I am not so cynical to believe the proverb, "Man makes plans and God laughs." 

I'm hoping He, at the very least, gives us credit for a good attitude and maybe even extra credit for doing some planning.

After all, business planning, specifically your plan for growing your firm, should help make the world a better place.

Making a plan for growth by no means assures your success, but not planning your firm's growth risks knee-jerk reactions to cyclical long-term economic trends and wasted opportunities. So apart from gaining favor with The Big Guy, a growth plan for your business would seem to have obvious practical benefits.

My guess is that only 20% of financial advisors-those with business coaches-have written plans. The rest don't find the time, are paralyzed at the thought, or think they are so smart that they don't need to go through the tiresome exercise of committing a plan to paper.

Some good news: Whether you're too busy, insecure, or overconfident to write your growth plan, I'm going to try to help, and tell you how some advisors are planning to grow their businesses.

Let's start with Cheryl Holland at Abacus Planning Group in Columbia, S.C. Holland is that rare personality who lights up rooms everywhere she goes. She just has that natural ability.

Abacus has 20 employees, which is a fairly large number for an independent advisory firm. The firm is riding a growth wave brought on by a confluence of events, including the movement of wirehouse advisors to RIAs, a population boom in the Southeast U.S., and acceptance of women as business leaders.

"Growth is not my goal," says Holland, 53. "It's building a business that's my goal. Growth is a byproduct of having a healthy business."

Holland's growth plan is based on her vision of what it would be like if everyone working at Abacus now were to still be there in ten years. Holland asked herself: "How would we grow this firm if we gave everyone working here everything they wanted to accomplish in the next ten years?"

"We're thinking about the human capital we have here and how we can nurture it," says Holland.

It's striking, but cultivating human capital is largely ignored by the trade press, leading institutions and the most popular practice management experts. Yet, when you think about it, human capital could be a small business's best opportunity for growth.

Holland says many advisors get on a growth treadmill without realizing it. They just keep adding employees and capacity without thinking about where the company is headed. Without a growth plan, an advisor can suddenly find himself running a business and managing people instead of doing what he loves.

Holland says advisors don't just want growth for the sake of it. They want quality growth. "We don't have any trouble getting new business," says Holland. "But because our human capital isn't ready, we cannot afford to have too much growth."

Holland says she was always a natural leader, "but I have had to work really hard to be a manager and create a healthy workplace for my team.

"I spend a third of my time advising clients, a third mentoring and managing team members, and a third on business development-thinking about the future and client communications."

For Dennis Stearns, growth comes down to one idea: "delighting clients."

Stearns, president of Stearns Financial Services Group (SFSG) in Greensboro, N.C., says his plans for growth include opening a branch about an hour away from his main location in an area known as the Research Triangle.

"The Triangle" covers the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. With an abundance of leading technology firms, world-class universities, and medical centers, the Triangle's economy has performed exceptionally well. Wikipedia says significant increases in employment, earnings, personal income and retail sales are projected over the next 15 years.

Stearns says about 20% of his clients are in the Triangle. SFSG, which manages $400 million, has a national client base. Stearns says SFSG has steadily grown at a 25% rate for many years and is planning on maintaining that for at least the next five years. Stearns says 90% of the growth is based on referrals from existing clients.

To accommodate the growth, Stearns hired four employees in November and December, going from three to six advisors. Two of the four new employees are currently SFSG clients.

Stearns says one of the new hires has been a client of SFSG for 15 years and worked as a consultant to technology companies on mergers and acquisitions. She told SFSG that she wanted to get away from the M&A business and was considering opening her own M&A research boutique. But in talking with her advisor, she kept asking about working at SFSG. Her job as an advisor at SFSG is to help business owners grow their business and plan for a successor or sale.

Notably, Stearns' growth plan is similar to Holland's in its focus on human capital. Of SFSG's 14 employees, six are advisors. The remaining eight are all financial planning specialists. Two of the eight planning specialists are Registered Paraplanners (RP), licensed by the CFP Board of Standards; one is a Chartered Financial Analyst and another is a candidate for the CFA designation and holds an MBA. Two financial planning specialists round out the staff; one holds a CFP license as well as a CPA and MBA, and the other is an RP who graduated from the Virginia Tech financial planning program.

