Yet technology isn't his biggest challenge. "We've put more time and effort into managing and strategically planning for our human capital needs than our technology needs." Currently, Joyce is hiring new staff to augment the planning teams in his Pennsylvania office and the client service team in his Virginia office. "We don't want to be ahead in our human capital investment, but we don't want to be behind either. The proper balance is difficult to achieve. We've done a decent job, but I still lay awake at night wondering if we'll get it right in the future."

Lou Stanasolovich, owner of Legend Financial Advisors Inc. in Pittsburgh, has depended on his carefully crafted internal systems to help him take in a surge of new clients. "We have an adequate supply of staff and we tend to be highly systematized. We have numerous checklists we use to keep new clients moving along, so the process isn't chaotic but very organized. Everyone knows what their role is."

To teach new staff members how to use the various lists that guide the new-client intake process, Legend creates videos with Camtasia (http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/screencasting/defaultb.asp?gclid=CLCmhe2Hg50CFSFRagodkFiFaw) that staffers can watch to learn the process. The company uses its ProTracker CRM for other parts of the process its lists don't cover. "Once we invest the portfolio," says Stanasolovich, "we use what we call our 'Determinator,' which is housed in ProTracker and entails selecting the dates for the client's billing and reporting, creating report cover sheets, billing and performance reporting. That document guides everything," he adds.

Typically, says Stanasolovich, the company picks up 12 to 20 new clients a year. (The big exception was in 2002, when it brought in 40 new clients.) But in the first eight months of 2009, the firm has already picked up 19. "Chaos causes good client inflow," says Stanasolovich. "If we brought in 80 or 90 new clients, we'd be strained, but this is within our means."

In addition to chaos, Stanasolovich attributes the new faces to Legend's marketing programs and client referrals. "We didn't lose much money [during 2008] and our clients told others about it. We also held Webcasts this year for prospects in our database. We attracted 40 people to the first one and 45 to the second. From the first, we got seven new clients and from the second, three.

"A lot of these were comeback prospects ... people we talked to five to seven years ago during the first downturn who became clients during this downturn. Some were referrals, one found us through a Wall Street Journal article, one from the Worth list and, earlier on, we were getting clients from Internet searches."

And from wirehouses? "We've had a few. They've had no service unless [their assets are] are north of $5 million, so they appreciate the higher level of service and the fact that we're extremely high contact. They'll receive as many as 25 to 30 phone calls from us within the four to five months." The toughest clients to deal with, says Stanasolovich, are those who don't give you the information needed for planning and these, he says, aren't any more likely to be wirehouse clients than clients from other sources.

Armond Dinverno, a principal in Balasa Dinverno Foltz LLC of Itasca, Ill., says the same thing about the handful of wirehouse clients his firm gets: "These clients say they haven't been reached out to as often as they would have liked. Response times have been poor. From our perspective, this makes them great clients because we smother them with touches," he says.

Of course, the firm has to "navigate them" away from the frequent conversations they're used to having with their brokers about buying and selling. "With a firm like ours, there's less need to pay attention to the portfolio so often, and that's a positive change for the client."

Reluctant to provide confidential client information, Dinverno spoke in percentages rather than absolute numbers in describing his firm's experience during the recession. "Our year-over-year [2009 over 2008] change is about 20% more new assets than last year."