When We Get Slow, It’s Time to Grow: Remodeling Business Lessons From Ax Torres of Pristine Remodeling
Ax Torres has tried nearly every lever a contractor can pull for remodeling business growth: Thumbtack, Yelp, Angie’s, Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, what he calls shotgun marketing. Over eight years, he hired agencies and fired them. Then he did something most marketers would call reckless: he turned every ad off. For several months now, Pristine Remodeling’s marketing spend has been zero beyond what his wife earns running the company’s digital presence in-house. The result, in his words, has been explosive growth.
Torres told the story on a recent episode of Everyday Excellence with host Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group. His company, Pristine Remodeling, serves mid-to-high-end residential remodeling clients along Central Florida’s I-4 corridor from three offices, eight years into a run that began with a layoff, a conversation with his dad, and a lifetime of preparation he sums up in one line: people call you an overnight success without realizing you invested twenty years into being lucky.
The episode runs from flea market booths to Air Force logistics to the contrarian growth philosophy that has Pristine opening offices while competitors retreat, and it lands on one of the sharpest marketing conversations the show has recorded.
The Flea Market MBA
Torres grew up inside what he calls an echo chamber of entrepreneurs: serial-entrepreneur parents who rarely collected a paycheck from anyone else. By ten or twelve he was working the family’s flea market booths, where the merchandise was commoditized and the differentiation was entirely human. Stand at the front of the booth, dress well, greet everyone, bark a little, and befriend the regulars until half out of guilt and half out of interest, they wander in. His father added the lesson that stuck deepest: whenever a family with a special-needs child passed, he would pull a Swatch from the showcase and have his son hand it over, just to show a little kindness. “I learned charity through it,” Torres says. “Whether it’s a hot dog stand or a multi-million dollar business, the responsibility is pretty similar.”
Logistics, Demystified
The Air Force added the operational engine. Torres defines logistics in one unintimidating sentence: putting the right people and the right things in the right place for the right price. Every business, he argues, shares exactly two functions, marketing and logistics, and how well you run both determines how efficient, competitive, and pleasant the business is. In construction, that translates into right-priced subcontractors rather than the cheapest ones, materials arriving where they should, honest answers to questions like whether to buy trucks or rent them, and a customer who experiences it all as better prices, faster jobs, and clearer communication.
Golden Handcuffs and a Hurricane
Before Pristine, Torres wore what he calls golden handcuffs: the best money he or anyone in his family had ever earned, managing roughly fifteen million dollars of construction work for a large company during the Hurricane Irma recovery. The scale taught him leadership under pressure, and its costs. He learned that the eighty-first hour of work feels nothing like the first, that sleeplessness degrades a business, and that everyone on a stressed team is carrying a life outside work: take even a cursory interest in it and they perform at a different level. He also learned who he did not want to be, the reactive manager stress had made him, and not to take it personally when the higher-ups treat you as a number.
When the hurricane work dried up, so did the job. The layoff stung less than it might have, because his father handed him a springboard: “If you can manage fifteen million for somebody else, you can do one million for yourself.” Torres had two master’s degrees, four or five years in construction, and a lifetime of wanting to own something. The encouragement came from his dad, his wife, and his circle, but he adds the caveat every founder recognizes: if you don’t have it within you, no one can convince you. Asked whether he started confident or terrified, his answer covers both: “It was like riding a motorcycle for the first time. Exhilarating in the most dangerous way possible.”
The Guy Managing the Guy Holding the Paintbrush
The first six months were, in his words, a crash course on how to break even: what not to do, who not to trust, which red flags not to collect. The next stage was owning a job, where the money comes to you because you do the work. The leap after that is the one most owners never make, and Torres describes it with the clearest image of the episode: delegation is a ladder that never ends. “Right now it’s the guy holding the paintbrush. In a year, it’s the guy managing the guy holding the paintbrush. And then it’s the guy managing four of those guys.” The ladder only stops where you choose to stop climbing. He credits his wife with the push that mattered: we will never get to the next milestone if you don’t put the tools away.
