Want to unlock massive value in home service businesses? Join host Bronson Hill for an insightful conversation with Phil Risher, founder of Phlash Consulting, a digital marketing agency that scales home service companies for private equity exits. Recorded in June 2025, this episode explores Phil’s journey from paying off $30,000 in student loans to running a $3 million Enterprise branch at age 25, then leveraging digital marketing to grow an air duct cleaning company from $3 million to $4 million in revenue in just 10 months. Featured in Forbes, CNBC, and The Wall Street Journal, Phil shares how to boost business valuations by fixing visibility, conversion, and retargeting funnels, why service contracts are key for sticky revenue, and how AI is reshaping home services with search and automated processes.
Whether you’re an investor eyeing plumbing or HVAC rollups or an entrepreneur seeking growth, Phil’s strategies for consolidating businesses and securing 10-12x earnings multiples will inspire you to think bigger.
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Full Transcript:
Bronson Hill: Welcome to the Mailbox Money Show. I am your host, Bronson Hill.
Super excited to be here with you today. I’ve got Phil Risher, who’s awesome. I was on his podcast recently. He has Phlash Consulting Company, which is a digital marketing agency. So, what really they do is they come in with purchases with private equity. They’ll buy a company, and they’ll say, hey, we’re working with this plumbing company or this other home services company. And they’ll say, okay, Phlash Consulting will help them to grow their sales, to help grow in different ways.
So that’s really important.
One thing I’ve learned recently is that some of these companies that have three or four million in earnings per year can sell for three to five times earnings. But if you have eight or ten million in earnings, you sell for, say, ten, twelve times earnings. The same business, the same everything, and the multiple is two to three times higher, which is incredible. So this growth, anybody who can help kind of grow that, is really a part of helping increase the value of the business.
So we’re entering more in this space. We’ve talked a lot about that. We were gonna buy an e-commerce company that was importing from China, and of course, that shut down because of some of the tariffs and things like that. But we’re always learning and growing.
So anyway, side note. He has also been featured, Phil has been featured, in outlets like Forbes, CSNBC, and Yahoo Finance, The Wall Street Journal. He has a blog that has the general, I say, newsletter, excuse me, that generates over 4,000 a month in passive income.
So we’re gonna have a great conversation today.
Really excited to have you here Phil. How’s it going brother?
Phil Risher: Yeah, good, man. Really excited to talk with you.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, I’m excited to talk with you. I really enjoyed being on your show. You asked some great questions. But let’s get into your background. I don’t know that people start out saying, hey, I want to be a digital marketer for home services businesses. So how did you, maybe that’s what you said when you were like five. Like, this is what it’s gonna be, right?
I’m gonna throw this when I grow up. So how did you get to be doing this?
Phil Risher: Yeah, coming out of college, I had student loans. I had about thirty thousand dollars in student loans, and I only had two offers for jobs. One of them was working at Enterprise Rent-A-Car in their management track program.
Bronson Hill: My brother did that same job. He does same job. Yeah, everybody is a manager training, right?
Phil Risher: Yeah, basically you clean cars and get your tie sucked up in the vacuum is what the job is. But I worked through that program, I ended up being one of the top branch managers in the DC Metro area. And we actually get paid off the bottom line of the business.
So whatever you produce inside of that business, you get paid off of the profit. How to run a local service business. And how to look at a P&L and analyze it and make adjustments with my sales process, my customer service, my B2B partnerships, all this stuff. I was 25, running a three million dollar business.
Bronson Hill: Amazing. Wow.
Phil Risher: At the time, I had reread Rich Dad Poor Dad, and he talked that, I’m not the best writing author, I’m the best-selling author. And he said one of the best skills you can do is to know how to sell. Which I knew how to sell, like residential customers and stuff, but I wanted to learn B2B sales. So I went into corporate enterprise, and I sold fleet management services to large home service businesses. Like ten to a hundred million dollar home service businesses. I was calling on the CEOs, setting meetings, selling them fleet management services.
At the time, I had paid off those student loans that I had. I ended up saving up and buying my first condo with cash. And I started a blog about personal finance. And I’ve been writing, this is one for free ChatGPT, writing three blog posts a week, doing email newsletter, media content. And I ended up getting about 30 to 40,000 people to my website every single month.
Bronson Hill: Wow.
