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The Build a Vibrant Culture Podcast explores the real-world strategies behind building strong work culture, improving organizational culture, and leading with clarity in today’s fast-changing business environment.
Hosted by leadership expert Nicole Greer, this podcast features conversations with business leaders, executives, and entrepreneurs who are shaping modern business culture through effective communication, leadership development, and intentional management practices.
Each episode delivers practical insights into leadership and business, including topics like team communication, project management, career growth, and creating workplaces where people perform at their best.
You’ll gain actionable tools, frameworks, and leadership skills you can apply immediately through coaching concepts, real-world examples, and professional development strategies, whether you’re a manager, executive, business owner, or emerging leader.
If you're looking for guidance on building a thriving organizational culture, improving communication, or advancing your leadership career, this podcast is designed for you.
Learn more about training, coaching, and courses at https://vibrantculture.com
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phil-risher-_episode
[00:00:00] Nicole Greer: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Build A Vibrant Culture podcast. My name is Nicole Greer and they call me the Vibrant Coach, and I have another amazing guest on the show today. He is vibrant. In fact, we have the almost the same energy. I think I'm a little more hyper than Phil, but I bet you when he's on a roll, which we're gonna get to,
[00:00:18] Nicole Greer: he is gonna be blowing it up.
[00:00:20] Nicole Greer: He is gonna be so much fun. So let me tell y'all about him Phil Risher. He is the owner of Phlash Consulting. He helps local service businesses increase their sales and keep their schedules full through data-driven digital marketing consulting after helping a 20-year-old, $3 million service business scale to 5 million in 24 months. Like don't miss that. Don't miss that. And they sold to private equity. Phil took that blueprint and now he helps other home service businesses grow. And guess what? He understands that you don't grow it just by putting out a good social media post. He understands it's about people and process. Oh my gosh, I can't wait to talk to him Phil. Phil took that blueprint, like I said, and now he helps other home businesses grow. Phil's efforts in technology and small business have been featured on: Jobbers, Masters of Home Service -that is the podcast and a CRM for, home services. He's been in Forbes, CNBC, Yahoo Finance and Wall Street. Phil is no joke.
[00:01:27] Nicole Greer: Welcome to the show, Phil. I'm glad you're here.
[00:01:29] Phil Risher: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to talk to you today.
[00:01:32] Nicole Greer: Yeah, we're gonna have a great time. Right? And we wanna talk about marketing that feels human. So, my show is all about building a vibrant culture. And my philosophy, as you're aware, is like, here's all the stuff that needs to get done in the company. And guess what?
[00:01:48] Nicole Greer: It's all the people that do the stuff. And so, you gotta have people that do it. And employees actually become our brand. What do you think about that? Right out of the gate, employees become the brand.
[00:02:00] Phil Risher: Yeah, it's very timely right now with AI search because AI slop is out there and every AI slop
[00:02:08] Nicole Greer: Talk about slop. I don't know about slop. Uh oh.
[00:02:11] Phil Risher: Yeah, so what happens is most home service businesses, they have a marketing company that's floating out here and they have really smart people saying stuff in their business. And the marketing company out here is going to AI and creating marketing content for them that is slop.
[00:02:25] Phil Risher: It's regurgitated junk that has nothing to do with their business. This is hurting their brand. It's not just hurting it. People see things that are not unique to them, but it also is hurting them from an AI search perspective because search is shifting and the only thing that matters right now is trust.
[00:02:42] Phil Risher: And so you have to be building trust on these platforms to be shown. I uncovered this big problem when I was at my home service business was that our CSRs and sales people were saying really smart things and our marketing company was saying all this crazy things from ai. So what do you do? Do you turn your CSRs and technicians into TikTok famous people, how do you do it?
[00:03:00] Phil Risher: Right? So what my company does, one of the playbooks that we implement is called the call to Content Playbook. And if you're listening to this, you can do this yourself. If you have call tracking phone numbers, where you track phone calls from certain ad platforms or certain things, they have transcripts attached to them.
[00:03:18] Phil Risher: You can take those transcripts and create content from those transcripts, blog posts, social media posts, all that kind of stuff. There's way more that goes into it that you could do, but essentially when you talk about your team is your brand, I believe that the number one place that Smart Conversations happen is with them.
