Brian J Esposito Podcast Transcript
Brian J Esposito joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive podcast.
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Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Brian J Esposito. Brian J Esposito, A luminary in the corporate world has been consecutively ranked among the top 10 CEOs globally in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2024 as acknowledged by the world CEO rankings, awards organized by Adria Management as the visionary founder and CEO of Esposito Intellectual Enterprises.
He Helms an expansive empire comprising over 115 entities and 200 plus joint ventures with a dynamic presence across 25 plus diverse industries worldwide. In 2023, Brian Jay Esposito embarked on a new venture as the CEO of Diamond Lake Minerals.
Well, good afternoon, Brian. Welcome to the show.
Brian Esposito: Oh, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for having me, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. And you taking the time. Hailing out of the New Jersey area this morning. I’m in. Kansas City, so I appreciate you making the time. Jump on, on calendars, et cetera. So, Brian, we’re gonna jump right into your first question here. You’ve been ranked among the top 10 CEOs globally across multiple years in industry’s.
What core leadership philosophy has enabled you to consistently deliver? Results across such a wide range of sectors.
Brian Esposito: Oh, great. Great question, Brian. And there’s a lot of life lessons and business principles and philosophies that apply to that continuously happening, and that’s been happening over the last five years now consistently, but it’s also now 25 years in total of my entrepreneurial career journey.
So, the, how I do business and how I work with people is nurturing relationships, caring about people, creating win-win situations for everybody. Doing that consistently and not expecting overnight success and understanding that things take time. Great things take a lot of time, and when problems arise, knowing how to navigate them, how to correct them, and more importantly, as you continue to grow and evolve, how to prevent the problems from happening in the first place.
So that’s a loaded question every year that probably question could be answered differently, but it’s, it’s been a long journey of understanding how to be consistent and how to create sustainable business models that aren’t based off of nonsense valuations or things that don’t make sense. Our business philosophy is the same as it’s been for, I think, since business was created. If you want to be in business, you need revenue. If you wanna stay in business, you need to be profitable. And it’s as simple as that. And when you have that as your core foundation, and you probably build off of that, you can create some great things.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. A lot of patience for sure, but I know 25 years in entrepreneurship makes a huge difference. You’ve kind of built upon your early successes, but what I heard is nurturing those relationships basically loving on those people. Patience, persistence, consistency and building sustainable business models.
And that is obviously a recipe for your success. And my audience appreciates those insights. Brian, when you became CEO of Diamond Lake Minerals in 2023, you drove a transformation that took the share price from 35 cents a share to $13 a share and a market cap from 1 million to 413 million. What were the most critical steps in that turnaround?
Brian Esposito: It’s taking again, all your life lessons and learning experiences, successes, and more importantly, the failures and missteps that I’ve taken on my journey and applying it to a really good security like Diamond Lake and building an amazing team around me. So, if you look at what I did there, it’s understanding the markets.
We’ve been called the Berkshire Hathaway of tokenization, so really great timing on bringing a company like Diamond Lake. Properly to the markets since it’s been a public company outta Salt Lake City, Utah since 1954 has a longstanding history of trying to find itself. And what we’re able to do is create a really great foundation of what Diamond Lake is today and what it is going forward and when you have the right team.
In this case, the right share structure that can really create value for shareholders and start to build a really good balance sheet again based off of understanding business. And that’s earnings and profitability and assets. So what we did with Diamond Lake is exactly that and thankfully we, we made a lot of great moves, but also that’s because in the, my past I made a lot of bad moves and I made a lot of mistakes.
So, it’s, knowing what not to do is extremely important in life, especially when you go into a new venture and a new opportunity like Diamond Lake.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really appreciate that. A lot of life lessons. You know, we talked about that in your first question. But really building upon that experience, you talked about your failures, your missteps obviously those aren’t.
As we, as you, if you, as you heard before, failures aren’t really failures. They’re a learning lesson, and that has applied in your role as CEO at Diamond Lake Minerals. Of course, having a great team, having great people share team and shareholders having that right, fit as well makes a big difference.
So, thank you, Brian. You’ve worked across real estate, energy, Web3 technology and more. How do you identify industries that are right for disruption and avoid sectors where the timing isn’t right?
Brian Esposito: For me, it’s not about. The sector being right or wrong because there’s opportunities in every sector. And I’m in over 25 different industries now in my career, and that continues to grow and evolve and proudly operating in those different spaces and sectors.
And again, there’s always an opportunity whether it’s a company that’s failing, a company that’s distressed or a startup that needs help my. Angle is, I can share with, I’ve shared multiple times. There’s, there’s sectors I don’t get involved with just from my own personal belief, which are things like firearms and tobacco and the adult entertainment industries.
