Moving the Needle in Business, Purpose, and Faith

The telescopic boom lift basket tipped in an instant.

Seth French was 150 feet in the air on a construction site, holding a harness with 400 pounds of equipment in the basket, beside an 18-year-old co-worker frozen with fear in the face of a fatal fall. In the Marine Corps, there had been no time to freeze. You moved, or someone got hurt. In the span of a heartbeat, Seth faced the problem head-on and talked his young coworker through crisis the way he once talked junior Marines through worse, and together they stabilized the lift and made it to the ground unharmed.

Seth should have felt heroic after such a save. Yet that night, when that same co-worker called him to decompress, Seth was met with a harsh reality.

“Isn’t it crazy,” his co-worker had joked harmlessly, “that you were a JTAC [Joint Terminal Attack Controller], you’ve got a master’s degree, you did all these great things, and we’re still doing the same job, getting paid the same, and almost died the same?”

The comment crept its way into his core, destroying every image he had of himself. Sure, Seth had a decorated military career behind him. He had two degrees. But on that day, none of it had kept him off a construction lift, running the exact same job as a teenager with no diploma. Every ounce of achievement he valued was suddenly called into question. He would later call it a light switch, that awful moment he became convinced he’d done nothing with his life at all.

Over the course of another year, a cross-country move, his father’s cancer diagnosis, and the near loss of a canine best friend, Seth’s mental state snowballed into something dark and terrible. Yet it sparked in him a step towards change, towards true eternal change, whether he realized it in that moment or not. In Seth’s own words, it was the start of “moving the needle,” of his journey back to Regent University, and of the rebirth of his faith.

An 85-Degree Trajectory

Seth grew up Pentecostal and thus found himself in church every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday. He hadn’t planned on anything after high school, a teen with undirected passion, until a mentor at his church — a former Air Force mechanic — asked him simply if he had ever considered enlisting. Seth knew little about the military and nearly nothing about the Marine Corps, aside from their “cool uniforms.” Yet something about it called to his desire for purpose. A few months later, he eagerly signed the enlistment contract, and from then on, Seth experienced a rapid, almost improbable rise.

A two-year associate’s degree from Ivy Tech, completed in 10 months, put him a rank ahead upon entering boot camp. He made Joint Fires Observer within a year, a role that took his peers four years to reach. After two and a half years, he made Platoon Sergeant. Eventually, Seth became a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) trained to direct aircraft and guide munitions in combat, a role typically reserved for far more senior Marines. Seth held it as a Corporal.

He describes that progression using his own terminology: an 85-degree trajectory, nearly straight up. Everything was rising. Everything, that is, except his faith.

When the Trajectory Breaks

The same fleet that handed Seth rapid promotions handed him his first drink — a bottle of tequila — on his very first day among Marines he considered role models. “It just went downhill from there,” he says, describing a slow drift into partying, infidelity, and terrible habits. A relationship that ended poorly led him to cut his military career short. He expected the move home to Indiana to be a simple transition, but instead found a life that no longer quite fit. His old friends were married, buying houses, raising kids. He felt he had lost all common ground outside of a shared bottle of whiskey.

Yet that fire to achieve something still brewed within, and he sought a new purpose, earning an online bachelor’s degree from Regent in 2022, with family and military connections in the Hampton Roads area. He even pursued an online M.A. in Strategic Communication the following year while working full-time and driving for DoorDash to make ends meet. But despite his academic accomplishments and pursuits, there was still something missing from his life: a relationship with the God he had spent his entire childhood learning about.

He describes it the way a Marine would. In the military, it could feel like there are no rules, but there are guardrails. The same could be said for his faith. “Once you step outside that structure,” he says, “you can lose it quick.” First, the shoulder of the road. Then, without quite noticing, off entirely. Seth felt like his heart, mind, and spirit were lost adrift.

Rock Bottom

It was within that state of mind that the call from his co-worker atop the manlift destroyed his sense of self.

Seth had moved to Wilson, North Dakota — a stretch of land so remote that his nearest neighbors were horses and the closest Taco Bell a two-hour drive — to work for his father on a construction crew. His first day hit 66 degrees below zero with wind chill, he describes, while he was given a blowtorch to unfreeze portable toilet lines. It was about as far from a JTAC as a life could get, and — after their near fall from the construction boom lift — his co-worker’s phone call, which had reminded him of his perceived lack of achievement, emphasized every mile of that distance.

He refused to return to work the next day. He went to the gym instead, screamed into a mirror, ran until a treadmill shut off beneath him, and cried out something close to a prayer: “God, if you’re real, now is the moment.” His mother called that same week to tell him that his brother, too, was struggling. And in the time that followed, he learned his own father — the man he’d traveled so far to work for — had been diagnosed with stage 3 cancer.

He bought a Bible that season, his heart aware of that which was missing, yet his mind refused to open it. “I was so ashamed,” he says. He reached out to Veterans Affairs for help to no avail. The dissatisfaction with his achievements, compounded by a barrage of life’s adversities, plagued his mind, clouding any path forward in an insurmountable darkness.

“Nobody knew I struggled with it,” he says. It was the type of pain one is often taught to keep to oneself. “And I struggled, and I struggled, and I struggled every day.”