[00:03:34] Phil Risher: So allowing them to show you in your marketing is really what people wanna do. They just don't know how to do it.
[00:03:39] Nicole Greer: Yeah. So when you say slop, just for clarity for everybody, I think what you're saying is that people are using perplexity and grock and chat to write social media posts, but it has nothing to do with the real humans that work at your place. Is that what you said?
[00:03:56] Phil Risher: Yes, they do it for social media posts, email, newsletters, blog posts, website content, flyers. It's all starting on ChatGPT, right? It's junk. It's already regurgitated
[00:04:07] Nicole Greer: which is called Slop.
[00:04:09] Phil Risher: which is called slop. So what my company does is we build AI avatars for our clients. So we take all their transcripts, their fathom calls, everything, and we create a.
[00:04:18] Phil Risher: A database, and then we can ask it questions based off of the business to build content and information based off of the real stuff that they're saying.
[00:04:25] Nicole Greer: Yeah. Yeah. So I want you to think about that. Your customer relations person answered the phone, answered all these quick questions, fantastically talked about the way we do things, and we're gonna pull the information outta that. And then we're gonna make a social media post. Do we, did I get it right?
[00:04:41] Phil Risher: Come on now. Come on now.
[00:04:43] Nicole Greer: Is that
[00:04:43] Nicole Greer: right? Okay.
[00:04:45] Phil Risher: that's your people. That's the brand that you're actually using their,
[00:04:48] Nicole Greer: I love that
[00:04:50] Phil Risher: that is, that is it?
[00:04:51] Nicole Greer: That is so good. I love it. Okay, so you work with all sorts of different clients and when you step inside a client's business as if you're an employee, what are the first cultural signs you kind of see when you go in? What do you see?
[00:05:05] Phil Risher: Yeah, so the cool thing is as a consultant company, we're not just like another agency, which is what I faced. So each company that we work with gets paired with a consultant and that consultant. Is, pulling data from their CRM working with their team. We basically are almost an extension of their business.
[00:05:21] Phil Risher: So the number one thing that we see a lot of times is fragmented communication. So people don't know what they're doing or what the goals are, and they don't know so like when I was at a home service business, we were $3 million. We had four customer service representatives. They didn't know, well, how many jobs are we trying to book this year versus next year?
[00:05:41] Phil Risher: Like last year we did 500 jobs. What's our goal for this year? They didn't know.
[00:05:45] Nicole Greer: Yeah, you gotta let people know what the vision is.
[00:05:47] Phil Risher: Exactly. So a lot of it is unclear issues. And to be honest, I think, I don't think that it's on the business owner per se. I think that the onus is to figure it out, but I think they don't know the data, so it's hard for them to craft a vision because they feel like they're flying by the seat of their pants as well.
[00:06:02] Phil Risher: 'cause they don't know. And so they need more clarity on that, which we help try to coach them through that. And people like you as well, try to coach them through what does this actually look like and how can we correlate that to what we're gonna tell our people.
[00:06:13] Nicole Greer: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And paying attention to see if they know kind of where we're going. Yeah. And I think the other things we have to look at when we meet these companies for the first time and we're working on culture is like energy, language, trust, the pride we see people have that tell us who they really are inside the company.
[00:06:30] Nicole Greer: Right. And I love what you just said earlier though, about reading the transcripts and getting the genius from the people on the
[00:06:36] Nicole Greer: front line. I'm just still. Still in a little bit of shock about that. Yeah, love that.
[00:06:40] Phil Risher: When I, when I talk to you about that, they're like, oh my gosh, that's so genius. Why have we not done that? Home service, it's really hard 'cause it's fragmented and you need to have something, someone that owns it. What we see a lot of times is the one to $10 million business owners just who we serve, they are sitting in this like seat of like digital marketing and data and automations and they're trying to do all this stuff and now I gotta be my CTO and I gotta be this.
[00:07:05] Phil Risher: And so that's why like with my company, it was just like, let's just plug us in and then we'll help you with this so that way you don't have to figure it all out. We have engineers and all this stuff.
