Our inaugural 40 Under 40

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you our inaugural class of 40 Under 40.

In choosing the talented young professionals profiled here on the pages of InvestmentNews, we went beyond assets under management or production.

Instead, we opted to base our picks on more meaningful — albeit, more subjective — measures of success. I’m talking about such measures as accomplishment, contribution, leadership and promise.

Though they come from different backgrounds, one thing you will find in common among all of the men and women featured on Pages 10 to 22 is that they already have achieved a high level of accomplishment and, more importantly, they all show promise of even greater success down the road.

Trust me, these are the folks who will give keynotes at conferences, head up important industry initiatives and raise the stature of the planning profession in the eyes of the general public.

A YEAR OF PLANNING

Believe it or not, the issue that you have in your hands right now has been in the making for more than a year. It’s true. It’s been a year of conceptualizing, planning, designing and developing. From our newsroom to our marketing team to our web developers, this has truly been an effort of love and teamwork.

A special shout-out goes to Christina Nelson, InvestmentNews’ series/features editor, whose leadership and organizational skills kept this project’s many moving parts chugging along. Also, to our web developer David Rankin, who spent countless hours listening to a roomful of wild-eyed editors tossing about their ideas and, somehow, made the good ones work and the bad ones go away.

I’d also like to thank our 40 Under 40. Not only did so many of you graciously come to our offices in New York to be photographed and videotaped (on your own dime!), but you all took the time to provide us with selfies and to answer our many questions that allowed us to get to know you better.

To really experience the depth and breadth of this project, I urge all of you to visit our website at InvestmentNews.com/40. There, you will find expanded profiles, cool infographics, videos and so much more.

We also are launching a robust social media campaign around this project. For example, you can communicate directly with many of our 40 Under 40 on Twitter using the hashtag #IN40. And we’ve set up a great photo album featuring all of the honorees on InvestmentNews’ Facebook page.