Origin Story: How I Built Phlash for $1M–$10M Home Service Businesses

Last year, our average client grew anywhere from $250,000 to $1 million in revenue. And over the last 7 years, I've helped home service companies generate close to $47 million in revenue. This wasn't by luck or me magically figuring this out. There were unique steps that happened in my process from how to grow a local service business, how to do actual digital marketing that actually grows, and then blending it all together to grow a home service business. So people ask me, how did you figure this stuff out? So I thought I'd share my origin story of how I built this company to help $1 million to $10 million home service businesses grow. So my first interaction with a home service business was actually with my dad. He's still a service manager at a pest control company, and I vividly remember when I was 9 years old, I went to Take Your Child to Work Day. My parents were divorced, but I saw my dad every other weekend, and on this specific instance, I got to go to work with him, which was really cool. And he was a pest control technician, so he had his route. He literally had a clipboard like this in the side of his Toyota Tacoma, and I'm sitting there looking at his route sheet He has his Garmin up and he's putting it in there where to go. And he would go up to the home, knock on the door, the homeowner would come to the door and he'd do the walk around, the inspection, you know, any service that needed to get done. Then he'd go back and go to the next job. And it was so awesome. Like, I remember people asking me, what do you want to do when you get older? And I said, I want to be a soccer player and I want to be a pest control technician just like my dad. So that was my entry into home service businesses. Now, when I started my career, I was working at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about that experience. But one of the big shifts that happened was I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, and he said the number one skill you can learn is how to sell. So I went into enterprise corporate office and I was selling fleet management services to home service companies. So I would be calling on home service business owners anywhere from like $2-ish million to about $100 million, and they have fleets of vehicles and I would be selling them on enterprise fleet. What I realized was that I would go and talk to these guys and they were just like my dad, like, you know, blue collar guys. You know, like to drink beer, hang out, talk about sports, whatever. And it was very natural for me to get along with them. And so this was like how I got into home service was through my experience with my dad, but then ultimately selling fleet management services to home service companies. And one of the people that I sold was the company that I ended up working at actually. Okay, before I get into working at this home service business, there's a unique part about what we do as a company that was built from Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Enterprise Rent-A-Car is a 27 $1 billion business, and they were not built just off of random things. They're a family-owned business, not franchised on every single location because they do two things really well. One, they build operators from the ground up, so they only promote from within. So they take people from management trainee to assistant manager to branch manager to area manager, all the way up to the CEO, all from the ground up. So they have a great training system that I went through. The other thing they do is that they run their business on data. So they take the data and then they fix the business based off of data. So me starting as a management trainee, I was built off of those two things. So some of the things that I learned along this process was one, how do I get paid off of the P&L and analyze the P&L? And then how do I make adjustments? So I mentioned that 25, I went into the corporate office. From the age of 22, 23, 24, 25, I was a management trainee. Then I was an assistant manager and I was a branch manager at a flagship location. I was actually the number one branch manager in the D.C. metro area, and I had won 5 Diamond Club awards at that flagship location. It was a $3 million business. I had 20 team members. I had 2 satellite offices, 2 assistant managers. We had 400 cars that I was responsible for. We were doing $300,000 months, and it was my job to grow the business, have good customer service, make sure that we are doing all the right stuff. And that's the branch that I actually won Diamond Club awards at. So this is what I was taught. At this $3 million business was how to run this thing efficiently and be the number one local service business inside of a $27 billion family-owned business. What I learned in this experience was a couple of things. One, we have to look at our data year over year. We have to look at how many cars did we rent last January versus how many we rented this January. Because if we want to grow, grow our revenue, then we need to rent more cars. And the only way we can know if we're renting more cars is to know last year's numbers. This played pivotal