Trying to steer a small, year-old independent financial planning practice through the tumult of a global pandemic can be a sticky wicket, but Thanasi Panagiotakopoulos has been challenged before by tough circumstances. Like, for example, the time the home fans spit on him when he was a professional basketball player in Greece.

Granted, these are entirely different circumstances (with different health risks), but Panagiotakopoulos overcame the first challenge and seems well-positioned to make it through the coronavirus situation in good shape with his firm, LifeManaged, the advisory shop he founded in Phoenix in May 2019.

After he spent a couple of years in the hurly-burly world of pro ball in Greece, Panagiotakopoulos, 34, came home to begin a career in financial services that has included stops at Wells Fargo Advisors and Pathlight Investors. He served as executive vice president and senior wealth advisor at the latter before striking out on his own.

He’s currently a registered rep of Dynamic Wealth Advisors, a registered investment advisor with about $1.5 billion under management and roughly 60 advisors across the country. “They’re essentially my outsourced COO,” Panagiotakopoulos said.

“While I’m a registered rep of an RIA, I am an RIA and a fiduciary,” he added. “We have a CFP creating plans. We’re transparent; we don’t sell anything.”

The certified financial planner is Ben Fredlake, 35, who is LifeManaged’s planning director. He spent five years with a firm in the San Francisco Bay Area before returning home to Phoenix.

“I was looking for a paraplanner and spoke to a couple of people who I could mold into a full-fledged advisor, and someone from another firm referred me to Ben,” Panagiotakopoulos said. “We met and it was good timing in that we share the same vision regarding being planning-centric and having a passive management investment philosophy. It’s a good fit. Ben is in all of the meetings with me—right now that’s via Zoom chats—and we work together to deliver the financial plans.”

Panagiotakopoulos said their planning process incorporates a client’s attitude about money and the things that are important in their life. And with his designation as a Behavioral Financial Advisor (BFA), Panagiotakopoulos also focuses on the behavioral side of finances.

“When you talk about investments and helping people get to their goal, to me investments are a means to an end,” he explained. “We talk about how we’re not always rational, and investors have limits of self-control. We try to help them overcome any of their biases, and we do that by trying to understand their investment experience and how that can affect the types of investments we make for them.”

Panagiotakopoulos says a major component of the BFA program, which is issued by Kaplan Financial Education, involves a four-step process centered on the four “R’s”—recognize, reflect, reframe and respond.

“We help clients recognize everything going on in their situation, and how we’re interpreting it and how they’re interpreting it,” Panagiotakopoulos said. “This has been applicable during the pandemic with multiple clients.

“When you remind them of the discussions we had, that’s what the behavior side is,” he continued. “And then they stop getting super-emotional and they don’t want to make irrational decisions.”

Young Professionals
LifeManaged has about 100 clients and roughly $62 million in assets under management. Panagiotakopoulos said most of his clients from Pathlight followed him to his new firm, and that his practice has added a number of new clients during its short existence. The client base consists of a sizable number of business owners, along with high-income professionals such as physicians who might work in a big group but technically are working on their own as group partners. He also works with orthodontists, dentists and commercial real estate brokers who might be working at big companies but are actually 1099 employees.

“We proactively engage our clients’ CPA to determine how we can best put money away for retirement while saving them a hefty amount on taxes,” he said. “By understanding their earnings and self-employment taxes, we find the optimal strategies to reduce their taxable income and defer capital gains, or implement mega-backdoor Roth 401(k)s.”

Many of these highly paid professionals are in their 30s or early 40s and don’t have much in retirement savings because they’re balancing various needs that could include paying off massive student loans, buying a home or figuring out how to pay for their children’s education.

“That’s the ideal market we’re going after,” Panagiotakopoulos said. “We’ve been doing more monthly retainer fees for financial planning only, and we’ve found there’s a segment of people making great money but they don’t have a financial advisor because they don’t have any [retirement] money. They think that because they don’t have money they can’t hire someone.”

He sees these folks as the type of clients who can help grow his firm as they grow their wealth. 

Greek Hoops
Panagiotakopoulos was a walk-on basketball player while majoring in finance and management at the University of Northern Colorado, whose basketball team competes at the NCAA Division I level. While there, he played point guard and won accolades as a scholar athlete.

After he graduated, he was part of a team of seven Division I Greek-American basketball players chosen to scrimmage against the Greek national team. “That’s how I wound up playing in Greece,” Panagiotakopoulos explained. “It wasn’t on my mind to play in Europe, but when I was in Greece a couple of scouts asked if I wanted to sign a contract and stay there to play.”

He signed with a club in Thessaloniki. He was no stranger to Greece: His father was a Greek immigrant who moved from Athens to Washington, D.C., where he learned English and later attended George Washington University. The father later transferred to Arizona State University, stayed in Phoenix and eventually got into the restaurant business.

“The Greek culture was always very important to me,” Panagiotakopoulos said. “I’ve been involved with Greek dancing and helping run the Greek festival [the Original Phoenix Greek Festival], which finances the operations of our parish the whole year.”

He played just one and a half seasons in Greece before knee and ankle injuries ended his professional athletic career. But it was an eventful life experience.

“In my first home game we had about a 5,800-person capacity gym, and it was packed,” Panagiotakopoulos recalled. “There was a mushroom cloud of smoke in the arena, and we’re playing basketball and breathing this stuff.”

But playing in a haze of cigarette smoke is only part of the unique charms of the Greek professional basketball league. To describe the atmosphere as raucous might be understating the passion and intensity of the Greek fans.

After a loss on their home court against a rival team, the Thessaloniki players were approaching the tunnel when their rooters showered them with saliva.

“I never in my life thought I’d be spit on by my own fans,” Panagiotakopoulos said. “That was an experience! The Greeks are passionate people; they love you when you’re doing great and they hate you when you’re not, but they forgive you the next day. The fans are crazy, but that’s what makes it fun.”

In the end, he said he made a lot of friends and it was a good financial deal.

“I was making really good money, and they paid for my apartment and my car and got some meals,” he said. “I made enough so that I could buy a house after I came home in December 2009.”

And now he has his own advisory practice, and he feels it’s on solid footing, though challenges remain. “We’ve had amazing growth; we’ve grown about 40% from what I brought over from Pathlight,” Panagiotakopoulos said. “But I’m looking at how am I going to grow another 40% from here, and where is the new pipeline of clients going to come from?”

He describes himself as one who thrives on networking, which has been difficult to do during the coronavirus crisis. Still, he feels confident his approach to financial planning is key to his firm's continued success.

“I think we’re well-positioned to keep honing our service model and grow this thing,” he said.