[00:07:11] Nicole Greer: Right, right, right. Okay. All right. So first thing is take a look at who you've got on your team, who's got a little bit of genius, who's the best one answering the phone, servicing your people, and let's glean from that. Okay, so I have this little coaching methodology everybody knows about SHINE.
[00:07:25] Nicole Greer: And so now we're gonna talk about habits. Okay? Habits, what daily or weekly habits do strong cultures consistently practice, that naturally translate into compelling social media content? That's a long question, right? Yeah. So what, what are people doing inside their business that they could highlight in their social media?
[00:07:46] Nicole Greer: I think when we think about marketing, we're just thinking about marketing our products and services, but you gotta market the people that do the work.
[00:07:52] Phil Risher: Yeah, so like social media when pe when Homestar fans don't always hear social media, they're like likes and shares and dancing and all this stuff. Okay. That is three years ago. Three years ago, things shifted to the TikTok ification of social media, which is, it's not about likes and shares, it's about being the subject matter expert in the authority and the future is with trust and AI platforms.
[00:08:14] Phil Risher: They trust based off of data. And the way that AI search platforms learn is through large language models. Large language models are built on content that's in the internet. So the number one thing that you can do as a business owner is feed the large language models content about how you are the expert in the industry.
[00:08:33] Phil Risher: Okay, so when we talk about habits, the habit is, you need to see yourself as the subject matter expert, and not having everything trapped in your brain, but getting it out into words, whether that's through social media, whether that's through SOPs, whether that's through loom videos, whether that's through recordings, because as I mentioned, these AI avatars, which are these knowledge bases of businesses.
[00:08:54] Phil Risher: When I was at my home service business, the owner said, well, if I just duplicated myself and answered every call, I'd book every single job. Well, now you can actually do that by getting the knowledge out of your head and building an AI avatar that your team can use and interact with and ask questions to.
[00:09:07] Phil Risher: The habit that I see in high performing companies is that they are taking the information out of their brains and getting it into some type of an SOP or process or, into content of some sort, but then building an avatar platform that they can interact with that can articulate on their behalf or answer questions on their behalf.
[00:09:24] Nicole Greer: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And this thing about using ChatGPT or whatever to know you help me with this Phil on your side, but. I went to a four-day AI deep dive. My brain was swimming in mush by the time I got back because it was just like drinking from a fire hose. But one of the things that I did, one, one of the first things I did is I said, take every single blog post, take every single thing you've written articles, podcasts, transcripts, whatever, and put it into your chat.
[00:09:53] Nicole Greer: You, you do need to have the paid version, I think. Right? Is that still right?
[00:09:57] Phil Risher: Yeah. Yeah,
[00:09:58] Nicole Greer: Yeah.
[00:09:58] Nicole Greer: 20 bucks. 20 bucks, y'all 20 bucks. 20 bucks. And so a month. And so I put it all in there. And now when I go to use it, like it knows me like it,
[00:10:10] Nicole Greer: it totally knows me and how I talk and can talk like me, which is wonderful.
[00:10:14] Nicole Greer: And so you can give scripts to your people that answer the phone? Yes.
[00:10:18] Phil Risher: Exactly. You can build scripts off of it. I'll give you two other secret sauce things on
[00:10:22] Nicole Greer: Okay.
[00:10:22] Phil Risher: one. There's a tool called Delphi, D-E-L-P-H i.ai. We use it in my business. Basically what it does is it will automatically take any new YouTube video, podcast interview, SOP, from our Google Drive, and it will put it into a knowledge base, and then we can ask it questions and it will cite the source.
[00:10:41] Phil Risher: To that exact thing. So this automatically is happening. So you almost have this knowledge base building in the background as you're creating content or doing things. The other one, and that one's probably like 50 to a hundred bucks a month, but there's a free one called Notebook lm. This is what we built.
[00:10:55] Phil Risher: AI avatars for our clients on. So we take their call transcripts, we put them into a Google spreadsheet, we take their fathom calls from our call recordings with our team, put them into a spreadsheet, and then we add that into Notebook LM with their website and everything. And now we have this knowledge base for them.
