It was truly a Cinderella story. In 2000, Edmond Walters took the knowledge he had gained from years of working as a financial planner and developed a Conshohocken, Pa.-based online company called eMoney Advisor.

Walters had taken a big gamble: He'd pulled together $2.5 million in start-up financing from former clients. His goal was a simple one: to develop an Internet-based product that would help financial planners better serve their clients. Once he and his team had developed a solid financial planning and client management software platform, they began touting it on the road among the advisor community.

The product was a hit. In the next several years, the company's revenues grew to the point where Walters sold the company to Commerce Bancorp for a whopping $32 million in stock in January 2006.

Shared Fascination

Bradley Dugdale Jr. is envisioning a similar fairy-tale ending to his own entrepreneurial story. Dugdale and fellow financial planner Rich Ronnestad, both with D.A. Davidson & Co. in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, have launced Munny Journey, a keepsake book designed to teach children about personal finance.

Dugdale had already co-authored a previous book about financial planning entitled Let's Save America: 9 Lessons to Financial Success. Moreover, he and Ronnestad, used to working together, also created an audio and workbook package about various financial planning topics. They envisioned the book as a new way to share their fascination with the power of compound interest.

Troubled by the lack of financial literacy among many of his clients, Dugdale came up with the idea to help educate children to give them a financial leg up in life. He, Ronnestad and their wives, Sheraie and Shelby, set about designing a children's book that would help parents save their kids' first financial gifts and teach lessons on saving and investing.

That's a noble cause, but Dugdale admits it would have been nice if the project had paid off financially for him and his co-author rather than just being a labor of love. "I would love for this to be the next Baby Einstein," he says, referring to the popular series of children's product DVDs.

Indirect Value

Producing books, videos, software packages, organizing kits, proprietary asset-analysis tools and other products can set financial planners apart from the pack, says invention guru Don Debelak, author of Bringing Your Product to Market in Less than a Year. Bringing these products to market without losing time, money and focus can be harder than it looks, however.

As with Walters and Dugdale, many advisors quietly and passionately nurture hopes of developing the next big idea in financial planning to benefit both themselves and their firms. But before you descend into a basement lair to spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars developing your idea, Debelak advises that you design a new product with two things in mind: First, what do you want it to do for your business? And second, how much money might it bring in?

Whether intentional or not, many financial planners' products become a means to an end, delivering more indirect value to firms than they generate in actual sales. After explaining her investment recommendations over and over again to clients, Chanie Schwartz, president of A Vested Interest Wealth Management in New York City, knew there had to be a clearer way for her to help them more easily understand her choices. So, over the course of a month in 2002, she hunkered down in her office after hours and developed her idea, the "Tactical Asset Allocation Spreadsheet."

The spreadsheet shows clients-in either print or electronic format-how much money they have in various asset classes, as well as the target amount for those asset classes based on clients' risk tolerance. "A lot of people are making investment recommendations and aren't showing the client the logic behind them. [With the spreadsheet], they can see it clearly," she says.

Schwartz doesn't have plans to take her product to market because she believes that it could easily be replicated. However, the spreadsheet has become a hallmark of her firm, allowing her to communicate better with her clients.

She says that many of her clients love the spreadsheet's clarity, and she has been able to help some of them redistribute their assets based on their improved understanding of distribution principles. That benefits her business as well.

This kind of grip on the value of a proprietary product is essential to success, Debelak says. "In the financial planning business, your customers want [to have] confidence in you. They want to trust you. A successful product in this category will help contribute to that," he adds.