The Call Back

The call that pulled him out came from an old mentor at Quantico, offering him a job as a military instructor and a way back east. Seth took it on a whim, craving a path forward. The same mentor immediately ushered him back toward two paramount things: church and Regent.

Even after arriving, he drifted, reconnecting with old Marine friends up and down the coast. This reunion tour, without him fully realizing it, kept igniting the same pattern. Worse yet, his dog, Donnie, his one steady companion, was injured when struck by a car in Norfolk.

However, a realization had sown its way into Seth’s mind. Nearly every person Seth met who had experienced similar struggles yet seemed “whole,” as he describes it, shared two things in common: a military background and a church home. On top of it all, the late Dr. Gregory Stone urged Seth to pursue an MBA at Regent. Thus, by August of 2025, Seth had returned to Regent University. In one of his first conversations with a professor, Dr. Steven Renz, Seth was asked to define his goal. Half-joking, Seth answered, “I should find a church,” to which Dr. Renz questioned why he had waited.

That October, he walked into a church in Virginia Beach and sat alone in the second-to-last row. “I just sat there. I don’t really cry a whole lot. Not a very emotional person. But I just wept,” he says. “I just sat there and felt like 10 years of my life were wasted. All these credentials, everything I’ve ever done. Living in the dark. It’s like seeing the light, and you don’t even realize how much you need it until you’re back. I just felt that connection again.” And the path forward suddenly became clear.

The Doors

Something in Seth’s heart reawakened, long forgotten, but not lost. Seth describes a chain reaction far beyond ordinary luck, one in which door after door opened directly into the next. A revival of the 85-degree trajectory with the needle moving once more.

Two weeks after he returned to church, he attended his first networking event for what would become his real estate investment and property services company. He signed his first cleaning contract the day after his MBA graduation in May. Two weeks after the event, his high school crush posted on Facebook. With a spark of confidence and an ounce of serendipity, he messaged her. They’ve been together ever since.

“You look at these things falling into place,” he says, “and it’s not a coincidence. Good people want to work with good people. And once God opens doors for you, you don’t even realize it’s happening.”

And at the heart of every opened door, every gift from the Lord, was Regent. It was Dr. Jeanne McDonnell who sent him — a struggling entrepreneur cleaning houses for $75 per job — to a small-business development meeting, where he met the mentor who would restructure his entire company around one question: “Who do you serve?” It was Dr. Renz who checked on his church attendance during his MBA capstone with the consistent, caring attentiveness of a commanding officer. It was that same capstone course that asked Seth to build a business plan grounded in Scripture, section by section, a specific verse tied to the function of each greater part. His Human Resources section leads with Jesus washing His disciples’ feet.

Full Circle

Today, LabraDon Properties — named after his Labrador, Donnie — is a thriving real estate investment and property services company that Seth built from that single cleaning contract. It has grown so fast that he’s had to turn down work, and he’s already fielded his first buyout offer. He marvels at how, without exception, he finds himself across the table from bankers and investors who share the love of God. “When you find another man of God on the other side of the table,” Seth says, “you trust that God’s going to get you where you need to be. Regent brought me back to my faith, and I’m not ashamed to say that. They challenged me to go back to church.”

More than the growth, he points to what’s changed around him. In recent days, one of his employees told him, “I bought a Bible,” and has now begun to read Genesis to his daughter every night after a full shift. Another pulled him aside after Seth bought him a jump pack for a dead battery and celebrated, “All you’ve done is bless me.” Seth recognizes the positive ripples of his own faith and praises God and Regent for every wave.

Recently, he ran into Regent School of Business & Leadership Dean Doris Gomez at a State of the City event, standing in a room full of accomplished people while he was “still just a guy who cleans houses.” He told her plainly, “Because of [Regent], I went back to church for the first time in 10 years, and I’m here.”

“It ain’t me,” Seth summarizes the blessings. “I’m just a pawn. The [Regent] professors, the deans — they planted these seeds.”

Find Your Footing

When asked what he’d tell a student sitting where he was two years ago, disconnected from God, carrying something heavy, Seth does not hesitate.

“There are no pros if you’re doing it by yourself,” he says. “That’s like going into battle alone. You’re never alone with God. Don’t start over from zero. Start over from what you already know. God will meet you halfway. Open your hand to Him.”

He’s candid about how tired that decade away from his faith left him. Yet he’s candid that walking across the stage to receive his MBA meant more to him than any medal or title that came before it, because for the first time, he felt he could achieve something eternal. “Sitting on [the Regent] campus, around like-minded, godly people — that propelled everything,” he says. “I’ve been in business 60 days, and I’m already hiring people and changing their lives.”

Seth French went soul searching and found, instead, the collapse of everything he thought he valued. He returned to Regent and found a church, a company, a support system, and a faith he thought he’d lost for good. A kid on a telescopic lift asked him how a JTAC with two degrees ended up doing the same work for the same pay. Seth’s answer, in the end, wasn’t to find a better job. It was to rebuild a foundation. A faith-filled foundation that could last into eternity. Yes, Regent gave Seth more than degrees. It gave him a path back to everything that matters and a chance to move the needle meaningfully, eternally. And despite being “just a guy who cleans houses,” he fondly recalls Christ did the greatest possible thing while He Himself cleaned feet. “None of it,” he says, “feels like a coincidence anymore.”