The cleaner in your office might be the reason you’re in business.
Brandon Arbuckle didn’t know that for years. He ran a creative agency in Gainesville, Florida. Built it from a home office in 2013. Grew it to 24 people. Good culture. Good clients. A flourishing framework built on six dimensions of human wellbeing.
And the whole time, a survivor of sex trafficking was cleaning his floors.
He only found out when a nonprofit director introduced herself at a gym. She said, “Did you used to have a company clean your offices?” He said yes. She said, “That person was the first person we ever rescued from trafficking in this city. And while she was in our programme, she kept telling us. You need to meet whoever owns that office.”
Brandon had no idea.
That’s the thing about brokenness. It doesn’t announce itself. It works quietly, nearby, while you’re in meetings about Q3 revenue.
He had always believed trafficking occurred in Asia, in impoverished countries, or perhaps places like Las Vegas or Miami—if he was being honest. It never crossed his mind that it would happen in Gainesville, yet here it was, unfolding in his own city.
And that one conversation changed the direction of his business. The story walked into his life and he chose not to walk away from it.
He went on a street outreach at 1am. Drove through Gainesville looking for people being trafficked. Got out of a car to hand a gift to someone who didn’t understand why she was being given something for nothing. Because in her world, nothing came free.
That night he learned what dignity means. As something that gets stripped from a person and can, slowly, be handed back.
He brought it back to his team. Said, what if we funded a sex trafficking safe house. The first one in North Central Florida. His leadership team laughed, wrote it down, said maybe one day. A year later it was done. Within a month, every bed was full.
He set a goal of 30 care centres by 2030. His team hit 37, five years early.
None of this was in the business plan.
There’s a principle underneath all of it. One speaker said it to Brandon years ago and it stayed. Do for the one what you wish you could do for the many.
Not a campaign. Not a strategy. One person. Then another. Then you look back and there’s a wake behind you.
Brandon talks about purpose in two forms. Lowercase: Your work helps someone. You push the keys, someone somewhere is affected. Uppercase: The profit this company generates funds something that outlasts the company itself.
Most entrepreneurs stop at lowercase. Not because they’re selfish. Because no one showed them the other option was real.
He also wrote a book built on a C.S. Lewis quote. “It is not your business to succeed, but only to do what is right. And then doing trust the results to a faithful God.”
That’s not a motivational line. It’s a recalibration of what you’re actually building toward.
You could do everything right and still close the business. Market crashes. Tariffs. Shutdowns. A thousand things outside your control. God is not measuring outcomes. He is measuring faithfulness.
That’s a hard thing to sit with when you’re staring at a P&L sheet.
But it changes what story you tell. And what you build toward.
If any part of this is landing, watch the full conversation. Brandon tells it better than a blog post can. Including the part about the 267 light bulb sockets on the wall at FOS, and the man who DM’d him on LinkedIn and ended up funding five care centres.
Watch it here: Why Christian Entrepreneurs Must Take Their Blinders Off
Credit: Faith Driven Entrepreneur
