Podcast: How Chris Cline Went From Corporate VP to $1 Million in His First Year Running a Roofing Business
Chris Cline has spent the better part of his career helping other people’s companies grow. He took Power Home Remodeling from around $45 million a year to $600 million. He scaled PJ Fitzpatrick from $24 million to $120 million in just three years. At 43, he decided it was time to do it for himself. The result was Lemus Remodeling Group, a Southeast Pennsylvania exterior contracting company he launched in May 2024 with a borrowed backlog and a clear operational plan.
In just the first four and a half months of operation, Chris and his team generated over a million dollars in revenue. He recently joined Todd Baldwin on the Everyday Excellence podcast to walk through what that first year actually looked like, what hit harder than expected, and where the most expensive lessons came from. Spoiler: it was not the production side.
From Windows to VP of Operations
Chris got into contracting at 17, helping a friend’s father install windows, mirrors, and shower doors. After high school, he went straight into commercial work, climbing from installer to foreman to project manager. By his mid-twenties he was managing major commercial glazing projects. When the commercial market slowed around 2010, he pivoted to residential remodeling.
That pivot landed him at Power Home Remodeling, at the time doing about $45 to $50 million a year. Within a year he was director. He eventually became vice president of operations and was instrumental in opening six new territories and helping grow the company to $600 million before he left. Power Home Remodeling is now a $1.5 billion operation.
From there he joined PJ Fitzpatrick, a nearly 35-year-old exterior remodeling company sitting at $24 million a year when he arrived. In three years, they scaled it to $120 million. Having done it twice at that level, Chris decided the next chapter had to be his own.
Starting From Zero Is Nothing Like Scaling From Existing
“Creating a business going from zero to 100 is a completely different animal,” Chris told Todd on the podcast. When you are scaling a company that already exists, you have infrastructure, brand recognition, cash flow, and staff. When you are starting from nothing, everything you take for granted disappears at once.
What helped Chris bridge that gap was the backing of Victor Lemus and Lemus Construction, the commercial and multifamily brand that is the parent company behind Lemus Remodeling Group. Victor had been receiving residential calls he could not service at scale. Chris came in to build the residential exterior side of the business, and that existing pipeline of interested clients gave Lemus Remodeling a backlog to work through from the very first month.
In the first two months, Chris closed around $350,000 worth of those projects. The backlog ran out quickly. From there, he had to go out and build lead flow from scratch, something he had managed at a high level for years but had never personally had to build from the ground up.
Marketing Was the Hardest Part, and It Surprised Him
Chris spent his career on the operations and sales side of the business. He understood how to build capacity, manage production teams, train sales staff, and hold the operational side of a fast-growing company together. Marketing was the piece he had always managed at arm’s length.
“Understanding and diving into the marketing side of this business was difficult. My original thought was to outsource it. Outsourcing marketing is very difficult. It takes almost more focus to outsource marketing and time and effort than it does to just do it yourself.”
That realization is one of the most common and costly discoveries for trade business owners in their first year. The assumption that handing marketing to an outside agency frees you up is almost always wrong. Managing an agency, reviewing what they are delivering, making sure the spend is producing real leads, and course-correcting when it is not requires attention. It is not a set-and-forget decision.
The Big Agency Mistake
Chris made a specific mistake early on that he was candid about on the podcast. He assumed that spending more on a larger, more established agency would produce better returns and require less management on his end. Neither turned out to be true.
“I figured, if I pay for the more expensive, larger company, I would get a better return and I wouldn’t have to manage it. It was quite the opposite.”
A friend who does similar work in the marketing space stepped in during the transition between agencies and outperformed the larger company. Chris drew a clear conclusion from it: “Working with a smaller brand or someone who’s owner-operated, like yourself, I actually had a much better experience, and for that matter, a better ROI.”
Todd, who founded and runs Everyday Media Group, echoed the sentiment. Large agencies in the digital marketing space can charge based on what they think they can get from a growing company, not based on what the work actually costs or is worth. The result is often expensive contracts with underwhelming performance. Not every big agency falls into that trap, but the pattern is common enough that trade business owners need to interrogate it before signing.
The In-House Shift
Rather than cycling through more agencies, Chris and Victor decided to build an in-house marketing team, shared across both Lemus Construction and Lemus Remodeling Group. The shared structure made the cost manageable across two businesses. Content creation, digital platform management, Google presence, and paid search all run through that team now.
“The transition time was a little tough, but once that happened you definitely saw a pretty quick turnaround,” Chris said. The thing that made the biggest difference, in his view, was straightforward: the in-house person wears the company shirt. They are invested in the brand in a way that outside contractors are not. That pride of ownership changes the quality of the work.
