A Conversation on ESOPs

Nov. 5, 2025

2 min read

Key Highlights

ESOPs are increasingly adopted by family-owned businesses as a means of employee engagement and succession planning.
Albert Del Pilar brings over 20 years of experience in corporate finance, specializing in equity offerings and shareholder liquidity transactions.
The episode discusses the strategic benefits of ESOPs, including aligning employee interests with company success and facilitating business liquidity.

Electrical Wholesaling Executive Insights podcast on ESOPs

Albert Del Pillar, managing director for ButcherJoseph & Co., St. Louis, MO

This episode of Electrical Wholesaling’s Executive Insights looks at Employee Ownership Stock Plans (ESOPs) and why they are becoming an increasingly popular ownership option for many family-owned businesses.

Our guest is Albert Del Pilar, a managing director and a member of the leadership team at ButcherJoseph & Co., St. Louis, MO. He is an expert on ESOPs and has more than 20 years of global corporate finance and capital markets experience at industry-leading investment banks.

Del Pilar began his career at Merrill Lynch where he helped execute over 50 equity and equity-linked investment offerings totaling more than $18 billion. He then joined the Credit Suisse capital markets group in New York where he collaborated on 45 public equity offerings totaling $6 billion. Afterwards, Albert joined the Sao Paolo office, working on cross-border mergers and acquisitions.

Prior to ButcherJoseph & Co., Del Pilar was a member of the Global Industrials Group at Morgan Stanley, where he advised public and privately held companies on corporate finance, capital markets and the structuring and execution of shareholder liquidity transactions involving the sale of equity to employees, management, and private equity investors.

He graduated cum laude from Harvard College and holds a Master of Science degree in foreign policy from Georgetown University where he was recognized for academic excellence. He has also served on the board of the St. Louis International Institute Community Development Corp.

You can contact Albert directly via email at [email protected].

Click here for information on ButcherJoseph's ESOP advisory services

About the Author

Jim Lucy

Editor-in-Chief

Over the past 40-plus years, hundreds of Jim’s articles have been published in Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing newsletter on topics such as the impact of amazonsupply.com and other new competitors on the electrical market’s channels of distribution, energy-efficient lighting and renewables, and local market economics. In addition to his published work, Jim regularly gives presentations on these topics to C-suite executives, industry groups and investment analysts.

He recently launched a new subscription-based data product for Electrical Marketing that offers electrical sales potential estimates and related market data for more than 300 metropolitan areas, and in 1999 he published his first book, “The Electrical Marketer’s Survival Guide” for electrical industry executives looking for an overview of key market trends.

While managing Electrical Wholesaling’s editorial operations, Jim and the publication’s staff won several Jesse H. Neal awards for editorial excellence, the highest honor in the business press, and numerous national and regional awards from the American Society of Business Press Editors. He has a master’s degree in Communications and a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, N.J. (now Rowan University).