If you’re wealthy but don’t know it, Smith Barney wants to talk to you.

The Citigroup Inc. brokerage unit is targeting a client demographic it calls “Working Wealth” — successful entrepreneurs and executives with $1 million or more to invest who don’t see themselves as rich.

Most of these people have been millionaires for less than a decade, consider themselves middle class and think splurging on luxury goods is a waste of money, according to the firm’s research.

“We think we have struck upon a social phenomenon that is not well articulated,” a Smith Barney spokesman, Alex Samuelson, said.

Smith Barney, like the rest of the brokerage industry, wants to collect steady fees from clients by offering them sophisticated advice on all aspects of their financial affairs. The Working Wealth effort, which debuted with national advertising, is a milestone in the shift of the firm’s more than 14,000 financial advisors toward that fee model, executive vice president of Smith Barney’s private client group, Craig Pfeiffer, said.

“We spent the last few years getting ready, putting financial advisor competency in position for them to have a dialogue with clients that’s about their lives,” Mr. Pfeiffer said.

That effort has included beefed-up financial-planning training, the opening of 15 regional wealth planning centers,, and funding to help more than 1,200 of its advisors earn the Certified Financial Planner credential. In 2005 the firm unveiled Smith Barney Advisor, a fee-based account that lets clients manage their own investments with oversight from their advisor. That program has attracted $9.6 billion of client assets, and Smith Barney plans to upgrade the technology that runs it in 2007, Mr. Pfeiffer said.

Fees overtook commissions as a source of revenue at Smith Barney in 2004. In the latest third quarter, feebased revenue was $1.31 billion, up 32% from a year earlier, while commissions fell 7% to $689 million. The firm has $322 billion in fee-based accounts, compared with $258 billion a year ago. The brokerage force has grown from about 12,100 last year.

The Working Wealth ad campaign began last month with billboards in major American cities and print ads in national newspapers and magazines. Television advertisements will air in December. Mr. Pfeiffer declined to disclose the cost of the campaign, the firm’s first major national ad campaign in nearly two years.

The print advertisements feature photographs of stylish baby boomers with text urging them to work hard, pursue their dreams and pass on their values, not just their money. “Leave no statues. Leave signs of significance. Working wealth wears no uniform and meets in no club. But you know who you are,” the text reads.

Evelyn Ehrlich, a financial services marketing consultant in New York, said she finds the Working Wealth message confusing.” Are they talking about your money working?”