The Challenge
Felski builds steel: farm shops, car washes, truck stops. The crew was skilled, the work was good. The problem sat upstream of the build.
Almost no online presence, and a pipeline that ran on word of mouth. When referrals slowed, the schedule slowed with them, and a slow month in a high-ticket trade is revenue you do not get back. It is a hard way to run a business: do excellent work, then hope the phone rings.
Key problems:
- No findable brand
- A pipeline built on referrals, not a system
- No way to reach farmers and builders before they were ready to buy
The Solution
We built Felski a marketing engine: a website that converts, two funnels that cover the whole demand curve, and the automation that turns a new lead into a booked conversation before it goes cold. The same engine we built for FrameX, applied to a second construction trade.
A website built to convert
Steel buyers do not all want the same thing. A farmer pricing a shop, an operator planning a car wash, and a developer building a truck stop each land on a page about their build, not a generic homepage. That structure also gave search engines something specific to rank, which pays off later.
The lead magnet
Most contractors put everything into the quote form. But most buyers are not ready to quote on the first visit. So we built the Legacy Steel Building Guide (go.felski.ca/farmguide): a free download that shows Prairie farmers how to avoid the common steel-building scams, the real fifty-year cost difference between steel and wood, and the questions to ask before they ever request a quote. It helps the buyer and it positions Felski as the expert. It pulled 104 farmer opt-ins, and it is the reason the lead base skews toward exactly the buyers Felski wants.
The direct quote funnel
For buyers who are ready now, a clean request-a-quote path. The lead magnet catches the not-yet-ready; the quote funnel catches the ready. Together they cover the whole demand curve, instead of only the narrow slice of buyers who happen to be ready the day they find you.
A CRM built for speed-to-lead
Every lead lands in a CRM we run for Felski under our own brand. They got a dedicated number they can text leads from, automated follow-up sequences that fire the moment a lead comes in, and phone handled through the CRM. In construction, the contractor who replies first usually wins the bid. This is what turns a lead into booked work instead of a list that goes cold: 89 leads replied to the first automated follow-up, across 248 conversations, many of them by text.
On paid social, the demand came in efficiently: Felski generated leads at roughly $35 each over the year, in a trade where a single build runs well into six figures.
The right leads, not just leads
Volume is easy. This engine was built to filter for fit. Of the 255 leads, 130 identified as farmers, most wanting full design and installation rather than a bare kit, and many planning to start within six months. The median requested building runs about 6,300 square feet, with requests from 5,000 to over 10,000. Real projects, across Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario.
The compounding foundation
Marketing fills the pipeline today. The website keeps paying off quietly. Felski now ranks first for their own name, and the search foundation is compounding: monthly impressions are up roughly sixteen times year over year, and the site is starting to surface for the category searches that matter (agricultural steel buildings, car wash construction, truck-stop builds) across the Prairies. Most of those terms are still climbing. The foundation is built, and it keeps working without a media budget behind it.
The Result
In a year, the engine generated 255 leads and a predictable, branded pipeline. Felski moved from “do the work, then hope the phone rings” to a system that produces the right buyers on repeat, with a brand-visibility flywheel turning underneath it.
Key wins:
- A demand engine that runs daily, not a one-time campaign
- The right leads: farmers, design-and-install, large builds, ready soon
- A branded CRM with instant, textable follow-up
- A search foundation that compounds on its own
The math is the point: about $35 to put a qualified buyer in front of a six-figure steel build. That is what a demand engine does.