Phil Risher: I would go to these meetings with these business owners and ask them, like, hey, what are you doing for digital marketing?
I was just featured in Forbes and started kind of talking to them and learning the home service space. So I ended up leaving my job at Enterprise, and I quit my job. I bought a tiny school bus and made a little tiny home. And I traveled around the country with my dog, hiking and creating content. I was basically like an influencer before influencing, which never took off.
Back from that trip, one of my clients was an air duct cleaning company. And he was a three million dollar home service business. And he reached out to me and said, hey, I need someone to be my director of business development, to help me grow. I’ve been in business for 25 years. I’m stuck. I’m stagnant at 3 million.
So I went to work there. In the first three months, all my worlds collided. My enterprise management training, me running a business, looking at the P&L, analyzing its sales, my digital marketing of getting people to my website, converting them into email subscribers and into leads. All came to a head. And in the first 10 months, he went from 3 million to 4 million in revenue, 300,000 to 900,000 in profit.
And I was like, dude, we’re just scratching the surface. And he’s like, dude, you need to chill, because I’m making a million dollars. I never thought this was possible. He basically, like, fired me. Kind of like, hey, you need to go do your own thing, and I’ll be your first customer. Here’s a couple referrals. And that’s how I got started.
Bronson Hill: Wow. Okay. Amazing.
What’s funny is, there’s a lot of lessons from that, Phil. You know, I think one of the best ways a lot of people don’t realize is, like, how do you make money? You get around, it’s a Jim Rohn quote, it’s a paraphrase, but it says, make yourself valuable to valuable people.
So a lot of times, you go to someone who’s doing well, and doing well in business or in life, and you just, hey, how can I, and you try to figure out, how can I solve a problem for this person?
And if you can do that, like, there’s a lot of people I would pay a lot of money if they can solve problems for me, right? If they can find deals for me, if they can bring investments, like, or investors to me, like, those are all super valuable to me, right?
And so in business, it’s all about that, right? So you had a chance at a young age, 25, you’re over here, you’re kind of plugging things in, and you’re kind of seeing it. Then you just do it, very quick at it, you’re able to do it. Do you think that your skill set, like, what was the skill set that really enabled you to do that?
Because obviously people come in and they, like, you know, they don’t have the success that you’ve had. So what is, I guess, the way that you see things, from your eyeballs like, what do you think is what you noticed about your friend’s business, or that person’s business, that you were able to scale? And see the opportunity. First, you saw it, and then you’re able to do something about it. But, like, what do you think, like, qualities you had to be able to do that?
Phil Risher: Yes, well, so this was a glaring issue. It was that, because I had this blog experience of lifecycle of a customer, a lot of times traditional digital marketing is just looking at new customers coming in. Like, how can I get more visibility? I could run ads, then I get people to my website to buy my product. Like e-commerce, for example, is like run Facebook ads, get people to my website, customer acquisition costs, LTV, you know, all this math stuff.
The problem with in-home service is that that’s fine and well, but there’s two other pieces that most people miss. It’s the conversion funnel and the retargeting funnel. The conversion funnel is when a lead comes in In home service, it’s not just go to a landing page and buy something. It’s turn into a lead, your customer service representative has to talk to them on the phone, a salesperson has to go out to your house, give you an estimate, you have to follow up on that estimate, and then you have to close into a sale. And after that, you might not turn into a sale. Now you need to do email marketing and text marketing to bring them back into your funnel and cross-sell them other services.
It’s much different than just run ads to a landing page and buy something, and then we’re all good. And so, when I went in, it was that exact process. Do a bunch of ads over here, try to get these customers and leads to come in. But those two processes, the conversion funnel and the retargeting were non-existent. And once we fixed those two processes, it was off to the races. It’s unlimited.
Bronson Hill: Well, I think anybody who’s a business owner can appreciate this, that there are constraints, right? We have things that, like, really the goal is just more sales or more business. And, to be able to deliver on that, right?
So it’s usually, if you have the constraint, if you have, for example, in an e-commerce business, which is kind of what we’re working on. Like, if you either can supply the products and you get the sales, the most important part is selling the stuff. Once you sell the stuff, kind of figure out how to get the products. I mean, just make sure people don’t get too upset it takes them too long to get the stuff. But I think it’s being able to kind of sort that out.
