Broker Turns Battle with Cancer into Missionary Effort
Washington Business Journal – May 28, 1999
The pictures on Mark Larsen’s desk read like a shrine to Anthony Robbins or Confucius.
“Do not fear the winds of adversity.” Advises the image of a hang glider cutting through the distant blue sky. “Remember: A kite rises against the wind rather than with it.”
“It seems like through every tough challenge, you grow,” said Larsen, a newly anointed senior vice president at CB Richard Ellis, “Great change happens from bad things.”
If that’s the case, call Larsen a chameleon.
At 42, he has a loving wife and two kids, lucrative relationships with several Fortune 500 clients, and a hard-earned senior job title at the country’s largest commercial real estate brokerage.
He’s happy, though the events he’s been through including the death of his parents from cancer and his own battle with prostate cancer, would make most men’s faces pale.
Flash back 20 years, Larsen is at Virginia Tech, and his mother Mary is back home in New Jersey, withering away from a rare form of internal cancer. Mark, the youngest of four, teams with his siblings to give his parents a trip they had always wanted to take.
The Larsen kids craft a treasure chest out of papier mache, then stuff it with $1,000 in quarters, enough for a down payment on a trip to England.
“I learned that life is precious,” Larsen said. “I had to treat every conversation with my mother like it could be our last.”
Mary Larsen died in 1981 after a 4 ½ year battle with cancer. She was 55. Three months later, Larsen’s father Kevin and English professor at nearby Kean College, was diagnosed with colon cancer. He died the following year at 56.
Never one to dwell on hardships – he learned that trait from his dad – Larsen embarked on a career in computer sales. Still in his 20s, he soon was making $150,000 a year.
“He could sell ice to an Eskimo,” said Warren Amason of Grubb & Ellis, a longtime friend of Larsen’s who now is competitor.
Amason proved he was no slouch at salesmanship either. While teaching a scuba diving class to Larsen and his wife Cindy – then his fiancée – Amason convinced the erstwhile computer sales man to get into the commercial real estate business at Leggat McCall, later Gubb & Ellis.
It was at Leggat McCall that Larsen began volunteering for the American Cancer Society (ACS). Before long, he became a member of the local board of directors.
“He had a great enthusiasm for everything he did,” said Leslie Gephardt, senior vice president of income development for ACS’s mid-Atlantic division. “He was always there for us when we needed him.”
Larsen had found a niche at ACS, but his professional career was stagnating. After nearly four years at Leggat McCall where only seniority paid dividends, Larsen moved to CB, where production correlated more directly with pay.
However it was the late 80’s, and there was a problem, a big problem. The market had collapsed. Instead of doing huge office deals, brokers now were lining up for 2,000 square foot leases, the kind of deals that used to be afterthoughts.
The few money-making deals Larsen did land in those lean years were tenant deals. If he could focus on tenant representation, Larsen figured, business could really take off.
“When you’re on the landlord side, you have the buildings to market,” Larsen said. “When you’re a tenant rep, your product is yourself”
Larsen soon was winning over clients, using his honest, affable approach. When one of his clients, TRW, signed two leases totaling 160,000 square feet, Larsen knew he had broken through.
But fate’s cruel hand wasn’t done with him yet.
Since his early days with ACS, Larsen had gone in for regular colon cancer checkups, aggressively fighting to prevent his dad’s killer from sneaking up on him. Later, when the insurance companies stop paying for tests, he stopped taking them for a while.
It’s January 1996, and Larsen vows to go in for a complete physical, including a colonoscopy – the $1,500 fee be damned. Through most doctors are loath to test for prostate cancer until their patients turn 50, Larsen’s doctor decides to give him the prostate test along with the colonoscopy.
The doctor tells him his risk factor is a little high and he should come back again in six months. Not wanting to wait, Larsen goes to a urologist who had examined him four years earlier.
After a biopsy and more tests, Larsen gets the news. He has prostate cancer, a disease that kills 40,000 men in America every year. He is 39, uncommonly young for what many people still consider an old man’s disease.
The day after Larsen learned he had prostate cancer, his wife had a miscarriage.
It was time, Larsen said, to take stock of his life.
“Within a few hours of the diagnosis, I became far more worried about my wife and kids, thinking I might not see their children, or their high school graduation, even their elementary school graduation,” he said.
Larsen spent thousands of hours on the Internet researching the disease. He read a book by Dr. Patrick Walsh, the groundbreaking prostate cancer specialist at Johns Hopkins University.
He knows the risks. Sterility is almost a given, incontinence is foreseeable, impotence a possibility. He also knows if he dos not go through with the surgery quickly, the cancer could spread beyond the prostate and eventually kill him.
Though the waiting list can run six months. Larsen gets an appointment with Walsh within two weeks. The surgery is a success.
Larsen soon goes back to volunteering with ACS. Total strangers call him at night, on weekends, whenever. They’re scared, wanting to know what they should expect as young men with a disease still kept under a shroud of mystery in most circles. Larsen, one of the top deal-making brokers in the city, listens and shares his story.
He has started the annual “Day of Golf” fund-raiser to fight prostate cancer. Day of Golf had its best turnout ever May 17, but Larsen still wants an honorary chairman for the event who will bring celebrity status, local ties, a corporate background and prostate cancer survivor status to the table.
Ask the people who have crossed paths with Larsen, particularly the ones who fight with him against the specter of cancer, and they’ll tell you what else he brings to the table.
“A passion for helping men take a proactive role in their live,” said Karen Brav, director of golf fundraisers for the mid-Atlantic division of ACS.
“What he has given us is far more than whatever we’d be able to give him.”
Mark Larsen
Senior Vice President – CB Richard Ellis
Age: 42
Family: Wife Cindy, son Mark 10, daughter, Sarah 7
Residence: Oak Hill
Education: Bachelors in marketing, Virginia Tech, 1980
Civic Activities: Executive committee International Development Research Council, Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, Economic Advisory Commission, former member American Cancer Society board of directors, “Day of Golf: co-chair
Hobbies: Playing hockey, golf, skiing, coaching hockey and soccer.
Reading List: Tom Clancy Novels, “They take me out of the day-to-day world to something completely different”
Vacation Spot: South Bethany
Words of Wisdom: “Forty thousand people die needlessly from prostate cancer”
Mark Larsen is president of Larsen Commercial Real Estate Services in Reston. Phone: 703/ 716-1000
E-mail: mlarsen@larsencommercial. com