How Structure Builds Retention with Roggen Frick

Introduction

In this episode of People First Builders, Fletcher Wimbush talks with Ragin Frick, founder of Bear Iron Works, about blending hands-on construction expertise, family business heritage, and practical product solutions that streamline the industry’s workflow.

From Construction Roots to Product Innovation

Ragin’s journey spans early trade skills, formal construction education, and a pivot from hands-on work to product development. Starting with Grizzly Rock Screens, he partnered with his father to scale a garage operation into a disciplined manufacturing business providing standardized, on-demand construction tools.

People, Systems, and Culture in Construction

The discussion highlights proactive subcontractor management, repeatable processes, and team culture that retains skilled welders. Bear Iron Works emphasizes safety, efficiency, and collaboration, illustrating how people-first leadership and the right systems drive successful construction operations.

Transcript

00:03
Welcome to People First Builders, celebrating leaders in construction who build success through their people. My name is Fletcher Wimbush, your host. I'm the CEO of Discover.AI, a performance hiring software, helping small and midsize AEC companies solve their hardest problem, people. We help

00:25
people first leaders install and execute repeatable talent acquisition systems that drive business results by hiring top performers, lowering turnover, and building worldclass company cultures. Stick around to the end and you can learn more about how to become a guest

00:41
on our podcast and share your story with the world. Welcome to the People First Builders podcast. My name is Fletcher Wimbush. I'm your host. Today I have Ragin Frick with me. He's the founder and co-owner of uh Bear Iron Works. Uh Ragin has a really unique uh background here. He he

01:05
grew up in in a family of in the construction industry and found that passion and went to school and went down a traditional construction management path. uh ultimately to uh found and co-found a uh unique product solution that services the construction industry

01:26
with his father. Uh it's a great story. We had his father on the podcast a few months ago uh and he had his take and today we get to hear yours. Um you know where a start though, Robin, is you don't hear a lot of young people get excited about the construction industry.

01:44
Um, I know I don't know if you want to share how old you are, but if you would that that'd be great. If not, yeah, no worries. But why did you Yeah. What got what got you interested, right? Yeah. You know, I'm 26 years old. Um, but I I guess what got had me interested

02:00
in the construction industry is just growing up in it. My dad had a construction business ever since I was born. Um, been on and off doing his own business and working for major contractors in the US. And I've just been around it. I've been in heavy equipment growing up. I've I learned how

02:16
to operate heavy equipment at a young age. I learned how to weld when I was in like uh my teenage years and I just kind of developed some skills, some good hands-on skills and like building things and I like making things with my hands and I was originally actually going to

02:30
go into um a career path of like film production and making movies. this is something that I wanted to do. But I sat down and looked at the career path and felt that construction was a more viable career and I already had a good skill set for it and I did like being outside

02:46
and being able to work with my hands. Yeah. So, you know, that I think not everybody has that experience, right? And obviously we need more people in the construction industry and and we need, you know, to see more young people get excited about it. I mean, have you seen

03:02
any of your peers, you know, maybe they didn't have that same opportunity being in the business, the family business, I guess, or being exposed to it that way. Have you seen others get excited about it or, you know, what kind of conversations did you have with your

03:15
friends while you were going to college? And, you know, uh, you know, just perspectives maybe that you've seen or maybe been able to influence others. Yeah, you know, I did have a handful of friends that, um, ended up finding their way into the construction industry. Um,

03:30
some of them started out with they they were going to go into engineering, be maybe a mechanical engineer, and then they kind of made their path towards construction. I don't know if it was exactly the same reasons as mine, if it was just like being outdoors and building things or if it was just the

03:47
influence of being around me and being around other people in the industry because a lot of my friends that I was associated with were also in construction management degree. Um, but I I have seen a lot of younger people, you know, at least in my degree and everything, be excited about it because

04:03
it's something new. And I've seen people that are in the program and they don't have any construction experience at all. And they were still excited to learn it and understand it. And the hardest thing I think that we have in the industry is we have a little bit of this like