So, obviously, I can tell you’re very good with that. So I know you’re also, there’s a lot of private equity that’s working with you, and they’ll hire you as a service to come into these home service companies to help them to grow their sales. Is it the same process, kind of, that you’re using before? Are you doing anything, you kind of have created this engine now, so you just kind of put people, here’s what we’re gonna do with you, and you just kind of, okay, we’ve got the system, we just put you in here, and we kind of work it through and get you more sales, right?
Phil Risher: Yeah, well, so there’s two sides of it. So we’ve been on both sides. We helped home service businesses scale. We helped one HVAC company go from three million, six million, eight million, sell to private equity. And the way that we did that was through creating these three parts, which is visibility, conversions, and retargeting.
And any good private equity, search fund, whatever they’re gonna look at this as a good marketing plan and come in and implement this inside of a business. So if you’re a home service business, you want to set this up so that way you can grow your business and you have it ready to sell.
Now, when we come into the business, there’s a couple things that a lot of the PE companies or search fund guys that are not used to home service that they miss. And that is the customer service representatives. Because they just think, oh, I’ll get more leads. But the problem is, you need people to answer the phones and to schedule appointments for your technicians to go out on the job.
And the second is the sales process. In the home service, it’s very intimate, and there’s a lot of steps that go into it. You don’t just, like, fix the sales process. You have to know what to do. So you have to fix these things. Most companies don’t have a lead problem in the home service space. They have a lead management problem. And what they need to do is fix that workflow.
So I’ll give you an example.
Let’s say it’s an HVAC contractor. It’s Sunday night. They fill out a form on your website. Monday morning, you come in and you call them, and they don’t answer. Oh my gosh, what do we do?
Do we just leave the lead there, or do we have a process to manage the lead? And this is the thing that businesses need to fix. And a lot of times, with a PE or search funds, they don’t know the exact way to do things because they’ve never run a home service business before. And so they’re looking at it, you know, with the numbers, saying, like, this should all work, but they don’t have the processes to fill in the blanks.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, so you deal with that lead then. The example you gave, you’d put them in, you’d say, okay, we’re gonna have some automated thing call them, we’re gonna send them emails. We’re gonna just kind of call them every couple days for the week. And then, after that, every once a month, or we’re gonna whatever. You kind of figure where that follow-up is gonna be.
Phil Risher: That’s right. So, like, in that specific example, there’s a company that we worked with, and we helped them increase their lead-to-close ratio from 21%. And what they did was, when a lead came in, they set up a text, email, voicemail drop nurture sequence. So that way, over 21 days, they’re following up with these leads and then converting them—same thing with their estimate process.
And the big part of this, okay, Phil, yeah, we can implement that ourselves. There’s another factor, which is your CRM. So in home service, there’s this CRM that’s out there, which is your dispatch software or how you maintain your customers. It’s different than just slap HubSpot on it.
You have to have a specific one for home service. But now, you need everything to work together. You need your lead nurture sequence to work with your CRM to make it make all sense. These were all the things that I had to solve in the business, as I’m going through that we solve for businesses now.
Bronson Hill: Well, it’s funny too. I remember, if anybody, I think sure a lot of listeners can relate with, especially if you’re, I’m 44 but if you’re older than me, or the same age as me, or maybe you’re not. But just a lot of people say, well, I’m just not a tech person, or I’m not a whatever person. But it’s amazing how there’s so much—like. We’ve raised 50 million dollars because we were willing to learn the tech stuff, right?. We’ve been able to learn that and be able to target, retarget, to go after, you know, investors and provide value and do our email newsletter now to 7,000 people weekly.
And it’s like, you know, it’s been great. And then people reach out and they say, hey, I want to invest in your deals. And so this is kind of how things will work a lot.
What’s one thing that you’ve learned, I guess going back to kind of the investor side like, have you invested in some of these deals as well? Or do you get equity in any of this, or is it all kind of fee-based stuff, or how do you do it?
Phil Risher: We’ve had people that ask us, like, hey, instead of fee-based work, would you take equity in the companies? The hard thing is that in my opinion, when we were to take equity, you’re betting on the jockey. Like, we would be betting on this business to execute on things. And it would need to be a really good jockey for us to want to do that deal, not just like doing work.
