Jason Phillips is in the business of making things better.
As founder and CEO of Phillips Home Improvements, he doesn’t just improve homes – he improves just about everything he encounters.
In the early 90s, Jason was working for a painting company and saw countless injustices in the home improvement industry.
“Homeowners were getting short changed – they weren’t getting the service, the warranty, the followthrough they needed from companies. I saw immigrants mistreated and not paid. I saw people like me not being paid.”
As the company Jason worked for declined, he considered his next move and realized he knew the answer: “I needed to raise the bar and improve things in the home improvement industry.”
And that’s precisely what Jason has spent the past two decades doing.
He started by knocking on doors, offering top-notch services and treating his customers and employees right.
And business grew.
Initially, he only offered painting services, but, in classic Jason Phillips fashion, he identified another area in need of improvement.
He was noticing a trend: the homeowners who hired him to paint their homes’ exteriors often needed new gutters as well. The problem? Now the homeowners needed carpenters to fix the fascia board and installers for the gutters – in other words, delays for homeowners, Jason, and his crew.
So Jason made another improvement.
He contacted gutter manufacturers, purchased the appropriate equipment, and hired professionals to teach his team how to install gutters properly.
The natural progression from installing gutters was to replacing roofs, so Jason and his team learned how to do that as well.
But there were still more improvements needed.
As business grew, Jason found himself in a predicament familiar to many contractors and small business owners – yes, he was making more money, but he was losing time with loved ones. Instead of finding freedom in owning his own business, his business had him in bondage. He came home countless nights to his family sound asleep and dinner waiting in the microwave.
Jason was a captive of what he calls “Contractor Prison.”
One late night, as he toiled away, Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” came on. Jason says, “That song just ripped my heart out. I made a decision that night that I was going to do things differently.”
And he did.
“Through the years, what’s really changed is we’ve developed our focus on people – not just on our clients, but on building our team. A lot of companies treat people like numbers. They use people up, burn them up, grind them down to build their business. Our philosophy is different. I believe that I can build the people who will build the business, and I think everybody wins that way.”
Phillips Home Improvements is, in Jason’s words, “A people development company. We’ve got the home improvements down. The more we can build people on the inside, the more we can help people on the outside.”
The improvements Jason vowed to make have yielded remarkable results.
In 2019, the team received the “Torch Award for Ethics in Business” from the Better Business Bureau. Last year, they received one of Dallas Business Journal’s “Best Places to Work” awards.
As if Jason’s improvements to the industry, his customers’ homes, and his employees’ lives weren’t enough, Jason is passionate about helping others escape the prison that once held him captive.
Jason sees developing leadership skills as integral to escape, and it’s much of what he shares with other contractors and small business owners who are trying to make their own great escapes. He’s a Certified Human Behavior Consultant and believes understanding yourself and others is transformational.
“I teach others that if they want to escape contractor prison and step into contractor freedom, the first thing they need to do is grow as a leader. When you grow as a leader, you can build a team of people – nobody did anything great by themselves. When you can delegate and have the right people on your team, everybody gets to work in their unique abilities. Everybody gets to grow, and you can do more together.”
The team at Phillips Home Improvements has a lot more they plan to do together.
Their goal is to be the premier home improvement company in the state of Texas.
“We want to be the premier because we really value homeowners, we value teamwork, we value people. And when we value people, we’re going to take care of your property, we’re going to honor your time, and we’re going to work ethically.”
