How Phil Risher Generated $47M by Fixing This Hidden Marketing Problem

Most companies don't have a lead problem. They have a lead management problem.

Today we have with us Phil Risher, the founder of Flash Consulting, a digital marketing firm that helps home service businesses increase sales and keep their technicians fully booked. Phil started his journey by paying off $30,000 in student loans in 12 months, which led him to start a personal financial blog. He then transitioned into digital marketing, eventually founding Flash Consulting after becoming frustrated with traditional marketing services while working at one of the country's largest air duct cleaning companies. I would like to welcome Phil to our show.

That was an awesome intro. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk with you.

No, my pleasure, brother. My pleasure. It's great to talk to you. And no problem. I used to just go right into it. I started doing. You always want to test different things. Right. So started playing around with this recently to give an intro and see how it. How it performs. Because there was one guest that came on. He actually said it. He said it as a feedback at the end. He goes, can I give you some feedback? I go, I love that. I have no ego. You tell me, what is it? Right.

Yeah.

And he goes, can you start introducing your guests in the beginning? Because it just gives the guests more. It feels better to be on a show more important. You just feel excited, right?

Yeah.

To be there. So I started doing it, and I noticed an energy shift in our conversation with the guests. So it did amplify it.

Yeah, it's good. I think as a listener, you want to hear a little bit more color commentary about who am I listening to, what's their.

Yeah. Awesome. You know, this paying off the loan in such a short time and then going into this marketing agency is a big marketing agency. I believe you said 1 million to 10 million is your mark.

Yeah. Revenue, that's our bread and butter for the clients that we serve. And it's also our size business as well.

Very good, Very good. So have you faced a turning point that you would like to share that caused such a success?

Yeah. So the paying off student loans. I'm a big Dave Ramsey guy. Like, no debt. Try to get it out of debt so that way you can build a foundation for success, which to me is more. I was more on the scarcity mindset of things like, I don't want to have any debt. I was more focused on defense than offense. And what happened was I paid off student loans. I actually ended up buying a condo with cash when I was 25. So I had no debt, no mortgage, no rent, and one of my wife is a kindergarten teacher. One of her friends was like, hey, how did you pay off your student loans and do all this stuff? Because I have student loans and it's bogging me down. So I started a blog and that's how I learned how to do SEO, website development, all that kind of stuff. But at the time I was working at Enterprise Rent a Car Renting cars and I was selling fleet management services to home service businesses, so they have fleets of vehicles. I was selling directly to the business owners of one to $30 million businesses. And what happened was my blog, I ended up getting featured in Forbes and CNBC and Yahoo Finance and all this cool stuff just by blogging and SEO and email marketing and all that. And I would go to these meetings with the business owners and hey, what are you guys doing for marketing? And I was just featured in Forbes and here's kind of stuff that I'm doing and they're like, wow, this guy's so cool. Then I decided to quit Enterprise and go do my blog full time and speaking. And I bought a tiny school bus and I made a tiny home and my dog and I traveled around the country and I did news interviews, videos, email marketing, social media. This was like 10 years ago. Then when I came back from that trip, one of my clients was the duck cleaning company that you mentioned and he was like, hey, I need someone to be my director of business development to help me grow. And he was a 20 year old $3 million home service business who was very stale. And I went to work there and within the first year he went from 3 million to 4 million. So you asked me, was there any like big epiphany moment or anything that helped me become successful? The epiphany was I did 10 years of digital marketing, basically not getting paid, just learning it on my own. And then my world's collided where my digital marketing, my home service, my local business marketing and my local business expertise from enterprise and my sales all came to a head when I came to work at this duck cleaning company and everything went and exploded. Like all my words collided and I grew. And what happened was I faced a big problem which was my digital marketing company didn't know anything about my business, they didn't know anything about my CRM or technology. And once I figured that out, our business exploded and I went and helped other businesses do that.

So same process as you're helping the other clients that you're working with implement the same structure.

