organization as a multiproduct company—in a way that both honors our values and matches the scale of our opportunities.  

If this all sounds a bit abstract or removed from the work you do, you’re probably not alone. If you’re quietly wondering what it really has to do with you, you’re in the right place, because it’s true: a strategy on a slide isn’t enough.

This Program is designed to make Guild's strategy feel real and relevant, something you can connect to, act on, and adapt with as our context changes. When strategy is just something that lives inside someone else’s head, we risk becoming drivers mindlessly following the voice of the GPS: following instructions without knowing the route. But if we’re only aware of the destination without any real understanding of how to get there (or why it matters), getting lost is almost inevitable. 

That’s why this Program will be focusing on the “what” and the “how” of our strategy. What are the behaviors, mindsets, and ways of working that will bring this strategy to life? It is a blueprint for how we win in 2026 and beyond.

Key Questions Posed by this Field Manual:

• Why are we doing this Academy Program together, and how can we get the most out of the experience?

• What can we learn from people we don’t always work with, and how can we do it more often?

• What are the strategic priorities and key results of our FY26 Strategy, and what are the mindset shifts and behavioral changes we need to make in order to execute on them?

• What are the FY26 strategic themes, and how can they help us stay focused on what we need to do to achieve our goals this year?

In this Program, we are dedicating time to looking inward. Being able to take time away from our day-to-day responsibilities is a privilege, but it’s not a luxury. It’s essential to understanding how we set the business (and ourselves) up for growth. But to understand the strategy requires understanding Guild. Chief of all: what are we really doing here, and how are we creating value? In this video, Rohan Chandran, Chief Product Officer, articulates the importance of staying focused on these questions and why he thinks it’s actually dangerous to think about the competition.

A strategy isn’t valuable unless all of us understand what it is and how we fit into it. We’ve worked hard to make sure that the FY26 Strategy is relevant and detailed enough to guide the work each of us do. In this video, Alana Brandes, Chief People Officer, highlights the reasons why our strategy looks the way it does this year and the clarity she believes it will bring.

The purpose of our FY26 Strategy is to serve as a meaningful and relevant guide for the work that each of us do. To do that, it has to be detailed and specific enough so that we can all see how our work contributes to the mission-critical goals we all share. To that end, our strategy outlines key initiatives, objectives, and results that we will use to measure our progress.

Click through the following slide show for a reminder of the FY26 strategic priorities and the initiatives that ladder up to them.