[00:11:10] Phil Risher: And you could do this for free if you're listening to this. You can just build your own Notebook LM,
[00:11:13] Nicole Greer: Which is a Google product, everybody.
[00:11:15] Phil Risher: It's a Google product. Yeah, so it's all integrated and I believe that these are the, the knowledge bases that every single business should have. It's literally a digital asset that you can give to new team members.
[00:11:24] Phil Risher: You can give it to your seasoned sales professionals to ask questions to. You can use this for creating content. It's a huge opportunity and a lot of people just don't even know how to connect it or do it.
[00:11:33] Nicole Greer: Yeah, that's fantastic. Okay. Yeah. So you need to collect the stuff. You have, good habit, then you need to put it into some source. And the first one was Delphi. How did you
[00:11:43] Nicole Greer: say it?
[00:11:44] Phil Risher: Delphi or Delphi, D-E-L-P-H-I
[00:11:47] Nicole Greer: Okay, Phi. Okay. Delphi or Notebook Lm. And here's the thing, you just Google this stuff and it'll work you through it. Like you don't, like you just need to go out there and get messy.
[00:11:57] Phil Risher: I have a YouTube video on how to build an AI avatar for a home service business. So there's a whole video on how to do it so they could just watch that.
[00:12:04] Nicole Greer: Okay? And where do they go to watch it? What's your YouTube Channel?
[00:12:07] Phil Risher: Yeah, YouTube. YouTube. And then it's Phlash Consulting, P-H-L-A-S-H consulting, and yeah, you just type in how to build AI avatar for home service.
[00:12:15] Nicole Greer: Okay, fantastic. Okay. And even if you're not in home service, you could still go watch the video and you'll get the gist
[00:12:20] Nicole Greer: of the underlying foundational ideas here. People right.
[00:12:24] Phil Risher: I literally am in coaching calls and people are asking me, and I'm like, just go watch this. It's, it's relevant no matter what you're in.
[00:12:29] Nicole Greer: Right. Okay. Very good. Very good. Okay, so sometimes in social media you highlight employees front and center in your marketing. Why do leaders often underestimate that their people want to be seen and heard?
[00:12:43] Phil Risher: Yeah. I'll give you two, two things on this. First, your customers wanna see winners and happy people and they're gonna say, wow, okay, this is a company that has great people like this. I wanna work with these people. So you get a double boost of like customers seeing great, happy people. Plus you can attract people to your business that look and act just like this person,
[00:13:06] Nicole Greer: That's right.
[00:13:06] Phil Risher: so you have this benefit.
[00:13:08] Phil Risher: What I would say is that I. Business owners, myself included, would say, oh, well now I have to have my team making content. And what if they don't feel comfortable on content, whatever, doing this stuff, okay, I don't disagree with you. And maybe there might be some people that resonate more with it, some people that are like, I don't wanna be on camera.
[00:13:26] Phil Risher: The good news, there's a bunch of ways to create content that don't necessarily have to be on video. So those transcripts that I mentioned, you could take those same transcripts and say, Hey, here's a recent call that one of our people had. Or you could turn it into a blog post or an email newsletter, and you could just put a picture of them up there if you want to.
[00:13:42] Phil Risher: We're not saying they have to be the star of the show or even be on video, but there's ways to utilize them as well. One other secret thing that we do on this is that we'll actually take like with our clients, they might use company cam, which is a tool that documents the real pictures on the job site.
[00:13:57] Phil Risher: So it's just bro, you're just a part of the show, so like you don't get a choice. But then also with our cl with our business, we record all of our calls. So there might be sections in there that we just clip and we just have their face up there talking with the actual captions.
[00:14:10] Phil Risher: And that works great too. So I would say don't just one default to oh, my people don't wanna be on it. Like maybe ask them, and that might be something that they're interested in, but two, think about ways that you can already use what they're saying and use that, and that's how you can blend the two together.