Stearns says there are two key strategic components of SFSG's growth plan. One is focused on succession and liquidity-event planning for business owners, while the other is women in transition-widows, divorcees, and mothers with grown children who are returning to the workforce.

Stearns says SFSG for the last several years has been focusing on building the intellectual capital to serve women; all three of the firm's financial advisors are women who have been through a divorce. "They've all been strong influences in helping other women either figure out how to avoid divorce or go through the process, and two of them are trained in collaborative divorce," he says. One of the new hires is a divorced female CPA, who is now returning to the workforce after raising her children and "wants to reinvent herself," Stearns says.

To better serve women returning to the workforce, SFSG has held workshops helping women go through this major change in their lives. "We are counseling married female clients and widows on making transitions to the next chapter in their lives routinely as part of the financial planning process," says Stearns. "If we can find a way to help make them successful, their entire family will be happy, which goes back to our main objective of delighting the client." She will be writing blog entries on this topic.
Mark Colgan of Colgan Capital Management in Pittsford, N.Y., is combining ideas from a longstanding program by Alliance Bernstein on a "professional referral method" with a new "client driven practice" approach created by Stephen Wershing of AdvisorChecklist.com.

"Steve Wershing and I are putting together a wisdom council of respected attorneys in the community and we will meet periodically," says Colgan. "Part of the discussion among this group will be focused on explaining what it would take to provide the right mix of wealth management services for their clients." Colgan points out that the goal is not to try to get referrals, but to understand what these attorneys want for their clients that will make them want to refer clients to Colgan's firm.
But perhaps even more important is Colgan's focus on bringing in the right kinds of client.

Advisor coach Tracy Beckes asked Colgan to describe the type of client who could call him on a Sunday asking for a meeting immediately, and who he would not mind obliging. By imagining such a situation, Colgan says he determined that the client he would be happy to help even on a day off would have to meet some very specific criteria: They'd have to be deeply committed to legacy planning, have suffered the loss of a loved one, and meet Colgan's minimum of $1 million.

"If you go to ColganCapital.com now, all of the copy and messaging is geared to that individual," says Colgan. "We're going into a real niche."

Kenny Landgraf, who built an investment firm using an active-management strategy over the difficult decade since 2001, is also looking for growth in niches. Landgraf's firm, which manages $76 million, is located in Austin, Texas, but establishing a presence in Bartlesville, Okla. Landgraf says he already has several clients there and an advisor posted there, but he is now specializing in employees working at Conoco-Phillips who need advice on their 401(k) and retirement investing.

Landgraf, a graduate of the University of Arkansas who received his degree in Accounting and Data Processing, started his career at Pennzoil before accepting a job at Enron, where he created a trading system for hedging oil drilling operational risks. Then he joined with a family member to build a money management business focused on sector rotation. At 48, he hopes to double assets under management over five years.

Landgraf says low returns on stocks in "The Lost Decade" have put pressure on margins. "You can charge a 2% annual fee when you can gain 20% annually, but not in a period of meager returns," he says.

Landgraf says lackluster returns on stocks in recent years forced him to branch into managing portfolios of bonds as well as stocks, which turned out to help his firm's growth. "It helped us retain assets, even though fees on managing fixed income obviously cannot be as high as those for managing equities," says Landgraf.

Landgraf says his trend-following approach shielded his clients from the worst effects of the bear market of 2008-2009, which is now helping him get more referrals. "While a lot of advisors suddenly got broken arms and were unable to pick up the phone and call clients, we increased our communication effort using e-mails, newsletters, and online meetings," says Landgraf.  "It's helped."

Last fall, Landgraf hired Quantuvis Consulting  of Redlands, Calif., to assist with strategic marketing issues. "We now have a formalized marketing plan which spells out activities month by month," he says. With the knowledge gained in working with Quantuvis as an underpinning, Landgraf is now implementing ideas to grow his practice.

Norm Boone, founder and CEO of Mosaic Financial Partners with offices in San Francisco and Lafayette, Calif., says one of the factors that will aid his firm's growth in 2011 is a reformulation of his firm's compensation package for employees. "We basically cut advisors' compensation in half and made it up by tying their compensation more closely to the revenue generated by their clients," says Boone, a Harvard MBA.