Because in marketing specifically, any good marketing company can help you produce leads. What they can’t do is help you produce sales and closures. They can build some of this stuff in, but, like, if you don’t have a good jockey that can put all this stuff together and execute, it’s really hard.
So I’ve kind of shied away, unless it’s a really good opportunity which I haven’t found one great with a jockey. But we’ve had the opportunities, and we could go to the market with this type of thing. But it’s just a lot of—I mean, you get it. It’s a jockey that yeah
Bronson Hill: Yeah. Well, and that’s for when we choose businesses we’re gonna buy or partners we’re gonna work with. We do a lot of vetting and diligence to make sure we’re working with people that we like and trust. And even then, we’ve had deals that, you know, we liked with them, and they don’t end up going well sometimes. So there’s risk involved. There’s things there.
And so, yeah, if you could take the money, I’d be wondering if there’s a situation, like you said, betting on the jockey, where it’s like, well, we’ll give you way more if you do it with equity. And it’s like, oh, that makes sense. But private equity groups, a lot of times, the issue is not money. Like, they have a lot of stuff plenty of money to, like, money.
Phil Risher: We’ll take the money get the profit and then if I want to deploy that in another way I can. But yeah, try to keep it as clean for us
Bronson Hill: Yeah, do you guys I was gonna ask you something about that? Would you guys take performance fees as like a performance cut based on how it does as well
Phil Risher: People have asked us before to do that. The problem is, there’s two sides of this. First, we don’t want to just be seen as a lead machine, because leads in and of itself is not what customers—really what businesses—really want. Because you want leads, and you want to be able to close them into a sale.
And so, but inside of the sales process, again, there’s so many parts to it. That’s like, if we were to take a fee then it’s like, oh, well, the leads are not good, or the sales process is not good, the salesperson is not good. So are we gonna actually close these things?
And so for us, it’s like we try to come alongside you as more of a marketing partner than an actual, like, performance-pay sales machine, because there’s so many moving parts.
So, I know a guy this kind of brings it back to investors. So a lot of people are very interested in buying a local business, right?
Bronson Hill: So I know a guy, lives in Northern California, Central California. He knows a lot of people. People say, hey, I’ve got a plumbing business, I’ve got a construction business, I want to sell it, whatever. So you’d be somebody they work with on the marketing side.
But what about on the operations side? Because I’m sure there’s times where, like, you’ll see it, and you’re like, oh, we fixed the funnel, whatever. But then these guys do terrible work, and they don’t, like the staff and staffing is a tough issue.
How is it? Are there other groups like you that come in and help on operations and do all that too? Are there managers, probably consultants that do that? You guys are there people you work hand-in-hand with on that?
Phil Risher: Yeah. The hardest part to this whole equation is tha person that you’re referring to really needs to be on-site. So, well, there’s a guy in Central California who wants to buy a company in Florida and then manage it off outside of it. Yeah, which is great.
But you need someone in there every single day executing, and that’s the hardest part about buying these home service businesses. Which is why search funds or PE would, you know, find an MBA in entrepreneurship, plug them in. But, you know, that whole equation works really good.
But I would really stress that you need to have someone that’s on the ground, that can execute on a daily basis—not be someone fractionally outside of the scope of people.
Bronson Hill: It’s really interesting skills that I actually talked to somebody recently about, you know, going and buying plumbing businesses and buying. We’ve been a part of a roll-up for car washes. So the roll-up is just simply buying multiples of the same and selling them for a higher multiple later, higher equity multiple later.
So this guy I met at a party, he called himself a consolidator. I was like, what do you mean? He’s like, well, he’s like, we bought plumbing. I started buying, I bought a plumbing business seven years ago, whatever, and I learned the business.
I went into the business. I helped it, whatever. I did all the stuff, and I learned that, okay, you know, plumbing—there should be one of three outcomes. He kind of went and did the operating side. They would train the managers on how to do some of the, you know, when somebody gets called to the house, they should have one of these three outcomes.
And then he did well. He basically bought it for three times earnings. Then he got it, he improved it, doubled the sales in a couple years or something. And then he bought another one. They kept buying more. They got, like, ten of these. So you have something that was worth, I think he ended up selling it for, like, a hundred million dollars or something. Had ten or twenty of these. And so he sold it to private equity.
