Founder Brandon West’s bold agenda: a marketing company focused on trust and well-being.

“Isn’t it fun when we come across those organizations that just absolutely blow our mind, that create a whole new paradigm, a whole new section for what business could be,” says PHOS Creative founder Brandon West to Chris Benguhe early in our exclusive interview. “Who would think of a car repair company as being for single women, and helping women to get into safe places with their car? Who would think of a marketing agency that cares so much for people, and seeing women and children rescued from extreme poverty around the world?”

Among his examples, the marketing agency he refers to is his own, which has a remarkable story. PHOS has a strong focus on building a people-centric culture and cultivating “true flourishing” in people and organizations. It has a greater purpose beyond just profit, including fighting sex trafficking.

“We help people to grow trust and build awareness, and we do that through strategic consulting, brand strategy, brand planning, brand activation, inbound marketing. We’re helping companies to connect their trustworthiness to prospective clients online,” Brandon says of his work with clients. “Really fun to do that.” With the company’s 12 years’ experience attesting to its success, he believes in the importance of trust and has identified four components: competency, credibility, authenticity and empathy. “If a brand can build those things and be those things, they can dominate the market.”

From his examples of such mind-blowing purposefulness of business enterprises and his description of establishing his own company, you expect Brandon to reveal himself as a very altruistic person. But his journey hits with even more powerful impact when he shares, “We’re not naturally wired that way.” He explains: “But the truth is, even when our eyes and our mind, our heart have been set free, we struggle with this one ultimate reality that is: Love is not efficient.”

Growth was organic, both for himself and the company he built out of his small home office where his wife would bring him and his small staff homemade, fresh-baked cookies in the afternoon. “I remember when I hired my first person on my team, I didn’t have a mission, I didn’t have values, I didn’t have this big vision. I didn’t have this big, core, centric commitment,” he recalls. But Brandon did make a promise to him: “My promise was that I would build for him a place where at some point, unpromptedly, he would come to me and tell me, ‘This is the best company I’ve ever worked for.’”

Along with trust, wellness is the other theme that runs through his conversation. “We’ve identified six dimensions of wellness at PHOS, financial, intellectual, physical, spiritual, emotional and relational. And I’m trying to help every single person on our team and their families and our clients and our vendors and suppliers and our local and global community, to flourish in all six of those ways.”

Brandon articulates a view of success in alignment with his people-centric focus. “The way that we typically define success is wealth; income; status; awards; things that we own, boats, mansions, bank accounts, blah, blah,” he says. “But the truth is, we could give ourselves to everything that this culture would define as success and still have written over our lives: ‘Life wasted.’” His recently published book, It Is Not Your Business to Succeed, explores how to define true success beyond just wealth and status.

“I don’t want to waste my business on profit. I don’t want my P&L to be the only thing I look at on a weekly basis. I want the people that I serve and the people really who are at the bottom of that P&L, to be the ones I spend the most amount of time thinking about,” Brandon says.

Click on the link below to listen in as Brandon talks about building success for his team, his clients and his business’s extended community.