Around year two, he accelerated the climb by hiring a business consultant, and his defense of the decision is the personal trainer analogy. You can watch every Arnold Schwarzenegger video ever filmed, but it is different when someone shows up, watches your form, and tweaks the one thing that changes everything. The objection, I can’t afford a coach, misreads the math. “The value of a business coach or mentor is tremendous,” he says. “And because it’s so valuable, a lot of people aren’t willing to give it away. So you pay for the privilege.”
What Is Working Now
The Rolls-Royce Experience at Any Price Point
Torres puts culture ahead of product, citing the gap everyone can feel between a Chick-fil-A and the drive-through down the road. The goal he names is a Rolls-Royce experience at any price point, built through compassionate leadership: know whether your people are moving or going through a divorce, because workers who feel cared for free up the mental space to care for customers. His non-negotiables are transparency and authenticity, anchored in a military lesson: it is okay not to know, and far better to say so, because surprises in business are bad. The culture shows up on job sites in acts of kindness that cost nothing, like carrying the groceries for a customer six months out of surgery.
When We Get Slow, It’s Time to Grow
The growth philosophy is pure contrarian discipline. Torres invests the same effort and money through every cycle, like dollar-cost averaging into the market, which means a downturn simply buys more. When post-COVID inflation and interest rates pulled demand back for contractors, he watched peers take vacations or downsize, and went shopping instead. “Offices went on sale. Employees went on sale.” Pristine added project managers and offices through the lull, a bet he frames as betting on America, and came out the other side with what he calls significant market share gains, because very few competitors choose to grow in a down cycle. His line for it belongs on a poster: when we get slow, it’s time to grow.
The Lesson: Own Your Relevancy Instead of Renting It
The marketing conversation is where Torres earned a marketer’s respect by walking away from marketers. For years, Pristine paid agencies fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a month for a couple of website pages and a regurgitated Google Analytics PowerPoint, “very little SEO, if any,” plus three thousand more in ad spend. His verdict on paid traffic has become his sharpest quote: “You’re renting relevancy, renting authority. The second you stop renting it, it’s no longer yours.” So he fired the agencies, turned off the ads, used AI to educate himself from a one-out-of-ten to a nine-out-of-ten on organic marketing, and pointed his wife’s full effort at the website, Google posts, and SEO. The site now carries what he values at ten thousand dollars a month in organic keyword equity, traffic and lead quality are up, map rankings have climbed, and the company is getting cited by AI platforms as an educational reference that turns readers into callers.
Notably, Torres has not written off paid or agencies forever; he has tabled them until he understands them or finds an agency he trusts, and his trust test matches what Todd Baldwin laid out on the episode: real conversion tracking that shows exactly which channel produced every lead, content structured answer-first for the long questions homeowners now type into AI, and education over black boxes. That is precisely how the team at Everyday Media Group operates with home service companies, campaigns and websites the client owns, reporting tied to real leads, and the same organic-first philosophy Torres proved on his own site. For the owners without a spouse who can carry 99 percent of the digital load, the lesson still stands: build equity you own, and hold any partner you hire to the standard Torres fired his way toward.
Key Takeaways From Ax Torres
- Grow when the market dips. Steady investment through cycles means downturns buy more: offices and employees go on sale, and almost nobody else is buying. Pristine gained market share growing through the lull.
- Own your relevancy. Ad spend is rented authority that vanishes when the spigot closes. Building $10K a month in organic keyword value means the visibility survives the budget.
- Keep climbing the delegation ladder. From the guy holding the paintbrush to the guy managing the managers, scaling is deciding where the ladder stops, and it starts with putting the tools away.
About Ax Torres
Ax Torres is the owner of Pristine Remodeling, a residential remodeling company serving mid-to-high-end clients along Central Florida’s I-4 corridor from three offices. An Air Force logistics veteran with two master’s degrees, he managed roughly $15 million in Hurricane Irma recovery construction before founding Pristine eight years ago. Learn more at https://www.pristinefl.com/.
Ready to Build Marketing Equity You Own?
Everyday Media Group helps home service and trade businesses build organic visibility that compounds: SEO, answer-first content for AI search, websites and campaigns the client owns, and conversion tracking that shows exactly where every lead came from. Hosted by Todd Baldwin, the Everyday Excellence podcast features real conversations with the owners behind growing home service companies. Schedule a free consultation at connect with Todd Baldwin on LinkedIn.