when I went to work at the home service business to look at the data. The second thing was when I look at the P&L, what are the numbers that I can drive growth on? I can drive growth on sales and upsells. I can drive growth on more cars being rented, and I can drive growth on downtime. So not having cars sitting around, but actually using them. Another big thing that they drilled into us was phones, like phone, phone, phone. When a lead comes in, You have 2 rings to answer the phone. When you answer the phone, you do what's called a no-look book. You book it. It doesn't matter if you have the vehicle on your lot, you book it. That's how you grow your business. You can't grow if you say no. And this was drilled into us. So I said, I'll book it all day long and I'm going to grow my business. And that's one of the biggest things that I did to grow the business was no-look books. Another thing they had was this thing called red cars. Think of this as a form that you would fill out on your website. And a red car was a flashing red car that someone just got into an accident. And they needed a rental car. The faster you could call this red car, the quicker you could get them on your schedule and get them a rental car. This is the exact same thing with web forms. The faster you can get to it, the quicker that you have the opportunity to get it onto your books. So this was drilled into us at Enterprise, these stories over and over again, and this is how I learned to run a local service business. Okay, Phil, cool, all that sounds good, but how did you learn that marketing stuff? Because this is the hidden secret that most people come up with black magic and voodoo and they do some marketing. So I mentioned when I was 25, I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and I went in to learn how to do sales because he said, number one skill you can do is sales. Well, I had paid off my student loans. I paid off $30,000 in 12 months when I first graduated college at Enterprise, and then I saved up for the next 2 years. So '23, '24, and then at 25, I actually bought a condo with cash. It wasn't in the nicest area. It was literally next to Section 8 and stuff. But I bought a condo with cash working at Enterprise. Like, who would have thought? So my wife is a kindergarten teacher and her friends were like, "Hey, how did you do this? How did you pay off your student loans? How did you buy this condo with cash? Like, what did you do?" So I started sharing with them my budget template and they're like, "Is it cool if I share this with some other people? Like, they're all asking me how you did this." So at the time, this was in 2015, blogs were kind of a big thing. So I said, "Well, what if I just start a blog and I share my journey on there? I can share the budget template and maybe some people will read it. Maybe there's a way to make money. I don't really know, but let me just start doing this." So I built a WordPress website. I started writing 2 blog posts every single week by hand. So no ChatGPT, right? I was literally writing it by hand with my story and I started to learn. So the first thing that I learned was how do I get people to actually come and read this thing? Like, okay, I'm just talking about it. So I could post content, so I could post social media posts that said, come read my stuff. I could also do SEO, which means how do I get people that are searching for this to come to my website and read this thing? This is the first thing I learned. How do I get people to come see my stuff? And what I learned was there's this thing called backlinks where I can get links to my website and I can get people to come and read it. This is more of a global strategy, but it's still to this day creating unique content that people are searching for and having them come to read your website, whether that's a home service business, you know, creating content based off the real questions that they're asking so that way they come to your website and then they get the question that they want answered. And the next piece I'm going to tell you is the next part. But essentially, I went out and I was featured in Forbes and CNBC, Yahoo Finance, all this cool stuff because I wanted to get backlinks. I wanted to get their readers to come to my website website, and then I did all the SEO keyword research to create content that was around budgeting and finance to get traffic to my site. So I ended up getting about 30,000-40,000 readers to my site every single month. However, what I realized was that they would come into my site and read one thing, but they would never come back. They would read one thing, they would come to my site and leave. So imagine in home service, they come to your website and they wouldn't actually turn into a lead. Who cares? I don't care about website readers or whatever. I want leads to grow my business. So what I learned was that I need to have call to actions on my website. I need to have a form on there that they could click and turn into an email subscriber so that I could do some type of affiliate marketing or sell them something. So first, I added a basic web form that was like a contact form for home service businesses, and that was