Count on 'em

Count on 'em

INVESTING by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

Lisa Keverian-Press

Financial planners, by nature, don't relish the word 'no,' either hearing it or saying it. The job is essentially one of sales, whether it's selling a specific mutual fund or the entire firm's services.

Lisa Keverian-Press, though, seems to relish a 'no.' A Sarasota-based financial planner with Robert W. Baird & Co., Keverian-Press has no qualms telling a client not to do something. She's told clients not to retire or that retirement in five years would be a huge mistake based on their current portfolio. She's told some clients to slow down, to get out of stocks and into bonds. She's also told clients flat-out when something won't work.

"If there's less desirable news to share," says Keverian-Press, "hopefully they will hear it from us first."

And despite knowing that nationally 85% of registered financial advisers are men, Keverian-Press has also rejected the notion that financial planning is a male-dominated field, at least the notion that women can't be successful at it. The latest proof is in Barron's Top 100 ranking of women financial advisers: Keverian-Press made the list for the second straight year in 2007. She ranked 100 this time, a drop from when she was ranked 84th in 2006.

Keverian-Press is one of three Gulf Coast financial planners on the list, joining Ami Forte, a senior vice president and wealth advisor for the Palm Harbor office of Morgan Stanley and Kim Ciccarelli Kantor of Naples-based Ciccarelli Advisory Services.

"We are delighted to have Lisa working here," says Jay Logan, a vice president at Milwaukee-based Baird and the Sarasota branch manager. "We'd love to have two more Lisas, but I don't think they are out there."

The top executives at Baird's corporate office obviously agree: Keverian-Press' picture is on the front cover of the international firm's 2006 annual report.

Keverian-Press, 49, has been working in financial planning for 26 years. She was born and grew up in the Chicago area and graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in economics. After college, she formed her own financial planning firm in suburban Chicago.

While on her own, Keverian-Press says she did everything she could to market herself and her business. She hosted seminars, attended conferences and sent out mass-mailings. She even appeared regularly on a Chicago-area financial TV show called "Ask the Expert."

In 1999, Keverian-Press joined Baird and moved to the Gulf Coast, spending half her time in the firm's Sarasota branch and the other half in an Illinois office. She has worked her way up with Baird, becoming the first woman to be selected to the firm's Chairman's Club in 2000 and then being named a managing director in 2004.

Kim Ciccarelli Kantor

Kim Ciccarelli Kantor participated in her first financial planning meeting when she was five years old. It took place on a Saturday morning in her family's living room in their Buffalo home. That's where her father, Frank Ciccarelli, held court on the importance of savings and what's so special about compound interest.

By the time she was 10, Kantor was already reading Forbes and Barron's, as were her six siblings. Says Kantor: "We took a liking to financial planning at an early age."

Forty years later, this past June, Kantor picked up a copy of Barron's and saw her name in it under the heading Top 100 Women Financial Advisers. It was the first time she made the list on her own and the second time her family run-firm, Naples-based Ciccarelli Advisory Services, has been mentioned in a top 100 list published by the newspaper.

"I never thought we would have achieved so much and affected so many clients," says Kantor, 50. "To pick up [Barron's] and see the list is one of the nicest compliments we can get."

Kantor is one of three Gulf Coast-based financial planners to make the Top 100 list. The others are Ami Forte, a senior vice president and wealth advisor for the Palm Harbor office of Morgan Stanley and Lisa Keverian-Press, who works out of the Sarasota office for Milwaukee-based Robert W. Baird & Co.

While making the list isn't the first personal honor for Kantor, she looks at the ranking as a satisfying culmination of nearly 30 years in the trenches of financial planning.

Those trenches were deep when she first started out. Kantor was rejected for her first job at one major brokerage house in Naples, told that since she wasn't a breadwinner, she had no chance of succeeding in the business. And in her mid 20s, when she attended a Charles Schwab sponsored conference, the Super Bowl of financial planning junkets, Kantor saw only a handful of women in the field.

Even Kantor's first job, for another national brokerage's Naples office, was a struggle at first. "You had to hide while you did your thing," says Kantor, "because there were so few women doing this."