But it’s like this idea of just consolidating, putting things together, and knowing how to do it. Not everybody wants to do that. There’s a lot of work and brain damage, whatever. But, like, he was able to create, you know—out of all these different plumbing businesses he was able to create one business together.
They basically have similar, you know, processes and similar software, private equity loves that. But it’s just amazing, you know, to buy for three times earnings and sell later I think it was like 12 times earnings. You 4x just on the multiple.
It’s kind of an amazing skill. A lot of people don’t do that. They don’t realize that that’s there.
But what is it like, have you seen some people like that, that they’re kind of that person that does that consolidating? And talk to you about, like, what skills that person has to be able to do that?
Yeah, so there’s two common ones.
Phil Risher: The first one is vertical, like what you’re saying plumbing, plumbing, plumbing, plumbing roll-up. An easier one is when you buy, like, plumbing company, HVAC, electrical, and roll them together. Because, against each other and if you’re in a local market you don’t want to buy a plumbing company right down the road over and over again, because then you’re kind of diluting, you know, the service that you can offer.
So if you were to buy, like, plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roll them together, then you have three million, three million, three million, and now you have nine million. And you can cross-sell all the services together, so it’s worth much more, and you can get service contracts, which help with the value as well.
That one is very common, and a lot of people don’t think that way, right? Like, the plumbing guy—he might buy a plumbing company, then go buy an HVAC and electrical, bolt it together, and now you have a nine million, ten million dollar business that can sell for a lot bigger multiples.
Bronson Hill: Wow, and there’s the private equity groups. Yeah, we’re gonna stay in touch after this. Eventually, if I get some stuff like I got a plumbing company I’m gonna buy. Who do I talk to on private equity? Because it’s not just like, I’m gonna buy it or we’re gonna buy it with investors. It’s like, who’s gonna buy it?
Who’s the private equity group that does that? Because not all private equity or family offices. Everybody wants to do it. And so it’s a special decision thing.
How, like, the private equity world or the family office world like, we buy plumbing and HVAC businesses in the Midwest or something. It’s like something super specific, and it’s, like, mostly what they do, right? It’s like so specific, right?
Have you noticed that out some of these firms? This is like their bread and butter, right?
Phil Risher: Yeah, exactly. Like, we have a guy, you know, in South Florida. I buy these companies, put them together, right? If you buy a three million, three million, like I just said, then, just doing that, the multiple is way higher. And you just, like, basically put all these pieces together quickly, you know.
And then put them all in the same CRM, integrate all their databases so you can send them emails and cross-sell them things. Get one call center so that way you get rid of a bunch of different call centers for your customer service reps. You can streamline a lot of your processes pretty quickly.
Bronson Hill: So I guess I so if I’m a local investor, let’s say I’m like, you know I’m that guy in central California and I find a local plumbing business guy is gonna sell me the business for you know Maybe it’s a million in an SD year million in earnings per year Yeah Or maybe two million whatever and then I can find some other like is basically do it with SBA Do any kind of loans you can to get it?
Then pick up another one, pick up the HVAC, and pick up the construction, or they’ll pick up different things together. And then I mean, is it really, is that, are a lot of people able to pull that off?
Or what are some of the challenges? I guess you could buy it, and then it fails or doesn’t work as well as you want. There’s a mutiny at the company, or who knows, right? Like, just from the employees.
Phil Risher: Yeah, I would say the biggest thing that it comes down to is, you want to analyze where the lead flow comes in. So, like, we had this guy Patrick Lang on my show, and he’s probably the number one business broker for home service businesses.
And what he said when you’re looking at these specific ones HVAC, plumbing, electrical is you want to look at what’s called service contracts. So what he told me was that for every million dollars in revenue, you want to have 500 service contracts. And a service contract is basically people paying to continue to have service with you on an ongoing basis, and it helps make that sticky throughout the transition.
So that way, you’re not just looking, well, where’s my next customer coming from, and can I help solve this problem? Because now, if you layer in a bunch of service contracts across plumbing, electrical, and HVAC, you can cross-sell all the different services inside of that.
So I would look at that number specifically with service contracts to make sure that it’s sticky. And then look at those three pillars, visibility, okay, you can do Google Ads, Yelp, whatever that part’s pretty easy to figure out. But what does the sales process look like from a lead into a sale? And then how are we cross-selling services?
