[INTERVIEW]

 

Mike Panico: Welcome to Saturday State of Mind. I am Mike Panico. I’m joined, as always, by my business partner, my partner in crime, Jessica Panico.

 

Jess Panico: Hi, Mike.

 

Mike Panico: Welcome to the first show here that we’ve got.

 

Jess Panico: I’m so excited. This is going to be one of those things where we look back and be like, “Oh, my God, look how old everything looked in 2025.”

 

Mike Panico: I think it already looks old.

 

Jess Panico: We look old.

 

Mike Panico: Yeah. We’ve been doing this a long time.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah, for a long time.

 

Mike Panico: I was actually reminded before this even got started, we had a radio show for a spell. We actually tried like a couple of things with TV. This is a little bit different. There’s like a huge video element to this. And also, I’ve been a little bit nervous about there’s like a permanence to it. It’s going to be out there.

 

Jess Panico: Because once you put it on the Internet, it’s there forever?

 

Mike Panico: It’s there forever.

 

Jess Panico: It’s a good reminder to the kids at home. I don’t know how many of the kids are watching this, but you put something on the Internet…

 

Mike Panico: You got to say all the right things. Mind our Ps and Qs, right? And we also got to put on a good show for the people here. I think where we wanted to start with our first episode, so to speak, is talk a little bit about the Arcadia origin story.

 

Jess Panico: Oh, a love story.

 

Mike Panico: How we even got here? Is it a love story?

 

Jess Panico: Sometimes.

 

Mike Panico: I think a lot you know how sometimes people will say like when you get married, you build a life together.

 

Jess Panico: Sure.

 

Mike Panico: I don’t know if people have built a life the same way that you and I have because we’re literally always around each other.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah, no doubt. I think probably one of the most commonly asked questions I get is, “How do you work with your spouse?” And I say, “Well, I have a separate office and we don’t see each other all day long and that is helpful.” But I think it’s also kind of amazing where I’m like, “Hey, did I tell you about this thing that happened like two weeks ago?” whether it’s work or family or whatever and you’re like, “No.” I was like, “Oh, yeah. I know. I actually haven’t had a chance to talk to Mike about that.” People say, “How? You spend all the time together.” It’s like, “Well, not really,” because yes, we do run this business here together and we’ve been working together for over a decade now, but we don’t see each other all day long.

 

Mike Panico: Well, I think we’re going to have to get more into the dynamic and how it all works. But let’s start like at the beginning. And you’re the better historian because I think a lot of people know my memory isn’t always the greatest. So, if people were to say, “How did Arcadia get started?” how would you begin to answer that question, Jess?

 

Jess Panico: It was a cold and dark evening. No. I like to and I do actually say the story quite a lot because I do a lot of interviewing around here and it’s kind of our origin. So, I’d say Mike’s been a financial advisor since 2003 when he graduated from Babson College. He started off in the corporate space and quickly came to believe that wasn’t for him. So, he was looking for his passion and his calling in life and knowing that he wanted to help people financially plan for their future. He worked for some independent organization for about five years and said, “Geez, I think I want to make a go at this.” And he quit his job and moved into the basement.

 

Mike Panico: It’s a very clean and tidy version of it.

 

Jess Panico: Thank you. It’s very concise, and I’ve said it a lot because our team’s pretty big. And so, we’ve done some interviewing over the years and I like to reflect on how you went to the basement. And I don’t really know what you were doing down there for a while, but you convinced me because I was pregnant with our first child, our first son, and you convinced me to quit my job as well and move in the basement so I could, like, care for children part-time to help you part-time actually build this thing.

 

Mike Panico: Yeah.

 

Jess Panico: And what I like really about this story is here we are, we’re in our late 20s. We’re both a few years removed from school, but we quit both of our jobs so we have no income. We have a new house, a new mortgage, and a brand-new baby. And we were making $0 a year. And knowing what I know now or just being someone in her very early 40s, I don’t think I would make that same decision today. And I’m so glad that that opportunity happened in our 20s because I don’t know if we were just like too dumb or just more fearless back then.

 

Mike Panico: You said you couldn’t begin this journey in your 40s?

 

Jess Panico: No.

 

Mike Panico: Or knowing what you know now, you wouldn’t have done it in your 20s?

 

Jess Panico: No, I definitely would have done in my 20s but like being able to take that huge amount of risk, I mean, no income, mortgage, baby, not really exactly knowing what we’re doing. I mean the finance stuff, but like, how do you get clients like how do we create an impact in a business of significance? And it was really a huge leap of faith. And one that I think paid off.

 

Mike Panico: It was kind of an accident, too. I mean, it wasn’t like we sat down and had a big meeting about like, “Let’s start a business together.” That’s not at all how this started.

