Today we’d like to introduce you to Phil Risher.
Hi Phil, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I started my career at Enterprise Rent-A-Car in their management trainee program, where I ran a branch with about 300 cars and a $2–3 million budget, leading a team of about 20 people. I was one of the top branch managers there. From there I moved into corporate, selling fleet management services.
At the same time, I started a blog about personal finance and taught myself SEO and content creation. I got the blog up to about 30,000–40,000 readers a month and got featured in Forbes and CNBC, among other things. Eventually I left my job at Enterprise, bought a tiny school bus, turned it into a tiny home, and traveled around the country making content and having fun.
When I came back from that trip, one of my clients from Enterprise a $3 million air duct cleaning company, needed someone to come in as director of business development to help him grow. He’d been stuck at $3 million for two years. When I went to work there, both my worlds collided: my Enterprise experience running a local branch and getting paid off the P&L, plus my marketing experience in SEO, content creation, email marketing, and automation. Within one year, his business went from $3 million to $4 million, and the next year from $4 million to $5 million and then he sold to private equity.
At that point he told me, “You need to go help other people.” He was my first client, and he actually helped me name my company Phlash Consulting, with the PH. That was in 2019. Since then, we’ve generated $47 million in revenue for clients, we have clients all over the country, and in 2025 we won Inc. 5000’s Best Workplaces award.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No, it has not been a smooth road. One struggle was getting out of the consultant mindset, trading my time for money and just doing the work for people, and moving toward actually building a company with a productized service. That meant building out a team and evolving as a leader, actually building a business and not just a job.
The other struggle was figuring out my actual purpose or calling in life. Is it just to be a consultant and help people? That’s not bad or wrong, but I kept asking: how can I help more people, and what risks would it take to achieve that outcome? That’s something I had to figure out.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We work with $1 million to $10 million home service businesses, and our bread and butter is helping them with three main things. One is helping them get data, using their CRM, specifically things like return-on-ad-spend tracking and year-over-year data, so they have clean data we can make decisions off of. Number two is building automations to support that data and their marketing, so no leads or opportunities slip through the cracks, when they set up a new lead channel, automations pull it into the data so everything stays clean. The last thing is data-driven marketing.
Basically, the owners of these businesses usually find themselves stuck in what we call the “three-vendor trap.” They’re trying to get data from their CRM to make sense of everything marketing-wise, they’re trying to build automations to make sure nothing slips through the cracks, and they’re trying to manage a marketing company and tell them what to do. They end up stuck being a marketing manager instead of a business owner. What my company does is replace them with a consultant and a team with seven products and proven playbooks, on average, they grow $250,000 to $1 million in 12 months.
How do you think about luck?
I don’t believe in luck. I believe luck is when opportunity and hard work meet, and it’s created. I believe in putting yourself in the right position to achieve whatever opportunity is in front of you.
Obviously, I could say I’m lucky I was born in the U.S., since my grandparents immigrated here from Greece when they were kids. I could say I was lucky to have an amazing mom who raised me and taught me perseverance, hard work, and continued education. I’d say those foundational things are luck.
Career-wise, I think when you work hard and an opportunity presents itself, that’s a luck moment, but it doesn’t just randomly happen, because if you’re not knocking on the door, you’re not going to be able to open it. If you’re just sitting on the couch, it’s not going to come to you. That’s my two cents on luck.
Pricing:
- https://phlashconsulting.com/contact-us/
Contact Info:
- Website: https://phlashconsulting.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/philrisher/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/phlashconsulting
- Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrisher/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@phlashconsulting/videos