You know, most of these companies have 10,000 people that they have over 30 years, that they’ve never emailed or texted ever before, cross-selling any services. They just say, “They’ll work with us when they need us.” Well, you know, that’s ripe for the picking—that you can go in and send these emails.
A good example of this we had a 1.5 million dollar HVAC contractor. They never emailed their 6,000 people. We sent out one email per month for 12 months. They generated $253,000 just from that email. So there’s a lot of opportunity here, is what I’m getting at. It’s not just looking at, “Can we run more Google Ads for this business?
Bronson Hill: Yeah, and that’s the amazing thing too about creating value. There’s, like, there’s value that people don’t see.
And so, for example, this e-commerce business we were planning to buy that we, at this point, it’s on hold, and we may not, we probably won’t buy it. But they were not really valuing one part of the business, where they had an email list of 3 million people. And it had 1.5 million active emails.
And it’s like, well, there are groups that will basically take that list, and they will email them kind of, you know, daily or frequently. They’ll create a newsletter around those types of this is beauty, in the beauty space, the beauty products, whatever and they’ll cross-sell them on other non-competing products.
And you get an affiliate commission every time someone clicks and buys. And it’s like, we figured that was like another million dollars. It’s just kind of right there, just sitting there, that they weren’t even using. Or they’re not doing influencer marketing, right?
They were doing all these other marketing paid ads. It was like, well, there’s other things that are there that potentially could be great opportunity. So I think just being able to approach it—the challenge, of course, you know, there’s a lot of different pieces. If you do put money here or you put effort here, it can take away from somewhere else.
But it’s just being really interesting to kind of continue to look at things in a new way.
Where do you see all this going with AI? With obviously I mean, I talked to my friend, he has an idea where he’s gonna create a service, you know, some sort of marketing business where he basically goes and gets all these leads for different, you know, plumbers, whoever all these different groups and then basically controls all the leads, and then he can basically sell them to different, or, you know, plumbers, or whatever.
I mean, that’s what people are already doing, but if he manages all the front end, their website, all their lead management kind of similar to what you were talking about. But does that kind of devalue, then, the actual trade itself and commoditize the whatever the work is being done itself, right?
Phil Risher: So like, in that example that you just gave if the business owner wants to sell their company, right? They want the processes built inside of their business. And they want the customer database and everything. That way when they sell the company, it’s worth more because they already have the processes built and the customer database.
So I would say it’s great if you’re just trying to grow your business. But the long term of actually building a sustainable business that is worth something probably not the best.
The other side to this, which is the AI question for home service specifically there’s really two big parts that’s going to affect home service businesses.
The first one is search. AI search.
The second one is AI processes.
So in search, in particular right now 87% of people are going to Google saying, you know, “Who’s a good plumber near me?” But that would be changing. LLMs, whatever, you know, all these other ones even AI mode inside of Google. How are you going to position yourself to be shown?
And the big way that companies are doing that is through brand. And that’s not just, you know, putting a billboard up. It’s Google reviews those are still very important. But the number one way that people can leverage this is content.
Because since these are large language models and they’re just learning from all the content that’s on the internet. Any business not just home service businesses should be creating content that these language learning models are going to be pulling into their database to say, “This is the company that’s an expert.”
So we’re coaching our people to create content based off of the They Ask, You Answer framework, which is: What questions are your customers asking? Create content around that to position yourself as the expert and build trust.
The other side to this is AI processes, like what I was just saying. And there’s really like three big ones.
There’s AI phone answering service, which is instead of having a CSR, customer service representative, answer your phones, have an AI answering service.
The second one is an AI agent answering your phone. And then the other one is AI texting, which is when someone communicates with your business, don’t just have a customer service representative sit there and try to text them back. Have some type of AI chatbot that can communicate on your behalf to close things.
And then the other one is My Agents which is, this is kind of getting in a little bit deep but when you go out on your estimates, or you’re going out talking to customers, all that information should be recorded. And then you, as the business owner, would have kind of like a dashboard where you can see, “Okay, my customers are complaining about the price. My customer over here, they’re getting tripped up on this.”
And you have this ecosystem of data, based off of all these decentralized things that are happening all around your business, almost like an AI dashboard with everything that’s going on in your business.
