The essential truth about Deena Katz, chairman and co-founder of Coral Gables, Fla.-based Evensky & Katz Wealth Management, boils down to this: She is a teacher and a doer. Along with her husband and business partner Harold Evensky, Katz has built a financial planning practice that has won widespread recognition and garnered $630 million in assets under management. She has authored and edited nine widely respected books on financial planning and practice management. (Her Retirement Income Redesigned won the Axiom Business Book Award for 2008.) And she offers her time and knowledge to myriad industry organizations, including a current seat on the national board of the Financial Planning Association. These days, she's in Lubbock, Texas, leading the financial planning program at Texas Tech University.

In all of her endeavors, Katz strives to motivate advisors to create thriving businesses first. While advisors often have empathy for their clients, she says, they don't do enough to protect themselves. "We have a responsibility to those clients. If we go out of business, we have done a detriment to our relationship with them."

Empathy, though, is nothing new to Katz, who got into financial planning after watching her widowed mother, a social worker, struggle to manage the family's finances. At Evensky & Katz, she has dedicated much of her time to helping such female clients, making them confident in their finances. "I felt my job was to work with women who were smart and capable, but who didn't have the experience," Katz says.

Those who know Katz well are never surprised at all she has accomplished, owing her success in large part to an innate gift for teaching. "It's so natural and easy for her. She has a great communication style," says Tim Welsh, president of Nexus Strategy, who has worked with Katz on several boards and tasks forces through the FPA.

EARLY ADOPTER

It is this ability to explain abstract concepts in a clear, concrete fashion that has put Katz at the forefront of the planning industry for decades. One of the first major subjects she tackled was long-term care. The issue had become important to some of her clients, so Katz educated herself. Then, in 1990, when insurance policies weren't standardized and misperceptions abounded about what was and wasn't covered, she wrote about the new concept in her book Planning Long-Term Health Care. And the rest was history. "I had a lot of influence on how the industry came to see long-term care as part of their responsibility and how to advise clients about it," she says.

Before financial planning, Katz was anEnglish teacher. In 2006, she returned to the classroom, this time to attack the lack of young talent entering the financial planning field. Ever since, she has become a voice of authority in the education of the next generation of planners, sharing her wisdom on core planning principles and business administration concepts to undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students. She is also a part of a team that attracts funding for the program, an impressive feat considering the Charles Schwab Foundation pledged $1 million to the program to build a modern teaching facility just one year after she joined the university.

GIVING SOMETHING BACK

Katz refers to the current phase of her career as the "kiss and bless" period, in which she entrusts the day-to-day care of Evensky & Katz's clients to her staff of planners. But she isn't looking to slow down any time soon. In fact, Katz is working to establish a financial planning clinic at Texas Tech that will serve local residents who typically don't have enough assets to qualify for professional advice. Once the clinic launches, she says, it will also provide back-office support for advisors around the country doing pro bono work. "I still have a great deal of passion around financial planning," Katz says. "I'm just more involved in a different way than I used to be."