Awards don't factor in Phillips success.

• Position: First Factors Corp President Phil Phillips - People

Phil Phillips doesn't let awards such as North Carolina Master Entrepreneur of the Year, which he won in June, go to his head. In November, the president and co-founder of High Point-based First Factors Corp. is up for a national award in the Ernst & Young-sponsored contest, but he doesn't care if he wins. "Let's be realistic - all that's just a lot of hoopla," he says.

Phillips, 56, can afford to be modest. The $60 billion-a-year U.S. factoring industry has given him generous rewards of its own. Businesses such as First Factors provide two services: buying clients' accounts receivable at around a 1% discount and collecting them; and making loans against receivables. Phillips says First Factors has grown from $25 million a year in accounts receivable when it started to several billion dollars last year.

Phillips and his brother, Dave, N.C. commerce secretary, grew up in the factoring business. Their dad, Earl N. Phillips, started High Point-based Factors Inc. in the 1950s to go with furniture-foam maker Phillips Foscue Corp. and upholstery-fabric maker Phillips Davis Corp.

After graduating with a business degree from UNC Chapel Hill in 1962 and with an M.B.A. from Harvard three years later, Phillips spent two years as an analyst for Wertheim & Co., now Schroder Wertheim. "I was a 27-year-old bachelor living in New York City," he says...