Podcast: From $780K to $6M: What Noe Madrigal’s Journey Teaches Every Contractor About Growth, Marketing, and Relationships
Noe Madrigal bought a roofing company at 22 years old with $4,000 in his bank account and a seller-finance deal he had no business signing. Five years later, A&A Roofing is a $6 million operation serving Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, with a clear path to $15 million by 2030.
In a recent episode of Everyday Excellence, host Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group sat down with Noe for one of the most honest and practical conversations the podcast has produced. They covered business failures, marketing mistakes, the real cost of scaling without a foundation, and the one philosophy that drives everything A&A does.
If you run a contracting business, manage a service company, or have ever written a check to a marketing agency and wondered where the money went, this conversation is worth your time.
A Career Built from the Ground Up
Noe did not come from a business family. He did not attend college, take entrepreneurship courses, or inherit a client book. He graduated high school in 2017, moved to Tri-Cities, Washington, and figured things out as he went.
His first job in the trades was as a material loader at MacArthur Company, a roofing supply distributor. His first two deliveries involved carrying bundles of shingles up to the rooftops of two-story, steep-pitch new construction homes, and at the time, he was terrified of heights. He nearly quit. He stayed anyway.
“My dad always told me, if you’re going to do something, do it right or don’t do it at all,” Noe told Todd during the episode. That mindset carried him through loading, inside sales, and eventually outside sales at the distributor, where he learned materials, specs, coverages, and pricing from the inside out.
That outside sales role led him to a roofing contractor, where he expected to work in sales and instead found himself running the entire operation: payroll, taxes, permits, scheduling, invoicing, and deposits. He was 21 years old. He was underpaid and overworked. But he reframed it.
“I said, this is free college. I’m running somebody else’s business without it being my liability.”
The Seller-Finance Deal That Changed Everything
When Noe decided to leave that contractor job, his former mentor and sales rep at MacArthur called with a warning: “You’re going to get a phone call. Make sure you pick it up.”
The call was from Alan Keller, the retiring owner of A&A Roofing. Alan and his wife wanted to move to Texas. The only thing holding them back was the business. Would Noe be interested in buying it?
Noe’s first answer was no. He had just come through a miserable stretch in roofing and had no interest in continuing in the industry. But Alan invited him to dinner. Then a second dinner. Two meals later, Noe agreed to a seller-finance deal: $50,000 down, the rest paid in installments.
He had $4,000 in his checking account. He raised the down payment in a month.
“I tell people success is where preparedness and opportunity meet,” Noe said. “And I was saved by a relationship.”
That phrase became the company’s trademarked motto and the foundation of A&A Roofing’s entire brand identity.
Five Years of Revenue Growth (Including One Year That Nearly Ended It)
When Noe took over in March 2021, A&A was doing $780,000 a year. He closed his first year at $2.1 million. Year two hit $3.5 million.
Year three nearly ended everything.
In 2023, revenue dropped to $2.7 million. Noe was staring at $600,000 owed to distributors, an unclear picture of where the money had gone, and a business that was growing too fast without the systems to support it. He had spent roughly $180,000 on marketing that year without being able to attribute much of it to real results.
“There are a lot of silent killers in business that you have no idea about,” he told Todd. “I was a professional firefighter when I was supposed to be running a business.”
The problem was not just spending. It was structure, or the absence of it. No formal processes, no accountability systems, no clear financial reporting, and an owner who had become the bottleneck for every decision. Noe acknowledged he had not even learned to read a profit and loss statement until February of this year.
He did not exit. He got help.
What Getting the Right People in Your Corner Actually Looks Like
Six months into owning A&A Roofing, Noe joined a mastermind group called Revolt out of South Carolina. From that single gathering, he built connections that continue to shape his business today: a fractional sales manager, a CRM founder, a roofing conference organizer, and collaborators who introduced him to offshore operational support.
“This was a group of people, and they changed the trajectory of my business,” Noe said.
