Theresa M. Hannon says 2008 and 2009 were the worst years of her business life. A dear friend committed suicide. That would be bad enough for some people, but Hannon was also her friend's succession planner, and she suddenly found herself without warning having to take over his entire practice.

It wasn't enough that the entire financial world during those two years was falling into chaos, and Hannon's firm was affiliated with the troubled insurance giant whose near-demise symbolized the market's upheaval: AIG.

Yet she emerged from these two awful years with a growing business, a devoted staff and loyal clients who cannot say enough nice things about her.

"I have never seen Terry without a smile," says Michael Bell, president and CEO of Curian Capital, a Denver-based managed accounts provider Hannon works with as a registered advisor. "Even when she was in the middle of her worst times, working 90 hours a week trying to keep the business going and assure her and her former associate's clients that everything would work out, she always had a smile on her face."

Amid the drama, the firm she founded, Theresa Hannon Financial Group Ltd. in Wheaton, Ill., has thrived, growing from $25 million in assets under management in 2003 to $60 million in 2008, and reaching just over $100 million today.

It's not a small note that Hannon is also a single mother raising four children in a home next to her office. (Many clients know her children almost as well as they know her.) And the fact that she's a woman hasn't made her career necessarily easier.

Hannon was recently handed an award for her work as an advisor by Curian Capital and noticed at the awards presentation that she was the only woman in the room. "We sometimes have to work harder to win people's trust and achieve the credibility of men," she says.

Her background has proved essential to her firm's success, but that wasn't a straight road either. Hannon graduated from Benedictine University in 1982. She had gone to college to become an accountant, but her father, who was in insurance, suggested she get a license in that, too. She said at the time she would never use it.

After she started doing tax work, however, she got a call from John Hancock with an offer she couldn't refuse: $40,000 a year to work in the company's financial planning unit. At the time she was making $17,000. Her boss told her that she needed to have a securities license to be employed there, and she got it thinking, once again, here was something she would never use.

Turns out she would need both licenses when she started her own accounting and financial planning practice in 1985. She finally sold the tax practice in 2003 to focus on the latter.

Along the way she has also become a fee arbitration panelist for DuPage County in Illinois and a certified divorce financial analyst. She now oversees four other staffers at her namesake firm, and handles retirement and education savings, survivorship planning, taxes and estate planning, as well as divorces, finding equitable, if not always equal settlements. ("It's not the same thing," she says.) Her typical client has at least $1 million in assets, though the firm has no minimum.

"We will take a 40-year-old with corporate benefits and get him on track to be a $2 million client by the time he is 60," Hannon says. She focuses on asset gathering and outsources the money management (working with broker/dealer American Portfolios).

"I believe in diversification, and also in active management of an account," she says. "I like mutual funds but also direct real estate investment and other products that will mitigate risk. I think of myself as a problem-solver to figure out what a client needs to accomplish and then let others manage the money."

Among her clients is Mark Vogel, a former federal prosecutor in Illinois, whose assets Hannon took over from her lost friend. Though Vogel says Hannon introduced him to some new ideas, like acquiring annuities, it was really her work ethic that convinced him and his wife to stay.

"On top of the worst downturn since the Depression, Terry had to reconstruct the entire practice and convert his clients to her own," says Vogel. "She asserted herself and now we are in a good position financially. Under some of the most difficult circumstances possible, she met the challenge. Now if she tells us to do something, we do it."

One of the crucial standards she operated by during the last two years was to keep the clients informed and educate them as much as possible. The firm holds numerous educational sessions for clients, keeps in frequent contact through e-mail and holds social outings for clients and staff.

One client couple, Jani and Jack Graziano of Arlington Heights, Ill., had been in the process of signing with another financial advisor group when a friend suggested they talk to Hannon instead.

"After an hour we signed on with her," Jani Graziano says. "We walked away from the other group-and from our deposit with them-without a second thought. I think they would have done a good job, but we were just an income source for them. With Terry, you become part of the Terry Hannon family."

When Graziano mentioned that she liked the free pen she got at the first meeting, she received a handful when she saw Hannon later. Hannon is also famous for remembering her clients' birthdays, anniversaries and family crises. She visits them in hospitals and calls just to see how they are.

But even more important, she communicates regularly, whether it is good news or bad. When the market was a mess and Hannon was converting the business to her name, she kept clients informed of what was going on instead of hiding the challenges she was facing.
"If something happens in the market, I want my clients to hear it from me first, not from the news," Hannon says.

"She wants us to know as much as possible," Graziano adds. "In our meetings, she picks up from my expression whether I understand what she is saying and she makes it understandable."

She also mentors her staff, some of whom came to her with little or no financial training. Amy Abaravich, her operations associate, taught Hannon's children in Sunday school (their "God connection," she calls it), and Hannon brought her on as a novice while trying to build the firm.

"I sit within three feet of Terry," says Eric Gilbert, the firm's operations manager. "I had no idea what running a practice was all about. She teaches and trains me just like she educates the clients."

Hannon devotes a substantial amount of time to pro bono work and to charities, and invites her staff to join her and her children in these efforts. She teaches financial awareness in a domestic violence shelter, House of the Good Shepherd, and volunteers with the female inmates at the DuPage County Jail.

"These are women who need to know how to save $5, but when you leave you know you have really helped someone," she says.
Another event she got her entire staff involved with was a 110-mile, two-day bike ride from Washington, D.C., to Gettysburg, Pa., to help raise money for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and their families. "It was not fun," Hannon says. "It was a lot of hard work. But when you think you are tired, you look at the veteran next to you who is hand-cranking his bike because he has no legs, and you know you have it easy." The staff plans to join again next year.

She also takes her children along on charity events and offers a temporary foster home for homeless children "because I want my kids to know how lucky they are. I have a strong need to give back."

Hannon's work prompted Curian Capital to create the Advisor of the Year award, just so they could give her the first one, says Bell. The company presented it to her at its annual Everest Club meeting in May (the one where she found herself surrounded by men).

"I did not know they were going to present me with an award, but as soon as they said it I felt the atmosphere change: I gained more respect," she says.

Her humanity is cited by everyone who speaks of Hannon, including her clients. They feel they are not just an income source for the firm, and she makes sure the entire staff feels the same way.

"Terry does the right thing and not the thing that will bring her money. She goes the extra mile for everyone," notes Helen Marrano, the firm's office manager and Hannon's assistant.

"When I call the office," says Graziano, "I know anyone will answer my questions, and if I want to talk to Terry, I can. ... I look at her and think 'This is what I want my daughter to turn out to be.'"