How Ryan J. Esko Is Leading Balfour & Co. Into Its Second Century

• Ryan J. Esko is CEO of Balfour & Co., one of the largest commencement services companies in the United States, serving schools, students, and families nationwide.

• He is leading a digital overhaul focused on customer experience and operational efficiency, with the gains reinvested into future products and infrastructure.

• Esko earned his Bachelor of Science in Finance at the University of Illinois and completed executive education at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

• He founded Juntos Regalando Sonrisas, Together Giving Smiles, in 2008, a nonprofit serving children facing health and economic challenges across Latin America and Florida.

Ryan J. Esko runs one of the largest commencement services companies in the United States. Balfour & Co. is present at nearly every milestone of American student life, from class rings and letter jackets to yearbooks, caps and gowns, and the photographs families keep long after the tassel turns. When RESIDENT first profiled Esko in early 2025, he had just stepped into the chief executive role with a mandate to modernize a company that has been celebrating students since 1913. Eighteen months later, the more telling story is how he is doing it.

His approach has been neither a teardown nor a nostalgia act. Esko is leading a digital overhaul aimed squarely at customer experience and operational efficiency, and he is structuring it to fund its own future, with the gains reinvested into new products and infrastructure rather than harvested for the short term. That kind of discipline rarely makes headlines because it is patient by design. It is also what determines whether a heritage company earns its second century.

Esko came to Balfour with the resume of an operator. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Illinois, completed executive education at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, and built his career leading some of the world's most recognized consumer brands. His background includes interim CEO roles inside private equity portfolios, where he led operational and financial turnarounds across fashion, apparel, and consumer goods companies. We covered that trajectory in detail when he took the helm. What matters now is the pattern behind it: Esko is consistently the leader chosen when a company requires both reliable stability and decisive action.

Balfour's portfolio spans graduation regalia, class rings and jewelry, yearbooks, student and commencement photography, school uniforms, letter jackets, diploma frames, and personalized keepsakes. Each is a product a family buys once, at a moment they will remember. That reality shapes Esko's modernization brief. The systems behind the scenes can change completely; the experience of the milestone cannot be allowed to slip.

In practice, the overhaul runs through the entire company. Online ordering has been streamlined so a busy parent can find a school, order a cap and gown, and add a yearbook in a single sitting. The company has invested in a new yearbook printing operation, Balfour Vivid Print, built around a new production facility. Its photography network reaches thousands of school picture days and commencement ceremonies each year. None of these moves is flashy on its own. Together they compound, which is exactly the point.

Plenty of chief executives talk about efficiency. Esko treats it as a funding mechanism. The logic of Balfour's plan is that stronger operations create room to reinvest in future products and infrastructure, which in turn protects the heritage the company trades on. It is a loop that rewards patience, and it reflects a private equity operator's mindset applied with a longer horizon than most funds allow. Leadership at this stage of a company's life is less about invention than about sequencing: what to fix first, what to protect at all costs, and what to build once the foundation holds.

Long before purpose became a boardroom talking point, Esko was building a purpose-driven organization on his own time. In 2008 he founded Juntos Regalando Sonrisas, Together Giving Smiles, a nonprofit serving children facing health and economic challenges across Latin America, with its home base in Aventura, Florida, and a growing footprint in the state.

The organization works in three lanes. It grants meaningful wishes to individual children who have shown extraordinary courage through illness or hardship, from trips and shopping sprees to funds for education, music, or treatment. It stages full event days for children and their families, renting amusement parks and zoos for an afternoon of food, traditional music, organized games, and visits from beloved characters. And it keeps room in its budget to respond to needs as they surface, working alongside the hospitals and orphanages it partners with. The premise is disarmingly simple: give a child the chance to be a kid, removed for a day from the challenges they carry.

He named the organization for the outcome, not for himself. That fact reveals as much about his leadership as any successful turnaround listed on his résumé.

South Florida has no shortage of executives with impressive titles. What distinguishes the leaders worth studying, in Miami and beyond, is coherence: the same values showing up in the operating plan and in the life built outside it. Esko's bet at Balfour & Co. is that profitability and long-term impact are not competing goals when the operating model funds both. A company built on celebrating other people's milestones is now working toward one of its own, and its chief executive seems entirely comfortable letting the results, and the smiles, speak first.

For more information, visit Balfour.com and JuntosRegalandoSonrisas.org.