What’s the Bigg idea?

Steve Bigari leans forward, the early-morning sun slicing through the windows of the Valley Hi Golf Club and bathing him in light. “I’m here to share some of the things in my heart,” he says.

And what fills his heart this day and every day is the plight of the 39 million working poor in the United States.

These are the people who serve your food, clean your hotel rooms and care for your children, he tells the gathering of Pikes Peak Sales Professionals members.

To many of us, they’re invisible, he says: quietly struggling, rarely acknowledged. But these people have names. Talk to them, he urges. Treat them with respect.

He practices what he preaches, interrupting his talk to thank the waitress who brings him breakfast.

Then he continues, seeking to instill in others the same passion that guides him.

That passion leads the famed entrepreneur to make similar presentations locally and to groups across the country. It fuels America’s Family, a Colorado Springs-based nonprofit organization Bigari founded to provide benefits to the working poor.

And it’s evident in “The Box You Got,” a book he wrote to stir others to action.

Bigari — a founding partner of Mr. Biggs Family Fun Center, now Bigg City, and a highlysought consultant known as one of McDonald’s most successful and innovative owner/operators — uses stories from his life to impart lessons on leadership in “The Box You Got.”

In doing so, the book opens a window into what drives him.

His mission to help the underserved has been molded by many things. By his childhood, growing up in a working-class family. By his years with Mc-Donald’s, watching low-wage earners struggle to get by. By his faith in God.

The dominoes of one’s life can fall in amazing ways, and in his case, everything has led to this point, to this mission, Bigari believes.

“I’m not saying you’re predestined for your life to go exactly one way,” he says. “But a lot of things just fell into place so easily. It just led me down a certain path. Divine appointment, that’s how I see it.”

FINDING HIS WAY

Bigari, 47, was born in the mining town of Iron River, Mich., where his dad managed a hardware store. When the mines closed and the local economy collapsed, his father moved the family to Milwaukee.

“It was kind of a culture shock, but it really opened up a world of possibilities,” Bigari says. “Going to a big school, playing football, I was able to get recruited. And that’s how I got my education.”

The defensive end/offensive guard was recruited by all three service academies, a couple of Big Eight schools and several Ivy League schools. He decided on Brown University but stayed there only a year. It was a great school, he says, but a wealthy one, and he didn’t fit in.

So he turned to West Point, where he learned about commitment — and about himself.

“I think what West Point does, first and foremost, is it takes everything away,” he says. “It humbles you beyond belief, it strips away who you thought you were, and then you really kind of figure out where you want to go.”

He met his first wife while at West Point. He graduated in 1982, went into the Army and was stationed at Fort Carson. He was a young lieutenant when his daughter, Sara, was born.

Sara suffered from various birth defects and ailments; Bigari says she was a “walking medical dictionary.” She was moved to The Children’s Hospital in Denver while Bigari and his wife stayed nearby at the Ronald McDonald House.

Wanting to give back, he joined the Ronald McDonald House board of directors. That led him to his mentor — and a career under the golden arches.

GAINING A MENTOR

While on the board, Bigari got to know Brent Cameron, the owner of several McDonald’s restaurants in Colorado Springs. With Bigari transitioning out of the Army, Cameron offered him a managerial job. But Bigari had his sights set elsewhere.

“A military headhunter took me down to Dallas and got me seven job offers with Fortune 100 companies, so I was pretty full of myself,” Bigari recalls. He moved to New Jersey to work for Johnson & Johnson.

Bigari expected to be a big fish in a big pond. Cameron warned him he’d merely be “a stiff in a Brooks Brothers suit.”

It took only a few months for Bigari to realize Cameron was right. The New Jersey job wasn’t for him. He returned to Colorado Springs to work for Cameron.

Bigari wanted to get his hands dirty, to learn every crew person’s job before rising to manager — and Cameron was happy to oblige. So Bigari’s career at McDonald’s began with scrubbing urinals.

Cameron moved him quickly from job to job, from crew to assistant manager to general manager. Bigari became Cameron’s partner about five years into their relationship.

And then tragedy: In 1992, Cameron and his wife died in an avalanche. Cameron’s company was sold, but Bigari was able to buy one of his restaurants, the McDonald’s at Academy Boulevard and San Miguel Street.

During the next decade, he bought 11 more McDonald’s restaurants. He also became known for a series of innovations, including a credit-card payment system and call centers to take orders speedily.

But not everything was a hit. His best invention, he says, was an automatic washer for sanitizing the thousands of plastic balls in a McDonald’s PlayPlace ball pit. But then Mc-Donald’s got rid of its ball pits.

“There’s this American notion that successful people win all the time, but the most successful people I know fail more than they succeed,” Bigari says. “Because if you’re not failing, you’re not taking big enough risks.”

Another innovation was his McFamily Benefits package, which offered access to transportation, child care, health care and other benefits to employees — an effort to build loyalty among workers while helping them on the road to self-sufficiency.

McFamily was the genesis for America’s Family, which Bigari founded in 2002. Last summer, Bigari sold his dozen McDonald’s stores to devote more time to America’s Family — and his own family.

CREATING A FAMILY

He and his first wife had two daughters, Sara and Cali. After divorcing several years ago, he vowed he’d never marry again.

