Jack Jostes:
What if you were in the middle of a huge landscape installation or construction project when a hurricane or other natural disaster came and devastated all the work you'd done? You say that you got half of the project installed so far, but your client says otherwise. Now, imagine having professional drone videos and photography taken just before the storm, proving exactly what you had completed. How would that change things? In today's podcast, I interview Andrew Kobza from Professional Drone Solutions. He works with landscape and construction companies on a wide variety of services, not only drone photos and videos, but mapping and so much more. Check out today's conversation to see how you can use drones for not only sales and marketing imagery, but also project management, documentation, and even employee training and retention.
Hey, everyone. Jack Jostes here and welcome to The Landscaper's Guide Podcast. This show is all about sales, marketing, and leadership ideas for the snow and landscape industry. This show is sponsored by Ramblin Jackson, my digital marketing agency, so if you'd like to learn more about how you can get your sales and marketing totally dialed in with a new website, with your branding, with video, with graphic design, getting all of that done expertly for you by a company that specializes in the snow and landscape industry, check us out at ramblinjackson.com. We have client interviews, portfolio samples, and you can schedule an appointment with us right there, so check it out at ramblinjackson.com and let's get into this conversation with Andrew Kobza. All right, everyone, welcome back to The Landscaper's Guide. Today, I'm excited to interview Andrew Kobza, who's the CEO and owner of Professional Drone Solutions. Andrew and I met at NALP's ELEVATE in, I guess that was September 2022. I really enjoyed meeting you. You had a very interesting business card that stood out. Did you make those? Were those 3D printed? Or what was the-
Andrew Kobza:
They're actually, yeah, they're cut on a laser.
Jack Jostes:
There you go.
Andrew Kobza:
They were a mistake, actually. We were trying to make paper ones and the paper ones didn't work out. We had wasteboard under it and I said, "Screw it, let's cut them," and people loved them, so we just went with it.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, I love that. It was just interesting. I'm excited to have you on the show to talk about drones and drone photography and drone video. I see so much opportunity for this in the landscape industry, not only from a sales and marketing perspective, but later, we're going to talk about not the HR, but the training benefit potentially of using this, and then also documentation. Before we dive too far into that, what is Professional Drone Solutions?
What is Professional Drone Solutions?
Andrew Kobza:
Yeah, so Professional Drone Solutions started about five years ago. Actually, I think we're on year six now, providing documentation services to contractors. Primarily, originally it was general contracting, heavy industry, things like power and lighting and tower inspections. Then Irma hit and we were doing a roof inspection on the East Coast of Florida on a 94-degree summer day. That means the roof was around 120, 130 degrees, and it came off the roof and said, "Hot." It wasn't the chimney. I just thought, "This is ridiculous. This guy's got 50 mouths that rely on him not falling off a roof and here he is on a hot summer day just trying to verify that it wasn't something."
From there, we got into the heavy inspection and Irma hit and we realized, "Wow, drones can be very valuable." But part of the problem is we get all this data and once I hand it to my customer, if they don't know how to process the data, it can slow them down. We did 200 roofing inspections, for example, in the first three weeks, and it took the insurance company that received them six months just to process them. This is where our concept that we spun off into Landscape Viewer came from was what if we could document entire communities and give people tools to understand where they are, to highlight issues they see, and then to get a report that gives them an action item to actually send to the field. What if we could make it so simple that the guy in the field that's supposed to be walking the site could actually do it? We started building to that end, and we finally, after, well, two years of development, four years of that being a concept bouncing around in my head, launched this year at Lawn & Landscaping's Technology Conference in Arizona.
Jack Jostes:
Well, awesome. Yeah, congrats on the launch, and you've had tremendous growth since then. Tell me a little bit about and maybe you could share your screen. Before we pressed record, we were looking at some before-and-afters of a hurricane. Just talk to me about how are landscape contractors using these kind of before and afters. How does it help their customer, the community?
How Are Landscape Contractors Using Before And After Drone Videos?
Andrew Kobza:
Yeah, so on the screen we've got a client of mine's data and on your left you'll see what it looked like before the hurricane and on the right you can see what it looked like after the hurricane. We can get into the nitty-gritty and see all the detail we would want, hydropolygon there. There's a lot of debris. This community was actually in the middle of a build-out with this contractor. Prior to our service, the unexpected loss event of a hurricane would create a lot of logistical issues. There'd be site walks, you'd have to document it with photography, often disparate photography, meaning the one at the north side of this 400-acre community, the photos taken there don't really have any way to be correlated to the north side of the community, so all the stuff from the south side of the community is in a folder.
