About Larisa
Architecting Business Where Markets, Governments, and Capital Meet
The Work
Larisa Miller is the founder and CEO of Phoenix Global, a specialized advisory firm working across more than thirty countries, and co-founder and principal of Provenance Family Advisory.
Phoenix Global works from the top down. If Larisa cannot reach the most senior levels of a government directly, the firm does not take the country. That standard is what makes the rest of the work possible, which is getting governments, capital, and industry to agree before anything gets built.
She advises ministries on cross-ministerial cooperation and on building export value in the industries that carry a national economy, and she structures public-private partnership across energy, infrastructure, transportation, waste management, smart cities, health, and food security. Much of her work in Africa has been moving investment into critical projects and writing the policy that lets a ministry earn revenue from industries adjacent to its own mandate.
She has spent twelve years working in the Middle East and has been building in the Gulf and Africa corridor for over a decade. She treats that corridor as the Silk Road of our era. The early-stage window in Africa closes inside five years, and the Middle East, China, and India are already consolidating position.
Her clients are governments, sovereign-linked institutions, family offices, Fortune 500 and emerging enterprises, and the founders and C-suites behind them. The work runs to market entry, capital deployment, regulatory strategy, workforce development, and transactions that do not fit a standard template.
Agriculture and food security are where she started and where the work runs deepest.
Provenance Family Advisory
Provenance Family Advisory works with family enterprises and family offices on the problem most of them share, which is a business that cannot yet run without the person who built it. The firm’s central discipline is Enterprise Independence, the work of preparing a founder-dependent enterprise for succession, sale, or global expansion without losing what made it valuable in the first place.
The firm works bottom-up as well as top-down. The rising generation has its finger on where an industry is actually going, and legacy models are built for decades that have already passed. Larisa co-founded Provenance with Scott Escujuri.
Boards, Stages, and Publications
Larisa serves on boards and advisory bodies on four continents and speaks internationally on business strategy, disruption, global operations, emerging market investment, leadership, entrepreneurship, and the architecture of reinvention.
She contributed the chapter “How Businesses Can Impact Agenda 2030” to The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Its Impact on Ethics, published by Springer in the Sustainable Finance series. She contributed the chapter “Balancing tradition and innovation in family offices” to The Rising Role of Women in Family Offices and Family Businesses, published by Globe Law and Business.
Twelve Years in the Middle East
Larisa built her professional life in Abu Dhabi. For just under five of those twelve years she served as Head of Business Development and Investment for members of the Abu Dhabi Royal Family, leading portfolios weighted toward agriculture, food security, greenhouses, sustainability, and energy. She founded Phoenix Global afterward, as her own independent firm.
She also represented a nonprofit initiative on behalf of Her Highness, working with children in conflict and displacement settings, providing solar light kits and access to education their circumstances did not otherwise offer. That work extended into humanitarian operations in Jordan, Iraq, and Yemen alongside the Emirates Red Crescent. It shaped how she works now in markets where the commercial outcome cannot be separated from what is happening on the ground.
Zaatari Refugee Camp, Jordan.
"My clients do not hire me to navigate disruption. They hire me to build the model that makes the rest of the market obsolete."
Pennsylvania
Larisa grew up on a farm in Lebanon County. Her grandfather farmed, her father has spent most of his working life as a governmental consultant in Harrisburg, and her own career started in Pennsylvania state government, in the Animal Health and Diagnostic Commission, the Secretary of Agriculture’s office, and Governor Tom Ridge’s Office of Policy.
She later founded Keystone Farm Future, the first fully vertically integrated, farm-to-fork beef program built for a grocery chain in the United States. The program is taking a knee. Small and medium USDA processing capacity was the one link in the chain she did not control, and it is the reason she now advocates publicly for processor capacity and for policy, capital access, and grant programs that farmers and processors can actually reach.
What Is Next
Her memoir, I Drove My Guardian Angel to Drink, arrives Fall 2026. Built Different: How to Build, Lead, and Compete When the Rules Keep Changing follows in 2027. She is co-founder of Wealth Warriors, a tiered education platform launching in the fourth quarter of 2026.
When you do things differently than others, you create opportunities that others do not have.