She launched in 1993. At first, she shared an office suite with two other people, but her company was just her and a phone, and she set up shop with LPL—a firm she’s still with because she still trusts it more than others not to try spiriting clients away behind her back. She played with hourly fees, but despaired at seeing her advice not implemented, and she wanted more control over the assets.

“Almost from the beginning I’ve never cold called, I’ve never given seminars, I’ve never done anything like that. It’s always been clients referring other clients,” she says.

One client is Jon Veznedaroglu, a former exec at a national bank who decided to retire when he was 45 in 2006. He had spent most of his professional life saving while working in M&A, credit cards and technology at his company (which he declines to name). He’d saved enough that he wanted to get out of the business, and he interviewed with some 12 financial advisors. Most of what he found was people with canned investment models and patronizing attitudes who assumed he was going to go back to work in six months and was just going through a phase. He’d also become leery of the private banking products at companies like his own.

“I was working at the bank,” he says. “The whole thing is you never want to go into the kitchen of the restaurant you’re eating at and see how they’re making the sausage. Places like banking, private banks they are factories. I understand the commission schedule. If they try to go outside the lines, forget about it. They spend tens of millions of dollars developing these models. Unless you are a mega-wealthy billionaire, you’re not going getting that sort of plan that’s sculpted for your needs.”

Kaplan, he said, “got it.” She knew that with his frugal ways and with the saving he’d already done, he could indeed stop working at 45 and behold the joy of a long retirement, even without tens of millions. She offered him a sense of comfort that he somewhat hesitatingly calls “motherly.”

A few months after Veznedaroglu retired, the market crashed, and he confronted a moment of terror that he’d made a bad decision—unstitching himself from his income and a banking industry at a time when it would be impossible to re-enter, and watching his portfolio tank for his trouble. He says Kaplan, acting not just as an advisor but a therapist, “talked him off the ledge.”

Since then his portfolio has regained its footing, and after letting it sit for seven years he’s even ready to take disbursements of principal in the middle of 2014.

Veznedaroglu had known of Kaplan from her radio show when he met her through a friend of a friend. But in many cases she’s found her clients from referrals through professional organizations such as the Women’s Business Network (a multi-disciplinary group) and the ICFP.

Kaplan has found herself on a number of “best of” lists, including the best advisors for doctors, and engineers also call her for trade meetings. Such people are often referred to as “clients from hell,” people who have a do-it-yourself attitude, who like to know the nuts and bolts of things and perhaps even micromanage what the advisor is doing. But Kaplan says bring ’em on. She likes working with involved people and there are lots of things they need help with.

“Often, people don’t understand what they own,” she says. “They hold accounts in three different places or five different places. They never marry them all together. They never look at their whole portfolio as a unit. We tend to find certain investments more appealing than others and we just keep buying them. Someone can come in with three different accounts and they’re all large-cap value.

“I think that having a few doctors and really seeing what they were going through with the advent of managed care, where they were really being crippled by what the third-party payers were willing to pay them, I think then when other physicians would come and interview me, they found that I was unique in terms of my understanding of what was being done to their whole field.”

She says a lot of the impression she makes has to do with simple candor and not using numbers as some legerdemain to stun her clients into muteness.
“I’m not trying to dazzle them with Sharpe ratios,” she adds. “I’m being much more candid, much more down-to-Earth.”

For several years she had the three-hour call-in radio show. There she held forth on many of her pet issues—like the risk in portfolios and how it harms cash flow. A conservative investor, she likes balanced funds—“a delightful investment class,” she gushes. “They are considered little old lady funds because they do have the cash and bonds. But in a year like last year that was fabulous that the S&P was up 29%, the balanced funds were up like 22% … 18%. You’re not laying on the side of the road in bonds. And so they really are a delightful investment class, especially if people are trying to bring down the risk of the portfolio as they are retiring and for the first time in their lives are not adding to it anymore. And they generate income.”

Her candor, though it may be anodyne to her clients, might anger the Gods elsewhere. She hates annuities, and has used her radio soapbox to say that even though she’s authorized to sell them, she won’t. Student loan debt is another pet peeve, and she goads clients to find good state schools. She got in hot water with the long-term care insurance industry for bad-mouthing their products in a Wall Street Journal blog, opining that the product premiums had become so high they were no longer worth the trouble for clients who likely wouldn’t pay in long enough to use them anyway.

She also recently unceremoniously dumped an Asian mutual fund, yanking $35 million and moving it to small-cap positions. (She won’t name the fund, lest bad publicity make a “not nice” move even less so.) It was simple, she says: Asian securities weren’t doing well, and her clients needed small-company exposure.

“Universally on the radio show,” she says, “callers would say this is the only place I can go to find out what’s really happening. So I would unmask commissions and all sorts of things to have people make the decision.” She would tell people there’s nothing wrong with commissions, but that you need to know if an advisor is making more money from one recommendation than they would from another.

She’s got a million-dollar minimum and it’s moving up, she says. Many of her clients are those anticipating retirement or a small number of people who have accumulated a lot of assets beforehand. She has 150 families.

“I say families because once I take on a client, I tend to take on everybody associated with them,” she says. “First of all, I see and help children of clients as a courtesy to them. So they’ll call me with their first job; where should they invest their first 401(k) contribution. Should they buy a house?” It’s gotten to the point that she cannot take on new clients regularly; before she stopped taking them, her asset growth was 10% to 20% a year, even during the recession.

“Even if you have a year like 2000, 2001, 2002, 2008, many people who are self-investors become terrified in a really bad market and want funds professionally managed. So one would think that a bad market would really be crippling, because certainly assets drop in value, but usually there’s more of a demand than ever from the client to take them on.”

“I’ve always been incredibly conservative. I found in the beginning that many advisors’ downfall was taking on too much overhead, more than they could really afford. I’m sort of a squirrel when it comes to overhead, although my offices are gorgeous. Each move I make is five years later than I could have made it, including starting my practice. So that conservative approach has been enormously powerful.”
 

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