Brett Diamond stood under tons of steel his family’s company had installed at one of many keystone construction projects that can be seen across Collier County.
DeAngelis Diamond is building a new orthopedic surgery center for NCH in North Naples.
Diamond, chief administrative officer for DeAngelis Diamond construction, grew up around the company his father David Diamond co-founded with John DeAngelis in 1996.
Brett Diamond said his father had him in the office from as young as age 7. After graduating from Barron Collier High School in 2007 and earning a degree in business management from Florida Gulf Coast University in 2012, Brett Diamond joined his father’s company and worked his way up to co-ownership status.
Now, Brett Diamond helps oversee a company that generated $396 million in revenue in 2022, $479 million in 2023 and projects to generate more than $600 million this year.
“In 2024, we’re going to be doing over $650 million in revenue,” Diamond said. “We’ve grown substantially. It all goes back to how much we can hire from a talent standpoint and the local labor.
“We’re happy to keep growing. It’s all about making intelligent decisions to what we can handle from a management standpoint.”
DeAngelis Diamond is overseeing dozens of active construction projects, including four that will impact the surrounding communities: NCH’s new orthopedic surgery center off Immokalee Road, Old Naples Hotel in downtown Naples, Naples Beach Club and The Cove at 47th, an apartment complex located between Cape Coral Parkway and 47th Terrace in south Cape Coral.
DeAngelis Diamond also, in recent months, completed the AC Marriott in downtown Naples, Margaritaville Resort on Fort Myers Beach, Grand Living in North Naples/Bonita Springs and Arthrex Studio X.
“We run about 17 different market sectors, from aviation to hotels to health care,” Diamond said. “All different market sectors. We steer to where we think the market is going.
“With commercial construction, we can see 18 to 24 months out of the market economy. We focus on the endpoint of where we think the market is going. We’ve built anything and everything.”
Although for the most part, supply-chain disruptions have faded, finding skilled workers continues to pose challenges, Diamond said, and he has turned to artificial intelligence for help.
“Technology is a passion of mine,” Diamond said. “Big time. I’m huge into AI. I’m not the expert in that, but I love learning what’s coming down the line for that.
“We have a lot of AI tools that we’ve been testing over the past years. One of them is Microsoft Copilot, it just rolled out, that we’re testing internally. It allows us to look at all of our existing platforms, like Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook. It has AI built into that. Open AI and Chat GPT.
“That’s all embedded now in our platforms. As we’re looking at Excel spreadsheets with thousands of lines of data, our chief financial officer can analyze that for us and tell us the key indicators or emphasis what we should be focusing on. The other side of it is recruiting. We’re using AI recruiting to find the best talent. We’re using a software now that analyzes all the resumes we’ve gone through. It will pinpoint and highlight the ones we should be looking at based on AI.”
DeAngelis Diamond hired 80 new employees last year and expects to hire 80 more this year, Diamond said.
“Southwest Florida is an insanely, fast-growing area,” Diamond said. “But to find that skilled worker who could be a project manager and has years of experience in the industry, but also has a construction management background with college or university degrees, it’s very challenging to find that. You use AI to help speed up that process.”