[00:14:24] Nicole Greer: Yeah. That's right. That's right. And I think too is like you're saying, bro, you're part of the show. You just have the camera. I mean, there's gonna be times where like the camera's gonna catch two fellas laughing,
[00:14:34] Nicole Greer: Right. And it's and all it has to say is, we have fun at work. I mean, that's
[00:14:38] Nicole Greer: it, or this is a fun place to work, right? Yeah. So I love that. Okay. All right. When culture is weak or unclear what habits do you help leaders shift before the marketing can work? 'Cause sometimes it's like you might go in and you're consulting with a company and you're like,
[00:14:52] Nicole Greer: Ooh, we got a little work to do.
[00:14:54] Nicole Greer: Before we start telling everybody, where we are and what we're doing. We've gotta work on our culture.
[00:14:59] Phil Risher: yeah. Okay. So if you're listening to this and you've ever reached out to a marketing company. And they tell you to spend more on ads to grow your business, whatever. Okay? And they don't ask you about your sales process, then something's wrong. They're just, they're just looking at it from the lens of just spend more on ads, pray to the Google gods and get leads.
[00:15:17] Phil Risher: The number one thing that you can do is tighten up your conversion funnel. When a lead comes in, what happens? Do you have a lead nurture sequence? When an estimate goes out, what happens? Do you have an estimate nurture sequence? Because you don't wanna put more marketing into a leaky bucket. And so what
[00:15:33] Nicole Greer: Oh, that's a good line right there.
[00:15:35] Phil Risher: yeah, what we see and what we do with our clients is we'll go through and fix the bucket first and then add more water into the bucket so that way we're not just leaking stuff out all over the place and we have a really good bucket to put it into.
[00:15:48] Phil Risher: So the habit that we see a lot, like we had a guy he was in California. Last year he did 70 estimates and he closed 30 of them. So about 40%. Yeah, 40% not bad. And we said, Hey man, your bucket's about to get crushed. Like you're gonna get a lot of leads. You're gonna grow. You need to fix your bucket and we'll help coach you on that and build automations to help you nurture this stuff.
[00:16:09] Phil Risher: He went from 70 estimates to 140 estimates in one month, jump. And he still only closed 30 of them because he was the number one sales guy. He was the customer service representative.
[00:16:19] Nicole Greer: He is already.
[00:16:20] Phil Risher: He's already maxed out at 30 is the most that he could do. So the biggest thing that we see is that they don't look at building the, fixing the conversion funnel, and they have their head in the sand about their actual numbers inside of their business, and they just believe that spending more on marketing is gonna grow their business.
[00:16:36] Phil Risher: And that's not the case.
[00:16:38] Nicole Greer: Yeah and don't miss the backstory there about the people, right? So again, we have a leader thinking. I'll just keep, okay, 140, I'll do it. And then he can't. You just know he
[00:16:48] Nicole Greer: can't. Right. And so that's the part where we really have to have people trained. That's why you gotta do your Notebook LM. You gotta hand that asset to the brand new employee.
[00:16:57] Nicole Greer: So like they're out of the gate and running right away and they're able to take phone calls. Right. Because it doesn't do you
[00:17:02] Nicole Greer: any good also to double the number of leads you have if you can't, if you don't have people ready and trained to do it. Right.
[00:17:08] Phil Risher: Exactly. People stall out when they try to go from like one to 5 million because they're just brute forcing it and spending more and more on marketing, and then they get burned out from marketing companies and they think that it's just a marketing problem when it's not a lead problem, it's a lead conversion problem.
[00:17:21] Phil Risher: And so they have to fix a lot of the stuff internally and then focus externally and then tie it all together.
[00:17:26] Nicole Greer: Yeah. And I'll just reinforce and you're gonna need people.
[00:17:30] Phil Risher: Yeah.
[00:17:30] Nicole Greer: Yeah, you gotta need people. You need the funnel that's not leaky. And then humans that can answer the phone and know what to say during the funnel
[00:17:38] Phil Risher: Well, this is a perfect thing. This is a perfect thing. The guy, he was doing 70 estimates and then he went and he converted 30, like the one that the story I just told, and we set up all the estimate nurture sequences and all the automations and da, da, da, da. And he still only closed 30 and we went from 70 to 140 because he needed people
[00:17:56] Phil Risher: to go out and close the deals. If you can do all the automations and AI and all this stuff, but it's not gonna help you grow your business. You need the people. So that's exactly what you're saying..
