This work gives the independent business person concrete advice from someone who's worked in retail stores 50+ hours a week, has known what to do when their back is against the wall and has a proven track record of success. It is aimed at independent business owners, many of which are being challenged by chain stores.
Bob Phibbs is the Retail Doctor®, an internationally recognized expert on business strategy, customer service, sales, and marketing. With over thirty years experience beginning in the trenches of retail and extending to senior management positions, he has been a corporate officer, franchisor and entrepreneur.
Phibbs is a popular speaker because he knows what business owners are up against since he has started three successful businesses and can deliver the message to "look in the mirror," with a straightforward, witty and detailed process to grow their sales.
Phibbs has creatively helped some of retail's best-known brands and their dealers, including Yamaha, Caswell-Massey, Hunter Douglas, LEGO, and Brother succeed. He has been a frequent guest on MSNBC and is an AMEX OPEN forum contributor. His Advanced Sales Training weekends using his Five Parts to a Successful Sale have boosted stores sales by over 20% within months.
After completing his degree at Chapman University and attending USC, Bob fulfilled an as-yet-untapped dream of wearing cowboy clothes every day while selling high-end boots and hats to the city slickers of Los Angeles County during the height of the Urban Cowboy trend. Bob's part-time job soon became a career, and he built a network of over 55 stores at the top of their industry.
In 1994, Bob started his own consulting company, The Retail Doctor®, with a mission to provide training, inspiration and hope to independent businesses; to teach them how to successfully compete in today's retail environment. By helping a coffee roaster that had been in business 25 years reverse a protracted sales drop-off, compete against a second Starbucks just 75 feet from his front door, and increase sales by 50 percent in one year, Bob found a national audience.
In 1998, the Los Angeles Times courted Bob to perform business makeovers. He began speaking about his success principles, which grew to include manufacturers and trade associations around the world.
Bob provided sales training for the elite Hunter Douglas Gallery alliance program, creating a culture of selling excellence to support a strong national distribution of over 400 dealers. Bob put his successive strategies for improving a business into his first book, You Can Compete: Double Sales Without Discounting.
Bob drank up the next big trend helping It's A Grind Coffee, a startup, first as COO and then as VP of Marketing. Along the way, they grew to over 125 franchised locations nationwide, created a lot of buzz as the featured coffeehouse on ShowTime's Weeds. Phibbs helped make it the second-fastest growing company in Los Angeles County two years running according to the Los Angeles Business Journal.
Phibbs programs and his work have been featured on PBS Life & Times, Entrepreneur magazine, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He received the Greatest Increase in Sales Award for his work with a specialty-clothing retailer at South Coast Plaza in Southern California, the highest per-square-foot grossing mall in the world.
Bob owns his own publishing firm, is a member of the Author's Guild, the National Retail Federation, and National Speakers Association. www.retaildoc.com
