Phil Risher went from managing Enterprise Rent-A-Car locations to selling fleet services to CEOs, then started Flash Consulting to help local service businesses grow. One client grew from 3 million to 8 million in revenue before selling. He shares how his background in operations, sales, and digital marketing shaped the business.
In this video, I'm going to explain how I came up with the idea to start Flash Consulting and how I got to this point in my career and more importantly, why it matters to local service businesses and how you can utilize the tools and resources that we've built inside of Flash to help your business. So if you're new to this channel, we post content about growing local service businesses. We share videos every single week about strategies to grow the business. Whether that's growing leads, growing jobs booked, or growing sales overall, or our whole thing is let's help you grow your business. And so essentially what we do is we partner with local service businesses to help them increase their sales and keep their technician schedules full. I have a unique background and that's why I'm making this video to explain how we got to this point. So about 12 years ago, I had just graduated college and was working at Enterprise Rent A Car coming out of college in their management trainee program. And in that program, it, if you're not familiar with it, it's a great course on how to run a local service business, specifically like a one to $3 million service business. And basically they teach you how to sell from the ground up and also how to run a business. So over three years, I became branch manager. I was the number one branch manager in the D.C. metro market two times in a row for two different branches. So I went, the first time I went to a bad branch and I turned it around. The second time I went to an average branch and I turned it into a powerhouse. And so I knew how to run a local that was producing 2 to 3 million dollars revenue and it was cranking, you know, sales, everything. So I had the framework of running a local service business on how to train your employees, how to manage the leads, the jobs and the sales based off of your P and L. And at that point I was about 25 and I decided that I wanted to go into, so I started here, I decided that I wanted to go into business, to business sales so that I could learn that strategy. And they have a division called Enterprise Fleet Management where you can go and actually sell business to business, to local service businesses like H vac, contractors, plumbers, electricians, duct cleaning companies, carpet cleaning companies, and actually sell them on using Enterprise for their fleet and what they do, you know, they buy vehicles, they help you maintain them, they help you sell them, and they basically managing your fleet for you. And over the next two to three years, I was selling B2B to local service businesses that were typically anywhere from 5 million in revenue to 100 million revenue. And I was working on contacting the CEOs of those businesses. So I started to. And I was analyzing their P and ls, I was looking at their fleet maintenance costs, coming up with strategies. And so I really started to dive into local service business on a holistic level, not just in my local branch. At the same time, I started a blog. And this blog was called Young Adult Survival Guide, where basically I was helping young people pay off student loans. And you can see this is me, Phil Risher, and I was helping people pay off student loans and plan for the future. And my blog got really big, and it was featured in Forbes and cnbc, Business Insider, a bunch of different places. We had about 30,000 readers. And I was doing this at the same time that I was doing Fleet Management just on the side, kind of learning all this stuff when it comes to digital marketing. And I built this up really good. And I actually left Enterprise and I went to do this full time. I learned how to build an email list, I learned how to get the call to actions, I learned how to do SEO. I learned everything as far as digital marketing goes. And so when I left to do my blog full time, I was traveling and doing stuff like that. And when I came back, one of my clients from Fleet Management was Atlantic Duckling. And he asked me, hey, could you come and work with me and be my Director of Business development? And this was in 2018. And so when I went there and I started, literally within the first three months, it all connected, which is all my experience of running a local service business, all my experience of doing B2B sales and working with them and analyzing PNLs. All. All my experience from a digital marketing perspective, doing SEO, building WordPress websites, building call to actions, tracking your analytics, tracking your conversion rates. It all connected and said, wow, I should probably be doing this for companies on a consulting basis. Not necessarily building a digital marketing agency, but more building an agency that has a consulting component to it where I can leverage all these resources and skills and build a custom program that helps companies grow. And so that's basically what we did, was we took that framework of working with these different companies, right? Local service businesses, blogging, SEO, heavy content creation, email marketing, all that stuff tied in with the local service business aspect. And we built this flash customer journey. And as you can see, it's gotten some really, really good results. Like one of the companies that we work with, they just went from. We worked with them for three years, 3 million, 5 million, 8 million and they sold the business to private equity company. We we increase, we focus on new customer growth, revenue growth. So if you're interested in learning more about our business and how we got and how we help companies like yours grow, we'll put a link down below. You can schedule some time to talk. There's no, you know, hard sales or anything. If it makes sense to work together then maybe we'll give you a little push and say hey, this makes sense. If not it's like okay, well hopefully we can give you some tools and resources to help you grow your business. And worst case, just hit like and subscribe and you'll get content about growing your local service business from us. Also in the link below I'll put a link to join our email newsletter where we just share bi weekly content to help you grow your business and I'll see you in the next video.