[00:18:04] Nicole Greer: The human resource is so important. Okay. All right. So we talk, let's talk about integrity a little bit. So what happens when a leader wants marketing to say one thing, but the employee experience or the customer experience is another thing? How do we navigate integrity in our marketing? I, I think most humans get outta bed and go.
[00:18:25] Nicole Greer: I'm gonna do a good job today. Now, I don't think, I don't think most people get up and go, I'm gonna do terrible today. I mean, we all have just a little bit of self-efficacy that says we can do it, but what if things are not good? What do we need to do there?
[00:18:37] Phil Risher: Yeah, this comes up a lot with it, I would say it's not necessarily per se integrity, it's more of clarity on the messaging, because I'll give you a perfect example. We run this playbook called the par partner Pipeline Builder, where we find let's say you do your roofing contractor, we find a bunch of gutter cleaning companies, and that's a complimentary service.
[00:18:57] Phil Risher: And then we reach out to the gutter cleaning companies cold, and we say. In an email partnership, we're gonna be in your area partnership. We came across your website looking for a good gutter cleaning company and wanna see if we can work together. Are you open for a quick call? So basically, this is a way to build partnership.
[00:19:13] Phil Risher: Every single time we pitch this to a business, they want to go and tell the world how great they are, how well they do roofs, all this stuff. And we tell them every single time this is you. You are not the hero in this situation. The customer is the hero that has a problem, and you're just the guide, which is the StoryBrand framework.
[00:19:31] Nicole Greer: Yes.
[00:19:32] Phil Risher: And I think a lot of times they don't do it per se, out of just poor integrity. They do it out of poor clarification of the messaging when the real goal is to build a partnership. It's just about how you go about it and what you say. That needs to be crafted the right way.
[00:19:46] Nicole Greer: Oh, that's right. That's right. And the book, if you're watching the YouTube, is up over his left shoulder
[00:19:51] Nicole Greer: on his shelf right there next to his bobblehead. Yeah. And and that is so important to understand. So if you haven't read that book, please get that book. That is an amazing little number you
[00:20:01] Nicole Greer: need to be reading.
[00:20:01] Phil Risher: Especially if you're, if your messaging and integrity is a little off, not that you have bad integrity, but your messaging is not lined up and you're not positioning the customer as a hero, and it happens so much in home service because. I don't have, I don't have ac let me come save the day and fix your ac.
[00:20:16] Phil Risher: But you're still not the hero. Right? You're the guide. The customer is the hero with a problem. But we naturally fall into that 'cause we solve a lot of problems and we show up as the hero, but we're not the hero.
[00:20:25] Nicole Greer: Right, right. Yep. So you have to get your hands on that for sure. Okay. All right. So next right steps. Let's see. So how does Phlash Core values show up? So you guys have core values right? On your website. I saw 'em
[00:20:36] Nicole Greer: as I prepped for this interview. And everybody that's listening knows Nicole Greer loves some good core values, but these core values just don't need to be on the wall in the hall.
[00:20:45] Nicole Greer: They
[00:20:46] Nicole Greer: need to be actually lived, eaten and breathed every day. So how do your Phlash core values show up as a practical decision making tool, not just words on the wall?
[00:20:55] Phil Risher: Yeah. What I can say is that I did not do a good job of this when I first started the company because I was the culture guy. Everyone loved me in home service, right? I was just the guy that, it was just easy to get along with. When I started a remote company, like my business, we had 20 team members all over the world.
[00:21:11] Phil Risher: So how do we build culture remote? Which was very difficult for me because I could speak to these people maybe for 20 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day. But it's not the same. So what we did was we established our core values. So that way I can hold people accountable, hire according to them, and then talk about them.
[00:21:26] Phil Risher: So like ours are an acronym of Phlash: partnership, hungry for results, lead with value. Always be obsessed. Share the wins. Honest communication,
[00:21:33] Nicole Greer: Oh my gosh. That was so good. Say it again though. I know you just said it so fast, but don't miss how these core values are not like integrity.
