PLANADVISER: What motivates you to stay in the retirement/advisory industry?
Clements: What keeps me in this industry is a moment from my very first day in it. I remember filling out a retirement plan enrollment form and having no idea how much to save. I asked the person sitting next to me for advice, and I think we were both guessing. That experience has stayed with me, because it highlights a challenge that still exists today: People are often asked to make life-changing financial decisions without the guidance or context they need to make them confidently.
I’ve had the opportunity to see this industry from multiple perspectives, including participant education, relationship management and retirement plan consulting. Each experience reinforced how interconnected our work is. The decisions made by advisers, committees and plan sponsors, from plan design to investment and savings strategies, ultimately shape participant retirement outcomes.
What motivates me is the opportunity to help close this knowledge gap. Knowing that our work can help someone make more informed decisions and achieve a more secure retirement is what continues to inspire me. The chance to help the next kid staring at that enrollment form, unsure of what to do, find a path to success is what keeps me motivated every day.
PLANADVISER: Where do you see the greatest opportunity to improve advisory services and business practices, and how are you acting on it?
Clements: The greatest opportunity in our profession is closing the gap between the advice delivered to retirement plan committees and the outcomes participants ultimately achieve. Investment menus, fee benchmarking and fiduciary oversight remain essential, but they’ve become the foundation, rather than the differentiator. The next frontier is personalization at scale, helping participants receive guidance tailored to their unique financial circumstances, plan design, goals, account balances, savings behaviors, career stage, Social Security benefits and overall retirement readiness, instead of relying on one-size-fits-all solutions.
At the center of this opportunity are plan sponsors and retirement committees, who carry the responsibility of making decisions that directly impact participant success. My focus is on helping fiduciaries make more informed decisions that lead to better outcomes for the participants they serve. I do this by expanding the conversation beyond the 401(k) to include financial wellness, retirement income planning and evolving regulatory considerations, while helping committees evaluate solutions such as managed accounts and financial wellness programs through a disciplined fiduciary framework.
Ultimately, my goal is to equip committees with the knowledge, structure and confidence to fulfill their responsibilities prudently and effectively, improving participant outcomes and strengthening long-term retirement readiness.
PLANADVISER: How do you incorporate purpose or mission into your day-to-day work?
Clements: For me, purpose isn’t a statement, but rather a filter through which I run decisions. The mission is simple: help people retire with dignity and set up the next person who’s unsure how to succeed.
Whether I’m evaluating an investment default, building a committee presentation or weighing a plan design change, I try to ask whether it actually improves the experience of someone who will never see the analysis behind it. In this line of work, it’s sometimes easy to optimize for the plan, the committee or the metrics and to lose sight of whom it’s all for.
Concretely, it shows up in how I spend my time. I focus on understanding services and conducting due diligence to create frameworks that help committees make better-informed decisions for their people. I try to translate complexity into clarity, because the gap between what we know and what participants can act on is exactly the gap I started my career trying to close. When the technical details become absorbing—which they sometimes do—the mission pulls me back to the only measure that matters: whether we’re improving participant outcomes.