Bob Phibbs, The Retail Doctor

Retail's leading expert on sales, training and marketing to wow customers and grow, even when you have less customers.

Bob is a sought-after speaker on how to grow sales and maximize marketing; especially when your customer base is challenged. Bob describes how he has built several companies and improved hundreds of others by showing them how to compete so that everyone can grow sales. He is a frequent guest on MSNBC's Your Business.

After completing his degree at Chapman College 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 small and medium sized independent businesses, and 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 opening just 75 feet from his front door, and ultimately 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. This grew to include large manufacturers and trade associations around the world. Bob helped to establish Hunter Douglas Window Fashion’s elite Gallery dealer program in 2002 as lead speaker/trainer, helping establish a culture of excellence and growing their numbers from 59 to over 400.

Bob drank up the next big trend helping It’s A Grind Coffee, a startup, first as COO and then acting as VP of Marketing. Along the way, they grew to over 125 locations nationwide, and created a lot of buzz as the featured coffeehouse on ShowTime’s Weeds.

Bob put his successive strategies for improving a business into his book, You Can Compete: Double Sales Without Discounting, which won the 2004 Benjamin Franklin book publishing award for small business. Bob’s aggressive, comprehensive ideas and best practices proved successful in helping firms of all types and sizes.

Bob’s passion and enthusiasm are hallmarks of his presentation skills. He has consulted for and given presentations to some of the country’s best-known retail brands, including Caswell-Massey, Viking, Brother, Yamaha, and True Value.

Bob’s programs and his work have been featured on PBS’ program "Life and Times," as well as in 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 is a member of the National Speakers Association.