Podcast: How Mario Aguilar and Lemus Construction Became the Northeast’s Fastest-Growing Roofing Company
Mario Aguilar compared sitting down with Todd Baldwin to couples therapy. Business therapy, he corrected himself. You go back in time. You bring up some good memories and some bad ones. And there will be no prefab story, he promised, full of unicorns and rainbows.
That opening is probably the best introduction to Lemus Construction that anyone could give. An 18-year-old roofing and exterior company, 200 people strong at peak season, the fastest roofing company in the Northeast, number one in the country for two consecutive years on GAF multifamily installations, built on a family-first culture and a long-term mindset that has never once been in a hurry.
On a recent episode of Everyday Excellence, Todd Baldwin sat down with Mario, CEO of Lemus Construction, for a conversation about what 18 years of doing exterior remodeling the right way actually looks like: the sleeping-at-the-office early years, the mistake-versus-negligence philosophy that runs through every team conversation, and the culture of love and respect that has kept good people around for the long haul.
The Company Behind the Name
Lemus Construction was founded by Victor Lemus and his wife Clady, Mario’s sister. From the beginning, it was a family business in every sense of that phrase: shared sacrifice, shared vision, and a relentless willingness to reinvent the company year after year. Mario credits the two of them with the skill of constant reinvention. If you look at their planning room, he says, you would think they were crazy for what they are aiming at in the next five and ten years.
Mario came into the business not by design but by convergence. Roofing chose him, he says, not the other way around. Eighteen years later, he is the CEO, and his primary job, as he describes it, is making sure the company does not depend on any single person, including himself.
By peak season, Lemus operates with roughly 200 people: direct employees, supervisors, project managers, operations managers, crews, and a mix of W2 employees and subcontractors in line with how the industry is structured. The company focuses primarily on the multifamily market, a division Mario handles directly, serving townhome communities, condominium associations, and commercial properties across the Northeast. A recently launched brand, Lemus Remodeling, serves the single-family residential market as a separate entity to protect the integrity and focus of the multifamily operation.
Survival Mode: The Early Years in Pennsylvania
When Lemus Construction started in 2007 and 2008, it looked the way most trades businesses look in their first years. Small. Lean. A very personal touch. No fancy systems. Just big dreams, hard work during the day, and proposals written at night in the office before sleeping on the couch and starting again in the morning.
Mario describes those early years with honest clarity: they were not chasing titles or the biggest story. The aim was results, reputation, and stability for the family. The mission was always straightforward. It just took a long time to scale the operation to match it.
What proved harder than expected was not the roofing itself. The physical work, while demanding, is what it is. The real challenge was leading a large team while keeping standards consistent across every single job. Building trust with customers. Making sure the experience the hundredth client received matched the experience the first client received. And absorbing, without flinching, the reality that as the company got bigger, the margin for error got smaller. At scale, things that were once forgiven by clients or absorbed internally become much more consequential.
What’s Working Now: Culture, Consistency, and Two Focused Brands
The framework that defines Lemus Construction’s culture today was earned through years of getting it wrong first. Mistakes were made. Systems had to be built. Standards had to be set, documented, and held. Mario’s philosophy on mistakes now runs through everything the team does.
He states it plainly: “A mistake is a learning at the first time. If you do it two times, that’s negligence.” The first occurrence is absorbed, examined, and turned into a system. If the same mistake happens twice under the same conditions, that is no longer a gap in knowledge. It is a gap in accountability. The distinction matters because it changes how the team responds: not with blame, but with urgency to prevent the cycle from repeating.
The culture Mario describes rests on two words he returns to consistently: love and respect. The team at Lemus is taken for their strengths. Their weaknesses are worked on, not used against them. They are made to feel part of a family before they are expected to carry the culture of that family into their work. And the founders, Victor and Clady, set the tone for all of it by example: first in the office, last to stop, seven days a week during busy seasons. It is impossible to build a culture of hustle through a memo if leadership is not living it publicly.
