I spent fifteen years in my father’s granite shop before I ever touched a line of code. Mercury Online is what I built after a job-site injury forced me to find a different way to earn a living. Today the agency works exclusively with remodeling contractors, because that’s the industry I know the most.
My dad’s name is Esteban Ramirez. He ran the granite shop where I learned what trades businesses actually feel like.
The shop was dusty. Cold in the winter, hot and humid in the summer. Music blaring from a busted speaker. I remember chips of rock hitting my face and my hands as I cut through stone with a diamond blade saw. Some days we’d lift multiple 700-pound slabs and carry them across uneven dirt to get them where they needed to go. It was hard work. The kind that teaches you what a real workday looks like and what it costs.
My favorite part of the job wasn’t the shop. It was the job sites. That’s where I’d meet contractors, electricians, carpenters, cabinetry makers. We’d talk shop. I’d listen to what kept them up at night, what made a job feel worth it, what frustrated them about how the business of remodeling actually worked. I didn’t know it then, but those conversations were the most valuable education I’d ever get. Fifteen years of them. Long enough to understand how trades businesses actually run, who they serve, and where the marketing they were sold by other agencies completely missed the point.
From a Swift calculator to building marketing systems for trade businesses.
I started by teaching myself how to code on the couch while I was healing. The first thing I built was a calculator in Swift. Nothing impressive. But it was the first thing I’d ever made that didn’t require my body to be functional. That was the hook.
Two months into recovery, a friend told me about a coding boot camp he was taking. Full-time, eight hours a day for three months, learning to build web applications on the LAMP stack. I joined out of curiosity. I fell in love with it. After I finished the boot camp, I went back to work in my dad’s shop while I looked for a job in the field. I got turned down a lot. Almost a year of rejections before someone said yes.
In 2018, a small marketing firm in Albuquerque hired me. That’s where I learned WordPress, then SEO, then how to build automated systems for clients. I worked there from 2018 until 2024. Then a larger Albuquerque firm hired me to work on accounts for national brands across multiple states. That’s where I am now. I’m still there full-time while Mercury Online grows into the business that will eventually replace it.
THE THING I LEARNED INSIDE LARGER AGENCIES
Working with national brands taught me what generalist marketing agencies do well, and also exactly what they miss about local trade businesses. The playbook that grows a national skincare brand does not grow a local remodeling contractor. Mercury Online exists because remodeling contractors need a marketing partner who understands their industry, not one who’s adapting a national-brand framework to fit them.
Because it’s the industry I know the most.
There are roughly 200 industries I could have built a marketing agency for. I chose one. The reason isn’t complicated: remodeling is the industry I grew up in. Fifteen years of granite work meant fifteen years of meeting kitchen remodelers, bath remodelers, addition specialists, whole-home contractors on their job sites. I know how their projects get sold. I know how their seasons move. I know what kind of homeowner they want and which kind they’d rather walk away from. I know the difference between a contractor running a tight ship and one barely keeping the wheels on.
A marketing agency that doesn’t know that difference is going to recommend the wrong things, write the wrong copy, and miss the moments that actually matter. Mercury Online is built for remodeling contractors because that’s the only group I can honestly say I know well enough to make a real difference for. Everyone else gets sent somewhere better.
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Three things I believe about how a marketing agency should operate.
These aren’t aspirational. They’re how I actually run client relationships. If you hire Mercury Online, this is what to expect from me every month, every quarter, every year we work together.
A marketing agency needs to be a business partner.
Not a vendor. Not a checklist runner. A partner whose sole motivation is to help expand the awareness of your business and highlight your company in the best light. I know firsthand the different hats a business owner has to wear. Figuring out how to market the business shouldn't be one of them.
If something isn't working in month three, I'll tell you before you ask.
Most agencies wait for the client to notice that the numbers aren't moving. I'd rather have the harder conversation at month three than a worse one at month twelve. If a strategy isn't producing results, you'll hear it from me first.
I don't take on clients I can't move the needle for.
If your market is too competitive for the budget you can invest, or your goals don't match what's possible in your timeline, I'll say so on the discovery call. You'll save the money and I'll save us both the wasted effort. Honesty is the only marketing strategy that compounds.
I’m building Mercury Online so my family doesn’t depend on my body lasting forever.
My body taught me what doesn’t last. I’m building a business that does. The work I do now is so my family has something stable to stand on long after the trades work that built me isn’t possible anymore. And the same goal goes for every remodeling contractor I take on as a client. If we’re working together, my job is to help you build something that lasts past the body that started it.
Opportunity comes when you build it. Not when you wait for it to come.
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