 

Jess Panico: No. I went very begrudgingly. People always say, “What’s one word to summarize your experience with Arcadia in the beginning?” and I say, “Begrudgingly.”

 

Mike Panico: Yeah. I mean, the short version of things is I have been in financial services for at least about ten-ish years, right, but with a number of different firms, a different amount of partnerships that just weren’t working out. So, I went off on my own and I was kind of a road warrior. I’d go to people’s homes. I go to people’s businesses. We were doing a lot of group health insurance. Like, this isn’t like ‘08, ‘09, that sort of deal. And that was a big deal. After like Romneycare, people were looking for cheaper group health. I go to people’s homes and all of them buy like life insurance but there wasn’t like a business there. I just went around and helped people with transactions.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah, it was kind of like just selling stuff. You call me half the time being like, “Hey, yeah, I know. It’s like 5:30. I just showed up at so-and-so’s house, but they’re not home so I’m going like drive back. You can get dinner started already.” Was it called like getting porched?

 

Mike Panico: Oh, yeah. I mean, there were times I’d go to people’s houses and like the lights would turn off and the blinds would get like shut really quickly.

 

Jess Panico: You’re like, “But you set the appointments.”

 

Mike Panico: They set the appointment. They just didn’t want to host it or I remember specifically there was one set of clients. I go to their home and their cats would be like crawling all over me the entire meeting. I had to choke down like a lot of ham sandwiches that didn’t have like enough mustard or mayonnaise on them to be.

 

Jess Panico: Well, it’s nice that those people fed you at least.

 

Mike Panico: They were being good hosts but it wasn’t always the best fare. But you had to do what you had to do to strike a chord with people and make a relationship. And I know you were saying it. I mean, we’re in our 20s. You had to make a buck. So, whatever worked.

 

Jess Panico: For sure. And so, I think, and two, when I went down to the basement, which was a finished basement, in all fairness, I did say, “Listen.”

 

Mike Panico: I don’t know if it was heated, though. Did it have heat?

 

Jess Panico: No.

 

Mike Panico: No.

 

Jess Panico: But we had a space heater. That’s good. So, I did say, “Listen, I’m going to do this with you for maybe a year, get to like solidified, help with the business a little bit. Maybe you’ll get some office space and hire some staff.”

 

Mike Panico: Well, the issue I was having is I was doing pretty well like going out and advising people.

 

Jess Panico: Sure.

 

Mike Panico: But it was all the in-between stuff. Like, there were phone calls, there were transactions, appointments needed setting up. Like, there was like just all the glue parts.

 

Jess Panico: It’s no different, honestly, than like a tradesman like plumbers, electricians are excellent at what they do, not really scheduling appointments and calling people and following up. So, you were looking for some administrative support really on just helping you be a one-man band. So, even then, I don’t really think we had the vision of what Arcadia has really become. And I knew that because my background was in health care that I wanted to get back into health care. I was probably going to go into like nursing or something like that.

 

Mike Panico: Yes. It was going to be a temporary stand, you just helping me out.

 

Jess Panico: Yes.

 

Mike Panico: I mean, what I’ve always told people is that you realize how helpless and clueless I was at running a business.

 

Jess Panico: I really, I always say you’re the smartest dumb person I ever met. Because, Mike, you are very smart and then some of the very simplistic tasks just really escape.

 

Mike Panico: I like to do what I like to do and everything else like just fades to gray.

 

Jess Panico: Right. And somewhere in the basement, we really came across the idea of doing seminar marketing to help individuals with retirement planning. And that kind of became a niche that we started focusing on. And I think you felt very passionate about it. And I did too. At the time, I knew this was going to be temporary to help these baby boomers. There was something like 10,000 baby boomers retiring each day. And the number one concern was not knowing if they were going to outlive their money or where their next check was coming from. And I think it really spoke to something that you’ve experienced, that you’ve seen firsthand, that you’re passionate about. So, we said, “Forget all the ticky-tack term insurance, group life and stuff like that, and let’s focus on helping.”

 

Mike Panico: Well, we want to know how to build this business. I mean, we knew people throughout town that actually had bona fide financial advisory practices with like lots of clients and lots of personnel. And it’s like, well, how do you get there? And I think people might take a little bit for granted, like now. But back in like the late 2008 through 2012 stretch, the Internet was still like relatively new, like getting access to good information was still kind of difficult. So, I believe we started talking to wholesalers like we would point out people throughout town like, “What is that guy doing? He’s got a big office, right? Like, all the cars out front like, look, like they’re nice cars. So, they must know what they’re doing. How are they building their…?” Because like prior to having this kind of a conversation, the way that I would get new clients is either literally knocking on doors or making cold calls like on Saturday mornings, like just brutal, brutal, like banging your head against the wall type stuff. And the common thread was that a lot of them were doing event marketing.

