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Aristotle's John Phillips likes a good fight and vows not to let up in his current battle

In certain Washington circles, it's said you may know a person by the conduct of his Risk game. So it is that among Washington's younger political consultants, John Phillips of Aristotle Industries has acquired a reputation in these periodic battles for world domination on the game board.

"John likes to get things going," confides Risk participant Jeff Browne of Campaigns Plus, a Falls Church, VA-based consulting group.

Phillips, he adds, will talk three or four other players into ganging up and attacking a rival. He'll make strategic agreements, then break them if it makes for better playing. He'll manipulate his armies with brush aggression. "He doesn't like a boring game," Browne says.

He also loses. A lot. "John is generally the first one out," Browne says, "because he's having so much fun getting people riled that the other players say, let's just screw him."

Life, it seems, would imitate Risk - to a point, anyway. That much seems obvious to those following Phillips' career. Phillips, 39, along with his brother Dean, is founder and president of one of the smaller, more innovative and most contentious software-and-data-base companies in the District area. Shrewlike in size and intensity, 12-year-old Aristotle Industries (Aristotle is the middle name of both John and Dean Phillips) has acquired a certain renown for taking on rivals, tipping sacred cows and pushing the industry around with a damn-the-torpedoes attitude.

Consider, for instance, Aristotle's current battle with list/database company Metromail. Though 40 tunes smaller than the $200 million Metromail, Aristotle has gotten a lot of ink lately for its bulldog quest to put the spotlight on Metromail's alleged illegalities (see sidebar). Metromail has called it a smear campaign; Phillips says, "I will not rest until full disclosure is made."

Physically, Aristotle Industries seems a laughable threat. The company's tiny, threadbare offices are located next to a burrito stand on Pennsylvania Avenue. In a wonder of space economizing, 33 people, mostly young and earnest, work a small battery of computers to create and sell two principal products. One is software, known as Campaign Manager, that allows politicians to track and organize information on voters and contributors. The other is voter-registration data organized by state on CD-ROM. Together, the two products contribute about equally to the company's revenues of under $5 million. A third product, an online database, was launched last month.

What Aristotle lacks in dimension it makes up for in profile. Though the company's products get mixed marks for quality - discussions with a couple of clients contacted by DIRECT predictably drew one bad review and one good - Phillips is known as an innovator.

"His idea of using CD-ROM was ahead of its time," says rival Frank Tobe of Below, Tobe & Associates, a Los Angeles-based compiler of political lists.

Phillips also "brings marketing to politics," notes Browne. By contrast, Phillips' competitors generally work in boutique fashion. They deal primarily with Democrats or Republicans, and bid for contracts put out by party organizations.

That way, the winning vendor for, say, the Minnesota Republican Party's voter file becomes the supply depot for party candidates, providing lists, labels, updates and list segments at the party's behest.

Aristotle doesn't work that way. Phillips, who no longer discusses his political leanings, sells to anyone who wants his products, be they religious conservatives or Libertarians. He makes his files available in any state, even - or especially - those where the party organizations have already cut "exclusive" list deals with other vendors.

And he doesn't hold hands with the buyers. Though his office provides 24-hour technical support, those who buy the product use it on their own. That way, Phillips says, clients keep their costs down and their data use confidential. "If you're a candidate in a primary," he says, "you may not want the party to know what lists you're ordering through the party's vendor."

Phillips' idea, in a sense, is to democratize the democratic process. Aristotle "lowers the playing field," he says, "to allow helpless trader-dogs to be able to mount a competent campaign."

But in the tight, cliquey world of Washington politics, what brings notoriety doesn't necessarily bring friends.

"We run a different business than what lobbyists and political consultants run," Phillips agrees. "Okay, in some ways it's similar. We're all in the business of democracy and we're all hawking our wares and our services, and so there's naturally some sense of competition. Some people do things I don't like and I do some things others don't like, but it's a business. And I take my business seriously."

Serious, indeed. Staffers testify to Phillips' sense of humor, but on this day it's evidently not easily excited. What he exhibits instead is a kind of self-aware importance, conveyed by heavy eye contact, a well-fitted suit and a shirt so heavily starched it seems to levitate. When he speaks, which is often and volubly, he breaks his talk into rhythmic, rolling sentences and assured, pithy statements. Tension, release. Tension, release. The cadence has a familiar regularity, like a packaged press conference.

Listen long enough, and you also sense a tenacity just this side of testiness. Phillips clearly has little patience for standard political protocol, where candidates "have to genuflect to the party every time they want something." And he's got little to say for vendor rivals, those "boutique businesses who do not take well to companies that come in with marketing muscle and know-how to talk directly to their customers."

Phillips tends to back his words with action. Some years ago, he pressed a libel suit after the trade journal Campaigns & Elections ran a negative and inaccurate review of Aristotle's product. He received a settlement and retraction, and has since, he says, become one of the magazine's largest advertisers. He was once sued by Tobe over what Phillips claims was a minor contract dispute; the issue has since been settled. Mention Phillips' name, and competitors and observers in Washington turn oddly silent, refusing comment or uttering variations of "He's a wonderful salesman."

Phillips has been dropped as data supplier by large list-compiling clients, including TRW and Donnelley Marketing. TRW, says marketing director Gary Laben, "was dissatisfied with the arrangement [with Aristotle] and also changed its [data-acquisition] strategy."

Further, Phillips says he was recently rebuffed when trying to join the Age Consortium, a data-buying group put together by TRW, Metromail and Donnelley Marketing. (Each one is responsible for acquiring driver-license data from certain states; data and costs are shared equally.) A good guess is that the consortium members haven't yet heard the last of it. "Why would a cost-sharing group not want a fourth member?" he asks. "I've yet to get a suitable explanation. I'm questioning what justification they have."

Says David Tabolt, spokesperson for Metromail, "We won't get into what we might or might not have talked about with our business partners. That's not a matter that's a public issue."

But that's all smaller stuff next to Aristotle's tangle with Metromail. What started as a contractual dispute has led, partly through Phillips' intractability, to a Federal Trade Commission investigation and a California class-action suit against Metromail, Aristotle's onetime partner in a list venture. Phillips has settled his end of the case for undisclosed terms, but his remarks about the list giant aren't what Metromail would use in pitching clients.

Pursuing Metromail

And the settlement doesn't deter Phillips from pursuing a shareholder demand about Metromail with parent R.R. Donnelley. (Last summer he bought some Donnelley stock, which lets him question Metromail's practices. He has since withdrawn a complaint with the DMA's Ethics Committee, a withdrawal he says was part of the settlement.)

More tellingly, he intends to capitalize on Metromail's hardship when promoting his own upcoming online list service for government and law-enforcement officials. So far, he claims Metromail is his only rival for such a service.

It's not exactly anger that characterizes Phillips' doggedness. Nor is it a paranoiac sense of enemies in the bushes. It's more of a peculiar and ornery quality, a refusal to cave in - and a thrill when others do.

This should not surprise those who knew Phillips 20 years ago as a Princeton undergrad, the kid who designed a workable atomic bomb using publicly available documents. In a book he wrote with a college friend, he called this "the great American Whoopee" - the phenomenon of being famous and then forgotten. CBS bought the movie rights but nearly backed out when Phillips insisted on being cast in the lead. The movie was never produced.