511: What It’s Like to Be a Top Ranked Wealth Advisor With Paul Pagnato, PagnatoKarp [Main T4C Episode]

Paul Pagnato is the CEO and Founder of PagnatoKarp, a top-ranked family wealth advisory with over $4.8 billion in assets under advisement. In 2019, Forbes ranked Paul as the number one advisor in Virginia (29th in the United States), and Barron’s ranked him at #2. Prior to founding PagnatoKarp, Paul worked at Merrill Lynch for 19 years, where he founded its Private Banking and Investment Office in Washington, D.C. However, Paul’s career had a very unconventional start.  After he graduated from college, he worked as a microbiologist with NASA and McDonnell Douglas to search for alien life. Lastly, Paul is the author of the new book Transparency Wave: Exponential Changes That Will Transform Our World, which shows why those who fear transparency are doomed to remain in the past. WHAT YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT IN THIS EPISODE: What a family wealth advisory does and the difference between a financial advisor and certified financial analyst (3:38) Why you should study the sciences as undergrad even if you want to go into finance (7:39) How Paul pivoted from Microbiology to Merrill Lynch (13:19) What lessons Paul learned from science that he has applied to finance (21:00) What Transparency Wave is about and why listeners should check it out (24:09) How Paul was able to bounce back from his “failure” during a recession (29:50)