At 19 years old, Doug Ulman heard the three most feared words in the English language — you have cancer. He was scared, angry and frustrated. So, he called organizations, seeking support and guidance.
“And one organization in particular told me, ‘Unfortunately, we don’t have services for people your age, because people your age don’t get cancer.’ And that just didn’t sit right,” he says.
Ulman ended up starting a grass-roots organization to help young adults affected by cancer. He didn’t know how to run an organization, but he knew that there was a great need and a void within the cancer community.
And he found his life’s work — eventually turning Livestrong Foundation into a global brand over the course of 14 years, before stepping in as the new CEO of Pelotonia a year ago.
Ulman spoke at the Smart Business Smart 50 event about lessons he’s learned. Here’s some of what he had to say.
Lessons from coach
Ulman played soccer for a legendary coach in high school, who was a bit of a tyrant. “He taught me so many things as a kid that I never appreciated until later in life,” he says.
In order to try out for the team, you had to be able to juggle the soccer ball 150 times.
“He’d say, ‘This is not a bearing on whether you’re good or not. This is a test of your discipline and your will, and how badly you want to be a part of this.’ Because anybody can do this, anyone can achieve this metric, if you spend hours and hours and hours and hours on your front lawn, like so many of us did,” Ulman says.
The other lesson this coach taught was that the ball doesn’t stop moving, there are no timeouts and stoppages. So, walk when you can and run when you must.
“From an entrepreneurial perspective, we have to do the same thing,” he says. “Pick our spots — when do we charge ahead with high-risk innovative ideas, and when do we take a breather and make sure that we’re covering the bases and growing our business or entity.”
Unexpected innovation
At Livestrong, Ulman had the privilege of working with people who were naive enough to think they could change the world and audacious enough to try.
The philosophy was that if they failed, they would have only positively impacted the lives of a few million people, which isn’t so bad, he says. But sometimes innovation comes unexpectedly.
“Sometimes innovative ideas strike you at first as things that are not possible. And you might, sort of, brush them aside, and say, ‘That’s a bad idea. We shouldn’t go down that path,’” Ulman says.
In 2003, he was sitting in a room, brainstorming ideas on how to create something that would inspire millions of people.
Somebody suggested creating a little yellow rubber wristband, and then selling it for $1. The organization could ask people who were supporting loved ones with cancer, who cared about cancer research, prevention and survivorship, to wear it as a symbol of hope.
“There were about eight or nine of us in the room, and only one thought it was a good idea,” he says. “I was in the seven or eight that thought it was a terrible idea.
“As a cancer survivor, I said, ‘Nobody is going to wear that. Why would somebody put something on that outwardly showed that they were a part of this community?’” Ulman says.
Measuring impact
Remember that the dollars are simply a means; they are not in any way shape or form the end, Ulman says.
“In the philanthropic world, people always ask you ‘How much money did you raise? How many donors do you have?’
“And while that’s one metric, the ultimate impact is how many lives did we improve? How many lives did we save? How many lives did we positively affect, in a way that was transformational?” he says.
The evolution of Pelotonia
Pelotonia started as an event but has become so much more.
“As we think to the future of sustainability, we’ve got a huge challenge,” he says. “How do we take what started as an event, in one city, in one location, and grow this to a national or international social movement to eradicate the suffering and death this disease causes?”
It’s going to take innovative ideas, support and even things like technology and infrastructure, Ulman says, because for an organization that is 7 years old and has raised more than $100 million, there wasn’t a lot of time to think about how to scale it.
In order to create a sustainable organization, you need to build your brand into a catalyst and keep communicating the impact you already have to inspire others, he says.
Uniting into a community
Ulman grew up in the first planned city in America — Columbia, Maryland.
It was built on the values of diversity, acceptance, inclusion and service, he says. It’s a place that fostered a belief that you can make a difference, give back and have an impact on society and your community.
Ulman says his parents, who were inspired to join this community, always talked about the stark difference between a community and a crowd.
“They said ‘In a crowd, people push and they shove and they elbow and they try to get ahead of the person next to them. And in a community, people embrace, and they smile, and they may hug, or shake hands, and they realize that if we ever want to move forward, we have to move forward together,’” he says.
And Ulman has witnessed time and time again how people can unite, including recently when he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with a group of cancer survivors.
“A group of people no matter how well they know each other, with one goal, with a unifying mission, can achieve anything,” he says.
