How many female investors are you helping plan for retirement? Before you answer, consider the first response of veteran advisor Janet Briaud of Briaud Financial Planning in Bryan, Texas. When asked the question, Briaud, who manages $450 million, took a tally of all the single women she works with and gave a number.

But there was something missing from it-namely, all the women who sign with her firm as part of a couple. When Janet recalculated, she discovered that about 65% of her clients are women. "That's amazing. I never looked at it like this before," says Briaud, who was even more surprised when she started analyzing her overall client list to see where the assets and decision-making were coming from.

"When I look down the list, one by one, I can see: It's her money. It's her money. It's her money," a surprised Briaud told me about each female client. "She has substantial inheritances. She is the highest breadwinner by far. There's another woman doctor. She's a business owner. The influence of women among my clients is tremendous."

If you run this analysis on your own client base to see how many women investors you have, you, too, might be pleasantly bowled over, especially when you then consider the impressive multitude of pertinent facts about women's growing financial might. Mull these statistics over for a minute:
Women will control 60% of the wealth in the United States by the year 2010.
Women today represent nearly two-thirds of the U.S. workforce.
More than half of women with business degrees outearn their husbands.
90% of women feel financially insecure, despite controlling more wealth, having more education and being more involved with financial decisions.
50% of all women fear losing everything and becoming bag ladies (48% of women who earn $100,000 or more annually fear this).
80% of women will, at some point in their lives, be solely responsible for all household financial decisions.
70% of married women fire their financial professionals within one year of their husbands' deaths.*

"This might be more of a female world than we ever imagined," Briaud says of her advisory business. My sentiments exactly.

As these statistics start to reverberate throughout the financial services world, more advisors (and financial services giants) are starting to take notice, sometimes to the point of creating entire divisions or even businesses around the needs of women investors.

Enter Eleanor Blayney, a veteran advisor and former principal at the powerhouse northern Virginia advisory firm of Sullivan, Bruyette, Speros and Blayney, which now manages close to $2 billion.

Blayney retired early last year and is now in the process of kicking off Directions LLC, a network of women advisors and women clients she hopes to take national. Blayney's goal is to match groups of professional women, from those aged 45 to those in their 60s, with female CFPs for vigorous monthlong workshops designed to give the investors the essential takeaways they need to take control of their financial lives and plan for retirement. (She named the firm Directions because she believes that women in general are better at asking for and following directions than men, whether that's a sexist stereotype or not.)

While the model is still in its infancy, Blayney realizes that time is of the essence as competitors swarm the women's market. "The interest in women is huge right now, but I want to make sure I get things right." For now, she is thinking that the price of the workshop may be somewhere in the range of $1,500 to $2,000. "But I'm seeking a lot of feedback from my targeted market to see what they'll pay and what the appropriate content will be for them."

The 45-to-60 cohort is the first generation of women who have been in the workforce their entire lives and have their own assets-a fact not lost on Blayney or the financial services industry at large.

But this group also suffers from a confidence gap about investing that needs to be addressed, and Blayney hopes that she and the national network of female CFPs she hopes to build will get in on the ground floor to address it. "Women will control more than half the wealth in this country, so we need to have a larger solution than simply, 'If you have a million or more, come in and see us,'" she says.

"What we hear from women is that investments are overwhelming, complicated and boring. What they need is retirement planning on one hand, but they also want to know what an annuity is. There is a very wide breadth of need."

In addition to a slew of female clients hungry for investments, Blayney's business model is depending on women CFPs who she hopes will want to become part of her network and use the seminar business model she is building. She hasn't yet put a price on these services for CFPs, but says they will include a workshop curriculum, marketing and referrals. "I believe that there is a whole world of people out there who need commoditized investment planning before they need separate account management," Blayney says.

All the women investors who have asset management needs and planning questions they can't address on their own or in the seminars will become referrals to the CFPs in Blayney's Directions network. In many cases, the seminars may be the first step for interested investors who want to retain an advisor, Blayney says. "This will lead to assets under management for the network, and I may offer a supporting investment management service for those CFPs who don't want to manage assets on their own," Blayney says. "I don't want to be just a seminar company, so yes, the more I think about it, the more I think offering assets management will be important."

