Six exits. Nine-figure outcomes. 470+ founders guided through the same process. There is no advice Steve gives that he hasn’t lived himself.
Steve Little started a lawn care business at 13 years old. Two years later, he sold it for nearly $250,000.
Not the equipment. Not the truck. Not the list of customers.
The contracts.
A buyer offered far more than the obvious assets were worth — because the contracts made the revenue predictable. The business stopped being a lawn care operation and became something far more valuable: a stream of guaranteed income. And that changed everything about what the buyer was willing to pay.
That lesson — that the real value of a business is almost never what’s visible on the surface — has shaped every engagement Steve has run since.
Over the course of his advisory career, Steve and the ZLV team have worked with more than 470 companies. The average valuation gain across those engagements is 6x to 10x compared to unassisted transactions — more than $100 million in additional returns founders kept that they would have left on the table going to market unprepared.
Steve has raised over $3 billion in startup and growth funding across industries. He’s founded and scaled six companies to private nine-figure acquisitions. And he’s been on the other side: he once led a buy-side M&A team that acquired and integrated nine companies in twelve months.
That last part matters more than it sounds.
When Steve sits across from a buyer on your behalf, he isn’t guessing what they’re thinking. He’s been the one doing the thinking. He knows which questions get asked in diligence. He knows which red flags trigger discounts. He knows which value drivers get a buyer to move faster and pay more — because he’s the one who acted on them.
That’s a different kind of advisor.
Steve is the author of The M&A Multiplier Playbook, a proprietary framework for identifying and removing the factors that suppress business valuations. The 26-factor methodology at the heart of ZLV’s work — organized into Operational Drivers, Market Drivers, and Value Accelerators — was developed from Steve’s direct experience on both sides of hundreds of transactions.
He has mentored more than 100 business owners. He has produced dozens of presentations, webinars, and masterclasses on the methodology. He teaches because he believes most founders are operating with an incomplete picture of what their businesses are actually worth — and that the gap between what they believe and what’s possible is almost always larger than they expect.
“Steve can see all the playing pieces and intuitively knows exactly which moves to make to win big.”
— Dr. Steven Feinberg, CEO, The Advantage Makers
Steve doesn’t take listings and shop them to buyers. He doesn’t work on commission from a 3-month sprint to close. He doesn’t optimize for volume.
He works with a small number of founder-owners at a time, each engagement running 6 to 12 months. The process is collaborative and diagnostic — starting with the 26-factor assessment, building a clear picture of where the value is and where it’s being discounted, and then executing the preparation strategy before the company ever goes to market.
By the time a ZLV client is in front of buyers, they’re not negotiating from weakness. They’re negotiating with leverage.
That’s by design.
Steve is a 4-time champion bodybuilder and powerlifter — which may be the least surprising thing about someone who has spent 40+ years building things from scratch and finishing what he starts.
He is the father of two daughters and a committed philanthropist. His charitable work spans organizations focused on youth development, environmental conservation, and ocean health — including Younglife Africa, the Pachamama Alliance, the BVI Art Reef Project, Oceans Unite, and Virgin Unite.
He also founded Zero Limits Capital, a venture firm focused on female-founded technology companies in AI and blockchain — because he believes the next generation of transformational companies is being built by people the traditional investment world underestimates.
He’s spent his career proving that wrong.
A great exit requires more than one kind of expertise. Transaction experience, operational knowledge, legal and capital structure, market positioning — no single advisor carries all of it. The ZLV team is small by design and specialized by necessity.
Most businesses hire the plumbers before the blueprint exists. Russell built a 35-year career around fixing that. Founder of Marketing Plan Formula, he makes sure the value ZLV engineers is visible to the buyers who will pay the most for it.
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Profile Coming SoonA specialist brought in for a critical piece of the exit-preparation process. Full profile to follow.
Read the full profile →
Profile Coming SoonA specialist brought in for a critical piece of the exit-preparation process. Full profile to follow.
Read the full profile →
The 26-factor assessment takes 15 to 30 minutes and scores your business across the same framework Steve has used across 470+ engagements. Most founders are surprised by what they find.