Many financial advisors will tell you that everyone could use some financial planning in their lives. Chris Panagakos, however, isn't just talking-she's building an entire company around this belief.

Panagakos' startup, BeniVest Inc. of San Francisco, is setting out to market financial planning to companies and their workers as an employee benefit. The reason: She feels financial and retirement planning have become such basic needs that companies are becoming compelled to help their employees get access to them.

The messes created by bankrupt companies such as Enron and Global Crossings have only underscored this need, she adds. "In light of all the financial turmoil, companies are really struggling on how to help their employees take control of their financial situation," she says. "They don't know what to do."

The strategy behind BeniVest has yet to be put to the test. Panagakos says she has been laying the groundwork for the company the past two years, and is just getting ready to launch the service. She expects to be serving her first corporate clients in early 2003.

The basic plan is that BeniVest will charge each company a flat annual fee in return for financial planning services that will be provided at the company's work site. Three tiers of service will be available initially, with the highest tier including extras such as estate planning services.

Although she wouldn't divulge the entire fee schedule, Panagakos says the middle tier of services will cost companies annually $1,600 per employee who take the benefit.

It will be up to the companies to decide how they split the fee with their employees. But she expects that companies will, on average, pick up 60% of the cost.

BeniVest currently has a staff of less than 10 people and expects to start hiring its in-house advisor staff before the year is out, Panagakos says. The company's vice president of client services, Tim Anderson, joined the company after 14 years with American Express Advisors.

After coming from a commission-based background, Anderson says he was attracted to BeniVest's fee-only structure. "The company's focused on financial planning solely, as opposed to financial planning as a means to generating assets," says Anderson, who is also a partner in the firm. He adds he expects much of the company's advisor staff eventually will be lured for the same reasons. "There's a whole pool of people out there who love financial planning," he says. "They love just doing financial planning."

Starting salaries for advisors will range from $60,000 to $150,000 depending on experience, and there will be performance bonuses based on client satisfaction and the recruitment of new clients, Panagakos says.

As far as for whom the services are designed, Panagakos says BeniVest should have something for everyone. The middle-tier service, for example, is designed for employees earning between $80,000 and $200,000 a year, with under $700,000 in investable assets. This tier, she adds, will include services such as stock option planning.

Observers note that financial planning as an employee benefit isn't new. Companies have provided such services for years as a perk for upper-management employees. One recent survey by Clark/Bardes Consulting found that about 57% of companies provide their executives with financial planning benefits, and 80% of eligible executives use the benefit.

In a survey of benefits specialists last year, 94% of respondents foresee an increase in financial planning benefits, according to the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans. Only 17%, however, say financial planning benefits are likely to become mainstream.

What sets BeniVest apart, according to those involved with the company, is its concentration on lower-level employees-whose moderate incomes aren't attractive to the typical financial advisory firm. "It's pretty tough to get financial advice if you don't have $250,000 in investable assets," says Eric Flett, portfolio manager at Bay Isle Financial in Oakland, Calif., and a member of BeniVest's board of advisors. "The business model for many planners requires either a sizeable fee or a large amount of investable assets."

Flett, who is also a minority shareholder in the company, says companies have tried to get at this niche market. For many, the answer to making their market cost-effective has been delivering service through Web-based financial planning tools.

BeniVest, however, will focus on face-to-face contact between advisors and clients, Flett says. "The Internet, on its own, cannot replace the relationship a client has with a valued advisor," he says.

How does Panagakos expect to profitably provide personal service to a market that many advisors consider too low-margin? For Panagakos, whose background has been mostly in the management consultant business, the answer lies in streamlined service and economies of scale.

Advisors, for example, will be in-house employees who will set aside certain days to meet with employees of a company in one block of time. Analysis and research, meanwhile, will be handled by in-house as well, she says.

"That allows us a fair amount of economy of scale," she says.

So much so that she believes the company can attain profitability with slightly less than 1,000 individual clients-a scale she expects will be achieved by signing on between one and five company clients.

"We have a scale curve, and it is so unbelievably low it blew our minds," she says.

Another advisor and investor in the company, Norm Boone of Boone Financial Advisors in San Francisco, says the key to BeniVest will be the way Panagakos has automated the analytical side of financial planning. "By breaking financial planning into its smallest parts and being able to automate what is automatable, they get incredible levels of efficiencies," he says. "But they haven't given up the personal part."

In that way, he says, the company has cleared a hurdle that has prevented other advisory firms from entering the moderate-income market. "It's really a capacity issue," Boone adds. "If I go in and work for Cisco, and they have 1,000 people who want financial planning, how am I going to do that?"

One of the ironies of the BeniVest startup is that Panagakos originally thought of the idea during the raging bull market of the 1990s. At the time, she thought individual investors desired help in navigating the glut of options available through the Internet and other sources. "Folks didn't know what to do with all that stuff," she says.

At the same time, she believed people highly valued a personal relationship with their financial advisor. What she found is that people continued to want these things just as much after the market downturn.

"The need is even greater," she says. "Interestingly enough, it's in times like these that we can provide a lot of value in helping people stay their course."