Dan Schulman believed he had swapped the corner office for cowboy boots for good. After close to a decade leading digital payments giant PayPal, he was enjoying retirement on a Montana ranch alongside his wife, Summerly, and roughly 900 head of cattle. He was happy, in love, and had no appetite for the punishing schedule that comes with being a chief executive.

So when fellow Verizon board members pressed him to take over as CEO, he declined. Several times.

The telecommunications giant, however, was losing market share, slipping behind competitors, and wrestling with its own bureaucracy. Ultimately, a sense of duty—plus some persuasion from his wife—pulled him out of retirement to accept the top job in October 2025.

“I came in with a little bit of a bad attitude,” Schulman told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell in the latest episode of Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry. A year on, he says he is “absolutely loving it and pretty hopeful about our future.”

The reluctant hire is now one year into a three-year turnaround plan at Verizon, a Fortune 500 company that generated $138 billion in revenue last year. And the early numbers are moving in his direction.

A reluctant return to the corner office

The former PayPal chief stepped down in 2023, and retirement gave him ample opportunity to lean into his inner cowboy. The New Jersey native had been wearing cowboy boots since eighth grade—long before he owned a ranch, or cattle to fill it.

“I really didn’t want to come back into the CEO job,” he said. “These jobs are all-consuming. You’re putting in 10 to 14 hours a day.”

Verizon, as it happens, knows a thing or two about making repeat calls. Schulman may have been prepared to hang up on corporate life, but the company was not ready to part ways with him.

He had served on Verizon’s board since 2018 and had been its lead independent director since December 2024. He knew the management team, understood the business, and had watched the company struggle to compete. In effect, he was already the board’s contingency plan.

“I was the hit-by-the-bus scenario,” he said. Had anything happened to then-CEO Hans Vestberg, “I would go in temporarily.”

Schulman said Verizon had been ceding market share for roughly five years. Once first in its industry by market capitalization, it had dropped to last, and its long-standing reputation for a superior wireless network was no longer enough to keep customers from shopping around.

“We had the lowest P/E, which is what the Street thinks of our future growth potential,” he said.

Schulman conceded that the board probably should have acted sooner. It had crafted a plan to confront the company’s difficulties, but the strategy failed to deliver. Invoking a line from his father, he put it this way: “People plan, God laughs.”

“We had a plan. It didn’t work out, so we had to go to Plan B, which was me, not Plan A,” he said.

Despite his reservations, Schulman believed Verizon still possessed the assets to turn things around—including what he estimated at 150 million customer lines. The board kept asking. In the end, it was Summerly who persuaded him, reminding her husband that he could still make a difference.

“I felt an obligation,” he said.

Verizon’s CEO cut 35-signature approvals—and 13,000 jobs

Once he accepted the role, Schulman had no interest in easing in gradually.

At his first all-employee meeting, he offered an unvarnished assessment of the company’s problems, speaking without notes or slides. Verizon had become a “big, lumbering giant that had fallen behind,” he said, marked by a hierarchical culture, slow decision-making, and processes that required roughly 35 signatures to move anything forward.

He also cautioned employees that layoffs were likely.

That warning materialized in November 2025, just weeks into his tenure, when Verizon began cutting more than 13,000 jobs—the largest round of layoffs in the company’s history. Schulman noted that Verizon had previously trimmed 2,000 or 3,000 people each year, often through voluntary buyouts. He wanted the cuts to free up money to reinvest in the business, and to signal to employees that this turnaround would be different.

“I needed to show this was different, that I was very serious about the change that was going to happen,” he said. “Playing to win is not just a slogan for me or a nice marketing thing.”

His strategy centers on replacing Verizon’s risk-averse culture with one willing to experiment, make decisions faster, and put customers ahead of internal processes. That requires rethinking what the company has long put first.

The network is “foundational to everything we do,” Schulman said, but “it can’t be about the network. It has to be about the customer.”

Early results are promising, with two years to go

The overhaul is starting to show up in the numbers. In the third quarter of 2026, Verizon added a net 406,000 postpaid phone lines, up from 44,000 a year earlier. Postpaid phone customers—those paying monthly bills after service, as opposed to prepaid users who pay upfront—are the segment carriers watch most closely, since each line anchors an ongoing billing relationship rather than a one-off promotional win. Its promotional costs to acquire customers fell 41%, and free cash flow—cash left after operating costs and capital spending—rose 12% to $7.8 billion.

Part of the shift came from abandoning an industry habit of luring customers with free phones and promotional offers.

“A free line is not really a net add from my perspective,” Schulman said.

Even so, he recognizes the turnaround is far from finished. He expects it to take three years, and the company has extended his contract through December 2028 to see it through. With roughly two years left on that clock, the quarterly run of postpaid phone net adds, promotional costs, and free cash flow will serve as the visible scoreboard for whether the early momentum lasts.

The ranch will have to wait. Asked how he will judge his tenure when he eventually hands Verizon to a successor, Schulman pointed first to customer trust, then to pride within a company many had written off as too big and too bureaucratic to change.

“We’re surprising a lot of people right now,” he said, “and it feels good when that happens.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.