04:19
culture of like if you weren't grown up in it or you don't have a lot of experience, it can be kind of um difficult to step onto a job site, you know, because there's a lot of pride that a lot of people have about building things and the knowledge that they have

04:32
in the trades. And I think it's could be a little intimidating for younger people to step onto a job site and have no experience at all and have to then jump into working side by side with these people who may have been doing it 10, 20, 30 years. Yeah. And uh it takes it's a little bit of a a

04:50
big jump into the industry compared to others. Yeah. Yeah. You could see that being pretty intimidating if you don't have any of that foundational exper experience or skills. So you you go to school for construction management. um you know what happens after that and you

05:07
know help us understand the journey that gets you to you know founding this company or creating this company bear bare Iron. Yeah. So I had I had those skills like I said before I could weld and some a passion of mine is racing motorcycles and I wanted to have a shop while I was

05:22
in college to put my motorcycle in so I could work on it. Um, and so my dad had this idea about making these grizzly rock screens that we could I could weld them weld them up, take them to a Richie Rose auction and sell them and have enough money to pay for my shop. Yeah.

05:37
So, I started that as a side business while I was in college and just started making them on the side. Now, I built a website and all of a sudden, I'm getting a lot of calls, getting a lot of interest. Wow. People are need rock screens. I found out there's actually a demand for them

05:50
and people are calling me directly and I don't actually have to just sell them to an auction. Well, pretty soon I'm in a bigger shop. I've hired on a couple employees and it's becoming too chaotic with going to school and running a business at the same time. And so I shut

06:03
it down, finish school, didn't have too big of an intention of starting it back up. Uh I was just going to go down the con traditional construction manager path and go work for a general contractor. I I managed some school remodels, um managed some additions. And my dad was

06:22
he was working for Kiwit at the time doing a large liquid natural gas project and he was working a lot of hours and he was kind of looking to make a change. So he was like, you know, I think that if you and I go in together, we could take the Grizzly Rockstream business and turn

06:38
it into a bigger business where we sell more products and we've brought on bedding boxes and concrete wash out tubs and things like that. And so we joined together, stopped working in construction fully, started serving the construction industry, and then we also do just a little bit of construction

06:55
consulting on the side, but our main business is building our products. Nice. Well, it was probably good that you were able to get out there and get some real hands-on experience and construction management, right? And better understanding of what your customers are going through and what

07:11
they need. And uh I mean you had some obviously probably in in your younger days, but having had you know reached that kind of pinnacle that's probably a pretty pretty good uh background then for you to to take the plunge. Yeah, you know it was I I learned a lot being on on bigger job sites with

07:30
multiple trades and managing teams of people um running schedules, managing budgets, doing submitts, doing all the typical things that you do on a on a bigger commercial job. Um, and just kind of learning, you know, how the trades interact with each other and what it's

07:46
like on a construction site. I learned a lot about uh employee culture, how people uh see their jobs and like how they they feel about their their employment and their employers, you know, because you're working with subcontractors who every company has a different culture. Um, and I learned a

08:02
lot about business in general, just working for them, which I applied a lot of principles that I learned there to my own business. So, working with a lot of different subs, I would imagine some were great and some weren't. You know, if you had to, you know, to to describe

08:16
the difference between one that was amazing and one that wasn't. What were some of the big takeaways or observations, you know, that you made there? You know, the the ones that were amazing, they were they really understood the trade that they were doing and they took the time to make a

08:30
work plan beforehand and understand what their scope of work was. call us as the general contractor to make sure that submitts are submitted, that they're approved, if any changes need to happen, and coming up with a plan of execution for when they need to be on site, what

08:46
they need to do, and how many people that they need to have to be able to achieve the task at hand. The subs that were really difficult to work with were the ones that weren't prepared, didn't plan ahead. They showed up on the day that you told them, if you could get them on the day that you told

09:03
them, you know, you you you can't get a hold of them for a scheduling meeting. And so you just p punch them in the schedule and hope that you can hope your best, right? And they and they get there and you know, maybe their crew has a foreman or maybe it's just three or four guys

