This month, Financial Planning looks ahead at the future of your business, and back over where you've been. It's been quite the year, hasn't it? Last September, Lehman Brothers collapsed and nearly took the world financial system down with it. Since then, we've all been on a long and crazy ride.

In honor of this not-so-happy anniversary, we devoted much of this issue to assessing where the industry stands. What have people learned from this awful experience, and how will the industry grow? Most important of all, how can planners best serve clients now?

You'll find useful ideas in every section of the issue. Columnist Bob Veres suggests that now is the time to hire a coach to tweak your practice, and recommends several-many of whom offer free sessions on our website, www.financial-planning.com. Glenn Kautt's column discusses a crucial subject: urgency. After a year of financial and business emergencies, it's tough but still necessary to communicate the importance of everything you do.

Our cover story, "What's Next," will help you foster your own sense of urgency. Now that the economy is coming back and financial markets seem to be stabilizing, you can move out of emergency mode and back to building your business. Clients are looking for you, but are you ready to grow? Marie Swift, president of Impact Communications and author of our March practice management feature, "What Works Now," once again culls great business ideas from advisors whose practices are flourishing, even now.

In our Practice section, we have two new bylines: Don Trone on fiduciary practice (it's coming!) and Brian Hamburger on succession planning. In the Client section, we have two important articles about Roth IRAs. As you know, next year there is no income ceiling for clients who want to convert their traditional IRAs to Roths. Don Korn, our senior editor, offers up great ideas for getting the most mileage from the conversion. IRA expert Ed Slott then details how to recharacterize Roths that have lost value.

Thus far, I've described articles that are forward looking; now, on to our backward gaze. Enough time has passed since the market collapse for people to be able to assess how they handled it and what it taught them. I learned that no matter how well I might intellectually understand investment risk, there's no escaping the nausea that comes with major losses and uncertainty.

Carl Richards, founder of the influential blog Behavior Gap, shares what he learned about risk as the lead-off to a feature on the meltdown. We asked various luminaries, including Roger Ibbotson, NAPFA president Diahann Lassus, Tiburon's Chip Roame and others, to share what they learned as well. I hope you find their responses as interesting as I do.

Marion Asnes became the editor of Financial Planning magazine in 2005. Financial Planning is the leading professional magazine for independent financial planners and has a circulation of 115,000. The topics covered on its pages range from industry news and trends to sophisticated discussions of portfolio management, estate planning and philanthropy. Asnes is the first female editor in chief of Financial Planning in the magazine's 38-year history.

Before joining Financial Planning, Asnes was a senior editor at Money, participating in the magazine’s coverage of personal finance, retirement, investment and health care issues. Her areas of expertise included retirement and 401(k) planning, asset allocation, estate planning and the particular financial challenges faced by women. In addition to her regular editorial duties at Money, Asnes co-edited Money for Women, an annual special issue that was featured exclusively on “The Today Show” on NBC.

A 27-year service journalism veteran, Asnes has contributed to a long list of national publications including Vogue, Elle, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, More, Mirabella, Working Woman and Lear's. She has spoken at conferences and symposia ranging from the National Endowment for Financial Education’s Retirement Summit to the National Football League’s Rookie Symposium. In addition, Asnes has appeared on national television programs as an expert on financial and economic topics including CNN, CNN Headline News, NBC's Today, ABC's 20/20, PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor.

Asnes graduated with a B.A. from Cornell University.