[00:00:00 ] Larry O'Nan: We could have failed miserably, Tommy, but that was okay. I learned a long time ago, and even in the book that I've written, I did a foreword about the freedom to fail. And I was afraid to step out and do things, and I had a guy that I was working with, and he said, Larry, freedom to fail is what you've got.

[00:00:19 ] Larry O'Nan: No one's ever done it before. Go ahead and step into it. All you can do is go back and do it again. If it doesn't work, then try something else. And freedom to fail never became a barrier to me. If this is not the way to do it, we'll figure it out later and tweak it and do it again.

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[00:00:34 ] Tommy Thomas: My guest today is Larry O'Nan, and Larry is a graduate of the University of Colorado. He and his wife, Pat, served on the staff of Cru, previously known as Campus Crusade for Christ, for 18 years.

And during this time, Larry dedicated 13 years to developing and overseeing the accelerated growth of many fund development initiatives, resulting in more than 150 million raised for evangelism and development programs worldwide. I first met Larry in July of 1973. I had joined the staff of Campus Crusade and had been assigned to report to Larry.

It's an immense pleasure to get to interview my first boss.

Larry, Welcome to NextGen Nonprofit Leadership.

[00:01:20 ] Larry O'Nan: Tommy, it's so good to be with you. Thanks a lot for inviting me to dialogue with you a little bit today about all kinds of things. We've got a long history.

[00:01:28 ] Tommy Thomas: We could go in a lot of directions. We could do a whole podcast on reminiscing about memories, but there was one that stuck in my mind. And I don't know if you remember or not.  It was the summer of ‘74 and Larry and I had traveled to Korea to attend this big conference, Expo 74, with a million and a half of our good friends.

And after the conference, we traveled around Southeast Asia, but the leg of the trip that I remember was with the Philippines. And it was so hot, and it was so humid, I was raised in the south and I thought I knew what heat and humidity was, but they put a whole new definition on it over there.

I remember we shared a bedroom that had two single beds and one oscillating fan. I can remember lying in my bed and that fan would hit me and then it would go away and it'd go over, swing over to Larry's side of the room, and hit him. And it'd go back and forth. And I thought, a lot of significant learning took place on that trip, but the heat and the humidity and that oscillating fan stick out in my memory, Larry.

[00:02:34 ] Larry O'Nan: Oh, my goodness. And I was in the Philippines about two years ago. I chair a board of a nonprofit in the Philippines called Little Feet and Friends, and I was sharing a room with a Filipino pastor that was with me. And I was laying there thinking at least the last time I was here, it wasn't oscillating. I was actually in the only air-conditioned room on that entire compound.

[00:03:00 ] Tommy Thomas:  Yeah, they get used to that heat over there. It's amazing. It is amazing. Before we dig too deep into your career and the books you've written and that kind of thing, I want to go back to your maybe to your childhood a little bit. Growing up in Colorado, what are two or three things that you remember most about your childhood?

[00:03:18 ] Larry O'Nan: My father was a pastor in Western Colorado at the time. And Tommy, the things that stuck with my head the most was learning to do something from nothing. Dad was encouraging. I had a horse that was 36 inches tall, a Grand Canyon pony horse. And I learned to make money with that little rascal.

He about killed me on a race, but I decided that I could take him to the richer part of my town. And for a quarter, I could get a kid to ride on the back of the horse and I could make more money in three hours as a 10- or 12-year-old than I could if I was doing anything else. So, learning to do something from nothing, taking an idea and creating something from it.

And believe it or not, over and over again in my life, I've seen that same pattern kick into gear many times. Because too many times I was told to go do it, but there's no plan.

[00:04:09 ] Tommy Thomas:   What was high school like in Western Colorado?

[00:04:13 ] Larry O'Nan: Western Colorado is a unique area in that we were the major town between Denver and Salt Lake.

And it was a rural community, but it was also a cosmopolitan mixing area. It was the largest city, and it was there that I got involved in theater a great deal. I knew I was going to become famous in the theater world for five years. Even into my junior year in college, I knew that's where I was aiming.

I began not only liking the acting, but I really got into the directing and the back of the scene, what goes on behind to make a show work. Again, it was taking something from almost nothing and creating in six weeks, a full production of South Pacific or you name the shows that we did. We did a lot of major shows.

[00:04:59 ] Larry O'Nan: And over again, when I was in high school, I started seeing that there was a need for some people to come in and do the backside of the curtain to make the front of the curtain actually work. And so I've enjoyed the backside of the curtain all my life and standing back in the back of a room, watching it happen when it goes off.

So that was my high school days. From there, I went to university. And majored in theater up to my junior year in college when I decided I wanted to get out of that field and ended up with a double major in English education and was supposed to become a drama coach and a debate coach and an English teacher.

And I never went that way. I went into full time ministry.

[00:05:43 ] Tommy Thomas: What are people always surprised to find out about you?

[00:05:47 ] Larry O'Nan: Oh, my goodness. What were they surprised to find out about me? Probably that I think it was a surprise to even me too, is that when I would make a commitment to do something, I later discovered I have a high degree of responsibility in my whole system, but I cannot give up on things.

When I say I'm going to do something, I do it, and that's probably surprised me as much as it did them. But it would also bother me when things happen when people would not follow through. Because to me, everybody should have that same value. I discover people are different, but in defining what my strengths were, I really discovered one of those was maximizing the occasion, but the other one was a driving force to be responsible, to get it done.

Even today. I've got to say no, because if I say yes, I'm caught with a responsibility to carry through and do something.

[00:06:41 ] Tommy Thomas: What do you remember about the first time you had people reporting to you as a manager?

[00:06:48 ] Larry O'Nan: When I was in my second year at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Campus Crusade in the Ivy League area, I was assigned a responsibility to have a music group come through the area. And they gave me 30 days of time with that group. And I decided if I was going to have them for 30 days and they were going to charge me by the day, I was going to get my money out of them.

And I about killed the group because I started organizing people on every campus in five states to get ready for this group to come to town. And we did, I think 32 concerts in 30 days. They never told me not to do it. They just told me to schedule the group and I overscheduled them. But I had good teams on all these campuses, both Ivy League and state campuses and Christian colleges that were in that area.

[00:07:38 ] Larry O'Nan: And I learned from that experience that people will do what you tell them to do if you lay out a clear plan and help them get there. So, to me, it's not about me getting the credit, it's about the people that I recruit to do the job where they own it. And then I can sit back and help them be successful at it.

For years, that's the way I functioned. Now, later, I got into developing more people when I got into early fund development. There was only two of us who started off with a huge project that no one had any clue what to do about. But within 13 years, I had about 100 people and seven departments working for me.

[00:08:18 ] Larry O'Nan: And again, it was more of a facilitator role and an encourager role that I saw my leadership to be not a one that went ahead and get it done. So even when I started writing books and doing other things, I developed teams that were working on those things and they had as much ownership on the project that I did, and they felt that ownership, I think, and it carried the whole program.

So, to say I was really leading. Yeah, I was influenced, but I was more by encouraging them to go get the job done and help us get it done together. So that happened.

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[00:08:54 ] Tommy Thomas: So, you were on the campus staff. How did you get over into fundraising?

[00:09:02 ] Larry O'Nan: I almost tripped over that one. I did two years at the University of Pennsylvania. Then that music group came through. It was called the New Folk at the time.

And when I killed them in 30 days, they asked me that summer, if I would move out of the campus ministry and had started advancing that Eastern United States group that had, I think, 30 s