09:18
that are just kind of like, I don't know, point us in the right direction. We'll figure it out. you know, and then even though I'm the general contractor and and it's all subbed out to them, you know, I end up having to hold their hand through their scope of work and kind of

09:31
manage their their crew for them. And so organization, I think, is really like the biggest thing and planning of what makes things go successfully for a a a scope of work or not. So the the best ones were really proactive in that and the and the worst ones were very

09:49
reactive in their planning and and and and that side. And what about their people? Any observations then how that affected their people or the difference between the the the ones that were more proactive and the more more reactive, you know, subs that you worked with?

10:05
Yeah. So the proactive subs people generally were you they were good to work with. They were professionals. They seem to enjoy their jobs more than the people who are reactive because the people that were reactive, they were dealing with nothing but problems all

10:18
the time. And they had to have me on the phone on their ass constantly. Yeah. Calling them, calling them, calling them. Hey, I need you to get this done. I need you to get this in the middle. I need you to get out to the job site. I need you guys to do this. You guys aren't here. Your your quality is

10:32
fallen. You guys missed a spot. You guys didn't do X, Y, and Z. And it's just I don't think it's very enjoyable. Nobody wants to have a 100 phone calls in a day from a general contractor going, "Hey, you're not doing things right." Where the guys that were proactive, you know, we have a

10:48
conversation beforehand about planning, get everything set in stone. They show up to the job site, make sure that they have the things that they need from us. It goes smooth. They got a process figured out. I'm sure they do that job to job to job. Everything's a lot

11:02
smoother in their lives. They don't have to listen to the GC hammering them all the time. Yeah. because because the trades themselves ultimately get into the middle of this kind of you know conflict and or you know they they do work and like any trade right I don't know you

11:16
dug that trench or you you know wired that you know room or that building and you're being called back to fix or change or do redo your work all the time right you know it's sort of you might take that personally and feels like oh man you know even though it might not

11:30
totally be their fault right their leadership had failed them in a way set them up for for failure failure in whether or not they were good at their job or not, right? Yes. It makes a lot of makes a lot of sense, you know, uh structure, planning, uh thought thoughtfulness, you know, really

11:49
trickles down to your people and probably makes their lives more enjoyable and makes makes them uh more successful at uh uh executing their work, right? Yes. and and you know the subcontractors that understood the importance of like a scheduling meeting where everybody comes

12:07
together, all the subs on site come together all at once to go through the schedule and try to make sure that you know this is getting done in time and that we're building a schedule that's realistic. The subs that showed up there and actually understood the importance

12:20
of that were they had a lot more success on the projects than the people that felt like it was useless. Yeah. Cuz there are still a lot of people in the industry that don't quite understand the importance of a schedule and why that matters on a construction project.

12:35
And if you're not like following your schedule consistently and making sure that you're hitting your deadlines, things are going to start slipping and things are going to start falling apart. Things are going to the quality is going to fall apart. The safety is going to

12:48
fall apart. Everything's just going to start becoming this chaotic mess if you're not actively managing that. Yeah. And it just gets worse and worse, right? you sort of get behind the eightball and it's a it's a slippery slope, right? You know, yes, this disorganized one, you start having a

13:02
bunch of problems. Well, then then the next one's going to even be more disorganized and more chaotic and then eventually might implode and that's not a pleasant situation for anybody involved in, you know, you're you going on to bare iron. I I one of the things that kind of just

13:18
struck me, you know, the preparation piece sort of reminded me of Gallup. So Gallup wrote uh a book uh called first break all the rules. They have these kind of 12 principles in terms of leadership and and uh good communication, good systems, processes that allow people to be successful. Sort

13:36
of what I think you've been, you know, alluding to and and demonstrating from your experience as being really important. Uh but I think one of the other things is having the right tools to do the job. And I think that's yeah what you guys do, right? Okay. So, you

