Grow A Small Business Podcast · Troy Trewin

From $50/hr consultant to building a $2M agency. Phil Risher grew Flash Consulting with a remote team of 18 by productizing services, mastering content & AI search, and adopting the mindset for 20%+ annual growth. (Episode 768 - Phil Risher)

·34 min·2 clips

Phil says AI search is built on large language models trained on content, so businesses need their own content.

1. Grow A Small Business Podcast features Phil Risher and Flash Consulting, a Washington, DC-based marketing consulting business for home-service companies. 2. Troy Truen hosts the episode and frames the show around owners with 5 to 30 team members, revenue growth, pain points, and what they would change from day one. 3. The episode asks how Phil took Flash Consulting from a solo start in 2019 to $2 million in annual revenue and 18 full-time equivalent team members. 4. Phil says he began at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, moved into corporate sales, and learned B2B fleet management from a home-service client. 5. He says reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad pushed him to ask Enterprise for sales training because he needed to get better at selling. 6. Phil describes a personal-finance blog, Forbes and CNBC features, and years of content work that brought traffic but only about $4,000 in four years. 7. He says he bought a school bus, built a tiny home, and traveled the U.S. making content while trying to figure out monetization. 8. The home-service client who became director of business development later suggested he go fractional and introduced him to two other HVAC leads. 9. Phil says Flash Consulting started on his honeymoon in August 2019 and his first client was the employer that had hired him as director of business development. 10. He says the company originally billed hourly at $50 an hour, then shifted to productized monthly packages after he hit a 40-hour ceiling. 11. Phil says the first two years reached about $200,000, while he was still trading time for money and feeling maxed out. 12. He says buying back his time with an executive assistant, a director of operations, a marketer, and a salesperson doubled revenue. 13. Phil says the turning point came on “day 2037” when a lead, salesperson, bookkeeper, and consultant handled the full workflow without him. 14. He says his biggest marketing framework has three parts: visibility, conversions, and retargeting, with free content, paid content, warm referrals, and cold outreach under visibility. 15. Phil says AI search changes the game because large language models are trained on content, and he prefers real call transcripts over generic prompts. 16. He says agencies that only white-label services or post generic content are heading toward a race to the bottom, while consultative firms using client data have an edge. 17. The interview style stays practical and numerically specific, with Troy repeatedly asking for revenue, hiring, stress points, and operating systems. 18. Phil’s tone is reflective and direct, and he uses examples from Dan Martell, Marcus Sheridan, Profit First, and The E-Myth to explain his choices. 19. Owners of home-service businesses, marketing agencies, or remote teams would likely get the most value. 20. Listeners looking for celebrity anecdotes or abstract theory would probably skip it.

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