Yeah, this is the big elephant in the room that I Experienced was I went to work at a home service business and the traditional digital marketing companies say, do more SEO, pay more on ads, if you want more leads, post more on social media, run Facebook ads. Oh, go on TikTok and do this. It's a normal stuff that all these digital marketing companies will tell us. And what I realized, I analyzed over a thousand customer calls. And what I realized was there's actually a bigger thing that most companies miss. And that's called a marketing customer journey. And there's three parts to it. There's visibility. You have to get visibility for your business, whether it's SEO and all this stuff. The second one, which is most companies miss is conversions. When people go to your website, they have to turn into a lead somehow and they have to go through a lead nurture sequence. So with home service, they need like an estimate calculator, a chat to text widget, an estimate form. But here's the big kicker. Most companies don't have a lead problem. They have a lead management problem. And we solve that in this business. They were getting calls and messages, 30, 40 a day, but they didn't have any process to manage their leads. They were just talking on the phone and then they were gone forever or calling them and they would never answer. So they had to fix the management problem. And then the third part to the customer journey is retargeting. Every single business has this honeyhole of customers sitting in their database.

I agree.

Customers, they're never reaching out to them. And guess what? You can't get lifetime value without a lifetime relationship. And if you're not building a relationship with your customers, you're not going to get the value out of think that you're going to get. And once we solve that problem, now we have this customer journey that we can just build out these three pillars. And every single business needs this. And that's what my company does for companies.

I love that aspect of relationship because it's such an important part. People say the words, but it's different to actually do what you need to do to build these relationships. And actually in reality, you don't really need to. I'm talking about human to human interaction. You don't really need to do much just being yourself and just providing value as much as you can. But in a business, what you're doing is you're looking at the people that are already there. They're all human beings. Provide a way to bring them closer, create that relationship where they have no reason to go anywhere else. Right?

That's right. And the relationship piece. A lot of companies think, oh, okay, how do I build this relationship? I'll give you four things you can do in the next 10 minutes. Okay, it's four.

Love it. Have you said it on any other shows?

This? No. This? I have not.

All right, good. I'm just kidding.

No, there's four. There's four things that you can do. The first thing is record a video. The video is when someone fills out a form on your website, have an automatic email and text that goes to them with a video that says, hey, thanks so much for filling out this form. My name's Phil, I'm the owner. I can't wait to serve you. You're in the right place. You picked the right company. We'll contact you soon. Number two, when you send them an estimate, have a video go out from the owner. Hey just sent you an estimate. If you have any questions, reach out to me directly or our sales team. We will answer every single question. And you have my guarantee that if you choose our company, I'll make sure 100% you're satisfied. Three, when someone approves the estimate, you have a video that goes out. When someone signs your contract, you have a video that goes to them that says, woohoo, we're teammates, man. I can't wait to work with you. We're going to crush it. Coming up next, you're going to get this and this from my team. And then the fourth video, when an invoice happens, you send an invoice. It's not just your normal, hey, here's a text, Leave us a review. It's hey man, thanks so much for choosing us for your service. Some ways that you can help us out, obviously you can leave us a review. Google loves that and other people. But if you know a friend, family member, someone else that needs our service, we really appreciate if you could refer us and you can just forward this video to them or this email to them, that would be great. Those four things you could do that. It's two minute videos right there.

Yeah.

Add it to your process and now you build a relationship inside of that conversion funnel. And people are like, this company is different.

Yeah, for sure. I wish I came in experience with a home service business that would provide that level of service. And to be honest, I have not experienced that type of service. It didn't have the aspects of the relationship building what you're talking about. And they could simply just sign up for Loom like it's a free tool. Just sign up for Loom. Very Easily. Right here. Yeah.

And just right here. Put on YouTube and then put it into your email.

Yeah. And you gave this the step. So clearly now with the loom, they can literally do it right now. As they're listening, as they're watching, they can actually do it right now. But are they going to do it?

