Also, he found that wirehouses aren't the only ones that can exert wrong-headed pressures. Clients themselves, he found, were also having an influence on what he was doing as a planner-often in a destructive way. Cassaday, in fact, looks back and sees a planner who was often pushed and pulled by clients in directions from which he normally would have steered clear. The result was muddled portfolios, peppered with a potpourri of limited partnerships, closed-end bond funds, technology stocks and Internet stocks-investments Cassaday got involved with just to placate clients.

The end result: a lot of pain after the market started going south in March 2000.

The turning point for Cassaday was the day a client was giving him hell about the plummeting value of Cisco stock. This was a client who had been adamant about overloading on the stock, against Cassaday's advice. Yet he looked Cassaday straight in the face and said, "You should have been more persuasive."

Cassaday decided that this client was absolutely right. That led to big changes. Among the most notable: If a client didn't want to follow the firm's advice, he or she was shown the door. The firm also clarified its investment policy and put more focus on comprehensive planning, including dealing with insurance and estate planning needs.

Finally, the firm built a client profile and stuck to it. Generally speaking, the firm sticks to "nearly affluent" clients whose net worth falls between $700,000 and $2.5 million.

"The niche is a good one because the banks, which are usually wrong, are going after the wealthy and people with $5 million or more," he says. "We found uniformly that those people are like spoiled super-models. Everyone is after them, they're finicky, they're arrogant and difficult to work with."

John Kvale, president and founder of JK Financial Inc. in Dallas, found himself in the same boat during the go-go 1990s. It was like there were two voices running the show, Kvale says. There were clients, exerting inexorable pressure to invest more and more into large-cap growth investments. Then there was the little voice in the back of Kvale's head, saying, "That's not a good thing, and we shouldn't be there."

In the 1990s, Kvale had a tougher time resisting client pressure because the investments he was telling them to go easy on kept going up, up and up. "It would have probably been better to allow the clients to go," he says.

Many of his clients felt the brunt of the market slide, and the firm has since made a pledge to not back down on its investing philosophy, Kvale says.

"I've been in the financial planning world for 14 years, and over the past four years learned more than the previous ten," he says. "It's a constant learning process, and that's where I wish I had been more steadfast."

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