Building Lead Flow from the Ground Up
With the initial Lemus Construction backlog exhausted, Chris turned to every lead channel he could test in the available time. Google pay-per-click was part of the mix, handled first through the large agency and then restructured. Paid lead services were tried and mostly found to offer no magic bullet. Direct mail and Valpak were added. Home shows and trade events gave the team a face-to-face presence in the market.
In the first six months, Chris was personally running a significant portion of the appointments. His close rate during that period ran between 60 and 65 percent, which is high for the exterior remodeling category. By the end of year one, the rate had settled closer to 40 to 45 percent as the team scaled and more salespeople were running their own leads. He considers both ranges healthy for where the business is.
The channel he was most excited about at the time of recording was canvassing, which Lemus Remodeling had just launched. Their first trained team went out the day before the podcast was recorded and brought in their first canvassing lead the same day. Chris expects face-to-face lead generation to account for roughly half of total lead volume over time. He pointed to the contrast between his two previous employers: one built its entire growth strategy on face-to-face marketing with almost no outbound advertising, the other scaled to over $100 million on direct mail and media with zero canvassing. Both worked. His goal is to build a version that uses both.
“Proof Over Pressure”: The Lemus Remodeling Philosophy
One of the sharpest things Chris said on the podcast was about how Lemus Remodeling positions itself in a crowded market. He broke the contractor landscape into three rough categories.
The first is what he calls chuck in a truck: small, owner-operated businesses with limited staff and variable quality. Some do excellent work. Others take advantage of homeowners. It is a 50-50 proposition for the customer. The second is the large established brands. They will take care of the customer no matter what, but the price reflects that guarantee.
Lemus Remodeling is built to sit in the middle. The quality of the work and the service process is comparable to what the big brands deliver, but the pricing is not. “We are providing a better service at a more reasonable rate,” Chris said. “We want people to make that good choice and not have to roll the dice with another contractor.”
The company tagline captures this: Trust Lemus for a Lifetime. The intent is not about lifetime warranties. It is about relationship continuity. If Lemus Remodeling puts on your roof, Chris wants them to be the company you call when your windows need attention, your siding is aging out, or you are finally adding that deck. The goal is to be the contractor in the customer’s pocket, indefinitely.
Hiring on Attitude: What 20 Years of Interviewing Taught Him
Chris has been hiring people for close to 20 years. During his years at Power Home Remodeling, he was running 20 to 25 interviews a week and traveled to 15 different states conducting interviews as the company expanded. That volume of hiring developed a strong filter.
His conclusion: background and credentials are a starting point, not the deciding factor. “I was just a contractor with not a lot of skills and no education when I started at those businesses. So here we are.” What he looks for in an interview is culture fit, attitude, and the potential to do the job, not just a resume that checks the boxes.
He also introduced a simple practice with every new team he has built across his career. On day one, he asks the team: what do you expect from your manager? He listens to the answers, and then makes a reciprocal ask. “If I do all these things for you, this is what I’m going to ask of you. You do your job very well, and I promise you I will do mine for you.” It creates buy-in before the first real challenge arrives.
What He Would Tell a Younger Version of Himself
When Todd asked what advice Chris would give to a younger person thinking about launching their own exterior remodeling business, his answer was short and direct: just do it.
“If you are on the fence about taking that opportunity, I say just do it. If you pour your whole heart, your soul, and everything into it, it will work. There is nothing, no question about it.”
He added something that did not get mentioned until the end of the conversation, and it was one of the most honest moments in the episode. Leaving a senior role with a reliable income to start something from zero comes with serious anxiety. The self-doubt is real. What made the difference for Chris was the support of his wife, who pushed him when he hesitated and held things together when the stress was at its highest. “If I didn’t have the right support at home, I would have never been able to make the move.”
The First Year Sets the Foundation
Chris Cline’s first year at Lemus Remodeling Group was not a clean playbook execution. It was an expensive education in marketing, a fast-moving pivot from outsourcing to in-house, a lesson in what building from zero actually demands compared to scaling what already exists, and a million dollars in revenue built in less than half a year.
The honest account he shared with Todd Baldwin on Everyday Excellence is exactly the kind of story that trade business owners at every stage need to hear. The path from operator to entrepreneur is rarely as smooth as it looks from the outside, and the marketing piece tends to be the piece that trips up even the most experienced operators.
If you are navigating that same transition, or if you are already running a home service business and struggling to get clear on what your marketing is actually producing, Everyday Media Group works with contractors and trade businesses to bring that clarity. The conversation usually starts with a simple question: do you know which channel is driving your best leads?
Listen to the full episode of Everyday Excellence wherever you get your podcasts. Visit golemus.com to learn more about Lemus Remodeling Group, and visit everydaymediagroup.com to find out how Everyday Media Group helps home service businesses build marketing programs that actually produce results.