If they care about their customer experience in being different and standing out, which I would say most businesses say that they're different and they want to be different. But will they actually.

Are they doing it?

Yeah, if they work with us, we have to do it. It's part of our.

That's what I'm saying. That was my point. I'm getting to that. They. People want these things. They want the transformation. They want to do better. For example, in my world, mindset. They know mindset is the most. One of the most important strategies that you could ever go into, for example, was you need a good foundation. Your entrepreneurship is not easy. And having that belief that this is going to help me and you still don't do anything about it. There's deeper concerns right here. Because what I'm saying is that you offered all this information step by step to do this. Are people going to do it? I find a majority may not. The best way is to call you, obviously, to get the help, but you gave them things that they could implement right now, but they hear it and they don't take the action. We call this the knowing doing gap. That's what I was getting at.

Yeah. The imperfect action of doing things. So you know that you should do it, but you got to do it. But what's holding you back? And then solve that thing. One other piece with loom. This is a huge area of opportunity. Imagine you create this beautiful estimate, you email it to the customer, and then you never hear from them again. What if you took a quick loom video and you walk them through your estimate, explaining what your estimate means and how this would impact them. And now you send this to them in your email. Yeah.

Now you're connecting to them. Subconscious to subconscious is powerful, man.

Exactly. And now it's so human to human relationship. It's not just a piece of paper that you're sending them. Hopefully they know.

No, that's wonderful, man. Thank you so much for sharing so much on the show. Because it's important. We really want people to get results. The more we are bringing on guests, the more we're expanding that information to the marketplace to give them these pointers, to give them these indicators, what they can change, what they can Improve in their life and business. I really want them to take these actions and do these things because it will change their business. It will make it better or improve. And if you're not doing it, really ask the serious question, why am I not doing it? Is it the cosmetic reasons? Oh, it's going to be too much. I call Phil. He's going to probably charge. Well, how are you going to expect to grow if you're not going to invest? It's so hard to scale if you're not putting in energy into the business and money's energy.

With the scaling thing, one of the lessons that I learned, because as I mentioned in the beginning, is like, I had more of a scarcity mindset, and it was scary for me to spend money and spend money and invest money. And one of the things that really helped me was by operating my business on percentages. And what I mean by that is, like, from a marketing perspective, most businesses should be spending 3 to 10% of their revenue on marketing. And when you set money aside from a percentage base.

Good point.

Permission to spend that money instead of just looking at your bank account and seeing, oh, you got 10,000, $20,000, let me spend a thousand over here and see what I get on a monthly budget. Yeah, you're running your business on a budget and it's giving you permission. Okay, I got $5,000 this month. So how am I going to allocate these funds from a marketing perspective? And it changes in your mind how you're thinking about deploying your assets, which for me was transformational because it gave me permission to start spending money on things. When I started operating that way, I didn't just have all this money coming at me. It was a game plan.

Yep. Because it's like a tool. Money is coming in as a tool to expand what you need to do for your business. And in the beginning, I think that percentage needs to be much higher.

Yeah. I think if you're serious about growing and scaling your business to seven or eight figures, then absolutely, for me, it wasn't because I, I came. When I came into the business, I was literally selling my time for money. I was just a consultants, hourly rates, doing my stuff, getting paid, just trying to make six figures. And what I realized was I wasn't building a business. I was just owning a job that I never had anything. I never had any. I was my wife, the whole thing. And when you start really thinking about building a business, I think it comes down to percentages and giving yourself permission to spend money. Yeah.

And Having that mindset of growth and sometimes we come consciously wanted but the subconscious side of us doesn't allow it. So it holds us back. That's the gap that we're talking about. So you have to have that belief that it's possible for you and your business to be in those ranges or even 10x what you're doing. It has to be that inner belief.

Yeah. I'm in the coaching program with Dan Sullivan called Strategic Coach and he has a book that 10x is better than 2x.

Yeah.