 

Jess Panico: Right. Dinner seminars, educational, yeah.

 

Mike Panico: So, a lot of them offer to educate people. Sometimes you’d have to entice them with the meal. I think part of like earlier when you said like the risks that we had to take, those events are not cheap. And just for a pair of kids with a new kid on the way, like having to scrounge up several thousand dollars to go rent out a space or serve everybody a steak. In fact, the very first event that we ran, I think one person came to it. Do you remember?

 

Jess Panico: Yeah. So, the very first event we ran was educational. It was in Lowell, Mass.

 

Mike Panico: Sangha, Serena?

 

Jess Panico: UMass. UMass, Lowell. Sangha Serena, like you could sell that.

 

Mike Panico: Got you. Sorry.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah, right. No, it was some classroom at UMass Lowell, and I think we had maybe five people show up.

 

Mike Panico: You sure?

 

Jess Panico: Yeah.

 

Mike Panico: But neither one person expressed interest?

 

Jess Panico: No. No, no, she wasn’t interested. She had something to say. But I remember, I don’t think it was you. I think there was another presenter there too at the time because they wanted us to work with somebody. And he wrote on the whiteboard with a Sharpie, so we did not get our security deposit back. And there was one lady that came up, in particular, wanting to talk but was telling us all about how she had sued her previous financial advisor. And we do not set any appointments and we sunk like I think $4,000 or $5,000 into that, which for somebody with no income was a lot of money.

 

Mike Panico: It’s a lot. Yeah.

 

Jess Panico: I mean, it’s a lot of money now but really to have nothing there. So, it wasn’t a great start but we didn’t give up. We persevered, right? And later that same year, so that was like May and August, we did another seminar. You were the presenter this time. You’re like, “I know what I’m doing here.” And that was a dinner seminar. So, just talking about retirement in general, meal was provided, and we did set some appointments. And we had one after that and that worked well and all of a sudden, we needed office space. We had to get out of the basement because we were doing a lot of those like Regus Rentals.

 

Mike Panico: Yeah. I don’t think I appreciated it then, but it makes sense now in hindsight that that worked. It still works now because people like they go through a lot of changes in life, right? You go from elementary school to high school, you get married, you go to college, you have a kid, you get your first house. There’s always these changes. And then there’s kind of like maybe one, two, or three decades, your 30s, your 40s, your 50s were really not a lot of like new stuff happens, but then retirement happens and it’s like one of the scariest changes you can go through, right? You’ve been like working forever and I’m not going to work anymore. And like, now what do I do with the rest of my life? And how do I make sure that I never run out of money? And so, again, like pre-Internet, like, where did you go to get those questions answered? I mean, you would just have to play roulette and go to any given financial planning office or try to do it on your own like going to the library.

 

Jess Panico: Or listen to Mad Money.

 

Mike Panico: Yeah.

 

Jess Panico: Suze Orman.

 

Mike Panico: I mean, like certainly cable shows or still radio shows but people did try to find for themselves, “What resources am I going to use or what professionals can I go to to trust?” and working through or going to a seminar just to hear out what people are talking about like maybe vet out that potential speaker as a solution. It makes sense that that’s how people would go about trying to solve this particular problem. And like I said, it still works today, the Internet certainly changing a lot of things, but fundamentally, there isn’t a lot of conversation in this country about how to handle that transition and how to handle it well.

 

Jess Panico: Right.

 

Mike Panico: Right? So, we started having success with seminars despite falling out the gates a little bit, just with some stick-to-itiveness and tenacity. We were over like what? Just a series of months starting to get more leads and potential clients and then turning into new clients then like just any two people could handle.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah. So, I mean, that dinner seminar was in August of 2014, and by that December, we had to get an actual office. And I remember you had some clients coming in to move over like a large sum of money, and we didn’t even have the sign hanged up on the wall yet. And you’re like, “Can you prop it up somewhere? They’re going to think we’re a fly-by-night-like operation.” And luckily, they came in and they believed and they’re still clients with us today, which is pretty amazing. But it was definitely humble beginnings, you know? And then 2015, we hired our first employee. She’s our longest team member here on our team. She’s still with us today, which is pretty awesome. And then we eventually moved out of our first office location. We outgrew that space in Salem, New Hampshire, and we moved…

 

Mike Panico: Can we do, though, like a special shout out for all those clients that did join us in the early years, like when we were using surplus furniture and just keeping everything together with like duct tape, you know?

 

Jess Panico: Sure. Yeah.

