If you knew Suze…

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Nov, 1998 by Robert Frick

She was nearly wiped out. After three years and two acrimonious court cases, which she won, Orman says she faced her former employee and apologized: "I said, `Listen to me. I don't know what I did to you to cause what you did to me. But I just want to tell you that I'm sorry.'"

Her financial-planning business prospered, even though she had a unique way of billing for her services. Basically, clients paid what they thought her advice was worth--a system she describes as "totally out to lunch." For her initial consultation, which generally lasted two to three hours, she got anywhere from $50 to $5,000. She also collected commissions on products sold to clients.

Among her clients from those days are Sharon and Ronald Baumgartner, who live in the Sacramento area. Sharon says Orman's success as a planner flowed from her intense focus on her clients' well-being--financial and otherwise. "I know she cares," says Sharon. "When she's with you, you have her total, undivided attention."

Orman might have remained a very successful financial planner in an office with a fabulous view of San Francisco Bay were it not for an urge to share her holistic brand of personal finance. Her 1994 book, You've Earned It, Don't Lose It, is a concise guide that underscores making safe choices when picking a financial adviser, writing wills and trusts, choosing long-term-care insurance, and so forth. That it didn't end up gathering dust on the shelf with other books that touch on similar topics is due to the persistence of Orman and her publisher, Newmarket Press, which eventually got her on the QVC shopping channel.

In a single early-morning spot in October 1995, she sold all 2,500 books then available. Newmarket ran the presses again, and on Super Bowl Sunday 1996, Orman sold a stockpile of 10,000 books in 12 minutes. "We had to yank her off the air because they sold out so quickly," says Karen Fonner, a QVC director of merchandising.

Jackpot. Orman in print is okay, but Orman selling Orman is a juggernaut. Fonner says Orman has a special appeal to QVC's predominantly female audience because she's a woman who didn't start out wealthy, and because she takes personal finance to a different level, tying money to emotions and energy.

Even for a master saleswoman, Orman on camera is something to see. Her confident gaze never wavers from the lens, and she infuses even minor points with gravity. She's just one buff shy of the Valvoline-slick deliveries of self-help gurus Deepak Chopra and Anthony Robbins (both of whom have given her dust-jacket endorsements). Explains Orman: "There's something about the energy of the camera that makes me think it's alive. I always say `hi' to it when I come in [to a studio]."

Orman became a regular on QVC, anchoring her own show, the Financial Freedom Hour, on which she sometimes works in front of a studio audience. When The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom was published in 1997, she sold 25,000 copies on her first show, and about 300,000 in all.

But a quantum cultural leap took her beyond shopping-network status. At a book signing, a friend introduced Orman to Erika Herrmann, a producer at KTCA, the PBS affiliate in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Herrmann was bowled over by Orman's ability to move the subject of money from "dry, staid and very male" into the "realm of emotion, psychology and family history. For the first time in my life, I was interested in financial issues."