And he talks about this gap in the gain which is yes, if you were to 2x your business, okay, I could see how I could do that. But if you were to 10x your business, it would change the entire way that you were to run your business. If you were to go from 1 million to 10 million in revenue, would you still be doing your sales and your customer? No, you would be doing different things. And so when you think about going 10x, you have to build a business that's 10x and not just try to take these ones and two here. And you get stuck in that gap, which I'm talking, I'm preaching to the choir on this because like I get stuck in that so much. I know I should do this, but it's a risk but you got to do it.

It's like we talk about this, that where your goal is, you got to become that goal in the present moment within. You have to feel that as possible that you have to be in that frame of energy of a 10 million dollar company and operate from that place, make decisions from that place, be in that energy and you'll be surprised how people and situation, circumstances are showing up to help you be there.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, they just, we met and we as soon as we started talking before recording, we're talking about collaborating, building a relationship, growing is that it changes the dynamics. When you feel energetically at a higher range already and you operate from that, your results transform like night and day. Because everything is energy. When you're operating from that place, you don't have to figure out how is going to come make itself available step by step, wherever you need it. It's so beautiful, man.

Yeah, for sure. And so part of my transformation and what you're talking about for me into the abundance mindset has really come for me in particular is creating content and sharing the content out into the world. Because I used to not. I used to be, I used to share a lot when I was blogging but then I, I stopped because it was very personal. And I was like, eh, people don't really care about what I have to say. Then when I started sharing content for Flash and my business and even my personal stuff, it opened up the side of me that was the true relationship piece. But more importantly, it expanded the possibility for impact of my life on other people way beyond the scope that I was thinking in. I used to think very it's all about me. Like, I don't want people to know this when I actually start sharing stuff and creating content for other people. There's people now that are like, hey, I saw your YouTube video. I've been following you for two years. You helped me scale my business. And I have no idea who these people are. They've never liked anything commented or anything, but now they see this stuff. And I think a lot of times business owners or people in general, they get stuck in their heads that, oh, I gotta go create this video, I gotta create this. But you don't know you do H Vac. You don't know the mom that's sitting at home who has no AC and her kids are upstairs sweating their heads off and all she wants to do is see a video from you about how she can solve this problem for her home and you're going to solve that problem for her. Who wouldn't want that?

Yeah, no, definitely. Such amazing information you're sharing here that will impact people. Because we collectively, as entrepreneurs or business owners, need to do bigger things and better revenues because we are the leaders that are going to make an impact in the world. We are generating the funds that can change lives. Not just ours, but people that interact with that company just as a number. How many people's lives have you shifted by from the energy that you're putting out there? Just approximately. Not the person, that client. I'm not talking about, I'm talking about each client has a spread of people. Right. So you're impacting roughly. There's probably thousands.

Yeah, yeah. So over the last six years that I've been doing the business, we came up with a rough estimate of $47 million in growth for the companies, which, that's a really big number. But if you think about the team members, the employees that have raised their kids, they can send their kids to college, the impact of that and our team, the consultants on our team, they're like, it's not just about, hey, we do some marketing for you. It's like, we're helping people grow their business so that they can support the local communities and their families. And stuff. And I think that's a part to this. As a business owner, I used to think so too small, right? Like the six figures, the hourly thing. And what I realized was I need to have my vision so big that my team's vision can fit into that vision. Right. I'm trying to go to 10 million and each person wants to make $500,000. Okay, how can I make this happen? But if I'm only shooting for a million or 3 million, my team's vision, it doesn't fit. Like I'm not going to attract those level of people that want to fit into this. How can I set the vision and the goal and stick to that and, and have the actions that show my team, like, oh, no, he's really about it. Like he really wants this as well. It's not just saying.

