When Bloomberg Wealth Manager magazine was launched in September 1999, I wrote a cover story called "How To Fire A Client." This idea certainly didn't originate with me. But over the last decade, it's become what I call, for lack of a better word, one of the "truisms" of financial planning: Every year you should fire your least profitable clients.

But today, many of these truisms are being questioned or even turned on their heads. It struck me the other day when I was interviewing Doyle Brown, a financial advisor in Reno, Nev., for a life planning book I'm working on with George Kinder. One of the first things Brown told me is that he often finds himself hearing bad advice at conferences. One idea he doesn't like is that planners should give their clients grades and eliminate those who don't get at least a "C." Brown has no asset minimum and has never fired a client for any reason other than being a pain in the neck. He continues to accept clients with assets under $50,000, as well.

After talking with him, I figured there might be other "truisms" that have turned into "contrarianisms." Sure enough. Dave Drucker in Albuquerque, N.M., whom I consider a trendsetter in financial services, tells me that even though larger has been recently considered better, a "sole practitioner" can indeed operate a very successful business that can also help her create the life she wants for herself.

I wondered if this means financial advisors are getting soft, that they are less the hard-edged businessmen and women they were a decade ago, eager to build big businesses with large infrastructures and complex succession plans.

More likely it means no one formula is sacrosanct today. More advisors are gaining the strength and confidence to set their own agendas, to develop "lifestyle practices" if it suits them, or to keep their practices small, something that Mark Hurley has questioned since he began publishing his studies on the future of the financial advisory business a decade ago. Hurley concludes that bigger is almost always better and that joining several large practices into an enormous network is better yet.

As I continued to interview advisors, I asked them for some "contrarianisms" and was rewarded with a few:

You don't have to have a succession plan. One planner told me she believes she can make a reasonable retirement income out of a declining practice. She plans instead to ratchet out of the business like a lawyer or accountant does. I hear some of you crying that that's immoral-that she's leaving her clients stranded.

I don't agree. Whenever I've been "handed off" by my dentist or doctor or even a yoga instructor to a successor, I've resented it and have never been happy with the replacement. (One time, unbeknownst to me, a cleaning lady I used found replacements and charged each one a finder's fee.) So I've always ended up searching for someone new myself.

Don't look only at top-end clients. Some of them can be a real pain. Also, they can be inefficient because they take a lot of your time and often demand you add services that may not suit you. Which brings me to the next point.

Avoid "service creep." Multifamily offices provide dozens of services. But that doesn't mean you have to. Don't keep adding services, letting your mission get bigger and bigger, just because a client wants them. You are the one deciding what's on the menu, whether it's financial planning, investments, life planning or insurance. It should be something you enjoy spending time with.

Perhaps a top client will walk away if you refuse to add a new service. But that doesn't mean it's economical-or pleasant-for you to do it. When David Drucker moved his business to New Mexico, he outsourced everything but financial planning, which he really enjoyed.

Rethink "buy and hold." I know many of you will balk at that. But when I wrote a recent column about technical analysis, I received a flood of messages. I was astounded by how many planners say they use it or want to use it. It's what prompted me to look at people re-evaluating practice management truisms.

Before I get carried away, I'll get back to what I learned from Doyle Brown about why he never fires clients and doesn't set a minimum account size. "I've been to several conferences and heard speakers say we should segment clients into groups and get rid of those in the bottom groups," he says. In other words, it's the old saw that 20% of your clients should account for 80% of your revenues. But those people in the bottom 80% are important, he says.

"These are the people who have helped me build my business and the sons and daughters of clients. They've become friends because they're clients." He says he's not going to fire his friends.

But this attitude means he has to use time efficiently. Over the past three years, he has worked to segment his planning practice, dealing differently with those who have fewer assets. If the clients have less than $50,000, he will not manage their money himself.

For these, he will do an initial financial plan and set goals and establish a savings plan with mutual funds or unit investment trusts.

Then he will sit down with the client once a year to review progress and set new goals. The client will pay for the service with commissions on the funds and unit investment trusts. Brown receives all the reports. He sets up a monitoring system for each client so that he can map her progress. When the client's portfolio reaches a certain size, she can graduate to a new level.

(As an aside, I've long wondered why more planners don't use this sensible approach. Perhaps it's because many advisors wish to be purist so they can become NAPFA members. I understand the desire to avoid a conflict of interest by taking fees only. But I don't see that as necessarily best for the client, particularly if it means that someone with just a few assets can't get a good advisor who will serve her with no conflict of interest. I wonder if advisors might look at it differently if we actually had a fiduciary standard and advisors were forced to adhere to it whether they received commissions or fees.)

Brown, who serves 300 families, is a registered life planner. Life planning, of course, is a fee business. He charges $1,500 to $2,000 for this service and hopes to continue to spend more of his own time on it once he finds a junior CFP to handle the commission clients. Brown is also flexible enough to accept hourly fees, charging $150 an hour (which he plans to raise to $200 this fall).

David Drucker, whom many of you probably know, is a pioneer in the planning business who has broken all the rules and been very successful at it. He built a practice in Washington, D.C., with Mary Malgoire and when the two split in 1997 and divvied up the clients, Drucker moved to New Mexico with 50 of them. "I've always fought against the notion that you can't be a sole practitioner," he says.

When he arrived in Albuquerque, he outsourced trading and his Web site and billing and got a virtual assistant. The only work he set for himself was the financial planning. Then in 2002, he sold his business, keeping only three clients who were close personal friends, and moved into a new career: writing for financial services publications, including Financial Advisor, and working with Joel Bruckenstein on technology consulting, newsletters and conferences. He sold the sole practitioner business for three-quarters of a million dollars.

"My buyer adopted all my systems," Drucker says. "He was so impressed, and he kept them."

Drucker had been using retainer fees as far back as 1990 when they were all but unheard of. "Retainer fees create economic stability" in financial planning, he says. "My profit margins were much greater than average." And his revenues held steady in the 2001 crash.

Drucker encourages others to create a "lifestyle practice." "You should look at what kind of life you want to have and then look at how to balance it with work," he says. "I've always felt the message that you have to grow to be successful is the wrong message.

"Part of the fun of having your own small business is creating and experiencing different processes and taking risks," Drucker says. "Sometimes it works out better than you expected."

Mary Rowland can be reached at [email protected]. She has been a business and personal finance journalist for 30 years and has written two books for financial advisors: Best Practices and In Search of the Perfect Model.