When Jesus Leads You to Janitorial: Patrick Poer's Unlikely Kingdom Business

Patrick Poer never imagined he'd end up in the commercial cleaning business. For most of his career, he lived in the world of technology startups — application development, managed services, solar energy for schools. Complex businesses with sophisticated challenges. The kind of ventures that require whiteboards full of algorithms and investor decks thick with projections.

Janitorial services? That was never on the vision board.

But when you run out of cash, options, and pride all at once, you discover something crucial: God's best ideas rarely look like yours. And sometimes the path to kingdom impact runs straight through the unsexy middle of a business you never thought you’d want.

When Everything Stops Working

Summer 2022 hit Patrick's solar company, Sun FundED, like a freight train. COVID had already battered their pipeline — schools shut down, and they only served schools. They'd clawed their way back to momentum when the next blow landed: supply chains seized, interest rates spiked, and capital markets froze solid.

In summer of 2022, the company ran out of cash. So did Patrick's family.

Six kids. Five in private school. A nice neighborhood. Zero income.

"I thought it would be a 90-day journey," Patrick recalls. "It ended up being over a year."

But in that crucible, God was working on something deeper than business strategy. He was dismantling Patrick's identity — the one built on performance, success metrics, and how much money he could generate.

Just because it's hard doesn't mean I'm not in it.

That's what Patrick heard in prayer. Not a promise of immediate relief. Not a three-step plan to financial recovery. Just an invitation to stay present, stay dependent, and let God redefine what success actually means.

Somehow, through miracle after miracle, the family made it. Never missed a meal. Every bill got paid. Patrick can't explain the math — he just knows it didn't add up on paper.

The Business You Never Thought You’d Want

By late 2023, Patrick was asking God what came next. He'd received some powerful direction: advance God's kingdom to the nations. But that kind of calling requires two things Patrick didn't have — flexibility and resources.

Then a fellow entrepreneur spoke up over coffee: "You don't need to consult or find a job. Go find a business that already exists and buy it."

Patrick had never considered it. Everything he'd done was greenfield startup — come up with an idea, launch it, see what happens. But acquiring an established business? That was new territory. It also made perfect sense.

When he told his wife, he braced for resistance. Instead, she said, "That's not a bad idea."

Check box number one.

Patrick started lighting up his network, and one of the first calls led him to Jack Frisby, a Kingdom Factor leader in Indianapolis. Jack immediately connected him with Chris Middleton, who owned an Office Pride commercial cleaning franchise.

Patrick's first reaction? "I don't want to do janitorial."

His wife's response on the way out the door: "Don't take that off the table."

That was the Lord speaking, Patrick realized later. Because the more he learned about the business, the more it fit. Office Pride needed someone who understood technology, sales, and marketing. Patrick needed a business that could scale without requiring his presence in every transaction. The partnership made sense in ways neither of them had anticipated.

Patrick started with a six-month consulting engagement, during which he led the team's bid for a massive battery plant contract north of Indianapolis. They won it — and the business more than doubled.

Patrick took over as CEO in June of 2024 and then In February 2026, Patrick finalized his ownership buy-in partnering with the founder, Chris, to scale the business. The tech entrepreneur was now a janitorial franchise owner. And he couldn't be happier about it.

What Kingdom Business Actually Means

Patrick first encountered the concept of kingdom business during his solar venture. He and his partner were both believers, as were all their investors. They weren't content with just being "good Christians" in business — they wanted to build something that actively advanced God's kingdom through culture, service, and intentional impact.

That vision carried forward to Office Pride, where the faith integration runs even deeper. The franchisor is unapologetically Christian with the faith built into all aspects of the business. Patrick and Chris’ leadership team is also made up predominantly of believers. And the company's 225 employees — many of them hourly workers facing real life challenges — are seen not as labor units but as people with inherent worth and spiritual needs.

"We're always trying to find ways to make positive impacts on them," Patrick explains. "One through expression of faith, but also through just investing in them personally and knowing that they're meaningful and they're cared for and seen."

But here's the challenge: with 270 customer locations spread across the region, most employees see their manager only a couple times a month. How do you build a faith-centered culture when your workforce is that distributed?

Patrick's answer is a custom app designed for cultural and employee engagement. Along with company values and on-the-job training, the platform will feature daily devotionals, a weekly prayer meeting for discipleship and prayer requests, and chaplaincy services.

We're really excited about what that can do, not just to help build our culture, but expand the kingdom and see people really impacted personally, professionally, and spiritually.

It's not performative faith. It's not a Christian veneer on a secular operation. It's the full integration of belief into business — the kind that shapes hiring, shapes culture, and shapes the daily rhythm of how work gets done.

The Revelation That Changes Everything

Ask Patrick what he's learned in the past two years, and his answer cuts straight to the heart of why so many Christian entrepreneurs feel isolated in their work.

Jesus is just as excited about business as I am. And he's way better at it than I am as well. And there's nothing more than he wants to do than walk with us in that adventure together.

For too long, the message to Christian business leaders has been: do your work with integrity, don't cheat people, maybe tithe generously, and keep your faith mostly private. That's not kingdom business. That's just being decent.

Kingdom business means inviting Jesus into every thought, every plan, every strategy. It means asking him for direction — not just in crises, but in the daily grind of operations, hiring decisions, and customer service. It means believing that God didn't wire you as an entrepreneur just so you could fund the "real" ministry happening somewhere else. Your business is the ministry.

Patrick's journey from tech startups to janitorial services wasn't a detour. It was an education in trust, identity, and what it looks like when God gets full access to your career.

"How are we walking day by day and including Jesus in our thoughts and plans and strategies?" Patrick asks. "You never know where it might lead."

It might lead to a coffee franchise. It might lead to a solar company. It might lead to janitorial services.

Or it might lead you exactly where you never thought you’d want to go — and reveal that God knew what he was doing all along.