“I really felt like no matter how hard I tried to save that marriage, to me it was still a failure. I blew my shot.”

Then he met Brenda, who worked at his Bigari Foods, and as he writes in “The Box You Got,” she stole his heart.

When they began dating, Brenda was working to adopt a baby girl from China.

“It was a passion for me,” she says. “It was something I felt compelled to do.”

It was a compulsion Bigari didn’t understand at first.

“The notion of adoption for me didn’t make any sense. I had two wonderful biological kids. Somebody else’s kid, how could I love them as much?”

But when Brenda brought young Anna Mei home from China, “she just swept me off my feet,” Bigari says.

He and Brenda, who married in 2002, now have three adopted children: Anna Mei, 6; Zachary, 3, who’s also from China; and Matthew, 2.

“My grade as a dad has been a C and I’m not a C student,” he told The Gazette last year when discussing the decision to sell his restaurants.

Brenda says that’s too harsh. “I would say that he was an A and he’s probably an A-plus now. He has such a passion for the kids.”

It’s that passion, she says, that she loves most about him: “his passion for being a better man and serving God and loving our family. And certainly his passion for helping the working poor and putting America’s Family in place. That’s what drives him.”

HONING HIS MISSION

Kim Shugart is Bigari’s friend and business partner. They’re among the founding partners of what is now Bigg City, which opened in 2005 and is under the same mammoth roof as America’s Family.

Shugart also is an ally in Bigari’s mission, serving on the board of America’s Family.

“We both are strong Christian men, and I think that’s part of what drives us,” Shugart says. “Our Lord and savior commanded us to do a number of things and one of those was to help folks.

“That’s a good command. It’s a great way to live, even if you aren’t a religious person.”

Shugart calls Bigari idealistic, honorable and tenacious. He’s fun to be around, he says, “and very challenging to be around, because he comes up with an idea every minute and you have to run fast to keep up.”

Bigari’s idea for America’s Family isn’t to evolve into a mammoth organization with offices in every city. Instead, it’s to inspire businesses to provide similar benefits — and ultimately erase the need for America’s Family.

“It’s not about building an organization,” Bigari says. “It’s about framing a movement. I want to change the way people treat the underserved.”

Bigari may seem bigger than life, a vibrant personality doing everything in what he kiddingly calls Bigari Standard Time. For him, “it’s not OK to just write a book. I have to write a book in three months.”

But don’t put him on a pedestal. “I just don’t think I’m very impressive,” he says. And he’s quick to rattle off reasons to support that view.

“I tend to be unfocused. I tend to get all caught up in what I’m doing and lose sight of the needs of other people around me. I’m always attracted by the next big thing. I’m often distracted by lots of insignificant things. I never do everything I’m supposed to do.”

Still, he says, he was put on this Earth for a reason. To help orphans and single moms — “the widows of our time,” he calls them. To help those 39 million hard-working Americans build better lives. To motivate others to develop their visions and follow their hearts.

“My best hope for my life,” he says, “is that it might inspire people who otherwise would have sat around and said one person can’t make a difference.”

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0272 or bill.radford@gazette.com

TRAPPED IN POVERTY

Steve Bigari’s mission, as he details in his book, “The Box You Got,” is to “help 39 million hard-working Americans who are trapped in poverty connect to the resources that will improve their lives and enable them to achieve the highest levels of prosperity.”

According to “Working Hard, Falling Short,” a report released in late 2004 by the Annie E. Casey, Ford and Rockefeller foundations, more than one in four American working families earn wages so low that they have difficulty surviving financially. “These are families with responsible, hardworking breadwinners who want to get ahead but hold down low-paying jobs with inadequate benefits and little hope for advancement,” the report states.

Among the report’s findings:

- 20 million children live in low-income families.

- Single women head 38 percent of low-income working families.

- Working families with a minority parent are twice as likely to be low-income as families with white parents.

- 20 percent of American jobs pay less than $8.84 an hour, a poverty level wage for a family of four.

- More than half of low-income working families pay more than a third of their income for housing.

- More than a third of low-income working families have a parent with no health insurance.

- Low-income workers are nearly three times more likely not to have finished high school than those who earn more.

PEARLS FROM ‘THE BOX YOU GOT’

In “The Box You Got: Transforming the World You Live In,” Steve Bigari offers several of what he calls “bigg ideas.” Among them:

We are all leaders.

“If you don’t think of yourself as a leader, don’t fear. It just means you’ve never gotten in touch with your deepest passions.”

Vision attracts talent.

“Great vision transfers the passion of your heart into the hearts of others.”

Always consider the question, ‘What’s in it for me?’

“The bottom line to collaboration is that it works best when the people involved pursue their vested self-interests.”

Don’t take “no” for an answer.

“Wise people seek alternate ways to get a job done even in the face of opposition, dissent or naysaying. Whatever you’re faced with, there is a solution.”

If you’re afraid of failure, get over it — everybody fails!

“Swinging for the fences means taking more risks. You have to swing harder, commit sooner and react faster.”

You can’t put perfume on a pig.

(Well, you can, but it’s still a pig.) “Like the little child in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ don’t be afraid to call ’em as you see ’em.”

To order “The Box You Got,” go to

www.theboxyougot.com. ($19.95 plus shipping and handling.)