[00:21:41] Phil Risher: Yeah, so partnership. So for us, we partner with our clients. It's not you guys and y'all's, it's We's and us's
[00:21:49] Nicole Greer: yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:50] Phil Risher: right? So that's like a way, that's like how we interact with our clients is that way We's and us's, hungry for results is like . You don't hire a marketing company 'cause you just wanna spend money on marketing.
[00:21:59] Phil Risher: You hire a marketing company 'cause you wanna grow your business. So we need to be hungry for results and everything that we do and try to prove results out all the way through to the end. Leading with value. It's not just, Hey, you hired us just to do this thing. Eh, it's okay. It's hey, you're doing a home show.
[00:22:15] Phil Risher: Let's create a QR code to a landing page with an offer and do a text message right afterwards that ties into your CRM, so that way we can track return on ad spend, like lead with value and go for the gusto.
[00:22:24] Nicole Greer: Right.
[00:22:25] Phil Risher: Always be obsessed. This is basically like you need to be obsessed with whatever you're doing. Do not just settle for mediocre.
[00:22:31] Phil Risher: Our theme this year is best in class. So it's like always be obsessed with whatever you're working on to make it the best. Sharing the wins, this is probably our go-to one. We have a Slack all team where we are constantly sharing the wins. So we see a win, we record a Loom video for the client, send them the win.
[00:22:46] Phil Risher: We document wins on every single monthly meeting. And then we're sharing the wins in our Slack with our whole team. And then honest communication, another one that shows up a lot, which is. Hey man, honest communication here. You really dropped a ball on this or
[00:22:59] Nicole Greer: Truth telling, honesty and candor is what I call it.
[00:23:01] Nicole Greer: Yes.
[00:23:01] Phil Risher: yeah, exactly. Or like your customer is distracted all over the place.
[00:23:04] Phil Risher: Like you gotta have honest communication discussion with this person and be that partner with honest communication and don't shy away from it. So that's our core values. They show, I mean, I just rattle them all off and we talk about them
[00:23:14] Nicole Greer: But notice how he's excited and he knows them and that, and how he's telling you they're applicable. Please don't miss all that.
[00:23:22] Phil Risher: yeah.
[00:23:22] Nicole Greer: That's just not Phil excitement. That's real. Real.
[00:23:25] Phil Risher: No, like this is real stuff that we actually do. I mean, I can't give you these examples without actually having the real examples. So it's this is really what we do,
[00:23:31] Nicole Greer: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love it so much. We're gonna clip that out and send it all around the world. 'cause I need everybody, I need every leader on the planet to act like Phil. Okay, let's talk about the last thing here. Energy. Okay. So some social media feels alive and some feels flat. From your perspective, what gives marketing real energy and what drains it instantly?
[00:23:54] Phil Risher: Yeah, so I might have a little contrarian perspective on this because when we talk, like my company, we do performance marketing. So that what that means is like we help them grow their business by getting more leads that are local and we wanna grow. A lot of times when people think of energy and social media, they think oh, TikTok, da da da, da.
[00:24:10] Phil Risher: Yeah, likes and shares and views and high energy stuff. That's not bad. What I can tell you is like for me, I set a goal for myself to create a viral reel. It took me 20 reels. I created a viral reel of my daughter. She was eating spaghetti,
[00:24:24] Nicole Greer: Oh my God. I wanna you have to send me the link.
[00:24:26] Phil Risher: I'll send you. I said, I had the video. I said, how was the spaghetti?
[00:24:30] Phil Risher: She said, that boy cooks. And she said, she basically said that boy cooks like I would cook through spaghetti. She's eating it. She said, that boy
[00:24:37] Nicole Greer: Yeah.
[00:24:37] Phil Risher: it went viral. I had 130,000 views, right on my personal Instagram, you know how many zero, how many leads I got? Zero. Because it's like nice, high energy, fun stuff, right?
[00:24:48] Phil Risher: But it's not gonna close deals. Then I had a post that was like, if you're running an email newsletter for branding and not for sales, you're doing it all wrong. And I explained the seven parts of a good email newsletter and how to turn it into a sales machine. And that generated two leads in one customer.