Later, he joined WinRate Consulting with Mike Claudio, where he was paired with Dave Owens, a coach who had built and exited a multi-location roofing operation worth approximately $50 million. He has also leaned on Jake Brighton, founder of RoofLink, a roofing CRM that sold to Sales Rabbit as part of a combined exit valued at over $100 million.
Noe was clear about something Todd has observed in many contractors: it is not enough to join a group or hire a coach. You have to take what you learn and actually implement it. He did.
By year four, revenue rebounded to $5 million. He paid off the seller-finance deal a year ahead of schedule. In 2025, A&A hit $6.1 million.
“Saved by Relationships”: A Motto That Earned Its Place
The phrase “Saved by Relationships” is printed on A&A’s shirts, painted on their trucks and vans, embedded in their website, and registered as a trademark with the USPTO. It is not a tagline someone invented in a branding meeting.
Noe was driving between Oregon and Washington one summer evening, late in the day, sun hitting him square in the face at what he described as golden hour. He started crying. Uncontrollably. Not from stress, but from gratitude.
He thought about how he got there. The business, the team, the customers, the house he had bought from the same owner he bought the company from. And he traced everything back to one moment: the phone call from Dan, the mentor who gave his name to Alan Keller, who called Noe and offered him a business he initially turned down.
“Out of everybody Alan knew, he called this punk 22-year-old kid,” Noe said. “He had a full book of business owners who could have bought that company in a heartbeat. He called me because of one relationship.”
The motto is also operational. Noe defines relationships in his company’s core values as “value and foster long-term relationships.” He is not interested in short-term customers.
Today, 70% of A&A’s business comes from repeat customers and referrals. Of that 70%, three to four out of every seven customers are builders, property managers, or realtors. Not one of those relationships came from a paid ad.
Marketing Mistakes That Cost Real Money
When Todd turned the conversation to digital marketing, Noe did not hold back.
He called it paying the “dummy tax,” and he paid it more than once.
His first instinct when he took over the business was that a better website would generate leads. He cycled through two or three website providers over the years, spending significant money each time, only to realize that a well-designed website is not a lead generation strategy. It is a destination.
He sponsored golf course advertisements at local courses, paying for bench placements at hole number five. “I cannot tell you the last time I got a call from someone saying they found my number at hole five,” Noe said.
He signed up for discount promotions and coupon campaigns. That was also a mistake. “Never discount, always add value,” he said. “We were labeling ourselves as a discount contractor, and that hurt our brand.”
And then came the most costly lesson.
He spent $16,000 in a single month on pay-per-click advertising through a marketing company and received zero leads. Not a handful. Zero. He still has the dashboard to prove it.
Todd was direct about what that means from an agency side. “There is no reason to spend $16,000 your first month out of the gate with PPC. Those campaigns need to ramp up. You get data, make decisions based on that data, and optimize as you go.” He added that the digital marketing industry, broadly speaking, has earned a bad reputation in part because of exactly this kind of outcome, where agencies overpromise, lock in short-term contracts, and throw money at campaigns without the intent to actually deliver.
What Actually Works: A Contractor’s Honest Assessment
Noe did not walk away from marketing. He got smarter about it.
Today, A&A Roofing’s only active paid channel is PPC, and the approach looks very different from year one. The account is fully optimized. They spend $3,000 per month. Last month, that $3,000 returned $28,000 in revenue.
“I’ll spend $3,000 all day every day if I’m getting $28,000 back,” he said.
Todd used that number to make a point he often makes with contractor clients at Everyday Media Group. When contractors call looking for financing because they need $50,000, he sometimes asks: if I handed you $3,000 today and you handed me back $28,000 in 30 days, would you say no? Of course not. That is a nine-to-one return. The goal is recognizing that a well-run, optimized campaign is not an expense. It is a multiplier.
Noe is also realistic about lead volume. He does not want more leads than his team can service properly. His PPC budget is sized intentionally around the capacity of his current sales team, not around vanity metrics.
The Attribution Problem Nobody Talks About
One of the most insightful moments of the conversation came when Noe raised the issue of lead source accuracy.
