Leadership problems aside, there could be 100,000 CFP licensees by 2010.

For an organization that can't find the right CEO, the CFP Board of Standards still has a lot to crow about. The news that the CFP Board's CEO, Louis Garday, resigned only two years after taking the position brought the professional regulatory organization (PRO), which was striving to lower its profile, back into the news.

If Garday's surprise resignation put a spotlight back on the PRO and created an initial impression of an organization in turmoil, the bright lights also reveal how far the mark has come in the last three years. In particular, CFP Board Chair Rick Adkins believes that by the year 2010 there could be more than 75,000 CFP licensees in the United States, or nearly double the number in 2000. Indeed, Adkins thinks that 100,000 American CFP licensees by 2010 is conceivable. Outside the United States, even faster growth is expected.

If his estimate proves accurate, the CFP mark is likely to emerge as a force to be reckoned with in ways that it has not been in the past. Allied financial professionals, government regulators and others would be compelled to take the designation seriously. Adkins notes that the number of CFP licensees grew 6.4% in 2001 and 7.6% in 2002. "This year it could be closer to 12%," he says. For the rest of the decade, an 8% to 10% growth rate is reasonable, he thinks. That projection is based on taking the rising enrollments in university CFP programs and combining them with historical data on how many students complete the program and obtain the designation, among other factors. This past February, about 2,000 individuals took the CFP exam, up from about 1,200 people in the same period a year earlier. There are currently about 43,000 licensees.

The accelerating growth rate of the CFP universe refutes the logic behind the CFP Board's ill-fated proposal in 1999 to develop a related, less rigorous designation it called Associate CFP. Worried that the number of licensees was not growing fast enough partly because the CFP exam had increased its level of difficulty, board members saw a new "CFP lite" designation as the answer to its problem. Without such a vehicle, they argued, the CFP mark was in danger of being marginalized. But the PRO blundered by billing the proposed new designation as a vehicle primarily for brokers at wirehouses, outraging existing licensees who viewed it as a sellout by the board and an attempt to dramatically expand the PRO's power base and revenues while diluting the credibility of the CFP mark.

Had the board tried to market "CFP lite" as a way for young people to get their feet in the door and proceed toward the CFP mark, the proposal might not have elicited the indignation it did. But to outsiders, then-CEO Robert Goss and other members of the board appeared obsessed with coming up with a vehicle to convince giant financial institutions to buy into the CFP process and "bring them inside the tent." Treating existing licensees as a constituency to which it held no obligation-the PRO claims its mission is "to protect" the public-almost proved to be its undoing.

After several months of licensee outrage and threats, the board conceded it made a mistake and withdrew the proposed new designation. That concession in 1999 came only after then-CFP Board Chair Harold Evensky and Chair-Elect Patti Houlihan argued intensely with Goss that to do anything less would leave the organization with an irreparable credibility problem. Seven months later at a board meeting in May 2000, Goss, the longtime executive director and CEO of the CFP Board who was credited with making the designation respectable, stunned the board and resigned in the midst of a sweeping reorganization initiated by Houlihan. "It was like he was reading his own obituary," recalled one board member.

Suddenly, the entire CFP community was forced to reflect on Goss' achievements. Despite his infuriatingly bureaucratic communications style, those achievements were staggering. In ten years, the CFP mark had morphed from a mail-order certificate to a professional designation respected by regulators of the nation's financial markets.

Goss' departure resulted in a yearlong search for a successor. During that year, the PRO also reorganized its operations, shrinking the size of the board itself to make it less unwieldy, and attempting to rebuild its credibility with licensees by opening up its once sequestered deliberations to the public. Several CFP Board members also spent 13 months conducting a search for Goss' replacement, hiring an executive search firm to narrow down the choices for it.

But the ghosts from the CFP lite fiasco still loomed large. In 2001 when Adkins was named chair of the board, a position that many agreed he was more temperamentally suited for than his predecessors, he was asked what his goals were. "Don't do anything stupid," he replied. For the CFP Board, that would be a minor achievement.

The PRO eventually decided upon Lou Garday, a successful real estate executive and investment banker who seemed about as different from Goss in style and temperament as possible. While Garday brought a lot of enthusiasm and business experience to the position, he lacked much of a background in the nonprofit world.

Eager to take the CFP Board beyond the controversy caused by CFP lite, Garday reached out to some of its most vociferous critics, including Nigel Taylor, an asset protection specialist in Santa Monica, Calif. Taylor participated with Adkins, then chair of the PRO's subsidiary Board of Practice Standards, and others in rewriting the so-called 400 series of standards regarding compensation disclosure. According to Adkins, Taylor made some valuable contributions.

Taylor says that Garday's fresh approach was beneficial. "[Garday] was being very innovative and not quibbling over the trivia" that had often engulfed the PRO in the past, Taylor notes. For his part, Garday asked Taylor to consider running for one of the board's two elected seats in 2003. With the planned shrinkage in the total number of board members, the elected board seats are scheduled to be phased out next year.

Goss was a onetime high-level government official in Washington, D.C., who had often frustrated outside board members with his cautious, legalistic language and lack of openness. Garday was a skilled, enthusiastic marketer determined to grow the number of CFP licensees as fast as possible, but he began to raise other red flags. After the Financial Planning Association (FPA) confirmed that it would require all members of its practitioner division to receive their CFP license by 2010 or transfer to the allied professional division, the CFP Board extended what Adkins calls "most favored nation" status to the FPA. According to Adkins, Garday hoped to offer the same status to both the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) and the Society of Financial Services Professionals.

Adkins and other board members felt that the FPA had sacrificed and made a strong commitment to the CFP mark at significant cost to the association in terms of lost members. Consequently, they were unwilling to extend the same "most favored nation" status to other associations unless they made a comparable sacrifice. Representatives from both the FPA and the Society have attended recent meetings of the board.

Apparently, things came to a head at the CFP Board's tri-annual board meeting in May. After almost two years on the job, Garday unveiled several initiatives that he wanted to pursue, according to participants. Other board members immediately questioned whether the organization, as a 501(c) 3 nonprofit corporation, could legally implement these proposals. "Lou was clearly frustrated at the May board meeting," Adkins says. "He was operating on a playing field he was not familiar with." Adkins also insists that Garday was not about to "do anything stupid," though he would not provide details on the specific circumstances of Garday's departure.

Having gone through the search process only two years ago, Adkins predicts the "same process won't take as long because we recently went through it." However, this time the Board will look for someone with a background in the nonprofit world.

So far, Adkins would appear to be well on the road to achieving his modest goal of avoiding major blunders. And far from being marginalized, the CFP mark is doing better than many would have expected.

The CFP Board has managed not to incense its licensees, but a sense of alienation towards the board's staff remains. "Lou was running it like a business, and I don't think the other folks in Denver realize they are running a business," Taylor says. "But they are very enamored of themselves."

Another advisor with closer ties to many board members is more critical. "The bureaucrats in Denver say they are protecting the public, but it seems to me they are trading on the credibility of people like Rick Adkins and Harold Evensky to expand their own fiefdoms and feather their own nests," this advisor remarks, requesting anonymity.

He cites a recent idea, reportedly proposed by the PRO's staff, to start marketing Web site addresses with the acronym "CFP" following each firm's name for a $500 or $1,000 annual licensing fee. "That would do a lot more for the board than it would for the public, but that's the way they think," he says.