About Phil Shmerling

My name is Phil Shmerling, and I would like to be the first to welcome you to the Crowdfunding Capital blog, where I will be touching on trends, news and regulatory updates in the fledgling equity-based Crowdfunding industry.  You can also find this blog at www.philshmer.com.  I hope to make this the destination page for anyone looking for information on the Crowdfunding industry, and I welcome any and all feedback that will help improve the content of this blog.  Here is a brief introduction about myself to get you started, and I will be following up with some additional blog posts in the coming days:

I was recently told by the Chairman of Choice Food Group, the last company I worked for, after telling him about the possibility of my leaving to start my own business – “Phil, entrepreneurship is an addiction – a bug - and you have been bitten.  I have it too, so I understand, and let me tell you, there is no cure for this addiction.  Betty Ford cannot help; there is no 12-step program.”

Hello, my name is Phil, and I am an entrepreneurship addict. 

I have known most of my life that I have wanted to start my own business, so for me, the past 30 years have been preparation for the inevitable.  My journey started with brief stints in Birmingham, AL and Indianapolis, IN before my Mom, Dad, older brother and two younger sisters settled in Memphis, TN, which I consider my home town.  I went to Ridgeway High School in Memphis, a public school where I considered myself getting the best “social education” one can receive -  having not hit 100 lbs. until my junior year, let’s just say that I had to learn very quickly how to get along with a very diverse group of people.

After high school, I attended Indiana University and studied accounting and finance at the Kelley School of Business before spending three years as an investment banking analyst with Morgan Keegan, working as an analyst in mergers and acquisition advisory.  After three years of learning about the financial side of business, as well as learning from some very smart and successful people, I left Memphis for Nashville, to work for Choice Food Group, where I learned more about what it takes to run a business as the head of Choice’s retail division.

After close to five years at Choice, the fateful words were spoken, and now here I am, with a new addiction, recently married to my dear wife, Laura, and starting a new business out on my own (Laura is, of course, ecstatic!).  Now, as the CEO of InCrowd Capital, an equity-based Crowdfunding platform based here in Nashville, I am living my dream of running my own business, while doing what I love – meeting entrepreneurs, listening to great ideas, and helping others realize their dreams, too.