For the hurricane, we're able to see where we're going to have grass dying because there's debris that's loitering. We're able to see what was there prior to the hurricane, so when it's a build-out situation, there's very little dispute over, "Well, what did you guys actually complete? We think you completed less than you did, but you're telling us you completed more, and now, we have to pay for it twice." Those conversations all but disappear. This client was a little bit wary themselves of what the benefits are and we saw a lot of resistance initially. Before our hard launch, we had soft launched about six months prior and had been getting a lot of feedback about, "Well, we use so much, we're so busy," and after the hurricane, those all but dried up because it's so obvious that the documentation, the ability to go, "Well, for $2 a quarter," which is where most of our clients start, is quarterly site updates, now, we have something that covers our tail and we have something that we can use in sales and we have something that we can use for training people.
Jack Jostes:
Andrew, that's incredible. I can see a lot of benefit to this for landscape contractors. I'm curious, how do you find the people to do this, right? The drones don't quite fly themselves entirely yet, right, but they may someday. How many people work with you and then where in the United States are people able to work with you at this time?
Andrew Kobza:
We're currently a team of three pilots here. That doesn't sound like a lot, but like I said, after Irma, I did 200 roofs in three weeks by myself, working four days a week, so we can cover a lot of ground. Our current timeline is we're out like four days and we subcontract. We have a network of subcontractors that we use. Part of the beauty of our software is we built the entire process to be scalable nationwide, so we have a nationwide footprint. We have a whole system of how we share flight plans, share regulatory information, and help our subcontractors in the sense of a lot of the smaller drone businesses don't quite understand the insurance requirements and whatnot.
We have an open policy that we can actually add other companies to, which allow us to provide a homogenous product, a homogenous experience with customers, whether they're in Florida or California. But yeah, our footprint is nationwide and we really love learning new areas and being able to tackle the fun challenges of different airspaces. I'm a private pilot, I fly full-size aircraft so that regulatory environment and different areas of the country always pique my interest because of how much I travel and have a good time doing it.
Drones in The Business Community
Jack Jostes:
Well, Andrew, this sounds really interesting. You're aware of the site droners.io, and I happen to know the founder of that company, Dave Brown, but this was like 14, 15 years ago and I remember meeting him, and I didn't quite get it at that time, and none of our friends really understood, but he had this vision for how drone photography was going to be used in business and all these different things, and now, it's everywhere. How are you seeing that with the business community now? Are people embracing it and totally on board and ready to pay for it, or are they resisting it?
Andrew Kobza:
Yeah, yeah, it's a really interesting world to live in because you get told by some people that your price point's way too high, and sometimes those people, you can't even give it away for free, but I would say that the main challenge that I see in the industry today is that drones are seen as an engineering product right now, and I think a lot of people classify them as that, "Oh, that's what the smart businesses use." What it's done is it's left a lot of the trades out of the benefits. Instead of having to walk 400 acres once a month, what if instead they could sit down at their computer and actually see the whole site and then be able to go, "Hey, I've got some problem areas, let me generate a report, and get that out to the field"? That's something that's just easy to do instead of an interface that might be a little more cluttered. It might be a little more feature-rich as well, but it's definitely a little more cluttered.
AI plays into that as well. I have a lot of respect for AI, especially after going to the Lawn & Landscaping Technology Conference and getting to talk to some of the AI technology providers. I see a lot of promise in it, but the middle ground between when the field workers will be using AI and what we can improve today just by simple upgrades, there's a lot of opportunity there.
I always use this, the founder of Ring doorbells always said that DoorBot was his first product, and DoorBot didn't really work because they didn't put a button on it. They could sense when someone was at the door and send a notification to your phone and ring your doorbell for you and it drove people nuts because people would walk up to the door and turn around and walk away because there was no doorbell. The founder had stated at one point that one of his main decisions that he loved was putting a button on it because he didn't want to change the status quo too much. People are somewhat resistant to change, and when you get into the labor field, I think the more consistent you can be and the smaller the changes you can make, the better off and the easier it assimilates and scales.
