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Fast Track – Napfa: A new chairman, a new direction

The National Association of Personal Financial Advisors is planning to take off in a new direction now that Steven P. Kanaly is at the controls.

“Napfa’s future is about to take off the way the Starship Enterprise does at light speed,” says Mr. Kanaly, 49, the new chairman of the 19-year-old association for fee-only advisers.

“We are in the process of transforming for the 21st century,” says Mr. Kanaly, a charter member of the trade group who is president of Kanaly Trust Co., a Houston planning firm with $1.8 billion in assets under management.

Napfa is past being simply a voice for fee-only advisers, says Mr. Kanaly, who assumed the reins in June.

“We are fee to the death, but there is more in our life and practices than just giving fee-only financial advice,” he says of the 750-member group.

After the group’s national convention in Phoenix in May, Mr. Kanaly says, he realized that every member defines fee-only differently

As a result, he says, “we’ve evaluated our core concepts and have come up with some potential new ones, if approved by members. In the meantime, we are trying to define our brand and get our governance in line with our new strategy.”

“We are restructuring the board so that it does more strategic thinking rather than day-to-day running of Napfa,” he says.

For the time being, however, those plans are on hold as the organization and its members turn their attention to the attack on the World Trade Center.

Mr. Kanaly says that although no Napfa members were injured, the organization is shocked by the attack. “We do have two or three members whose offices were dislocated physically or indirectly impaired because of the terrorist attacks,” he says.

The association has decided to proceed with all planned conferences, including last weekend’s Midwest regional conference in Arlington Heights, Ill.

“It’s important to keep going and not look back, other than to develop plans so that these things don’t happen again,” Mr. Kanaly says. “I think this is a perfect time for Americans to rethink their financial plans.”

Mr. Kanaly says events of the recent attack’s magnitude send signals to Americans that their freedom and financial security could be at risk. “An awful lot of our members … were around when the stock markets really did crash. As a result, they have gotten their clients sensitized and ready for the volatility,” he says.

Meanwhile, Napfa has positioned a strategic-planning task force and a governance task force to determine the future of the association. Napfa over the next six months will start announcing where it is headed. Mr. Kanaly says that while the group has developed some concepts, the regional boards and membership must review the ideas before he can provide details.

One initiative that Napfa plans to proceed with is a program to help advisers go after “the middle market” – those with a household income of $70,000 to $100,000.

“We weren’t able to help [that market] before, because we didn’t have enough members trained in that market,” says Mr. Kanaly.

To promote financial planning as a vocation, Napfa also has become involved in educational programs. Napfa members have started offering internships to students studying financial planning at schools such as Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Chairman emeritus Gary Schatsky, who ran Napfa the last two years, says that the association will benefit from his successor’s involvement.

“He is following through wonderfully on a host of initiatives that we started last year, whether they be the middle-market initiative [or] reorganizing the organization,” says Mr. Schatsky, who is president of IFC Personal Money Managers in New York.