13:51
identified there are certain tools that, you know, we need on a construction site that didn't exist or were not readily available and you created it, right? Yeah. You know, all the products that we offer aren't some new invention. You know, they've been around. People have

14:06
made them and probably easily homemade type products like a rock screen is a really good example. There's all kinds of people that have made them from 2x4s and chain link fence to our actual manufactured product that we sell everywhere. Um, but that was a big thing

14:21
that we identified in the industry. And I I give all that credit to my dad of just because he has so many years of construction experience to be able to understand what these products are needed out there in the field. When he was running major projects, he needs a

14:34
rock screen. Well, he can't find one anywhere. And maybe you can find a used one in an auction. It's kind of falling apart or something like that. Bedding boxes, you know, the rental companies don't have the bedding boxes and the stuff's just not available. So, we

14:46
started making these products and trying to at first just making sure that we can produce them fast enough, get them out the door fast enough to make sure that people are on on schedule because we we understand how important a schedule is. We understand how important that is for

15:00
your project. But then, now that we've scaled, now we can have things in stock. We've identified the popular choices, standardize a product line. Now we have things in inventory that if you need a product, we can just put on a truck and ship it out to your site and get it there quick.

15:16
Yeah. Might be there tomorrow or in two days or, you know, however far away you are. But yeah, depending on the middle how far in the middle of nowhere you might be or not, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, drones will be delivering them soon, but you know, um those are probably a little heavy, I

15:36
would imagine, but um Yep. Not a couple thousand pounds. Well, you know, they can drop bombs, you know, they could probably get that over there, right? To to the middle of Wyoming or something, you know. Uh, uh, though, I mean, it makes a lot of sense. So, when did you reboot the business? And, you

15:56
know, how has that journey gone? Uh, where do you guys start? Back in a garage or in a in a small shop or and how have you grown and scaled since? Yeah. So, the second time around that we did the business, we started in my um my grandparents little garage that they

16:12
had, uh we just we brought our first welder out there and had and showed him the products that we had developed already and showed him how to make them and he started making them. So, then we got another shop. That was the kind of period where it was like, we're taking in the orders and

16:27
making sure that we can get them out the door. We don't really have anything in inventory. Yeah. Everything was kind of custom at that point. We got into a new shop, really flushed out our operations team, built out more processes that we can do in our shop. Um, and then developed a system

16:42
because, you know, I see manufacturing, it's it's like construction. You're building things, but it's repeatable. Yeah. Construction, it's a unique thing that you're building each time. Manufacturing, it's again, but the principles of managing it are still the same. You need to know what you're

16:59
building. You need to understand your material costs and your labor hours. You need to have a schedule to be able to make sure that you're doing things smoothly and getting it out. And at the same time, you also have to prioritize safety. That's still number one priority

17:13
in our in our shop. And housekeeping is number one. We have a really clean shop. That way, nobody gets hurt. And then we have a nice safe workplace that people actually want to show up to. Yeah. Yeah. That's a a huge piece of it. So, how many people do you have now? And

17:27
how have you scaled the team? Um, you know, finding welders is not an easy thing to do in this day and age. Yeah, we've got a a company size is 10 employees, including the owners. And uh, you know, I don't know if it's kind of like luck in our area. Uh, we're out of

17:44
Grand Junction, Colorado, and it's a boom bust oil field uh, location. And so there are some a lot of decent welders in the area. Um, and I don't know if we managed to just find a handful of them because they're they're it was kind of during a little bit of a bust period for

18:02
the oil oil field in there and it's not as booming as much on the western slope of Colorado. But we did manage to get a handful of welders that are good and we retain them by building that good company culture, building that team dynamic and making sure that, you know,

18:16
they're working there with each other and for each other and not just showing up to get a paycheck. uh we incentivize safety. We incentivize innovation and thinking and then we do something uh a little unique is we do a 4 day 10-hour a day work week. Um that way they can have a three-day

18:35
weekend every weekend, but if they have to work overtime, they still get a full weekend as well. Um and that's of the things that we like that I would imagine, right? They like to be able they love it. Yeah. even if we're not the highest paying shop in town. Um, you