At her former firm, Blayney helped create a business that grew to nearly $2 billion in assets under management. After having that success, why would she want to gamble on a new business model now? "I have been persuaded, having worked with women for more than 20 years, that the conversation needs to be different," she says. "In a traditional advisory setting, I don't think advice is accessible enough to women or that it's
a good context for education."

Some women report needing and wanting more investment information than men. Bank of America talked to female investors, 30% of whom indicated that they are behind when it comes to investing for retirement. At the same time 29% of women who do invest reported that they have difficulty knowing what kinds of investments to make.

We all know the statistics: Women are still more likely to have intermittent careers, earn less than men (11% less on average, according to the U.S. Department of Labor), accrue less Social Security benefits and, yes, invest less and less confidently.

It's true that many women start with significant roadblocks. But the real question, says Lynn Reaser, the retirement strategist and chief economist of the Investment Strategies Group at Bank of America, is this: "How can advisors help them address these issues now? It's important for [women] to understand how much they'll need in retirement. We find that most people, and women are no exception, [vastly] underestimate how much they'll need to live comfortably. Typically, people will need 85% of preretirement income."

The challenges facing women investors, however, could be good news for advisors. Allianz Life Insurance Company's new report, Women, Money and Power, found that while women want to learn about retirement planning and investing, they feel overwhelmed by investment information, which they find "overwhelming, complicated, boring and dry." In a separate study conducted by Prudential Financial, eight in ten women believe that maintaining their lifestyle in retirement is a priority, but 42% report not understanding what a mutual fund is, 30% don't understand IRAs and 23% don't grasp 401(k)-type plans.

The good news? Women want "a person to tell them" about investments, rather than reading about the topic, BofA found, and they find "human contact" the most meaningful and effective source of information.

Peg Downey, who helms Money Plans in Silver Spring, Md., with partner Denise Leish, must already be doing something right. About 75% of her clients are women. Downey believes that even though women seemingly need more education, it might be because they admit they need it while their male counterparts do not. "This may sound like a stereotype, but the women who come in really try to do the right thing. They maximize their 401(k)s, but they're nervous and insecure about their overall investment plan. It's probably no different than a man feels, but women are just more comfortable owning it," Downey says.

She starts her retirement planning by looking at assets and what a client's investment will generate in retirement. "It's a quick way to say, 'Here's where you'll be. Will you be comfortable with that amount of income? If not, here are the options we should start looking at.'"

All of these statistics about women and investing are general, and we have to remember that everyone has a different level of sophistication and expectations about investment advice. In Downey's neck of the woods several miles outside Washington, D.C., (my neck of the woods as well) there are a lot of high-level, professional women. They are generally highly educated and have great expertise, but only in their area of interest, not investments. Which makes them appreciative of a good advisor's services.

In Briaud's practice, she tells me that it's "the women who nudge the men to get things done and come see an advisor. It's not uncommon for us to work mainly with the woman in a couple. We find that it's often the woman who is managing the money or saying this is causing stress, let's do something about it. We just don't see relationships where men make all the decisions."

Briaud says her clients are never overly conservative. "If they understand what we're doing, they're willing to take the risk," she says.

Blayney says that the women investors she's worked with do tend to be more risk averse, but they are also much better advice takers. "They explicitly trust their advisors. Once you have that trust, they're willing to take your recommendations. Where as men seem driven more from a competitive point of view."

So what if there is a woman can't afford advisory services, even those priced at $1,500? Blayney hopes to find an answer for her too. "I hope this is a good, profitable business model, because I want to give people the best advice possible and create a career track for women planners. But if I can really get this thing working, I would like to be able to offer the services for women who are not able to pay, so there could be a nonprofit spin-off where women could support other women."  

*Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Allianz Life Insurance Company report, "Women, Money and Power," 2007 and 2008 studies