The Marketing Mistake That Cost Him 60% of His Leads

Everybody slows down for a fire on the side of the road. This is that fire — except it’s a marketing budget. Here’s what happened when a green-but-growing manufacturer trusted the wrong agency.

BareIron started in 2017, when Rogan Frick was a college student doing literally everything himself — building the website, welding the products, and handling delivery. The company manufactures construction and site-support equipment for excavation, shipping nationwide.

In 2020 came “round two”: a more legitimate operation. Rogan brought his father in as a partner to run operations, which finally freed him to focus on the area he actually wanted to grow into — online marketing. He started experimenting with Google Ads, pay-per-click, and SEO. The results were real: rankings climbed, and the business got found.

BareIron is the #1 manufacturer of grizzly rock screens in the United States — a simple device for sizing soil, used with a loader or backhoe. 100% American made, built from a solid steel rail you won’t find elsewhere, with short lead times and a fast return on investment.

Getting found is normal — and so is what comes next. The moment a business surfaces on page two of Google, the spammers and self-styled saviors start circling. The message is always the same: “You’re not ranking. We can do better.” Nothing else. Just the hook.

Rogan got that pitch. An agency he never approached promised to take over his Google Ads, build out his campaigns, actively manage them, and report back monthly on how they’d improve. It sounded great. And to their credit, the initial ad set was a real improvement — his pay-per-click performance genuinely got better at the start. “My ignorance led me to hire an agency that just kind of took advantage of me.”

The monthly meetings looked productive. The agency handed over data, pointed at the audit log full of changes, and reported glowing performance. But Rogan was green enough not to question the definitions — and that was the trap.

The agency had defined its own KPIs inside his ad account and called them “conversions.” Because BareIron wasn’t e-commerce yet, a conversion was things like time on site (three-plus minutes) and pages visited. Self-defined metrics, fed back to him as proof of success. Meanwhile the audit log was stuffed with busywork edits — changes made to look like something was happening when nothing meaningful was.

A Key Performance Indicator is the signal you watch to tell whether things are going well or badly. The danger: if the agency gets to define the KPI, they can move the goalposts whenever they like. Set the target yourself — and keep it fixed.

Locked into a year-by-year contract, Rogan couldn’t simply walk away — leaving would mean a breach or fees. So six months in, suspicious and trying to learn, he decided to start directing the work himself. He pulled the data, identified his 10 worst-performing states, and told the agency: turn these off. They said okay.

Then they turned off the top 40 best-performing states and left the 10 worst ones running.

It took about a month to catch it. With Google Ads driving roughly 60% of all his leads, that was a brutal stretch of essentially advertising into the void — a huge chunk of potential revenue gone. The silver lining: the blunder was severe enough to count as a breach of contract, which finally let him wiggle free.

The pivot came at the Build Expo in Charlotte, North Carolina. Rogan had only gone to scope out whether a booth was worth it — not to find marketing help. But he sat in on a free session on SEO taught by Josh Ramsey, even volunteering his own site to be critiqued in front of the room.

The feedback stung at first. He’d thought his site was great. Instead he walked away with a lot to chew on — and, crucially, no pressure to buy. After being trapped under a high-pressure contract, that no-strings approach is exactly what earned his trust.

BareIron — if you’re in the excavation industry, there’s a standard product or a custom solution for you. Learn more at bareiron.com.
Find Rogan Frick on LinkedIn (reportedly the only “Rog Frick” in the world). Hosted by Josh Ramsey, fractional CMO.