Boone started Mosaic 20 years ago. After a couple of years, Boone says, he hired an assistant to work part time. She worked full time right from the start, however, Boone recalls, and he doubled his business almost immediately. Within two years, Boone hired a financial planner and operations staffer and doubled his business again. Mosaic now employs 17, which includes five advisors who are responsible for business development as well as client relationships; four planners who are responsible for most of the client contact as well as designing financial plans: two investment specialists, one of whom handles research while the other is responsible for performance reporting and operational issues; a dedicated business development executive; a family business and succession planning expert; and three and a half clerical staffers.

The Mosaic Family Business Center is a key growth area for the firm, Boone says. This is a separate business for Mosaic and it's run by an individual who has worked in multigenerational family businesses and is familiar with succession planning issues. "We're providing consulting on succession planning issues in conjunction with attorneys and accountants," says Boone, who says he expects this niche could bring in at least $20 million of additional assets to be managed by his firm.

Boone says his firm has also developed a relationship with a local expert in advisory firm M&A. "I believe that there are a good number of individuals that are managing between $25 million and $75 million and who are drowning in administrative work and not having fun," says Boone. "We want to find those people in the Bay Area and make them part of our team here so they can get back to doing what they like best."

Dr. David Yeske, of Yeske Buie in San Francisco, a former chairman of the Financial Planning Association, is thinking big. 

A decade ago, he says, he was focused on building a practice managing $100 million and delivering great service as a solo practitioner. Having achieved that, partly because of his love of technology, Yeske has in the last few years focused on building a business with employees-thinking big. Why the change?

In 2008, Yeske merged his practice with another former chair of the FPA, Elissa Buie, whose firm was in Vienna, Va. After their marriage and merger, Yeske Buie was born and the partners both wanted to "play big," says Yeske.

The pair hired a former executive director of the FPA, David Brand, to consult on a ten-year plan for their newly merged firm. "We wanted  to make ourselves dispensable," says Yeske.

"We wanted to have an impact," says Yeske. "To be taken seriously and gain credibility, we felt that we'd have to grow."

Initially, Yeske and Buie ran into staff issues. Gen Xers, who were their initial hires, suffered from an entitlement mentality, Yeske says. Gen Yers, he says, don't suffer from that mentality, he says. 

In addition, Brand coached Yeske to hire staff who he felt could run the firm one day. "The minute you use that as a filter in hiring, it changes the kind of people you hire," says Yeske. A common thread in this story is that firms planning growth are highly focused on hiring great people and not settling for anything less. Yeske Buie also began focusing on training and education of the staff.

"We started something we call YeBu U," says Yeske, "which is a continuing program for learning about financial planning." In addition, the firm in 2008 adapted ideas in their practice about sustainable retirement withdrawal rates espoused in research by Jonathan T. Guyton and William J. Klinger. Rolling out these guidelines for clients to follow, Yeske says, taught him that clients would find comfort in "evidence-based financial planning." In addition to applying for a trademark on that term, Yeske Buie began seeking to implement evidence-based planning ideas in other areas of their business with their clients.

Yeske says the firm is also implementing ideas learned from Schwab Institutional's Referral Accelerator Program. "That program inspired us to create a culture of referrals," he says. "Everyone in the firm now understands their role in supporting and identifying referral opportunities, and that has really helped us."

Communications with referrals sources has been stepped up. No longer does Yeske Buie have one list of contacts for press release, another for clients, and yet another for centers of influence.  All constituents are sent the same communications, which simplifies distribution of information and makes contacts more frequent.

The firm's approach with referral sources has also been rethought. Now the focus is on making a referral source look good with clients. "If your firm focuses on making a CPA and attorney look good in front of the client, they will want to send you more clients," says Yeske.

"We have been building scalable systems in technology, policies, and every other aspect of the firm," Yeske says. The firm is now bicoastal but Yeske says that's just a beginning. "We could add an office anywhere almost overnight now because we have the foundation for that kind of growth," says Yeske.

Editor-at-large Andrew Gluck, a veteran financial writer, owns Advisor Products Inc., a marketing technology company serving 1,800 advisory firms.