Building With Intention: How Karlee Brown Built Trustworthy Cleaning Maui from the Ground Up

Karlee Brown was 19 years old, freshly moved out on her own, and quickly realizing that one part time job plus being a full time student just wasn't going to cut it. So she did what a lot of us would never even think to try. She started a cleaning company.

That was nine years ago. Today, Trustworthy Cleaning is a full blown commercial and janitorial operation on Maui, taking care of offices, private schools, and strip malls all over the island. Karlee will be the first to tell you it didn't start out looking anything like this.

"We were figuring it out as we went," she laughs, thinking back to where the business was before she joined Kūkolu's incubator three years ago. She knew how to work, and her small team knew how to work. The systems and structure came later, and Kūkolu is where that piece really clicked into place

Growing Into Something Bigger

Since joining Kūkolu, Karlee has watched her business transform. Her team has grown. Her client list has grown. She's shifted the business entirely toward commercial work, and she's now working toward becoming an 8(a) certified federal contractor, which would open up a whole new world of government contracts for Trustworthy Cleaning.

But ask Karlee what actually matters most to her about the growth, and it's not the numbers. It's who she gets to hire along the way.

She's built her team around young moms, single moms, and college aged workers looking for a way to make money while they figure out what's next. That's not an accident. It comes straight from her own story.

"I really wish somebody did that for me," she says. She remembers needing exactly that kind of flexibility back when she was starting out, and nobody offered it. So now she does.

Finding Pride in Her Own Story

Here's the part of Karlee's story that really stands out. For the first five years of running Trustworthy Cleaning, she downplayed it. Cleaning felt like a small thing to her, not something she led with when people asked what she did for work.

Joining Kūkolu changed that. Surrounded by other wāhine building their own businesses, Karlee started to see her company in a whole new light. She owns it outright. She built it from nothing. She's Native Hawaiian, she's a woman, and she runs a company that supports dozens of people in her community.

"My business is cool," she says now, and you can hear how much that sentence means to her.

The Mahalo Boxes

If you want to understand who Karlee is underneath all the growth and the certifications and the five year plan, look at what she did last Thanksgiving.

The federal government had just shut down, which meant a lot of families on Maui weren't getting paid right before the holidays. Karlee and a friend started asking themselves a simple question. What actually matters about Thanksgiving besides being together?

Their answer turned into something called Mahalo Boxes. Full turkey, pumpkin pie, all the fixings, delivered completely free to whoever needed one.

Karlee's plan was pretty simple too. Collect as many donations as she could, and cover whatever was left with her own business. She figured she'd end up footing most of the bill.

Instead, the community showed up. The only cost that landed on Trustworthy Cleaning was the turkeys themselves, around fifteen hundred dollars for over a hundred birds from Costco. Kūkolu stepped in to run the donation side, giving people a trusted place to give. Karlee's niece, who happened to be Little Miss Maui that year, brought even more attention to the effort.

By the time it was all said and done, Mahalo Boxes reached over 120 families. A few boxes went straight to foster homes. More support flowed through organizations like MEO and Women Helping Women.

Karlee's already planning round two for this November. Her goal this time is 200 families or more.

Her one piece of advice for anyone thinking about doing something similar? Find your turkey guy early, and line up somewhere with serious freezer space before you order them. Karlee found her answer in Makawao Hongwanji, who generously stepped up to store all the turkeys and made the whole thing possible.

Moving Forward With Intention

Ask Karlee what word keeps coming to mind lately, and she'll tell you without hesitating. Intention.

Every new hire, every new system, every next step for Trustworthy Cleaning is getting run through that filter now. If it doesn't have a clear purpose, it doesn't make the cut.

It's a fitting note for where Karlee is standing right now. Nine years into building something from scratch, three years into growing it with the support of her Kūkolu sisters, and just getting started on what comes next.