 

Mike Panico: Maybe to explain some of that, because outside of insanity, you’d be like, why would you work with young people who like they only have a shingle hanging on the wall? In fact, just before we started recording, I saw one of our oldest clients by the amount of time that they’ve been working with us and she said something to the effect of like, “I hope you haven’t changed, Michael.” And I said, “What are you talking about? What change?” She’s like, “Well, you’ve gotten older. I’ve gotten older. But I realize that part of the reason me and my husband started working with you in the first place,” and her husband is deceased now, “is that we just felt this connection. We felt like we could trust you.” And I think that’s because our process, even going back to day one, was always based in education and really with the spirit of truly trying to help people, right? Because this transition that we just described, it’s really, really scary, right? And there’s all these options. Half the options don’t even make sense to the average layperson, right? So, I do think we were able to grow as rapidly as we did because, I mean, listen, we’re tooting our own horn here a little bit, but I’d like to think that we always had our heart in the right place with it.

 

Jess Panico: Well, I mean, I think what’s different about this because like you said, where do you go for help? You know, if you’re in a city, you look at the biggest skyscraper and the name on the side of that building, “Okay. I’m going to walk in there,” and they’re going to sell you like a real nifty life insurance policy or you’re going down to the bank and they’re going to show you some really cool mutual funds, put you in or maybe a CD over here. Whatever it is, people are just either selling you stuff. It’s all stuff. It’s all transactional. And we, since day one, have always been about the relationship. You know, she says, “I hope you haven’t changed.” And, I mean, it’s not an accusation. It’s, “I’ve known you so long and I know who you are and I know you know me intimately and my family.” And to think like now that her husband has passed away, like she was never the decision-maker. She wasn’t the one driving the bus there. She wasn’t the one that was as maybe savvy and tuned in as he was. But they both trusted you, Arcadia, implicitly and we had that relationship. So, they knew, sadly, if he was no longer here, she would be well taken care of. And I think that that’s always what’s set us apart is having that relationship with our client.

 

Mike Panico: I hope so. Like, I feel that pressure all the time, right, because people will look you square in the eyes and be like, “I just gave you my life savings and I’m trusting you to do the right thing by me.” Right? And it’s like…

 

Jess Panico: I love it, too, they hand over the check and it’s like, “Here’s my money.” It’s like, “You’re not giving it to me. It’s still your money. I’m putting it in this account for you.” But, yeah, it’s money, man. Like, things get weird. People get scared and like you understand that too. But, yeah, shout out to Roxanne like our most tenured employee here that’s been…

 

Mike Panico: Ten years this year.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah, with us for just about a decade and then to all those clients that really took a chance on us and that are still around too. So, 2015, we hired Roxanne and then the business really started booming with a lot of this event marketing that we were doing. And what’s kind of funny is I think we looked around the table a few years into the business, maybe it was like 2016, like saying, “Do we have a company here? Like, do we need a mission statement? Do we need core values? Like, do I need something to hang on the wall?” Like, no one really told us in the beginning, like, this is how you build a business. Like, first you pick out paint swatches. And then like, yeah, you know how to financially plan like you understand how to like…

 

Mike Panico: The business was directionless. So, we would do events about retirement and there’s all these options. You get mutual funds, you get stocks, you get bonds, you get annuities, you get all this stuff. And people would come in and be like, well, they treat it like a buffet, like already got some mutual funds over here. I want to leave them alone. And I’d rather do some like get a long-term care policy with you and be like, “Okay. So, yeah, we’ll do that.”

 

Jess Panico: Well, I don’t like this one account. This account stinks. You manage this one account and let me see how it looks.

 

Mike Panico: It was very transactional and so it made it that over time we didn’t really stand for anything or have like one uniform process and that was becoming our chief dilemma at that stage of our development. So, we decided we have to kind of focus, like who are we and what are we going to do going forward here.

 

Jess Panico: Sure. So, I think we came up with like a mission statement, core values, like things that we are. This is actually it right here.

 

Mike Panico: This comes later but…

 

Jess Panico: I’m so glad that visual like our mission statement. Yeah, that actually has changed. Our core values have always remained the same but we did a little bit more of, I think, getting better aligned with what our messaging was and who we are putting that out to the public. But we created some of that stuff and 2017 we really became very process-oriented, making sure people were in like a good holistic, comprehensive, like full retirement plan.

 

Mike Panico: We’re going to help you with the whole picture.

 

Jess Panico: Right.

 

Mike Panico: We made that decision around like 2017.

 

Jess Panico: ‘17. Yeah.

 

Mike Panico: Yeah. So, like no more transactional type stuff because that does work and it works for a lot of other firms and certainly certain types of clients, but it really makes it difficult to build up processes around just one-offs or transactional type stuff. Nor was it really, I think, the business that we were interested in running being transactional. I mean, you already mentioned that for us, what we always enjoyed most was the relationship that we could have or that we could build with clients.

 

Jess Panico: Right. And I should mention that if not at this point a little bit before, I did decide not to flee the company, but this was somewhere that…

 

Mike Panico: That thing was worth mentioning. Sure.