decent. But then I realized, wait a sec, if I actually gave them a free 5-day budget guide, then they— I got more clicks that came through, more subscribers when I actually gave something away. So I changed my call to action for that. Then I realized, wow, I'm getting all these email subscribers. I need to start emailing them. So I started messing around with subject lines. What's a good thing? What's a good open rate? And my subject lines, 20%, 30%, 40%, getting people to come back to read my blogs. So when I wrote a blog post, I did an email blast that went out. I did a social post, and now I drove traffic to the top of the funnel. This was how I learned digital marketing back in 2015, and this was basically throwing me into the deep end of figuring out how to do digital marketing. So I actually did digital marketing for 4 years on my blog. I actually quit my job at Enterprise. I went and bought a tiny school bus, traveled around the country, made content, and did this game plan for 4 straight years. So now I was at Enterprise. I did the blogging thing. I quit, I quit Enterprise. I traveled around the country. And when I came back from this trip, this was about 2018. One of my clients that I sold at Enterprise was the duct cleaning company. He was stuck at $2.7 million for 2 years, and he knew that I was a killer. He knew that at Enterprise, he had friends that worked there that were high up and they told him if someone works at fleet management, which is what the division I worked in, then they're the top people. And he knew my story and he liked it and he followed me along my journey on Facebook and all the stuff and he knew what I was about. So he's like, "Hey, maybe you could come work with me and help me grow my business." When I went to work there, all my worlds collided. My enterprise experience of growing a local service business off of data with my digital marketing experience, which is get people to your website and convert them into leads. It was like a match made in heaven because I was trained on the enterprise model and then I had all this digital marketing expertise about converting leads and it was a perfect setup. So his business went from $3 million to $4 million. Some of the big things that we did in 2018 with his business was I added an estimate calculator to his website because again, people will come to his website and fill out a contact form, but then I needed my CSRs to call them. So I added the estimate calculator and online scheduling because I knew from my blog that I needed to get the right call to actions on there to convert these leads. It's still to this day, you need these call to actions on your website. That generated an additional 200 leads for us and 100 booked jobs just right from the online scheduling. Then I knew that the customer service representatives need to call these estimate calculators, these contact forms, these chat widgets, these 7-second forms, all these new call to actions that we're adding to the website. So what I did was I went through like my enterprise experience and I built a call script for them. I helped them track their booking rate. And I set up numbers to look at year over year. So I said, okay, last year we did 500 jobs, this year we need 600 jobs. So let me set this as a goal and put it on the whiteboard. This is exactly what we did at enterprise. So it's basically drive traffic to the website, get more leads, coach my CSR team on booking jobs, and then I coached our technicians on how to upsell on the jobs. So don't just do a duct cleaning, do a duct cleaning plus a dryer vent cleaning. And I coached them on how to get Google reviews and I incentivized them on Google reviews and I started tracking these numbers year over year. Leads, jobs, estimate count, estimate close, new customers, total revenue, because I knew that if I knew those numbers, I can go and fix the problem. The big thing that illuminated this was an aha moment for me was in ad spend, return on ad spend. We were working with these cookie-cutter marketing agencies. I was out, you know, doing my thing, growing these businesses, growing the business. But from an ad spend perspective, every single time that I said, hey, we're a little bit slower, you know, on these monthly meetings, the same thing every single time that we're talking about. They would say, "Well, why don't you spend more on ads?" And I would say, "Well, how do I know that? Who are these people that you speak of that are these leads, these conversions? And then how do I know that these are actually making me money?" And they love the, you know, the whole runaround thing. So I said, "Okay, I need to build this internally inside of my business so that I can track return on ad spend." Because the owner, Tom, he's like, "Oh, I just signed up for HomeAdvisor Pro." You know, this was before Angie. HomeAdvisor Pro, it's $2,500. And I would be like, "Well, how are we going to track return on ad spend?" I don't know, figure it out. Or like Yelp or all these different platforms. So what I did was I set up landing pages and tracking numbers, and then I coached our CSRs to put the right stuff in the lead source. And then every single month I produce a