[00:25:01] Phil Risher: And that video got 200 views.
[00:25:03] Nicole Greer: Right. And that is energy,
[00:25:05] Nicole Greer: right?
[00:25:05] Phil Risher: Yeah, exactly. So that, that's why I'm trying to correlate like high energy. It doesn't mean fun and funny and views and likes and shares. It means maybe something that you're passionate about and helping people correlate that to social media content. And I think that there's a big differentiation that people just think the other way and not the actual solving people's problems.
[00:25:23] Nicole Greer: That's right because really if you're entertaining me, that's only for a hot second.
[00:25:28] Nicole Greer: That boy can cook. But if you help me with something that's a, a major problem in my life, I get my my walls painted, all my stuff done. That's, that's the energy that takes me way up the feeling scale and probably provides referrals.
[00:25:40] Nicole Greer: I'm just saying. So there's, that keeps on moving. All right. And so the last question about energy. How does featuring employees actually reenergize the internal culture, not just the external brand? So we could put the, the employees out there to the world and say, look at our great guys and gals, but what about on the inside of the culture?
[00:26:00] Phil Risher: So I have a guy named Dan. He started with us about 15 months ago, and I didn't tell them that I was gonna start clipping their fathom calls, which is their recordings with their clients and stuff. I just clipped them and then I shared it, right? And the one that I shared with Dan was like, so good. Like he was talking about, there was a client that was a hundred thousand.
[00:26:17] Phil Risher: We helped him go to 130,000 the next year. Like all this cool stuff that we did. I clipped it and I shared it. And then on the next one-to-one Leslie, who's a consultant on my team, who's been there for three years,
[00:26:27] Nicole Greer: Nice.
[00:26:28] Phil Risher: she was like. I just want you to know, I called Dan and I told him how proud of him I was and how impressed I was by what he was saying on there.
[00:26:37] Phil Risher: And Dan actually called me and was like, Leslie called me and told me how good, like big shout out to me. And then Leslie, she's been there longer, she's it encouraged me to speak up more about the numbers and stuff. So like even internally it shifted my culture based off of sharing their stuff publicly.
[00:26:51] Phil Risher: And I have other examples of that, but like that right there was like culture building by sharing stuff externally that just happened in my business.
[00:26:58] Nicole Greer: And I, that just made me so happy in my heart listening to that. Yeah.
[00:27:02] Nicole Greer: And in the SHINE coaching methodology, there's all these energies and there's intellectual, emotional, spiritual, physical, social and financial. And just that one phone call that she made, made her feel good, made him feel good.
[00:27:18] Nicole Greer: Then they're like, we're both on a winning team. Spiritual energy. Right? And then we learned something. This is how you do it. Right? And then social energy, we're, we're, we're great teammates, right? And then the phone rings because we're doing great work and we're making more money. It's, it's
[00:27:31] Nicole Greer: just all, it's all related, right?
[00:27:33] Phil Risher: This is what I'm saying. It all ties together from the start of the conversation with getting the real stuff out and then sharing it.
[00:27:39] Nicole Greer: Yes. Yes. Ah, you need Phil Risher to do your marketing people. All right. He can incorporate your employees, he can bring the human element to things. If go back and listen to what he said all the way through, get your Notebook LM account open and going and cooking and, and get things rolling. Phil, if people wanted to work with you, how would they find you?
[00:28:00] Phil Risher: You can go to Phlash Consulting, it's P-H-L-A-S-H consulting.com and click discuss your business. We also have some other cool stuff up there that you can get. I mentioned our YouTube video, so a YouTube channel. We have tons and tons of videos. Like we have over a million views on YouTube, so go to YouTube.
[00:28:14] Phil Risher: We have tons of content and you can watch up their Phlash consulting as well.
[00:28:18] Nicole Greer: Fantastic. Well, it's been such a delight to have you on the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast. Do Phil and I a little teeny tiny favor. Before you go, would you just go down there, click the "like," leave a little love note for Phil. Phil, love your energy, and we'll see you back here on the Build A Vibrant Culture podcast.
[00:28:34] Nicole Greer: Thanks again, Phil.
[00:28:35] Phil Risher: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.