At Nelnet board meetings, Steve Butterfield had a reliable enthusiasm for the dividend. When the quarterly payment came up for approval, he made the motion. A founder, a shareholder and a former co-chief executive, he appreciated a business that sent money back to its owners. There are more solemn ways to describe stewardship. Butterfield’s version had the advantage of making everyone know exactly where he stood.
He also had a line for the end of a meal: “Give us the check, and kick us out politely.” His colleagues remembered a competitive reader of financial results, a mentor and a supplier of sayings, some unsuitable for publication. The combination matters. A balance sheet can explain what a company owns. It takes a different sort of accounting to explain why people enjoyed being there.
Butterfield helped establish Nelnet in 1996 with Mike Dunlap. By the time he died on April 16, 2018, he had helped build both a public company and a set of expectations about how its people should treat one another.
A Kansas departure, an Arizona attachment
In 1970, Butterfield left his hometown of Hutchinson, Kansas, for Arizona State University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1974. Arizona became a lasting attachment. The student who arrived from Kansas would become a supporter of the university, a familiar presence around its athletics programs and a participant in the expensive, patient work of improving its facilities.
His professional preparation was in finance. Before entering the student loan business, he spent 15 years as an investment banker. The last four were at Boettcher and Company, where he specialized in municipal finance. That experience placed him among the relationships and financing arrangements on which large institutional projects depend.
In January 1989, he entered the student loan industry. His work included leading a for-profit secondary marketing facility in Scottsdale and then the nonprofit Student Loan Acquisition Authority of Arizona. Those roles concerned the market for loans after they had been made, an essential part of the machinery behind education finance.
The partnership before the ticker symbol
Butterfield and Dunlap began acquiring student loan portfolios together in 1990. Their partnership therefore preceded Nelnet’s founding by several years. The familiar corporate date, 1996, marks an organization taking shape around work they already knew. Their experience began with portfolios, counterparties and the practical question of how to finance education lending.
Nelnet’s public-company chapter began in 2003. Butterfield’s responsibilities included capital market relationships and investor relations, along with asset purchasing and marketing corporate services. These were jobs in which explaining the business was part of running it. Investors needed to understand the assets; business partners needed to understand the proposition.
His formal tenure as co-chief executive of Nelnet, Inc. ran from August 2003 to May 2007. He had served as vice chairman of its predecessor from January 1996 and became Nelnet’s vice chairman in March 2000. The titles shifted as the business developed. His connection extended from its beginnings through the public offering and beyond his departure from daily executive leadership.
A founder’s story can become so crowded with job titles that the actual work disappears. Butterfield’s work sat at an intersection: student loans, the capital needed to hold them and the relationships needed to keep transactions moving. The later recollections of his ease with people give that otherwise rather technical career a recognizable human shape.
Education finance, one transaction at a time
In March 2004, Nelnet announced a relationship with the Rhode Island Student Loan Authority. The arrangement involved selling part of the authority’s existing and future student loan portfolio. Proceeds were intended for education programs in Rhode Island, and Nelnet committed an additional $500,000 in scholarships for students in the state.
Butterfield pointed to an existing servicing relationship and familiarity with the authority’s programs. The transaction brought together a for-profit company and a quasi-state agency. It is a useful example of his professional territory: institutions with different structures finding a way to work together around student finance.
The following year, Nelnet announced its combination with FACTS Management Company. FACTS handled tuition payment plans and financial needs analysis, extending the services Nelnet could offer to families and educational institutions. Butterfield emphasized the additional fee-based revenue and the expansion into tuition payment services. His business vocabulary was precise: new capabilities, new customers and a broader way to participate in education.
For the families involved, the underlying problems were familiar. A tuition bill has a due date. A school needs a way to collect payments. A student needs a financing plan. The company’s expanding services addressed different pieces of that administrative life. Butterfield’s career unfolded around the systems that sit behind those ordinary, consequential moments.
Building that broader company also required people to explain it. In November 2004, Nelnet appointed Cheryl Watson chief communications officer, bringing government and industry relations, corporate communications and investor relations into a coordinated remit. Butterfield connected the appointment to the company’s development as a public business. Growth had created a need for coordination across audiences, alongside the work of acquiring assets and services.
