Thomas Papathanasiou doesn't spend a lot of time training his advisors. He would rather give them leads.

The 10-person agency he runs is built on a clear division of labor: His advisors close clients. He builds the systems that give them clients to close.

The biggest of those systems is an intake operation that runs through a website. A prospective client takes a 10- to-20-minute questionnaire on the agency's site, and the questionnaire produces a clear picture of what the client needs. By the time the prospect lands in front of one of Papathanasiou's advisors, discovery is done.

They already know exactly what the client is looking for, Papathanasiou said.

Prospects reach the questionnaire through multiple paths. Papathanasiou runs paid social media advertising and video content that bring inbound traffic to the agency's website. Advisors can also send the questionnaire link directly to prospects before a first meeting.

The system was built around one specific segment of the agency's clientele. Not traditional referrals, which comprise about 80% of agency production. Those clients are clearly critical, but his advisors know well how to build those networks with minimum involvement from Papathanasiou. The agency brand and the insurer behind it matter less than the person sitting across the table.

It's the remaining 20% of clients that distinguish Papathanasiou's intake system. This group is mostly English-speaking expats: clients newly arrived in the Mediterranean market without local networks, language fluency or existing advisor relationships.

They find Papathanasiou's agency because of online policy appraisal tools he built and the targeted social media marketing aimed exclusively at them. Before they can trust an advisor, they need a sense of what their options and requirements even are. Papathanasiou's tool does that for them.

Papathanasiou had integrated Zoom into client meetings roughly a year before the rest of the profession adopted remote consultations. He built the first version of the platform himself in 2020, during the early weeks of the lockdown. His wife, Anna, an MDRT advisor, had just given birth to their first child. He had spent his remaining cash on a new car he could no longer drive anywhere. He taught himself to code partly because he had hours to fill.

Eighteen months later, he brought in an outside developer to build version two. A third version is in development now, with an AI guide Papathanasiou plans to put in front of expat visitors. It will absorb the preliminary questions they typically ask before they're ready to meet with an advisor.

The team uses the system at different points. Experienced advisors like Anna use it heavily with new clients. Newer advisors send the link to prospects ahead of first meetings whenever they want to compress the cycle.

They now arrive at first meetings with the same diagnostic information about a prospect that an experienced advisor would have built up across two or three in-home visits.

"In our market, whenever it's in the house, we used to have a lot of appointments with clients," Papathanasiou said.

The questionnaire compressed those appointments into one structured interaction. Zoom replaced the kitchen table.

The intake system also required something Papathanasiou could not build himself. The proposals an advisor brings to a closing meeting come from his agency's exclusive insurance partner. Standard proposals come back in Greek. For expat clients, that was a challenge the questionnaire could not solve.

So, Papathanasiou went to the insurer and asked for English-language proposals on his expat clients' files. The insurer agreed. The result, Papathanasiou said, is that expat clients now move through the entire intake-to-close process without switching languages.

The combination of the questionnaire, the Zoom workflow and the language accommodation put Papathanasiou's advisory brand, Greek Insurance Leaders, on the 40 Under 40 list for Europe in 2023 and on the High Flyers 50 list in the Indian market the same year. The brand was also a finalist among the top four startup companies in the local market.

Papathanasiou wants to build one of the biggest agency brands in that market. He’s also preparing to break out as a fully independent brand. The platform, the recognition and the carrier accommodation are the infrastructure he's bringing with him.

"Trust is the strategy," Papathanasiou said.

Contact: Thomas Papathanasiou, thpapathanasiou@gmail.com