As Kantor grew in the business, so did her accolades and exposure. Kantor wrote a column under the heading "Preserving Wealth" for the Naples Daily News for several years and she was the original host and editor for "It's Your Money," a Naples area cable TV show. She's also been a guest on the Fox News Channel's "Your $ Matters."

Going on three decades in the business, Kantor's challenges have changed dramatically. A big one now is how complicated the financial markets have gotten and then explaining those complications to clients. The Internet-age has been one of those mixed blessings, Kantor says, providing information overload that many times lacks context. What's more, the number of products, from mutual funds to annuities, has grown significantly the last 30 years.

"It takes a lot more time now to get the right answer," Kantor says. "The homework is much more intense."

Ami Forte

It takes a lot to wow Ami Forte in the financial planning business.

For starters, her client list is a mix of wealthy entrepreneurs, foundations and individuals with a net worth of $10 million or greater. Many clients fall under the 'millionaire, but bored in retirement' category. Through Forte's team at two St. Petersburg-area based Morgan Stanley offices, including one in Palm Harbor, she manages almost $700 million in assets.

Still, two fellow financial planners wowed Forte pretty good in 2006.

It was then, at a financial planning conference in Palm Beach, that Forte met Rebecca Rothstein and Saly Glassman, a pair of financial planners with other national firms who had already crossed the billion-dollar threshold in managed assets. Rothstein and Glassman, with Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch, respectively, told Forte about how much their careers - and portfolios - were enhanced by being included on Barron's annual list of the country's Top 100 women financial advisers.

She was sold. "I suddenly decided that I wanted that to be a career goal," Forte says.

Forte, a part-time model in college who later gave up a career in the fashion industry to work in financial planning, reached her goal in quick and precise fashion: She placed third on the list in 2007, coincidently right behind the two financial planners she chatted with last year.

Forte is the third Gulf Coast based wealth manager on the list, which was published in June. Lisa Keverian-Press, who works out of the Sarasota office for Milwaukee-based Robert W. Baird & Co. and Kim Ciccarelli Kantor with Naples-based Ciccarelli Advisory Services, joins her on the list.

Forte, 49, attributes her strong showing in the list to her philosophy of taking the sky-high view of her client's financial lives. She likes to know everything a client has going money-wise, from simple savings to complicated estate plans, so she can help them make the best long-term decision. Says Forte: "You don't want to be the doctor that prescribes aspirin to the patient whose other doctor already prescribed aspirin."

She manages portfolios for about 150 households, which requires regular travel out of Florida to visit clients in person. That's one of her favorite parts of the job, when she gets to interact with clients on a one-on-one basis.

Forte has found the most challenging aspect of the business to be information overload, something that hasn't gotten any easier in her seven years with Morgan Stanley or five years with other firms before that. Her Palm Harbor office is testament to that, with a double-screen Bloomberg terminal on one side of the desk flanked by a TV and a stock portfolio computer screen. She used to have a Squawk Box on the floor, too.

A native New Yorker, Forte says that over the years, the sounds, noise and constant chatter has become part of the background, to the point where she barely hears it. She even likes it now, one of the benefits, she says, of being in the business through good and bad times.

"You truly get a grasp of this business by being in it," Forte says. "Experience is the best teacher."

AT A GLANCE

Robert W. Baird & Co.

Founded: 1919, in Milwaukee

CEO: Paul Purcell

2006 revenues: $656 million

Employees: 2,200 in the U.S. and Europe; Fortune magazine has ranked the firm as one of the top 100 companies to work for in the U.S. from 2004-2007.

Services: Investment banking, private equity and wealth and asset management

Source: Robert W. Baird & Co., www.rwbaird.com

AT A GLANCE

Ciccarelli

Advisory Services

Founded: In 1984, with offices in Naples and Rochester, NY

Ownership: Family-owned

Employees: 22, in Bonita Springs, Naples and Rochester

Services: Portfolio management, financial consulting, family generational planning, insurance review

Source: Ciccarelli Advisory Services, www.casmoneymatters.com

AT A GLANCE

Morgan Stanley

Founded: 1935

CEO: John J. Mack

2006 revenues: $76.5 billion

Offices: More than 600 offices in 32 countries

Services: Investment banking, securities, investment management and wealth management services

Source: Morgan Stanley, www.morganstanley.com