It is an unglamorous detail of company building, and a revealing one. A transaction has to work beyond the announcement. Customers, employees, investors and institutional partners each need to understand their part. Butterfield’s responsibilities put him close to that continuing task of making the organization intelligible to the people around it.
A scholarship closer to home
Butterfield was instrumental in establishing the Nelnet Foundation and the Nelnet Scholars program. Scholarships provided another way for a company built around education finance to support education. They also brought the idea of opportunity into the company’s own extended community.
A 2006 award makes that connection specific. Seth Morel, the son of an associate at Nelnet subsidiary LoanSTAR, received a $5,000 Nelnet Honors Scholarship. He planned to attend Louisiana State University and study computer programming. His activities included basketball, baseball, the Beta Club and a church choir.
Butterfield celebrated the scholars and their families, describing the program as a way to give back to associates. The detail is worth keeping: an employee’s child, a named university, a field of study. Corporate philanthropy becomes easier to understand when it reaches the scale of somebody’s next semester.
The season ticket holder with a fundraising job
Butterfield’s attachment to Arizona State lasted more than four decades. He supported football, basketball, golf, wrestling and baseball, and contributed to projects including the Weatherup Center and Verde Dickey Dome. He was a longtime football season ticket holder and served on the Sun Devil Club’s executive committee.
In 2014, he became co-chairman of the Sun Devil Stadium Momentum campaign. A stadium project brings an unusual constituency together: alumni, donors, coaches, administrators and fans who all have opinions about the place. Butterfield had spent his career working across institutional boundaries. Here was another set, with considerably more maroon and gold.
When coach Todd Graham and athletics director Ray Anderson each pledged $500,000 to the stadium campaign in 2014, Butterfield drew attention to a different number. One hundred sixty people in the department had given money the previous year. He wanted the employees’ participation noticed alongside the larger gifts.
That observation offers a compact view of his approach to giving. The people working inside the institution were participating in its future. Their contributions belonged in the story. A fundraising announcement naturally gravitates toward the largest cheque; Butterfield found room for the people whose names were less likely to make the headline.
By October 2017, ASU had reached an $85 million fundraising goal for the stadium’s reinvention. President Michael Crow thanked Butterfield, Jack Furst and Bill Kent on the field. The university’s plans extended beyond football to a venue used throughout the year for community gatherings, classes, concerts and other activities.
In 2019, the university recognized the three alumni and their families with the Butterfield, Kent, Furst Student-Athlete Facility. Together, the three had donated $40 million toward the broader vision. The naming gave a permanent address to a collaboration that had involved money, persuasion and years of attention.
What people kept
Butterfield stepped down as co-CEO in 2007 to make more time for family and travel, including time in McCall, Idaho. He remained vice chairman and a shareholder. Leaving daily executive duties did not end his connection to the company or to the institutions he supported.
When he died in 2018, Dunlap recalled his ability to remember faces and names and to help others stretch their ambitions. Jeff Noordhoek remembered his warmth and the mark his personality had left on Nelnet. These were observations about repeated encounters: recognition, encouragement, a sense that someone was paying attention.
“He coached up everyone around him and helped them reach further than they thought possible.”
Mike Dunlap, Nelnet co-founder, 2018
In 2022, Nelnet established the Steve Butterfield Award for Excellence in Leadership. Its criteria include service, developing people, humility, vision and innovation. The award puts his name into a recurring decision about which behavior the company wants to recognize.
Becky Pollock, the 2024 recipient, remembered how welcome Butterfield made people feel. Wendi Beck received the award in 2025. In August 2026, Nelnet announced Mike Soucie, chief financial officer of Nelnet Financial Services, as that year’s recipient. Soucie had known Butterfield, making the recognition a connection between colleagues as well as generations of leadership.
The company he helped build can be measured in financial statements. His continuing presence takes other forms: a scholarship, a facility name, an award presented to someone who helps others grow. Remembering a name is a small act. Butterfield’s colleagues kept remembering his.