Steve Little, Founder & CEO of Zero Limits Ventures 

Steve Little is the Founder & CEO of Zero Limits Ventures, an advisory, consulting, and venture investment firm specializing in:

• Growth funding and funding strategies
• Reinvention & fast-growth strategies to increase valuation
• High-return exit strategies

With direct access to over $2B in debt and equity capital resources, as well as 70+ years experience in their leadership team, Zero Limits Ventures helps companies dramatically reinvigorate growth, aggressively accelerate company valuation, and generate the highest possible return at exit.

Steve is an acclaimed veteran entrepreneur who has founded and grown a multitude of successful ventures.  Beginning with his first commercial venture at the age of 13 (which sold a few years later for a handsome 6-figure sum, Steve built and grew dozens of successful companies, including several highly successful venture-backed global software companies.  He helped several of those companies grow to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, which produced dramatic returns for investors and employed hundreds of people world-wide.

Steve has personally raised more than $1B in startup and growth funding for 11 different businesses in multiple industries. He has led 6 successful start-ups to successful private acquisitions averaging more than $100M each. He led the buy-side M&A team for a major technology innovator, acquiring and integrating 9 companies in fewer than 12 months.

About the Strategic Business Forum:

The purpose of the Strategic Business Forum is to educate and inspire business owners and other leaders to create remarkably successful enterprises.  We do this through interviewing founders who have grown their businesses above at least $3M in revenue or CEOs of larger companies that have led their companies through growth periods.  The forum is run at breakeven, there are no sales pitches, and there is nothing to join.  The Strategic Business Forum is a pure lunch and learn, with some light networking thrown in, for the express purpose of enabling business owners to learn from the great successes of others.

Using an interview format, questions are typically along the lines of:

• General background (where the speaker grew up, went to college, etc.  Basically any interesting aspects of his/her formative years,etc.)
• How he/she started or took over the business
• How did he/she grow the business to where it is today (or where it was when he/she exited).  Looking for events, strategies, key hires, key fires, etc.  Whatever were the key building blocks to getting him/her there.
• What were some of his/her most exciting victories (war stories)
• What were some of his/her biggest failures?  Things that if he/she had a chance to do over again, he/she would do it differently (common items here are waiting too long to fire someone, micromanaging, etc.).  Again, looking for war stories.
• What are the key takeaways that the speaker really wants the audience to know (ANYTHING  that is important  – lessons learned, processes, key advisers, hires, fires, leadership, marketing, tenacity, facing reality, etc., etc.)
• Anything else the speaker wants to share with the group?  Any words of wisdom? Who is/was his/her mentor? Where does he/she go for encouragement?  What book is he/she reading? Etc.

We’ll then end with Q&A from the audience.