 

Jess Panico: I could actually see. Because the thing with health care, besides being kind of a science nerd, is I could see the direct impact we had on people. It’s their health that’s like the most important thing to them. And it was just about, I think for me, finding that area of impact, creating significance, leaving this world a little bit better than what I found it. So, I had a big calling for that. But when we really started becoming less like, “Oh, you need like dental insurance like here you go. Like, Ned Ryerson selling you policy.” When I really like I think we transition…

 

Mike Panico: Shout out Ned Ryerson.

 

Jess Panico: Shout out Groundhog Day. Great movie. But when we really like, you know, we’re focusing on helping like the mom and pop next door like they work so hard for their entire life and save this money.

 

Mike Panico: I mean, health care is brutal. I’d like to think at least a little bit…

 

Jess Panico: You saved me?

 

Mike Panico: I did you a favor.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah. Please. Okay. Well, I was glad I wasn’t enduring health.

 

Mike Panico: Health care these days is super bureaucratic. It’s highly transactional. People are frustrated. They’re ready to fight with whatever doctor or nurse they’re seeing on a given day just because of the wait times or…

 

Jess Panico: A lot of bureaucracy and, yeah, everything you have to deal with.

 

Mike Panico: I do think it warrants mentioning. I mean, when you evolve from being transactional to planning-based, the reason that it helps you dig into the relationship is you can’t even put pen to paper and start a plan unless you understand who a person is, what motivates them, what keeps them up at night. What are they trying to do or accomplish? So, if someone walks into your office and says, “Hey, I need life insurance.” I mean, that’s a transactional. I don’t even really need to know a lot other than your age and if you’re a smoker or not.

 

Jess Panico: Smoker, yeah. That’s correct.

 

Mike Panico: That’s about it. I can write that policy. But when you say, “I need a plan. How many more years do I have to work? How much money do I have to put aside every single paycheck?” That requires a whole different level of intimacy. You actually have to work with people on a personal level. And that’s what’s always gotten me out of bed is not just like the industry or like paying attention to what the market’s doing. It’s just knowing that I’m going to be able to help people approach this transition with some confidence. And then once they get beyond it, I mean, retirement, it’s like being on a permanent vacation, right? So, if you’ve planned for it the right way and you’re in the right mindset, it’s an incredible period of your life. And knowing that we support people through that journey, we escort them to it in the first place, I mean, it’s literally awesome.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah. I always say, “We see you to and through retirement.” It’s not like, “Oh, you’re retired now. Great. Here’s a plan. See you later.” It’s like, no, we’re going to be here like every step of their journey too. And I did my undergrad in psychology and what’s so cool is that we talk to people more about life than we do money. And believe me, we talk to people about money, too. We are still doing financial plans here but it’s more like, are you afraid to spend the money? Like, are you acting radically? You’re spending too. Like, what motivates you? So, I feel that people are like, “Oh, are you sad you didn’t get to use your degree?” You know, it’s like, I do use it but in a different way.

 

Mike Panico: Yeah. I remember like we were trained coming up in the planning industry to take people through Morningstar reports. You explain to them like the Greeks on their portfolios. Those are statistical measurements, alpha, beta, or standard deviation.

 

Jess Panico: The delta. What’s a delta?

 

Mike Panico: So, understand how much like return to expect or what kind of risk that you were taking and you would see people’s eyes glaze over. And so, they would effectively just be making a decision. “I don’t know what those guys are talking about. They seem to know what he’s talking about so I guess I have to trust them.” And like just made for a very tentative-like type of bond. And so, instead, we’re saying like, “Listen, man, you do understand that with money, there’s no free lunch. You can keep it all in a tin can and it’s not going to earn any interest. If you want to earn some interest, we might have to take some risks so you’re going to see some fluctuations.” At a very basic level, people understand kind of the gist. So, instead, over the years, we started leaning into, well, what are the things that people do understand? And there’s like in life pay-offs and their sacrifices, right? So, if you want a certain payoff, you might have to make a certain sacrifice to get there, like save a little bit more, work a little bit harder, whatever that is, and those kind of conversations that happen at a very human level I think allow for relationships to get created more easily and then, of course, maintain more easily too.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of like fast-forward to how we do planning now but we knew we start with the end in mind. It’s like, what do you want your retirement to look like? And then we just backwards out the path. That’s really what it is. But you got to know what you’re retiring to. Like, are you traveling the world? Are you happy like tending to your garden? Like, what are your financial demands? But you got to know what’s important in life and where you want to spend your time, your energy, your focus. And then we make the plan happen from there. So, I think we have to 2017, we went to like…

 

Mike Panico: I think we could fast forward and we can get into like the COVID years.

 

Jess Panico: Sure.