“Someone calls and says they found us on Google. But did they? Or did they see our truck for years, hear our radio ad, see us at a community event, and then eventually go to Google and search us up? They say Google, but it’s years of branding that got you there.”
Todd confirmed that proper conversion tracking can often distinguish between those two paths, separating direct-type traffic from true organic or paid search arrivals. But many contractors do not have that tracking in place, which makes it nearly impossible to know what is actually working.
Branding as the Long Game
A&A Roofing sponsors local youth sports teams, community events, and other initiatives that may never produce a phone call directly tied to a sponsorship moment. Noe used to wonder if those investments were worth it.
“I might not have gotten much business in year two or three from that branding. But now people tell me they see us everywhere.”
He recently ran into someone at a grocery store who mentioned seeing A&A vans, recognizing a crew working down the street, and seeing someone wear an A&A hat. Three separate brand touchpoints. That person became a call.
Organic SEO: The Investment Most Contractors Regret Skipping
Todd brought up organic search as a parallel conversation to what Noe was describing. At Everyday Media Group, organic SEO campaigns for home service contractors take time to mature, but once they do, the results tend to be the highest-quality leads in the mix.
“Nobody has ever told me they regretted going through that painful process of giving it time to work,” Todd said. “Once they see how powerful it is to be showing up regularly on Google, they want to double down.”
He was also candid that doubling the SEO budget does not double lead flow. It does not work that way. When contractors ask about putting extra budget into organic, the better question is what other channels could supplement it intelligently, not whether throwing more money at optimization will scale linearly.
Lead Follow-Up: The Real Conversion Killer
Both Noe and Todd kept circling back to the same point from different directions: generating leads is only half the equation.
Contractors, broadly speaking, are notoriously poor at following up quickly. Calls go unanswered. Voicemails sit. Leads move on to the next option within minutes. Todd noted that even with Everyday Media Group clients, one of the ongoing conversations they have is around call response rates, voicemail strategy, and the simple reality that a lead not answered in the first five to ten minutes has a dramatically lower chance of converting.
“I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve listened to that go unanswered or have poor follow-up,” Todd said. “The campaign worked. The lead came in. And nobody picked up.”
Noe’s approach has evolved alongside his systems. With a defined intake process and a trained sales team, he can now actually service the volume of leads his marketing generates. That alignment between lead flow and operational capacity is something many contractors miss entirely.
Building Toward $15 Million
Noe is in what he calls a “peace of mind” year for 2026. The goal is not to scale. It is to tighten processes, build financial reserves, and prepare the business for the expansion that comes next.
“We’re roofers, not firefighters,” he said. “I want to put out the last fire and not create new ones just because we’re chasing revenue.”
The irony is that the year he decided to stop chasing growth has turned into a record-breaking start. A&A had their strongest first quarter ever in 2026. They recently landed a $1 million project. April and May are trending in the same direction.
By 2027, he plans to enter a new market. By 2030, the target is a $15 million company.
One Line to Leave With
At the end of the episode, Todd asked Noe for a go-to one-liner, something that shapes how he thinks.
Noe reached for one drawn from Jim Collins’ Good to Great: “What stops a good company from becoming a great company is that they’re always good enough.”
It is the same philosophy he applies internally when a job or a process reaches a point that most companies would call acceptable. Good is not the goal. It is the baseline he is trying to leave behind.
About the Everyday Excellence Podcast
Everyday Excellence is hosted by Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group, a digital marketing agency working with home service contractors and businesses across the country. The podcast features candid conversations with business owners, entrepreneurs, and operators who share what actually happened, not just the version of the story that sounds good in a highlight reel.
If you are a contractor working through your own marketing challenges or building a business that needs a stronger digital foundation, Everyday Media Group works with businesses at every stage, from those just starting to establish their Google presence to established companies looking to optimize campaigns and scale lead flow intelligently.
Connect with Todd Baldwin on LinkedIn or visit EverydayMediaGroup.com to learn more.
You can find A&A Roofing at aandaroof.com and follow Noe Madrigal on Instagram at @madrigal_noe.