18:50
know, it's that type of benefit and just having some health care benefits and just having some of the basic things there that really keep them retained, I believe. Yeah. Yeah. Good. And so, you've been successful keeping your team together. I mean, obviously they could go to the oil

19:06
fields or, you know, whether that be locally or somewhere else out of town, I imagine, and they'd have a much more lucrative package, I would imagine. you know, what's kind of been the feedback from from these guys? You know, uh they've come from that or they're aware

19:20
of it. They know it's available. They're in high demand, right? Why stay, you know, you know, uh the 4-day work week is great. You know, uh you mentioned a couple other things. How have some of these other benefits in your opinion or feedback that they've given you? How how

19:34
of the some of those other components played into their decision- making on, you know, staying where staying with you versus chasing the money? Yeah, I think that the one thing that they really like is uh is they like the consistency of the schedule. It's predictable, right? And you know, it's

19:51
like I said, if any overtime needs to happen, it's usually only on a Friday and it's, you know, it's not a full day, unless it absolutely has to be. Um, so predictability is something that they like. They like that they get a consistent paycheck. They like that they

20:04
they like the people that they work with. We've built a team of people that are like each other, that can, you know, conversate with each other, socialize, and um be friendly with each other. And then they also like that we are involved with them. Um that we're asking them

20:20
questions all the time. Making sure that they have the things that they need to be successful, making sure that we're recognizing when they put in extra effort and are doing things good. And just being involved in that sense creates a good positive work environment. um where people don't

20:37
necessarily want to go to the guy next door cuz yeah, maybe he pays $5 an hour or more, but you know, it's the I've heard the culture there isn't good or I have to go work outside in poor conditions and or the safety isn't as good or whatever it might be. You know,

20:53
it's just trying to check those boxes to make an enjoyable workplace. Yeah, it sounds like you're checking a lot of those boxes that, you know, Gallup talks about here and you found a good way to do that and encourage folks to uh or to to to demonstrate that you care and and

21:08
that's a big piece of it. and having friends at work, having great systems, having um you know, predictable uh expectations uh and people, you know, acknowledging your work and and being able to contribute in innovative ways are all, you know, pieces of that puzzle that keep people highly engaged

21:27
in whatever they do in life, I think, right? You know, we we all want those whether it's in our personal or our professional life, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, you know, the predictability is probably one of the biggest things I think cuz, you know, back to the the poor subcontractor

21:42
who shows up on site not with no plan and everything's just chaotic. Well, that's just stress that the employees have to bear. They have to bear that stress on their shoulders and they're thinking about that all the time and they're going to take that stress on with them and they're not going to like

21:57
where they're working. So, if you can plan ahead and prevent chaos, Yeah. then it's going to be a lot less of a stressful work environment. Yeah. Very few people like uh living or working in a chaotic environment, right? Or Yeah. Yeah. Most of us like some type of plan to our work.

22:16
Okay. Some sort of plan, right? Yeah. I think we all do. I mean, little chaos time to time, you know, if it's self-induced and on purpose maybe, I guess, but no, we try to try to avoid it, right? Awesome. Well, look, uh, I really appreciate you joining us today.

22:32
How can people find you guys? And yeah, what's the best way to get in touch? Yeah, uh you can find us on our website beareiron.com. Uh and then you can also reach out on LinkedIn if you want to get in touch with me personally. Great. Well, I'll have all of that in

22:48
the show notes and when we share clips and and on all the different platforms here, people can uh click and check through there and get in contact with you guys. Um, and I'm sure you can find them a custom solution or you have uh, you know, nice already pre pre-engineered uh, rock screens and

23:05
other tools that can help optimize their uh, work sites and keep keep moving fast. Yes, we can. Our goal now is to help excavation contractors however we can, whether that's making them a custom product or getting them something that they need fast. Nice. Awesome. [Music]

23:26
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23:44
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23:57
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24:14
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