One Life

At 72 years of age, Judy’s life hadn’t turned out quite the way she planned. Her grown children had lost their jobs during the 2008 recession and moved back in with her, and her Social Security check could only stretch so far. She didn’t want to just sit by and lament her situation; she wanted to do something. But what?

Enter Stephan Little, whose life’s purpose is about creating to make others’ lives better. “I’m a strong advocate of people really having a clear connection to their purpose,” he says. “I think we’re all ordained with a purpose of some sort. I think we’re here for a reason, and our purpose will be accomplished with or without our cooperation, so it’s better if you can get in line with it and enjoy the ride rather than struggle with it. But you need to explore it. It might not be what you think at first, but once you find it, you should really latch on and make it part of all that you do.”

Steve understands this struggle and search for purpose so well because he went through it himself. After garnering tremendous success in the technology and startup space but ultimately finding himself disillusioned by its nuance, he decided to do what he does best—he got creative. With the help of an incredibly effective friend and mentor, Steven Feinberg, he held a retreat at his ranch home in California, inviting venture investors and CEOs he had developed relationships with over the years to come for a weekend of music, wine, and brainstorming about his next move. “The idea was to bring together all these perspectives, cull them out, and generate something meaningful in the form of a compass point,” he recalls. “The key realization was that, instead of being systems- and executing-oriented, I’m always wanting to generate and create something new, and the real driver behind that is helping other people get to a place of joy and satisfaction. But how?”

As ideas were shared and mapped out, the group shot down one after another until finally, a collective chorus of “That’s it!” was sung. Steve had a visionary knack for seeing and navigating through the complexity of business success. If business was a chess game, Steve would know, within five seconds of first looking at the board, every possible move and exactly who would win. If he could find a way to encode that, he could help millions of people.

Steve quantified this realization in 2008 by creating The Perfect Biz Finder, a self-paced home study program based on the principle of creation through destruction—that is, creation of business success through destruction of the mental models that prevent people from seeing the opportunities around them all the time. “As human beings, we form belief structures that filter what we see and how we translate our experiences,” he explains. “I think there’s a whole generation of people, including the Baby Boomers, who don’t have enough money to live out the rest of their lives without an income, and have been encoded with a limiting mental framework that makes them feel they don’t have other options. I saw enormous opportunity in helping people develop the thinking skills that allow them to peel the lenses away so they can see opportunities that were previously invisible to them. It’s about helping people break down those old ways of thinking so they can reframe what’s possible for themselves and find opportunities they can really ignite themselves with.”

Judy was one of those people who came across the program, but after several sessions, she still didn’t feel ignited. She had a passion for knitting but was unclear about how to translate it into business success. “Stick with the process and it will be revealed to you,” Steve assured her. “It’s going to be exciting, I promise you.”

Several months later, he answered a call from an unknown number. “I just have one question for you,” came Judy’s voice over the phone. Steve thought she sounded angry and was ready to refund what she’d paid for the program, when she instead said, “What on earth am I going to do with all this money?” The grandmother had launched a membership site teaching people how to knit, expecting to accrue a few dozen members and charging $97 a month. But by the time she called him, she had 2,900 members—and a system, a method, and a belief in her abilities.

Steve’s approach also revolves around dispelling the belief that people have “lives” that are distinct and separate from one another, like a work life, a home life, or a love life. “We compartmentalize everything, but that’s really just another inaccurate mental model,” he points out. “We borrow time from our families to invest in our work with the bizarre expectation that somehow it will pay a dividend back to the family, but that’s not how it works. The truth is that you have one life, and you have to design it to incorporate all the aspects of what you’re here to accomplish. What are your real intentions? You need to actually map time for these concepts into your calendar. I wanted to help people recognize that they have one life that they are free to design according to their ultimate goals.”

Judy’s is one of about 3,800 businesses launched with the help of the Biz Finder, and once the program had become automated, turnkey, and stable, Steve began exploring ways to translate his approach to bigger, established businesses that were being held back by the presence of limiting mental frameworks in their leadership teams. “So many businesses have the old-school perspective that, if you work your life away, someday it’ll pay,” says Steve. “But that kind of thinking kills businesses.”

Once he began advising and consulting with these types of companies, Steve noticed the startling trend that very few of them had solid exit strategies. In fact, few of them had exit strategies at all. He also found that 80 percent of the business owners he consulted with were disappointed when he showed them their company’s first valuation, thinking it would be worth more. “The value driver of your business is determined by your buyer, not you,” Steve affirms. “If you keep this in mind when you’re first starting your business, you have a clear road map of where you want to go. If you can really understand the kind of company you would want to sell to in the future and what they would value in your business, that defines your business model and tells you exactly what you need to do to get the best exit possible.” Thus, Steve created Zero Limits Ventures in 2010, a growth-oriented consulting and investing firm that teaches business owners and CEOs how to begin with the end in mind.