return on ad spend report to know what levers to pull. This is exactly what we do with home service businesses now. And slowly I started to realize that there's this issue. There's digital marketing companies, there's your CRM data, and then there's automation and tech stack that all needs to work together. And when I figured that out in the home service business that I was at, growth exploded. $3 million to $4 million, $300,000 in profit to $900,000 in profit. And then ultimately he went to $5 million and then sold. All right. So I was growing his business and he was like, hey, you are killing it. But like, dude, leave me alone. I'm making $1 million a year. I didn't even go to college or anything. I literally started right out of high school. Like, I'm making $1 million a year. Leave me alone. You need to go help other people. So he actually named my company Flash Consulting. It's my name, Phil, and then my wife's name is Ashley, but I call her Ash. So he said, Flash Consulting, go help people. And he introduced me to two other of his friends that own businesses and said, go start your company and help them. So that's what I did. He was my first client, and then I had two other people and I started working with them. This was in 2019. So I started working with them. And what happened was I started getting referrals because we were crushing it. One company went $3 million to $8 million and sold to private equity. Another one went from $2 million to $4 million, sold to private equity. He went from $3 million to $5 million, sold to private equity. So I started getting people referring me. The problem is that I had to productize our service because I couldn't just be selling hours out here. I had to figure out like, what exactly do you do? And this all came to a head when the private equity company contacted him and said, hey, I want to acquire your company. It was a search fund. And he was like, okay, I mean, I'm down to listen to you. So he was like, Phil, can you come to this lunch with us? We went to a place called Lazy Dog in Northern Virginia. He's like, hey, can you come and sit with us and talk to this guy and tell him what we do? Like, what did you do in our business? So I sit down, it's me, him, and then this search fund guy. He's about my age, like, you know, mid-30s, whatever. And he asked me 3 questions. And this is what I built our whole system off of. He said, how do you get new customers and how do you track the customers that you get? How do you convert the leads into sales? And then how do you retarget your past prospects and customers? Those 3 things. And I said, okay, that's what he cares about. And he's literally buying this company for millions of dollars. So I need to articulate what we do in those 3 phases. So in a visibility side, there's 4 ways to get new customers. Then in a conversion side, there's 3 ways to convert visitors from your website all the way into a sale. And then from a retargeting side, there's 2 ways to do that. And so I started building out this customer journey and we have about 7 playbooks now that we implement in businesses. And they walk through that sales funnel, and we're basically plugging holes in these businesses, saying, okay, you don't have a lead nurture sequence, plug that hole. You don't do retargeting and email newsletters with the two-step sequence to turn it into a sales machine, plug that hole. You don't have a partner pipeline builder to build referrals, plug that hole. And basically, we're taking these playbooks and plugging the holes. And this is how I came up with this whole process, because I sat down with this private equity guy and he asked me these questions, and I said, let's build a system off of this. Since that point, that was like 2021, 2022, I made it my mission to go and help home service businesses, and we've slowly refined it down to what we serve is $1 million to $10 million home service businesses that are residential focused, that have a CSR and a CRM. We know if they have those pillar pieces, when we plug in these 7 playbooks, there's no way that they can't grow, which is why our average client grew 27% last year, anywhere from $250,000 to $1 million. And we've generated close to $47 million in revenue because we have such a specific avatar And the way that I built this company was based off of my own need. I was at the home service business working with these cookie-cutter agencies, frustrated, and I knew that I built this dashboard, I built these automations, I produce return on ad spend reporting, I built, helped build call scripts and lead nurture sequences with our CSRs. And I know that this stuff works. And I know that business owners are stuck in this hamster wheel of trying to do all of these things together, and they just want a company that they can say, help me grow my business. They don't want to just pay for more ads and pray to the Google gods. And that's exactly what we do. So if you are listening to this and you fall into that camp and you're like, hey, maybe you could help me out, I'll put a link down below. You can set up some time with us. We'll walk you through the 7 playbooks and show you exactly what you need to do to grow your business.