In a Sept. 16 letter to all of his clients, Greg Fenton, owner of Cambridge Cape Cod Advisors, wrote:

"On Tuesday, September 11, 2001 there were four non-stop flights leaving Logan Airport for the West Coast: American Airlines had one flight to Los Angeles and one to San Jose, CA. United Airlines had one flight to Los Angeles and one to San Francisco, CA. All were 757s with huge, full fuel tanks and we all know that the terrorists picked the two flights to Los Angeles to hijack. I was on the American Airlines flight to San Jose. I was lucky. To make a long story short, we landed in Chicago and I was able to make friends with three other people from Boston. We were fortunate enough to get a car and we drove 20 hours home to the safety of our families. I hugged my four-year-old son like never before."

Fenton's point was that if the terrorists had flipped a coin and picked his flight over the Los Angeles flight, he would have had no regrets because he'd fashioned a life that allowed him to do the things he always wanted to do. He vowed in his letter to now help his clients do the same. They responded with cards, letters, e-mail, and flowers. "That confirmed I was doing the right thing with my practice," Fenton says.

How many advisors can say what Fenton said? No, not the part about narrowly avoiding personal disaster, but the part about achieving the things you truly want in life. Not many. The reason is that we're all too busy being financial planners.

The burgeoning discipline of life planning still has a long way to go before it's a universal service offering, in part because most planners don't have a clue what it means to have a life. That's not true for Fenton, which is why he doesn't easily relate to his colleagues.

"I'm professionally lonely, like a fish out of water," he says. "I go to conferences, talk with my colleagues, and have nothing in common with them. They all talk about how many hours they're working."

When Fenton went home from his last conference and tallied up the hours he was spending in his business, he found he spent about 10 hours a year on each of the 20 or so new clients he took in, four hours on each of his 100 or so existing clients, and about 20 hours a week on non-face-time activities, including planning and administrative duties. For Fenton, who enjoys ample leisure time throughout the year, this totals about 1,400 hours or 27 hours per week--far less than most other planners.

Yet, his is not a fledgling practice. Having started out as a CFP working for Sun Life of Canada ("calling myself a planner and selling whatever insurance or mutual funds I could"), Fenton says he hit rock bottom in 1996.

"I was going into large brokerage firms," he says, "meeting with managers and talking to brokers, trying to get the brokers to use our insurance products with their clients, but all they wanted from me were slogans to help them sell."

That was when Fenton traded in the sizzle for the steak in the form of his own RIA. His firm would unquestionably provide client-centered fee-only planning services, but how would it otherwise be configured?

"I moved to Cape Cod, bought a house on the ocean, and started living what I like to call the good life," he says. "I'm raising a young son and have more personal freedom than you can imagine. I travel in Europe for two to three weeks every year, work 40 hours a month every June and July, take August off and haven't worked a Friday afternoon in six years."

In other words, Fenton has devoted as much time to planning his life as to planning his business. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they're both coordinated into the kind of life plan he tries to help clients achieve.

Within this framework, Fenton still manages to give his clients good service. "Existing clients get three meetings a year: in the spring, for tax preparation, in the late fall, for tax planning, and then a portfolio-analysis meeting once or twice a year," he says.

Fenton outsources his tax preparation, reviewing the final return before forwarding it to his client. He also saves a lot of time by scheduling face-to-face meetings with clients or using e-mail, but largely avoiding telephone contact.

This business model brings Fenton a gross income of a $250,000 a year with very modest overhead. "I have one administrative assistant and a beautiful 400-square-foot office outside of my home," he says. As part of his life-work plan, Fenton prefers to work in a separate office rather than from home, and he usually brings no work home with him in the evenings.

Given that Fenton's formula is so successful, I wonder why more advisors aren't following it. At least then Fenton would have someone to talk to at conferences. "I think many advisors enjoy [the long hours] and aren't looking for a way out," he says. "Perhaps working long hours validates them. [They think] 'I must be successful if I'm working 50 hours a week and doing everything I can for my clients.'

"But how can you counsel clients on getting more out of life when you're not doing it yourself? My clients respect that I've got the life I want. I'm not ashamed that I'm not open on Friday afternoons, and I've never had a complaint about it," he adds.

When Fenton eavesdrops on other advisors, the common "complaints" he hears are problems they're having with their staff, their overhead, how much time they spend researching the betas and turnover ratios of their mutual fund recommendations, and how long it takes them to prepare portfolio statements. "The implication," he says, "is that these planners feel they have to do these things themselves, whereas they don't."

For example, as a member of Bert Whitehead's Cambridge Connection, Fenton receives quarterly investment stats and research, or what Cambridge calls the Cambridge Directed Portfolio, which is put together by a team of Cambridge members.

"Each of us receives the portfolio, which includes reasons why specific funds were picked or dropped [from the recommended list], and I trust that document 100%," Fenton says. He has no need to reinvent the wheel.

Fenton divides the time he spends with clients between life planning and traditional financial planning, but in a counterintuitive way. Whereas most planners do goal-setting and create the foundation for life planning early in the relationship, Fenton does it after the first year, when the technical work is complete.

"I don't know [the client] well enough at first," he says. "It's an embarrassing appointment for some. They'll share much more after a year because they trust me more."

Fenton conducts his life-planning sessions in a comfortable setting where his client can reflect on where they want to be in five years. "No one's ever at work," he says. "They're with their families or on a beach."

Much like Fenton every day of the week.

Author comment: The problem with practice profiles traditionally featured in the financial-planning media has been that they use nebulous selection criteria, such as "best practices," or, in the case of membership publications, members who might benefit from the attention. I believe those advisors the media holds out as examples should meet more-specific and better-conceived criteria.

This column began six months ago on the principle of featuring advisors providing unusual services in unusual ways, rather than a series of articles on advisors whose primary success has been increasing assets under management.

While retaining this focus, I would like to broaden the criteria to embrace the issues explored in my column above. Should we really praise advisors who help their clients discover and achieve important life and financial goals if, in doing so, they work long, stressful hours, display less than impressive business acumen or organizational skills, or neglect their families and community?

In other words, I want to use this column to define the "successful advisor," and that will be the person who has his or her total act together, who has successfully done his or her own life planning, and has made the time and money for all of those things he or she truly values.

You may or may not agree with my definition of success. But if you do, or if you at least think it has merit, please nominate advisors (including yourself, if appropriate) who you think meet these criteria. I believe the vast majority of people in our profession desperately need these kinds of role models.

Please e-mail your nominations to me at dd@daviddrucker.com.