And so those are things I tend to say, hey, listen, we’re not gonna touch those industries, even if there’s great opportunities. But there are tremendous amount of wonderful situations where, companies and ecosystems like mine that can create value in almost any industry. And again, if you go basing off of the core business philosophies and practices that I was raised upon and that I apply to my world and the companies I’m involved with, those business philosophies and principles are industry agnostic.
And that’s why I’m involved in so many things. And the other fun part about having an ecosystem this wide and vast is that. These, the model I originally created is a, is a GE structure, an old general electric structure where you have all these different. Companies or subsidiaries or assets and resources and teams all working together collectively in creating opportunities and moving markets and creating brand new products or IP or technologies or services or solutions and getting them properly into those markets, distributed and, and service.
So, it’s not. In my mind it’s, it’s very controlled environment. It’s very understandable what I’ve been building and what I’m trying to create. A lot of people that just do one thing and do one thing, well, can’t see the grand vision here, but it’s very diversified and there’s structure and strategy and reason behind that.
Brian Thomas: Really appreciate that. And having diversification being structured. Having some discipline. Obviously, all that put together makes for a great recipe for success. But I like how you mentioned there are opportunities in every sector, most industries you’re involved with. There’s a few that we don’t want to get into or touch, but I totally like to hear that you’ve kind of really diversified in various industries.
Obviously, your personal beliefs, your fundamentals that have contributed much of your success as well over the years. So really appreciate that. Brian, the last question of the day, having been recognized as a top innovator and entrepreneur, what trends do you believe will define the next decade of business building, especially around emerging tech capital markets and diversified holdings?
Brian Esposito: My entire career and anybody that’s an entrepreneur or even in a mom-and-pop store up to Fortune 500 companies, it’s adapt or die. And there are major companies and brands, and they’ve been, they be, they’re referenced offense like the Blockbusters, the Sears or the Kmarts of the world, uh, MCI, WorldCom, that they were leaders in their space.
They were just substantial monsters. And then because they got so. Complacent and leadership just felt, felt so untouchable and added touch with the markets. In reality, other companies and opportunities came up and destroyed them. So it’s extremely important to bring into your business no matter what it is.
New in initiatives, I’ll, I’ll focus on tokenization and digital assets because I’ve been in that space for over 13 years. I’m not the biggest fan of ai. I think it’s very dangerous ’cause it’s not being deployed with any regulatory or ethical compliances behind it. But it’s happening and that machine can’t be stopped.
And in my world, I have control over how we use it and how we apply it. But when you talk about tokenization and digital assets, or crypto or any of these buzzwords that you hear, majority of the world does not understand them. And they’re intimidated by them, therefore they feel insecure and they don’t wanna talk about it.
And that’s very natural behavior. Just like an. Even when the fax machine came out or the telephone and then sending an email, then the internet. So all these things took time to, to get comfort around them, and now they’re part of our everyday lives. But when you look at tokenization, any business should look at it simply as the evolution of a financial transaction.
That’s how I looked at it from the Be beginning, and that’s why I’ve been involved in it for so long. If you look at your business, you, you take cash, you take wire, you take checks, you take credit cards, PayPal, Venmo. There’s been a consistent evolution of how you accept some sort of financial transaction into your bank account.
Tokenization should be the same thing in the same way that you’re looking at, I need to apply this to my business. So those are the types of trends that I’ve. Think is very important now for any company because there’s substantial amount of financial transactions that are being made around the world through tokens and crypto and digital assets.
And if you’re not involved in that, you’re missing out on a major audience that want to use those financial mechanisms in their transactions.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Most appreciated. You talked about a few things here, Brian. It’s, it’s something that I really took to heart here. Any size company you talked about, the big ones, the small ones you need to adapt or die and it’s extremely important to listen to the market, your customers, your shareholders, et cetera.
Totally get it. We see that happen. I saw a statistic just a couple years ago. About the 55 of the Fortune, five hundreds in, we’re gone, or maybe by 2000, the big ones that we knew from the eighties and nineties. Just, it’s just amazing how that stuff happens. But I like how you talked about tokenization.
That’s obviously a big part of your business and what you’re doing and digital assets moving forward into the future. I think this is kind of the way we support that here where our publication’s built on blockchain, by the way. So we love this stuff. And I agree with you. I talked to everybody on the podcast the last two years about AI and there needs to be more guardrails in ethics.
A hundred percent. I think that that has so much potential, but there’s just some, I think some people at the top that really have a full autonomy with this stuff. And it’s, it’s just we’re heading down I think, if we’re not careful, a bad path. So, I appreciate your insights, Brian. It was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Brian Esposito: Thank you, Sarah. I really appreciate the opportunity and have a great day.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Brian J Esposito Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