What clients see first when Lemus shows up is the dedication visible from the very first proposal. The team is not just there to earn the business. It is there to build a relationship that starts before the first nail is driven and carries through the lifetime of the property.
The launch of Lemus Remodeling as a distinct brand reflects the same thinking. The multifamily and single-family businesses serve different clients with different timelines, different processes, and different expectations. Running them under one roof would create compromise in both directions. Separating them preserves the quality standards that each market requires.
The Lesson: Process Over Outcome, and Building Something That Outlasts You
Mario’s advice for anyone starting an exterior construction business today has a counterintuitive center: “Don’t expect instant results. Because those will never come.” The desire for fast growth is understandable. The reality is that the results worth having in this industry accumulate slowly, through reputation built job by job, relationship by relationship, and system by system. Any shortcut that produces fast growth in roofing almost always sacrifices the thing that makes the growth sustainable.
The investment sequence he recommends: start with long-term planning. Invest in the team. Everything else follows from those two. Not the other way around.
For lead generation, Lemus Construction’s most reliable channel has always been word of mouth: the natural result of doing good work across thousands of projects and building client relationships that produce referrals. The recently launched Lemus Remodeling brand is adding door canvassing and direct outreach to reach the single-family residential market more actively. Both approaches reflect the same underlying belief: focus on the process, and the outcome takes care of itself.
Mario frames Lemus Construction’s broader mission with genuine clarity. The industry has a reputation for being messy, disruptive, and stressful for homeowners. He wants to change that narrative. “Your most valuable items, your family, are under a roof.” The roof is not the biggest purchase most people make in a lifetime. But it is the protection over everything and everyone they value most. A company that approaches that responsibility with the seriousness it deserves will always have a market.
At Everyday Media Group, Todd Baldwin and the team work with roofing and exterior contractors to build the digital foundation that amplifies the reputation a company like Lemus has spent 18 years earning. Word of mouth is powerful. Word of mouth plus strong organic search, a well-maintained Google Business Profile, and content that reflects the genuine standard of the work is what takes a regional roofing company to the next level.
Key Takeaways
- “A mistake is a learning at the first time. If you do it two times, that’s negligence.” This framework changes how a team handles errors. The first occurrence is a system gap: identify it, fix it, build a process around it. The second occurrence is an accountability failure. Holding that distinction clearly across a team of 200 people is what keeps quality consistent at scale.
- “Don’t expect instant results. Invest in long-term planning. Invest in your team.” Every successful 18-year company in the trades started with this patience. The reputation that generates word-of-mouth referrals, the culture that retains good people, and the standards that produce consistent client experiences: none of these happen in year one. They are the compound return on years of disciplined process.
- Make the company not depend on one person. Mario describes this as his primary job as CEO. A company built around any single person, including the founder, is fragile. The goal is building the systems, the culture, and the leadership bench that makes the company run equally well whether or not any one person is in the room. That is what a business worth 18 years of work actually looks like.
About Mario Aguilar
Mario Aguilar is the CEO of Lemus Construction, a roofing and exterior remodeling company serving the Northeast United States. Lemus Construction was founded by Victor Lemus and Clady Lemus (Mario’s sister) and has been in operation for 18 years. During peak season, the company operates with approximately 200 people across its workforce, serving the multifamily, commercial, and single-family residential markets. Lemus Construction is recognized as the fastest roofing company in the Northeast and has ranked number one nationally for GAF multifamily roofing installations two years in a row. The recently launched Lemus Remodeling brand serves the single-family residential market as a dedicated division.
Find Lemus Construction at https://lemusconstruction.com/.
Is Your Roofing Company’s Reputation Showing Up Where Clients Search?
Lemus Construction has spent 18 years building the kind of reputation that generates referrals without asking for them. Everyday Media Group helps roofing and exterior contractors build the digital presence that makes that reputation visible to the homeowners and property managers who are searching before they ever ask a neighbor. If your company does exceptional work and your online presence does not reflect it yet, schedule a conversation with Todd Baldwin and the team.
