The Business of Belief: How Alfredo Barulli Built a Multi-Million Dollar Media Empire on Trust

From a small town in southern Italy to the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, Alfredo Barulli built 10X Experts Agency on a simple corporate truth: before the meeting, before the pitch, before the handshake, the decision has already begun.

Image courtesy of Alfredo Barulli

In a crowded hotel conference room in Chicago, two leadership coaches stood at the front of the stage. The event, a high-level executive retreat, had drawn attendees from Fortune 500 companies, mid-sized businesses, and ambitious entrepreneurs. Both speakers had impressive resumes. Decades of experience, bestselling books, long lists of corporate clients.

And yet, as the first one stepped up to speak, the audience shifted in their seats, scrolling absently through their phones, sipping coffee, barely engaged. His message was polished but predictable. The second coach said many of the same things and held the room in the palm of his hand.

It is a scene Alfredo Barulli describes in his Amazon bestselling book Brand to Lead, and it contains the founding insight of his entire business: expertise is common, but perceived authority is rare. The audience isn’t consciously analyzing a speaker, but their minds are already making calculations. They assess his clothing, the quality of his slides, the authority in his voice. And when a man has been featured in Forbes and carries a verified social media presence, the audience believes he is worth listening to before he utters a word.

“In business, the verdict arrives before the argument,” says Alfredo Barulli, founder and CEO of 10X Experts Agency, a Dubai-based firm specializing in VIP publicity and reputation management. “Every partnership, every investment, every keynote begins the same way now. Someone searches your name. What they find in those fifteen seconds decides what happens in the next fifteen minutes.”

From Massafra to the World’s Tallest Building

Alfredo Barulli was born in Massafra, Italy, in 1987. He didn’t come from a long line of entrepreneurs, and he didn’t inherit a ready-made business. There was no golden ticket and no shortcut, just a deep curiosity about how influence works, and an obsession with figuring out why certain people command attention while others, often more talented, struggle to be seen.

That curiosity turned into a career. As a luxury travel influencer, he built a personal audience of over one million followers on Instagram, collaborating with world-renowned hospitality brands. He co-founded Haute Traveling Media Group, a network of 124 elite influencers reaching more than 113 million followers and generating over a billion views a year. And alongside his fiancée, luxury influencer Antonella Attorre, he built 10X Experts Agency into a multi-million dollar media business, placing executives, founders and luxury brands in the publications their stakeholders actually read.

Today he runs the operation from the Burj Khalifa, and he arrives at meetings in a Rolls-Royce. He is quick to insist the car is not the point. “Rolls-Royce doesn’t sell transportation,” he says. “It sells what people believe about you before you say a single word. That is the same psychology every executive should be managing. It’s about how you’re perceived, the trust you build, and the impact you leave behind.”

Lesson one: people buy into people, not products

Ask Alfredo Barulli what corporate leaders get wrong about branding, and he points to an uncomfortable truth from his book: people don’t buy products. They buy into the people behind them.

“Elon Musk doesn’t just run companies. He crafts narratives,” Alfredo Barulli explains. “Tesla isn’t just a car company. It’s an underdog taking on the fossil fuel industry. SpaceX isn’t just a space exploration company. It’s humanity’s ticket to survival beyond Earth.” The lesson for executives is not to imitate Musk’s theatrics, but to recognize that every company already has a narrative, and the only choice is whether to author it or to let the market write it for you.

Lesson two: trust is built through generosity

His second lesson comes from observing Alex Hormozi, who gave away strategies most consultants charged thousands for, without asking for anything in return, and became one of the most trusted names in entrepreneurship. By the time Hormozi released his book, his audience was already sold, not because of aggressive marketing, but because trust had been compounding for years.

“Executives ask me how to look credible,” says Alfredo Barulli. “I tell them to stop asking how to look credible and start publishing what they know. Generosity is the fastest route to authority. Give the market your best thinking, and the market gives you its confidence.”

Lesson three: the audit is now automated

The third lesson is the one Alfredo Barulli believes corporate leaders are least prepared for. Due diligence used to mean a phone call to a mutual contact. Then it meant a Google search. Now it increasingly means an algorithm, one that has connected the dots before the prospect has. The brands that will dominate tomorrow aren’t the ones that scream the loudest. They are the ones that anticipate what their audience needs before the audience even realizes it, and the engine behind that shift is artificial intelligence.

“Your reputation is no longer only what people find when they search for you,” he says. “It is what machines conclude about you when someone asks them a question. Executives who understand this are building digital fortresses. Everyone else is leaving the most important first impression of their career to chance.”

The cost of standing still

For a closing lesson, Alfredo Barulli reaches for a cautionary tale. In the fall of 1999, Blockbuster executives sat across from the founders of a small startup offering to sell their company for $50 million. The executives chuckled. The startup was Netflix. The companies that disappear are rarely the ones that made a wrong move. They are the ones that mistook yesterday’s dominance for tomorrow’s relevance.

“Reputation works the same way,” he says. “What carried your authority five years ago will not carry it five years from now. The executives who win are the ones who treat credibility as infrastructure, something you build deliberately, maintain constantly, and never leave to chance.”

It is a philosophy he summarizes in a single sentence, the closest thing his agency has to a mission statement: “We don’t just create personal brands. We engineer authority.”