Though this idea is a fundamental cornerstone of his approach now, Steve certainly didn’t begin life thinking he would end up where he is today. Born in Syracuse, New York, his father worked for General Electric and moved the family down to Daytona Beach, Florida, to work on the Apollo Space Program. He then transitioned into information systems, so they moved to Pennsylvania when Steve was 13. There, they had a creek running through their property where he and his older sister would play and catch crayfish, and his mother, a homemaker, always took good care of them. “She was very social, and from her I learned to talk, listen, and learn from people, which became important in sales later on,” he remembers. “And from my father, I got a sense of the importance of breaking away from material aspiration and the debilitating effects of mindlessly climbing up a ladder. He succeeded in escaping that mindset and then regenerating himself so that now, at the age of 80, he hiked Mount Everest and then the whole length of England.”

One of Steve’s most profound shifts in perspective came when he was 14 and, like any other kid, wanted to earn some money cutting lawns. Within several weeks, he noticed that he could either toil under the hot sun and make $8 a lawn, or he could hire someone else to do the work for $6 and earn $2 himself. With this model, he accrued 30 customers and would ride his bike from house to house each week asking if his neighbors wanted their grass cut.

Toward the end of the season, however, he noticed people turning him down more often and realized there might be a better way to do business. With that, he drew up quarterly, semi-annual, and annual contracts agreeing to varying levels of service, with the longest terms incorporating other lawn care services for the same flat rate. Almost everyone took the long-term contract deals, and Steve was able to scale his business, growing incrementally rather than having to return to each house each week to sell the same deal.

Two years later, his father was transferred. Only then did he realize that his son had amassed a garage full of equipment and a book full of business. With his father’s help, Steve looked up nearby lawn care businesses in the Yellow Pages and ended up selling his modest company for $200,000. “It was such a significant inflection point for me because I learned about value drivers,” he remembers. “The value of my company wasn’t in the customers or the equipment or the employees, but in the book of contracts I had put together. That single entity is what made the business valuable. Now, whenever I enter a business, I look for their ‘book’—that thing that’s driving their value. Most businesses don’t know what that is.”

Steve’s early entrepreneurial ventures continued thanks to the shop class he took in high school. The instructor, Gene Koons, was a grumpy old man who only took to students that proved they were truly committed to the work, which Steve did. The two developed a rapport and would do special projects together, which led Steve to develop a summer scheme to make and sell grandfather clocks. “But I hated the finishing process—staining, spraying, buffing, sanding,” Steve remarks. “By the end of the summer, we had a room full of unfinished grandfather clocks, and Mr. Koons convinced me I was better off selling clock-making kits rather than the completed clocks themselves.”

Steve was never athletic in high school, but that all changed when he enrolled at the University of Richmond and put his mind to getting in shape. He began training with the wrestling team and befriended a champion body builder, which got him interested in the sport himself. “I got pretty big and won first place in several regional and national contests as a teenager,” he remembers. “Being a champion athlete was certainly rewarding, but even more gratifying was earning the credibility to help others become champion athletes later.”

Steve intended to major in mathematics and was excelling with a 3.95 GPA and a course load of 21 hours a semester, but he decided to quit school after two years because he didn’t see the value in it. He had figured out how to become the official beer distributor for the campus fraternities and was making money that way, but he was far more interested in launching businesses than he was in classes and campus life. Free of the burden of school, Steve started a cabinet shop doing high-end work for law firms, which led to residential cabinetry and soon attracted the attention of George Tuckwiler, the owner of a light commercial construction company. The two began working together on various projects and developed a close friendship, until George suffered a massive heart attack and passed away soon thereafter. He left the business to Steve along with a note expressing his belief in him, so Steve ran the company successfully for several years.

“During that time, I became enamored with the idea of moving aggressively into the large commercial space, but I had no idea how to do it,” he remembers. He decided to call one of the big names in the industry and set up a lunch meeting. Steve showed up in his work clothes, but the executive showed up in a suit, setting the stage for the conversation that followed. After hearing his story, the man across the table said, “There’s not a single person I can think of in our entire executive suite who’s ever punched a nail in his life. The path you’re on doesn’t lead there.”

“The problem,” Steve says, “is that I believed him. In that moment, I decided there was no path from that construction company to what I envisioned. That was a big mistake. I don’t regret it, but looking back now, I know I could have accomplished all that and more.”

Steve ultimately sold the business, finished up his degree, and decided he wanted to move into a professional job, so he utilized his father’s contacts at GE and landed a position in Rockville with their information services group as a performance specialist. In that capacity, he performed the arduous work of building statistical models of performance to help decision makers predict outcomes, launching him into the world of technology. “Our office was right next to Jack Welch’s office, and we got to spend time with him while he was in town,” Steve recalls. “I learned a lot from him. He taught me that professional advancement isn’t about what you do; it’s about who you are. You have to be clear about what you want and then become the kind of person who has those things.”

