The October market meltdown taught investors and financial advisors alike a number of valuable lessons.

Too many baby boomer investors I've spoken to lament the positions they or their advisors have taken with their portfolios. "I thought I could just buy whatever seemed appealing and win," confided one. "Now I find myself with more speculative stocks than I should own, and I may have to delay my retirement." He was not alone. In fact, a pattern was developing. Few of them had a written financial plan, with suitably balanced investments for their specific objectives. Not that those with financial plans weren't hurt too. But that latter group seemed better able to take the blow and have the prospect of long-term recovery.

On the flip side, many of the financial advisors I've spoken to now regret the positions in which they have placed their clients. As one told me: "I've resisted financial planning for years. Now I have to embrace it. The time to simply sell individual stocks is behind us as we enter a new era of investing."

Regardless of how you approach your job, I suggest that this may be the time to redefine the financial plan.

There was a time when a "financial plan" was the end result of working with clients to help them articulate their investment objectives. It was, for the most part, a generic plan that attempted to take into consideration each of a client's financial objectives. But that was a time when life was less complicated.

Now, a generic financial plan rarely, if ever, works. From a marketing perspective, it's like advertising black and white televisions when everyone else is offering high-definition.

While the financial planning process still works very well, in fact maybe even better today than it did two or three decades ago, one plan cannot fit all the needs for your clients.

Rather, there needs to be specific financial plans designed to meet very specific investment objectives: college funding, retirement, estate planning and business succession; not to mention even more targeted plans designed to fund the purchase of a vacation home, pay for a child's wedding or cover that dream vacation around the world.

Each of these specialized plans revolves around different time horizons, risk tolerances and very specific goals, which require varied approaches from the crafting of the written plan to the execution of the investment portfolio. The original financial plan, therefore, is now a generic umbrella under which specific plans of an individual or family are sheltered. And each is administered and evaluated differently.

The days of writing an all-encompassing financial plan are gone, at least from a marketing perspective. The more variations of plans you offer, the easier it is to attract clients with specific needs. The spotlight now is on how you address each client's separate objectives, drawing on all your knowledge. Another challenge is building realistic expectation levels with each client for each specific plan. That will provide backdrops against which longer-term, more aggressive programs have room to absorb downward market pressure, but in which shorter-term, more conservative programs do not.

By target marketing a client's financial objectives through specific financial plans, you not only provide a needed service to investors, but you separate yourself from competitors and create a new image of expertise; namely, your ability to provide the highly tailored services that investors need to survive in this tougher market.

Larry Silver, director of marketing at Raymond James Financial until his retirement, writes about investment firm practices from Oldsmar, Fla. He can be reached at silvermarketing@earthlink.net.