In this interview, Santo Stephens recounts his journey from a little‑league player to an NFL "wedge buster" and explains how the brief, layered nature of a professional football career shaped his approach to business and leadership. He emphasizes that the NFL is "Not For Long," so athletes must prepare to restart in a new field, learning business skills while still playing. Stephens stresses humility, continuous learning from seasoned professionals, and defines leadership as fundamentally relational—both top‑down and bottom‑up. He shares a recurring practice of meeting with his young leaders, asking where they see themselves in 5‑10 years and how he can help them get there, illustrating his mentorship‑focused style.
I want to talk about Santos real quick. I want to talk about your claim to fame in the NFL, how you took what you're teaching now, how that resonated in your life on a celebrity status platform.
Yeah, so, you know, a lot of times what people don't understand is if you look at the sports analogy of it, you know, nobody starts off as a pro. Right, right. You go through Little League, Little League takes you maybe to travel ball, travel ball takes you to high school, high school takes you to college, and from college, if you're lucky, you get a shot at the possibility of playing in, uh, a minor league and then in the majors. Yeah. Or in my case, from college to the NFL. Well, I mean, during that time, nobody saw me when I was on just the travel team. Right. Nobody saw when I actually made the team. They said, well, you know, you're going to be a scout team player for probably about, you know, the better part of the first year of your existence here, you know, uh, or, uh, you had to make the team as, uh, and they don't even have this position anymore, a wedge buster, right? That's the guy who pretty much goes down and he knows that his job is to go down and find 2 or 3 people, put them on the ground. He's probably gonna be on the ground after it's over too. But you can't waste the timeout. You get your behind up and get off to the sideline because the Pro Bowler made the tackle, right?
Right.
But you had to get out of the way. You did your job, you got on out of the way. Uh, and so, you know, when I look at all of those things and I look at the way business is built, it's in layers, you know. There's levels to all this, right? And so if we're not willing to go through those pieces, we can't necessarily want to reap the rewards. If we haven't put in that work, right? Um, and so with me playing pro football at that, that period of time, after it's over with— because, you know, the NFL, uh, a lot of people don't know this, stands for Not For Long. So you're not gonna be there that long, you know. I don't care even if your career is, uh, a wonderful 10 years or better, that's still just a fraction of your entire life.
That's correct.
Think about this. You have to restart.
Mm-hmm.
You got to start all over again. Whatever business you decide to do, if you decide to coach, if you decide to go on and open a business, if you start a nonprofit, whatever it is, you've got to start over because you got to learn the skills that it's going to take in order for you to be able to open that business and to be a viable part of the marketplace. Right. And so 20, 30 years ago, I knew that that was something that I was going to have to do. And so while I was playing, I started to learn those pieces.
Nice.
But at the same time, getting into the marketplace, you've got to be humble enough to know that you don't know everything. And when you do get into that place, you learn from some of the best people that are already there. But for me, leadership and leadership in its totality is all relational. Yes. Now, and that's from the top down and from the bottom up. If in fact I'm going to create a team that's successful, I've got to then be open enough to be able to share what my desires are, but quiet enough to listen to what everybody else wants to do as well. One of the best conversations I have almost every single time I take over a new leadership post is I sit across the table from all of my young leaders and I ask them, where do you want to be in the next 5 or 10 years? And more importantly, what is my role in assisting you to get there?