From there, Steve went on to GTE Spacenet to supervise their satellite operations center. The operation was experiencing a technology problem that prevented them from seeing satellites in their system, so he brought in a small startup from Boston, Xyplex, who believed their technology afforded a solution. “In the process of getting to know that company and meet the founders, I realized that what I really wanted to do was work for a startup,” Steve says. With that, he became a sales engineer for Xyplex and began focusing on network management. Then, by chance, he sat next to Jeff Case and Marshall Rose on a plane, who created the simple network management protocol that became the TCPIP standard for managing devices on a network. They were having trouble getting device manufacturers to adopt their protocol, so the three decided to join forces, and Steve was able to show stakeholders that the microcode made their devices more manageable.

Before long, pieces of their microcode were deployed every time someone bought a new router, terminal server, or switch. The partners began writing programs that could read that code centrally, pulling performance and alert data from remote devices. This success brought Steve to Silicon Valley, where their first company made $147 million in less than three years. “We would pitch an idea to venture capitalists, put together an engineering team, develop a prototype, get funded, build a company, sell it, and start again,” he recounts. “I also helped launch the Desktop Management Task Force, which became the standard for all desktop management. That was the beginning of what is now a $100 to $200 billion industry.”

After selling companies to Seagate, HP, and Microsoft, Steve shifted his focus to more localized applications like software distribution, building and selling three companies to Microsoft in rapid succession. “We had a really good run and a lot of success, and I earned the reputation in that community of being someone who could figure things out, but it was time for me to retire and move on to something else,” Steve says. “After years of building successful software companies for venture investors, I realized I never really loved it. Looking back, I was making those decisions because I felt I had to, because I was boxed in by a mental model that said that path was my lot in life. In a sense, I was a lot like the very people I work to help today. I was driven by fear of not succeeding, rather than by a core sense of motivation.”

Steve was making tremendous amounts of money but was the unhappiest he had ever been in his life. He traveled so much that he missed his oldest daughter’s childhood completely, and he had been divorced. “Ultimately, I was a mess and really needed an answer, and thankfully, I got one,” he remembers. “I went through a sort of spiritual transition in my life where I felt like I connected with God in a very transformational way. I believe there are no coincidences in life and that we all have the experiences we have by design. Going through all of that allowed me to find the path I’m on today, creating opportunities that truly help others understand how to put themselves in a position to win.”

Transitioning out of a fear-based life and into an empowered life couldn’t have happened without the help of Steve’s wife, Kimberly, who was instrumental in helping him let go of his former existence. “I was feeling a tremendous amount of interpersonal tension about letting go of a stable corporate lifestyle for something that wasn’t a sure bet. Then, one day, while doing my daily devotionals, I had a very clear feeling that it was going to be okay, but I had to stop standing at the edge and just jump,” he remembers. “I talked to Kimberly about it, unsure about how she would react because it was her and our daughter’s security at stake too, but she just looked at me and said she was so excited about it, and that I should just do it. In doing that, she eliminated a big piece of the fear that was holding me back. She’s truly incredible and a wonderful partner.”

Today, Steve operates at the 50,000 foot level, leading Zero Limits Ventures around obstacles and creating an environment where his employees can flourish in a unified direction. With a focus on open and clear communication channels, each team member is not concerned with being right so much as getting it right. Once they have a good vision of who a client is and where that client wants to go, they tap their extensive network of strategic partners, investors, and merchants to find the highest valuation potentials for that client.

Alongside work, Steve designs his own life to prioritize time with Kimberley and to foster good relationships with his daughters, Emily and Madeline. He’s also returned to bodybuilding, recently taking second place in a national contest. “There’s a certain discipline that comes with being a champion athlete that’s mirrored in being successful in business,” he says. “It takes a level of commitment that only comes with a true awareness of one’s purpose, and an awareness of the influences of advisors and the people you surround yourself with. It’s important to fill your life with people who make you a better person and don’t drag you down.”

This focus on being mindful of both physical and mental states is echoed in the advice he gives young people entering the working world today. “It’s true that you can do anything you want to do,” he insists. “The important thing is to get the wiring between your ears right. Read as much as you can, from business books to the Bible, or whatever resonates with you. If you invest in fueling your mind with good brain food, everything else will take care of itself. You have to exercise your brain like you’d exercise your muscles. You become a better thinker with better quality outputs, both for work and for relationships.”

Beyond this, Steve’s example demonstrates the importance of recognizing and surpassing the mental frameworks that hold us back in life. “It takes courage to commit to changing and evolving as a person—to give up the status quo in the hopes of attaining a better life,” he affirms. “But it’s worth it. Every time I’m there to help Madeline with her homework, I know it’s worth it. Every time I see clients overcoming roadblocks and achieving the success they deserve, I know it’s worth it. Every day I remind myself that I’ve got one life to share with my family, my community, and my work, and knowing that I’ve designed it to be the kind of life I want, makes it all worth it worth it.”

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