Yeah, and that's a really good point, that you'll attract the right people into your organization because you're at that level. Because if you're thinking small or in planning syndrome, or just overthinking about things and not actually doing what needs to be done, we hold that back. We're holding back from expansion because we're in a way getting in our own way based on that conditioned thought patterns that a lot of times they limit. And we believe it so much because they're popping up. And so you don't need, don't, don't do this, do something else. Because you're only hearing that based on what you're conditioned to believe. So whatever resonates in the subconscious mind, that's what you're going to act on. But unfortunately, what you're acting on a subconscious level, it was given by other people. It was what you grew up with, your environment, genetically environment, all those ideas about money, about growth and what's possible for you is all in the subconscious mind. When you try to do anything different, there's stoppages, there's blockage, and people don't realize that they have the power to make that shift.

That's right.

They want to make their company in a big badass company. They need to become it. They need to believe it. You need to feel it. That is possible. And that needs a subconscious belief, a deeper sense of knowing.

Yeah, I, I fell into this trap too, which is funny that you're bringing this up. My. I was the first to go into college in my family. Both my parents just normal jobs. My dad is pest control technician. My mom works with computer stuff. And they, the framework that they had in life was more of Corporate, go to job, get a paycheck type of lifestyle. Not bad. But when I think about the lens that I grew up in, those foundational beliefs, how can those foundational beliefs get me to a $100 million business and how to operate a business from a lens of growth and scalability? It's a different. The foundation that was laid for me is not that foundation. So I had to put myself around other people and build other beliefs and habits that correlated with my goals. Because if I were to go to them and ask them, how am I going to get to $10 million or whatever, they're going to be like, I have no idea. What are you talking about? Just, you're doing part. And it's just like a different mindset. And I think a lot of times we get stuck in the old. In the beliefs that we're raised with.

Yeah. And that's why it's so important to invest in mentorship, the right mentorship, because they speed up that whole entire process. If somebody, for example, works with your firm, they're not just getting the results of the services you're providing, but they're also learning what you're doing. They're in the business. They're seeing exactly what you're doing. That will allow them to actually expand in different directions. Now, if they were thinking about multiplying their locations, this will make it. You will make that easier. That goal, that desire could come into reality because of this service, this value that you're providing and that people don't realize. And when I talk like this, some people might say, okay, this guy is just trying to promote the guests and all that. No, like, we are. You're not giving me anything. I'm just speaking up the truth.

That's right.

People that are coming on the show that have these products or services, they. At the end of the day, yes, it costs money, but they're adding value in your life. They're making you elevate in different areas. You know, life is really short. If we're not investing with the right people, not taking those steps, we're losing out on the time. Right. We want to make sure we take advantage of the time, that we're gifted. And. And that's why I appreciate my guests, and that's why I appreciate talking to you guys and hearing these things, because there's a deeper meaning to what we do. It's not just money.

Yeah. Money will come and go. I think it's about transformation and helping people. And, yeah, there's a. If you help people enough and you make enough impact on people's lives, the money will come to you. It's not, yeah, make the impact so you get the money. It's make the impact and the money will come. And I think, yeah, givers gain. Exactly. And I'm called, for me personally, I'm a Christian. I'm called to multiply my talents, not hide them under a rock. And so the more that I can go out and multiply my talents, because I fell into this trap around 4 or 500,000 in revenue, which was like I could really like dial this thing up or I'm good. And I felt, man, what, what should I do as a Christian? I'm not just sitting back here hanging out, like I need to go, I need to go push this. I need to go take my talents and multiply them. And I think a lot of times it can be too comfortable. We feel like, oh, we're too comfortable here, we're good, we'll do that later. But you got to go for it. Especially if, yeah. So, yeah. Another thing I want to mention this thing that I think a lot of people miss. For me, there was three benefits that I got when I hired a coach. The first one was I gave myself. I felt, man, I spent $10,000 on me, like me, like growth for me. And it was very liberating because I felt like I'm worth it. I felt like I was worth it investing back in myself. The second thing was I actually hired a video coach to help me create video content. And it was like a thousand dollars a month. About six months later, I had a company come to me to pay me a thousand dollars a month to post content for them as an affiliate. An influencer came right back. And the third thing was the proximity. I was on coaching calls with other people that were in my shoes going through the same thing that I was facing and they were solving the problem. So I could easily ask them, like, what are you doing where people are not opening their whole armor and their everything, their books and everything on LinkedIn or on a random one to one call that you have with them. You have to get in these intimate settings so that way you can see the true what's going on behind the scenes. Which for me was very impactful.

