Steven Dimitriou

Right out of college and working at an insurance company in Massachusetts, Steven Dimitriou thought retirement plans seemed interesting and decided to take it upon himself to learn about them, spending his time reading the Internal Revenue Code and researching regulations and products and products pertaining to qualified programs. Within a year, he says, he was the go-to person in the region for people interested in retirement plans.

However, he knew he needed to learn more, and so he moved to MFS in 1993, just as the firm was starting to take off with its recordkeeping program. He sat on the firm’s retirement sales desk, where he stayed for a couple of years, before moving on to Alex Brown and Sons in Baltimore, where he served as a VP of regional sales. A great offer from boutique investment bank and advisory firm H.C. Wainwright appeared, and Dimitriou went there in 1999 to build out the Retail Products Group, on mutual fund research, and other products and services, before leaving the firm to found Mayflower Advisors in 2002.

Mayflower has grown now to nine people, with the business split roughly 50/50 between retirement plan and personal high-net-worth advisory work. Dimitriou handles all of the firm’s corporate business, mostly retirement plans (the firm has more than 50 plan clients), with a little bit of legacy corporate 529 plan work.

The trend Mayflower has seen this year is in education, particularly an expansion outside its traditional client base. The firm has begun offering à la carte programs that cover both financial planning and investing topics to companies that want to educate employees. The curriculum is tailored to the client and is progressive, with segments named 101, 201, 301, and further. Each company typically retains Mayflower for at least one year, having the firm progress through the curriculum with various groups of participants.

Mayflower has five pure education clients, for which the firm does not have any activity with the client’s retirement plan administration, something Dimitriou says he expects to grow in 2009. Further, because participants “tune you out on the “rah rah 401(k)” stuff after a while,” Dimitriou comments, Mayflower also has taken its education curriculum back to its current 401(k) and retirement plan clients to keep the traditional participant education offered at those firms fresh.

Photo by Tracy Powell