 

Mike Panico: Right. Because that created quite like a left turn. And I think for a lot of businesses in this country, it was the end of the line, right? Because we, for us, like we weren’t going to be able to do events. Like, we used to go to restaurants like no one could go to restaurants. If you did go to a restaurant, everyone had to be six feet apart. We’re used to putting crowds together. I like to do public speaking. You can’t do that with a scuba mask on. So, like, we were basically shut down for the better part of a year and we were like, how are we going to bring in new clients and keep growing? Like, how is this going to work? I mean, everyone was scrambling at the same time to figure this out. And I think we were fortunate in that having put in the work for a number of years leading up to the pandemic, we had this list of people who had seen us over the years at a seminar but had never come in to see us or consult or they didn’t take action. So, me and a couple of the other advisors started just reaching out and people were at home. They were scared. They were bored.

 

Jess Panico: They were mostly bored. “Yeah. I’ll talk to you. What else is going on?”

 

Mike Panico: Yeah. They were like some people, for once, were picking up the phone and willing to take effectively a cold call. And we had one of our best years in the middle of the pandemic just reaching out to people who still needed and wanted assistance. I mean, we talk about anxiety a lot. People were at peak anxiety during that pandemic. You know, what if the market crashes? What if it never recovers? Are we in this new, terrible paradigm where the world is going to be shut down?

 

Jess Panico: And a lot of people left their jobs in COVID. Either they were forced out for whatever industry they were in or they were like, “I’m hanging up my scrubs. I’m not going back to the way this is. It’s no longer like health care. It’s sick care.” And they made a change and needed help and guidance during that. So, I think that was pivotal. And I think really like the next most pivotal thing in our business came around 2022 where we formed Arcadia Tax, the tax practice, because we always say that there’s like five key areas in retirement planning. One of those areas is tax and it’s tax planning, which is for going ahead. But you’ve got to coordinate that with tax preparation, which looks back or backwards, right? And so, we worked with a number of very skilled account professionals, but we said, “You know, what if this is a service so we could offer to our clients here so it’s coordinated all under one roof?”

 

Mike Panico: Yeah. A lot of firms will talk about how they do comprehensive planning and it’s kind of a word that doesn’t have any meaning because what does comprehensive mean for a lot of firms? It’s like, well, we do investments and insurance or we have somebody down the hall.

 

Jess Panico: We have stocks and bonds.

 

Mike Panico: We have a relationship who maybe we’ll do your tax return. But in order to have a complete financial plan, if you want to say with a straight face, “I am prepared for the next 30 years of my life. I know I have a good, solid plan for myself,” certainly, you have to know what your investments are doing, but you need an income strategy, you need a tax strategy, you need a healthcare strategy, you need a legal strategy. And for many Americans, each of those different pitstops involves a different professional. So, you have one person managing your money, another person helping you with insurance, somebody preparing your taxes, somebody doing the wills and the trusts, right? And it’s like, well, how many of these people actually talk to each other on your behalf? For most people, the answer is, “They never talk about me.” There’s no cohesion, there’s no coordination. And if that sounds frustrating to just ordinary people, it’s no better for professionals because like, say, we wanted to help a client sell an investment so they could come up with some money to buy their dream home. Okay, great. Easy enough. We know, though, that there’s going to be a tax consequence. So, “Hey, why don’t we call your accountant and see if they have a better idea of going about this or we have to stay away from a particular threshold? You don’t get whacked next April.” You know, out of every ten phone calls to your accountant, we would maybe hear back three, four, five times if we did hear back. It wasn’t always like a professional conversation. Sometimes the accountant would be like under threat. “Are you trying to replace me? Are you double-guessing my work?” It would be worse with the attorneys. I mean, attorneys very rarely contact people back. They don’t seem to like work well with others. I mean, like, listen, there’s some great attorneys out there. We know this. But we made a decision somewhere in that pandemic that if we were going to really help people like full spectrum, we couldn’t depend on other ancillary professionals to fill those gaps for our clients because we couldn’t control those relationships. There’s too many. There’s too many accountants. There’s too many attorneys, right? There’s too many options. There are too many mediums. Some people only took phone calls, others only worked by email, right? So, we needed to simplify things. And so, it was 2022 when we decided. And this was a crazy decision because running a tax practice, you can think at one level must be like running a financial planning practice.

 

Jess Panico: Sure.

 

Mike Panico: But they’re not alike at all, certainly not like from the stretch between February and April.

 

Jess Panico: Plus, I think we hired a whole bunch of accountants and like no admin staff or we have like one part-time person. So, it was a little rocky that year because we had a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but no one running the food out. But we staffed up. Luckily, we have some really great leadership here. And then really to round everything out came in 2023 where we partnered with an estate planning attorney. So, she is, for legal reasons, her own separate law firm, but she exclusively works with Arcadia clients. So, we always had relationship with estate planning attorneys, right? But she’s truly for like our clientele here.

