Brian Mullaney understands you can’t achieve BIG things without a BIG goals. For Mullaney — the co-founder and president of Smile Train, the world’s leading cleft lip and palate charity — audacity is a virtue.

Last month, Mullaney traveled to China, called a press conference, and predicted that within five years China would become the the first developing country in the world to be cleft-free. China has more than 2 million people with clefts!

One week later, in an interview with Generation BIG, Mullaney explained the bold move: “That is thinking big. That is the biggest country in the world…Along the way, we have thought big and we have reached high and aimed high. You certainly fail a lot, and you need thick skin. But it makes it exciting when it works.”

For Smile Train, it works for more often than it fails.

Established in 1999 by Mullaney and Charles B. Wang, Smile Train has performed roughly 500,000 surgeries to repair clefts in just 10 years.

Just three years before he started Smile Train, people laughed at Mullaney when he suggested a charity could perform 10,000 cleft repairs per year. Those people were affiliated with Operation Smile, an older charity which Mullaney served as a board member and volunteer.

Mullaney recalls his conversation with Operation Smile’s leadership: “I said, ‘Let us make this ambitious plan, and by the year 2000, we will grow to 10,000 surgeries a year.’ At that time, there were 3,000 a year. They all laughed. They said 10,000 by 2,000 would never happen.”

Three years later, Mullaney was running a new, competing charity which now makes the “10,000 by 2,000″ goal seem quaint and antiquated. Smile Train performed 110,000 surgeries last year.

Mullaney and Smile Train have reached such heights by reinventing the way cleft charities operate.

With Operation Smile, Mullaney joined massive medical missions that were costly, cumbersome, and ultimately ineffective.

“With these medical missions, you go with 40 or 50 Americans who are angels, taking time off, taking their vacation to go help other kids,” Mullaney said. “You ship 10,000 pounds of equipment to Hanoi, Vietnam, where I went. You set shop and 500 kids show up, but you only have days of surgeries. So you help 100 and turn away 400…I got sick of turning away thousands and thousands of kids.”

Mullaney urged Operation Smile’s leadership to adopt a new approach. Rather than ship medical personnel and equipment around the world, the charity could train local doctors to perform the surgeries. Operation Smile rejected the idea.

Knowing that the innovative business model he proposed would be more effective, Mullaney left Operation Smile and co-founded Smile Train. The rest is history. Smile Train performs more than 100,000 surgeries per year. Operation Smile, which has four times as many employees as Smile Train, still performs fewer than 10,000 per year.

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Brian Mullaney is clearly bold, innovative and generous — a role model for Generation BIG. He is one of several prominent BIG people whom we’re profiling in our upcoming book, Generation BIG – The Rising Tide of Dreams to Action. In the book, we’ll tell you more about Smile train, reveal more of the extraordinary innovations that Mullaney has applied to the charity, and give you ideas that you can use as you strive to be BIG or get BIGGER.

Meanwhile, for more information about Brian Mullaney and Smile Train, please visit www.smiletrain.org.

Posted in BIG Blog, Inspiration