Those are the big AI things. They’re pretty much here, but they haven’t been in full effect probably the next two or three years.
Bronson Hill: I would say, it’s so fascinating, man. I mean, the AI conversation is a whole, you could spend another hours just talking about this. It’s really incredible, the things that exist now.
I mean, especially the deep research button on ChatGPT, and some of the stuff where you can go in and get, you know, ten hours of research in five minutes I mean, it’s insane.
But it is really interesting to see. I’m interested to see what actually in the field that you’re in, it’s not gonna be overnight. Like some industry it could be like accounting or some other thing is all of a sudden. For 20 years somebody’s working there, yeah, we’ve just found a way to automate all this.
Or like, versus a plumber, you can’t just AI a plumber. Now, eventually, maybe there’ll be a robot that could do it or something. But like, not for a long time. That’s gonna be something that’s a lot of nuance there.
Phil Risher: The thing with the plumber that’s pretty crazy is like your hot water heater. Eventually, it can have a computer chip in there that can diagnose the problem. And then send a pitch to Alexa and say, “Do you want me to find a good plumber for you?”
And then Alexa goes online and schedules your appointment, and communicates, and gets the pricing, right? Like, all that can happen. Same with your HVAC unit. So, there’s a lot of things that are coming down that can happen.
Bronson Hill: Well, and maybe eventually, with the same thing with the water heater, all of a sudden it’s so easy that maybe, you know, it orders the new water heater for you. It comes to your house and then, “Hey, do you want to, you know, do you want to put it in yourself?” It’s just getting wheeled in and popped in.
I don’t think that’s maybe because of the gas, but there may be some point where they find it safe enough to do it.
But, you know, Phil, this has been amazing. I really appreciate you. Thank you for the conversation. Really love your role in really helping businesses to scale. And I think it’s something that’s close to our heart.
I think for any investor that wants to buy a business or wants to get involved in this—it’s huge. And you’ve also created some passive income streams with your blog.
How can people hear about you, listen to your podcast?
Phil Risher: You’ve got a great podcast as well and follow what you’re doing. Yeah, so, well, if you are a home service business or you’re thinking about buying a home service business and you want an audit, we actually do these free marketing audits.
You can go to the website Phlash, P-H-L-A-S-H Consulting, and just click “Discuss Your Business.” It’s literally hop on a call and go through your business and analyze everything. Give you the playbook to how to grow.
That’s a good way. LinkedIn is where I usually hang out, Phil Risher. And then on YouTube, Phlash Consulting, that’s where all of our content is. So those are the best places to keep up with us.
Bronson Hill: Thanks again for being here, man. Really appreciate you. Yeah, you got it.
Thanks. Alright, so, great interview with Phil Risher. Again, I think I always love learning about the process of buying businesses. People that operate deals, whether it’s in real estate or other things. Because there’s not just one person. You can’t just have the person that sells, and you can’t have the person that operates. You need them both working hand-in-hand to make sure that the deal actually gets done and actually grows.
So again, there’s incredible value if you can buy a company and not just buy it. But you can scale it. And he talked about this method of buying a plumbing company. Then an electric company, and an HVAC company, and putting them all together. All of a sudden, now you have all this revenue. A private equity group would love to buy that because they basically do all this. And have these service contracts, and they maintain certain things. It’s not just new sales, it’s all of this as well.
So really, really enjoyed that. We are looking at new deals. We are committed this year to get a deal done. So we’re excited. So if you’re looking for a cash flow deal, cash flow, cash flow, cash flow. That’s the thing that does not exist very much in real estate these days.
So if you are a burned out real estate investor, either on your own real estate. And you bought a rental house. Or you invested in a syndication and it’s not cash flowing. It’s because it’s very difficult right now to cash flow any real estate. And I’m a big real estate guy, right? But it’s hard right now.
That’s why we’ve shifted to oil and gas. Shifted into owning oil and gas for the tax benefits and cash flow, or the mineral rights. We’ve also done some shifting to buy businesses because businesses often are incredibly high cash flow.
So if you haven’t joined our investment club, check it out down below. The link, you can go to bronsonequity.com, click the join button. We look forward to starting a relationship with you.
Appreciate you taking the time to educate yourself. Look forward to seeing you in the next episode of The Mailbox Money Show.
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