 

Mike Panico: It’s gotten to the point where we can say with a straight face we’re more or less a one-stop shop. If you want to come here, get your financial plan done, but also get your taxes done. I mean, it makes it so that in pivotal moments and thankfully, they don’t happen often, right, it’s usually like when you’ve lost your job or there’s a death in the family or you’re being forced to move across the country. So, the way I like to put it is sometimes your money doesn’t matter until it’s the only thing that matters. And for some people in those pivotal moments, they’ve got to go all across town to get their questions answered because they have the tax guy over here, the investment guy over here, your attorney gal over here. And it makes it so that you have to coordinate and ask questions of all these different people.

 

Jess Panico: While you’re going through some tremendous life-changing event.

 

Mike Panico: And for sure, like sometimes I think that the big marquee, one of those is death like navigating the loss of a spouse or a parent. It’s cumbersome. It can be nightmarish. There’s all this paperwork and forms that you got to fill out. You get to grab these certificates. It’s a tremendous lift, right? And so, like, what does it mean to help people? Am I helping somebody if I sell them a long-term care policy? Sure. Especially if they end up using it down the road, right? But people need help at like stops along a journey. Right? Because things change year to year. The markets, they go up or down, right? Your job, there’s good years. Sometimes you get a bonus, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes there’s a death in the family. There’s an inheritance to deal with, right? There’s all these different things that happen. And what I must think is really lousy is that if you go to talk to your person, your finance guy, like, “Hey, I’m going through this. You helped me with the last thing, Can you help me with this new thing?” It’s like roulette. Sometimes they can help you and sometimes they can’t. And like I said before, this isn’t just like attacking the industry. You know, there’s reasons that there’s specialists and there’s a room for everybody, I guess. But we’ve always looked at this from the client perspective. Like, when you come and say, “I’ve got this financial problem,” in the past, we used to say, “Ooh, well, we do some of that, but for the rest of the things that we don’t handle, here’s a business card. Here’s some other people throughout town.” And nobody likes, I mean, I don’t like that. I wouldn’t want to have to plan my finances that way.

 

Jess Panico: Exactly.

 

Mike Panico: So, I didn’t want to build a business that was like part of that same problem.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah. So, I’m really happy to say that our clients now can come in here and literally sit down with their financial planner, their accountant, the estate planning attorney. They can sit down around the table and they’re talking about everything and they’re in agreement with like putting that person first. It’s like the family office for the person next door.

 

Mike Panico: Right.

 

Jess Panico: So, I think that brings us to current day where we’re just killing it. Right?

 

Mike Panico: We’re killing it.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah.

 

Mike Panico: You think so?

 

Jess Panico: Well, I’m happy I’m still here.

 

Mike Panico: Let’s have a word on that for a second. So, how is it working together with your spouse?

 

Jess Panico: Sometimes it’s fine.

 

Mike Panico: Yeah. Is this the honest take, or is this…?

 

Jess Panico: Yeah. No, sometimes it’s fine. Like right now it’s fine like…

 

Mike Panico: Just right now?

 

Jess Panico: Yeah, right now. I’m enjoying this. It’s right now. Yeah, it’s fine. It’s good. Yeah, it’s good. I don’t give anything a ten out of ten. Okay. So, I just want to put that out there.

 

Mike Panico: When is that at its most challenging?

 

Jess Panico: Sometimes I’m like, “Would I rather sell the business or get a divorce?” Like, I don’t know, which has less paperwork to it. No. What I think happens is that you just got to be really clear on like, I do this, you do that because we’re both pretty strongly opinionated individuals, right? But we’re both very impassioned about what we’re doing here.

 

Mike Panico: Yeah. When we butt heads, skulls fracture.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Because nobody will…

 

Mike Panico: Nobody likes to give ground in this relationship.

 

Jess Panico: No. God, I do remember when we first married too, like you’re such a bully sometimes. You took like an Italian ice for me one time, and you were like, “You have to say I’m the most handsome ever and I’ll give it back to you.” I was like, “I’d rather starve than fold.” And it’s just like dumb butting head, things like that earlier in the day. Those things don’t matter so much anymore.

 

Mike Panico: Did you ever get that Italian ice back?

 

Jess Panico: I probably ignored you. And then you got distracted by something else. Yeah.

 

Mike Panico: Sounds delicious.

 

Jess Panico: God, yeah. Just like getting it in there and being like, “I’m going to start eating it now.” Yeah, probably something like that.

 

Mike Panico: I would say the hardest part is there’s not a lot of separation between work and our personal lives. Right?

