From the New Kids on the Block to #668 in the Country

“I work 100 hours a week. I’ve been doing that for four years and eight months, and my top sales guys work anywhere from 60 to 80 hours a week,” said Frankie DiAntonio, CEO of Lexington Capital Holdings, a small business finance brokerage headquarterd in Port Jefferson Station, Long Island.

It’s a grind that he literally dedicates seven days a week to.

“Every day. I do not miss a day. Even holidays, Christmas. I’m still here. I go see my family, but I make sure that I wake up earlier those days. I’ll be here from like five, six a.m. to like whenever…” he added.

DiAntonio recently turned 27 years old, and he calls the sacrifice—one of total dedication to success—an investment. To his credit, he already has something to show for the effort. His company just placed No. 668 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 list after recording a whopping three-year growth rate of 514%. He says he ended up being the second-youngest CEO to make the list.

The earliest mention of DiAntonio on deBanked was recorded in April of 2022, when his company had only been in business for three months and he was still almost completely new to the industry. In a quote he supplied at the time, he called Lexington Capital “the new kids on the block.” Now, with close to a hundred employees and a reputation for being one of the most in-demand brokerage partners in the business, the company can point to its system as a model that yields results.

“There’s like a Lexington way around here, and if you don’t kind of buy into what we’re doing around here, it’s kind of hard for you to succeed,” said DiAntonio. Most of the Lexonites who work there and have bought into the system are 20-somethings like DiAntonio. Part of that means they need to put in the effort to become great at a rapid pace, especially when much of their competition may have more than a decade’s head start in experience.

“The only way to shorten the gap of getting really good at sales very quickly is to work as many hours as humanly possible on your craft,” said DiAntonio. And so those around him go all-in and embrace a lifestyle that’s not always understood by their peers. Outsiders may see sales, long hours, and an industry that moves at lightning speed and subtly preach that they should prepare a backup plan if it doesn’t work out. DiAntonio says there is no backup plan. The plan is Lexington.

“As an entrepreneur, I don’t think that you can have a backup plan because I’ve noticed in life, and not even just my life, but others, that if you don’t have two feet in to do something, you won’t be successful,” said DiAntonio on this subject. “If you always have in the back of your mind that this might not work out, and have an exit plan, an exit strategy, I’ve seen that those people never really seem to work out.”

Less than a year ago, deBanked was invited to cover the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the company’s new 16,000-square-foot office, where some of the old hands who had been with DiAntonio from the beginning, along with new recruits, expressed an unbridled optimism about the work culture there. DiAntonio credited a number of his very first hires as integral to everything that has happened since inception.

“Those first few hires that you have are so key for the future trajectory of your company because they’re going to set the tone and the foundation and the culture for the rest of the company, like Corey [Digi], Ryan [Showe], and my sister [Nicollete DiAntonio] care so much that it makes everyone else care,” he said.

It’s worth mentioning that Corey was one of six finalists in deBanked’s Broker Battle in 2024, and Ryan won the entire competition in 2025.

But what’s the secret sauce to funding deals beyond long hours and company culture? When it comes to customer acquisition, they have “a good crossbreed of everything.”

“…cold outreach still works, paid ads still work, cold emailing still works,” he says, while adding that they spend about 20% of their profits trying out different things, including technological enhancements. Some of those efforts involve AI and are designed to move deals from their intake systems to funding with the appropriate partner in the shortest amount of time possible. When merchants find them through social media specifically, they tend to find them on Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, in that order. But DiAntonio said Google still dominates the online channel for business owners seeking capital. It helps that when prospective customers find Lexington there, they also see a perfect 5-star rating aggregated from more than 1,100 reviews.

As for the plan from here, DiAntonio said the next milestone they hope to break is $100 million in annual revenue, and to eventually conduct an IPO within five years.

“We got a lot of eyes on us,” DiAntonio said. “There’s a lot of people who want to invest in Lexington at this moment in time.”

Sean Murray is the President and Chief Editor of deBanked and the founder of the Broker Fair Conference. Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on twitter. You can view all future deBanked events here.