That's wonderful. That experience that you're sharing, the people can relate to that in many ways. And then you're actually coming here and becoming the success that you have been is inspiring. And I'm hoping that we're inspiring others if they're stuck, even if they want to skill, they're doing really good. It could be this angle that is missing and we can help with that. So can you share any mistake that service businesses make when it comes to digital marketing? I know you mentioned a few, but is there anything that comes to mind that is the most obvious that are not people are not realizing?

Yeah, once you get to around one or two million dollars in revenue, you start to hit this pain line in your business. And a lot of it comes to marketing because up until that point you can hire cookie cutter or like siloed marketing. Right. Someone who's just going to do SEO, someone who's just going to do Google Ads, someone who's going to post on your social media account and you have these silo things. The problem is that you're not using your data inside of your CRM to make decisions. And when you don't use your data, you don't know what's working. And you need a marketing company that can tie the loop together. You also, up until about a million dollars, you can focus just on visibility and you can get new customers and leads in the door if you ever solve that problem. The problem is you get to a point where you can't manage all the leads and then you start, you don't retarget your bring them back into funnel which is why you have to start building out this customer journey which is going to help you scale from 1 million to 10 million. So you hit this pain line where you need a company that can tie everything together. The other thing, just like general digital marketing companies if you are in home service is do they have Google reviews? Because if Google reviews are important, your digital marketing company should have Google reviews two whatever they're going to do for you, you want to ask them this question, how are you going to track your performance? Because SEO is all black magic and voodoo and who knows if it's working or not. And you never know. You just pay for SEO and it's oh, I posted this blog post, I did this thing, who cares? I want to see my rankings increasing and my leads going up. And so these are, those are the questions that you need to ask these people is how are you going to track your performance? And you want to answer that makes sense to you?

I was laughing because I spent on SEO and that's exactly what it was. Whatever you just explained it was, here's the spreadsheet. This is what we did. What's going on? I have, I had no idea if it's actually working.

Exactly. So I was in a home service business, trying to grow my business, and I was asking these same questions, and I even knew digital marketing stuff, and I'm like, okay, cool, you, same here. Yeah, yeah. For this exact example, what you. The answer that you should hear is, hey, we track these keywords. We put them into this thing. We use a tool called Bright Local, but you can semrush, ahrefs, whatever, and you have all these keywords. And then every week we're seeing where we rank on these keywords. And if we're doing SEO properly, we should be increasing our rankings on these keywords. And over time, you should see your performance increase, not just, oh, we posted this blog post about this and hopefully this works.

No, this is great. It's been great talking to you, Phil. Honestly, I really dig your vibe, your energy, and people probably, most probably, they can see it as well, sense the genuineness, the availability to help collaborate, grow together. All that stuff is exactly what I like to grow people, that kind of person or business I like to grow with. And I would definitely like to have you on again. So we can maybe even go back and forth and figure out what's the most important aspect of a service business that they need to get deeper in. And we could do an episode to actually go in. We can maybe do screen share, whatever, and actually go in to show them how we can add. Help them as much as possible. That would be great if you're open to that.

Yeah. So leads us to the first step to working with us. We do these marketing audits where we literally get on a call, like what you're saying, and we audit people's stuff, live with them, and we tell them, perfect. This is the issue that you have. Here's all the stuff you need to fix it. Here's. If we were to work together, here's what we would do. But regardless, you can do it.

We get someone from the audience and just do an episode, live with them.

Exactly, exactly. That's perfect.

Yeah, let's work that out.

Okay.

Appreciate you, Phil.

Sa.