ENOUGH! PLANNERS, VENDORS IN GRIP OF CONVENTION FRENZY: SEEMS LIKE CONFERENCE A DAY, MARCH TO MAY

Used to be Charles Foster didn’t have to think too hard about which financial conference to attend. He’d go to the annual retreat of the Institute of Certified Financial Planners and consider himself up-to-date.

Participants bunked in college dormitory rooms back then, and Mr. Foster remembers one particularly sticky night more than a decade ago at the University of Rhode Island, where he and fellow CFPs were tormented by mosquitoes.

“Sleeping in the dorms led to a lot of camaraderie,” recalls Mr. Foster, partner with Del Mar, Calif.-based Blankinship & Foster, which supervises $170 million in assets. Of course: “Then we got older.”

The entire industry has matured. (The accommodations have gotten classier, too.) More important, the number of financial adviser events has exploded, making it difficult for potential attendees and exhibitors to decide which meeting to spend time – and money – attending. Especially now, as conference season revs up after the April 15 tax-filing deadline.

“Between March and May, you could go to a conference every day,” says Bruce Katz, director of New York-based Zweig/Avatar Capital Management, with $180 million in assets under management.

May gets particularly harried. The first three weeks of the month finds major offerings from many large groups, including the International Association for Financial Planning, the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors, the Securities Industry Association, the Investment Company Institute, the Association for Investment Management and Research and the Association of Investment Management Sales Executives.

The conference frenzy picks up again in late July, when the ICFP, the National Endowment for Financial Education and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants all hold overlapping national meetings.

Add those get-togethers to the growing number of mutual fund and brokerage company events, such as the annual Schwab Institutional and Jack White & Co. conferences, and the ye
ar is set before it’s barely begun.

“It’s impossible,” says Mr. Foster, who’s planning trips to AIMR’s annual conference in May and the ICFP retreat in July. “It’s obvious no one could afford to go to all of them, because it’s too expensive and you couldn’t take that much time off of work.”

All industries have been beefing up their conference scheduling, says Dorothy Weber-Shadrick, president of Association Conferences & Exposition Management Inc., an event-planning firm in Denver.

“Everyone has to stay up to date,” she explains. “It’s becoming harder to book into the hotels. It used to be a buyer’s market. Now it’s a seller’s market.”

Yet the growing number of investment advice and financial planning organizations – some of them competitors – also is helping to fill the calendar faster than a debutante’s dance card at a coming-out ball.

Conference revenues generated by nonprofit financial planning organizations have been increasing, although their representatives say proceeds from meetings make up roughly the same percentage of total revenues as in previous years.

At Atlanta-based IAFP, for instance, this year’s conference budget is $8 million, up from $7 million, says Dale Brown, the group’s associate executive director. The money typically accounts for 30% to 35% of the association’s total budget.

one conference at a time

Conference proceeds typically comprise half of NAPFA’s revenue, says the Buffalo Grove, Ill.-based group’s chairman, Mark Spangler. Last year, NAPFA took in $1.2 million compared to $850,000 in 1996.

At the smaller Society of Asset Allocators Inc., or SAAFTI, 25% of $250,000 in revenues comes from its annual spring and fall conferences, a spokeswoman says. To make sure its November pow-wow can draw the 200 or so the group expects, SAAFTI schedules its events to coincide with Schwab Institutional’s fall fete, which draws more than 2,000 participants.

“We figured a lot of people want to go to Schwab as well,” says Zweig/Avat
ar’s Mr. Katz, who also is SAAFTI’s president. “We made a point to work around it.”

Sometimes, however, conference schedules conflict. In July, the National Endowment for Financial Education and the ICFP – both organizations catering to certified financial planners – are holding annual shindigs at the same time: The ICFP retreat is in San Diego, while NEFE’s annual conference is, as usual, in its hometown of Denver. Because of the conflict, speakers were a little harder to secure, says Sandra Knisely, NEFE’s director of professional development.

Advisers who attend the NEFE event could think about piggybacking the Datalynx Financial Advisor’s Conference if they wanted to stay in Denver an extra few days. Despite the widespread belief that Denver-based Datalynx intentionally holds its conference around NEFE’s schedule, Skip Schweiss, the company’s director of business development, says it’s purely coincidence.

Conference scheduling also is important to exhibitors, who must decide where they’ll get the biggest bang for the typical $2,500 to $5,000 they spend for booth space – and for major corporate sponsors, who can easily spend several hundred thousand dollars to underwrite cocktail parties, dinners and outings.

For Los Angeles-based Analytic TSA Global Asset Management Inc., the attendee profile matters most. Since the $1.5 billion company offers no-load funds, it targets the ICFP and NAPFA events, where participants are least likely to accept commissions, says Angelo A. Calvello, the firm’s director of client relations and business development.

But Mr. Calvello recently had to cut short a trip to NAPFA’s southern regional conference in Atlanta last November so he could schmooze at the Schwab Institutional conference in San Francisco.

got to get credit

Even if conference schedules don’t overlap, advisers say they have a hard time justifying attending too many.

Mark Bass, partner with Lubbock, Texas-based Pennington Bass & Associates, has numerous continuing education requirements as a
CFP and a certified public accountant. Still, Mr. Bass, whose firm has $90 million under supervision, finds he must be picky. “I just gear it to what I feel I need to serve my clients and better my practice,” he says.

Besides, he also attends the annual conference of IFG Network Securities, his broker-dealer. “I get continuing education credit for that. Some of the broker-dealers have excellent educational programs.”

Hugh Barndollar of Ocala, Fla., sticks to the same schedule every year. He attends the IAFP advanced planning conference because he says he learns a lot from the sessions and the participants.

“A high percentage of them are CFPs,” says Mr. Barndollar, a CFP with $50 million under supervision. “It’s not that I’m snobbish, I just don’t like to spend my time hobnobbing or playing golf.”

Fremont, Calif.-based adviser Ruthe Gomez doesn’t like to stray too far from her neck of the woods for “educational” sessions that may or may not be all that educational.

“A lot of these conferences just seem to be money-making vehicles,” Ms. Gomez says. “They are very expensive – hundreds of dollars. To me, it’s ridiculous.”

Last week, she attended a local session on long-term care insurance. The meeting space was strictly utilitarian, but Ms. Gomez was satisfied.

“It didn’t cost a thing,” she says, “and the Danish were delicious.”