 

Jess Panico: Yeah, that’s a challenge sometimes. I do think that we’re both very lucky, right? Our business blesses our lives. Like, for sure, we’ve grown this together. We’re on the same page. Like, people tell us, like, often that we’re like the same person. And sometimes I think that is why we can butt heads from time to time. But really running this business has been great. Our marriage, also great. But no doubt, sometimes there’s bumps like it happens. It’s life, man. Right?

 

Mike Panico: Like, I think for a lot of husbands and wives, you come home and whoever is making dinner you say to the other person, right, you sit down to eat, “How is your day?” Right? So, for us, how was your day was like what the other person experienced just like in a different wing of the building. And so, you’re hearing about the same people and the same problems just from maybe a different angle.

 

Jess Panico: Or it’s like I want to solve it. You know, they say with like someone comes to you with a problem, they either want to be heard, helped, or hugged. So, that happens a lot. So, sometimes I’m like, “Oh, I just want to be heard. Like, it was so crazy. I had like back-to-back meetings today and I forgot to book the conference room so I had to have the meeting in this other room that I don’t like as much,” something like that. It’s like, “Why didn’t you book a conference room? I’m sharing this other person.” It’s like, “Hey, what are you doing?”

 

Mike Panico: Right. Because I can still work.

 

Jess Panico: Right. Or you’re like, “You know what we should do in the future? Like, write this down, Like, we should do this going forward.” I’m like, “I’m not working still. I’m like decompressing. It’s after work.”

 

Mike Panico: There’s not a lot of decompression.

 

Jess Panico: No. I will say I don’t think we ever bring home stuff into work. Like, it never flows that way. It’s always bringing work stuff into home.

 

Mike Panico: Yeah.

 

Jess Panico: Maybe we don’t do enough at home.

 

Mike Panico: Maybe it’s more work in home life.

 

Jess Panico: Maybe there is. I don’t know. Maybe that’s something to consider. But I think working with each other while it’s not perfect, I’d rather not be doing it. Anything else? Health care. Otherwise?

 

Mike Panico: Fortunately, now we’re getting a lot of support. I mean, we’ll talk in the future, I think, about what Arcadia is working on now, 2025 and beyond. But we have an enormous team of support, like along the… We mentioned Roxanne, right? She was our first employee back in 2015.

 

Jess Panico: Yep.

 

Mike Panico: And so, now today we’re somewhere in the mid-30s. Incredible team.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah.

 

Mike Panico: A lot of them are doing the heavy lifting now and working towards the vision and whatnot. And so, hopefully, that helps with this like the work-life balance.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah. I think one thing we probably could have hit on like in the beginning of this too is really why we decided to do this YouTube show and podcast. I think it really was to, first of all, like we’ll spend some time talking to one another about just things are important to educate people on, like in our industry, but we want to spend a lot of time talking to our clients, too, like real-life people. Are you excited about those shows?

 

Mike Panico: Yeah, because I think the conversation gets to evolve. Like, where this whole thing started is that I said people don’t really have like a medium or they didn’t, going back say like 10 or 15 years. Like, where do you go to talk about your retirement questions or concerns? You would be like, “Gosh, I have so few options. I guess I’ll go driving to a library at 7:30 at night to listen to a stranger from an ad I saw in the newspaper.” Right? But now you’ve got all these options. You can go to Reddit. You can watch videos on YouTube. That’s where the conversations are now happening. And the conversations can be as technical or as wide-ranging as you’d like. I’ve noticed a lot of the content from the financial industry is in the tactics. Like, when do you use a Roth? What’s better? A revocable or an irrevocable trust? And those are great questions, but it gets right into the tactical. It’s kind of transactional and it’s something that we’ve shied away from a little bit because we take more of a life-centered approach. The mission statement, we’re here to help people live every day like it’s Saturday. Now, of course, tactics are the foundation of supporting it, but we think that the industry sometimes totally ignores, right, the conversation that has to start where you start, which is what are we trying to do here, right? What motivates you? What keeps you up at night? What is this all for? If we were to look backwards on your dying day, what sort of things would we have to have done or accomplished? Whether it’s with your money or your family or certain bucket list things. Like, what is success when it comes to life? That’s where I want this conversation to be. And we’re going to have this conversation, Jess, with each other, other members of the team. I can’t wait to have this conversation with clients because I think that’s a conversation that people have only been having like in small, intimate settings, a glass of wine with their spouse or maybe over the holidays, probably an argument with family members. But like in this setting, online, we can have a conversation that’s really wide-ranging about all these topics that for decades have been ignored. So, I’m super excited to have this conversation.

 

Jess Panico: Yeah. Well, Mike, it’s been a pleasure. I can’t believe it’s our first show and it’s done now, but next time?

 

Mike Panico: First Saturday State of Mind in the books. Hopefully, many more.

 

Jess Panico: Okay. See you soon.

 

Mike Panico: See you next time.

[END]