Jack Jostes:
Great. Yeah, people do resist the change. That's an interesting comment around Ring and not changing it too much, but now, you see Ring everywhere, right?
Andrew Kobza:
Yeah, and they're doing a lot of the same things that they were, which is AI, facial recognition on cameras, but their doorbells still have a button because people expect that, and they need it for their own psyche. We can get into a whole thing about how Facebook actually slows some of their pages down because they found that when they loaded too fast, people got scared that databases could load so quickly, so for a while the internet was slowing itself down to meet people's expectation of, "I just queried a database and now it's so quick in pulling its information." That was an anecdote I heard like two or three years ago and it's interesting to build who you're building towards is as important as what you're building. If you have the coolest product but you didn't build it with a client in mind, you'll struggle to find that client, so that's something that we spend a lot of time thinking about, "Well, who's the end user? How do we make it more efficient and easier for them?" We're constantly moving towards that process.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, that's one of the concepts on this podcast and in my book is called having a "Hell Yes!" customer. I really believe that figuring out your "Hell Yes!" customer, it takes iterations. You have to serve people and make sales and along the way you find out, "Wow, this particular client really appreciates what I do and they're willing to pay more and they refer me and I enjoyed working with them and this type of market doesn't."
I found that in my own business and in general I found the green industry to be a really good industry. It tends to be always looking for ways to use technology and to collaborate and get better. I'm seeing that specifically in the last three to four years. I've been working in the green industry for almost 10 years and it was not as quick to change before, but I think a lot of people are looking at partly because of years of labor shortage and challenges, they're trying to think of, "Well, how could I do that?" We're starting to see robotics come out and AI and different softwares and different things, so I think what you're doing is really cool.
Before we wrap up, I wanted to hear a little bit more about the training benefit to employees. Landscape companies are pressed for people, the people they have are overworked. How can a drone video or drone photography help make training and retention easier for a landscaper?
How Can A Drone Video Or Drone Photography Help Make Training And Retention Easier For A Landscaper?
Andrew Kobza:
Yeah, so that's a great question. There's a couple of different sides that we've seen our software help with. The first one is we can allow fewer people to do more with less stress. All three points of that equation are very important. If you take the same amount of people and you have them do more but you don't reduce their stress load, you start creating an unsettled environment where people might be inclined to leave. One of the things that we find our clients are able to do is save about 25% of time that they would spend on site walks at a minimum. You basically completely eliminate that because it can all be done from an air-conditioned office sitting somewhere that's comfortable and have the same level of acuity, if not better because what we find is often on these large HOA projects, especially, it's very difficult for a project manager to actually go check work.
Similarly, on the documentation side of checking work, when you're going to onboard new employees, whether they're field workers, or a project manager, or a superintendent, being able to say, "Here's an excellent example of when we had a problem, right? Here's what it looked like on this day and this time. Here's the notes that the guy wrote on it and then here's three months later and here's what we changed and here's what it looks like and this is what it should look like and then here it is a year later," the ability to actually hands-on show people what is going on on your sites and what you expect.
We also find that in communicating those expectations and then holding people accountable, I know from my field guys that I managed when I was in construction, they really do enjoy knowing very clearly what's expected of them, and to be able to set that expectation and follow up and be consistent and not let the natural kind of bleed of responsibility where I start with the company, I'm excited, I feel like they're watching over me because I'm a new employee, and then a year in, I'm punching in 15 minutes early on my way to my job. Things slide and this is a great way to be able to see and know that things are getting done. We find that when that gets paired with the ability to turn around to your client and go, "Hey, here's your quarterly snapshot of your community," it's a benefit to everybody involved. It helps your sales team, it helps your training, and it helps your documentation, and cover your tail insurance policy, yeah.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, I like that, your quarterly snapshot. I think the thing about having clear expectations is so important in business, especially for employee retention because if there’s a gap in what the client thinks they bought and then what they're actually supposed to do and then they're getting complaints and they didn't know they were supposed to be doing something right, that's not a very positive work experience.
I also could see this really helping identify upsells, so coming to a community and saying, "Hey, as you may see, the sod needs to be replaced here because people are cutting through here," or, "Have you ever thought about replacing this part with landscaping?", different things like that.
Andrew Kobza:
Yeah, one of our communities did exactly that where they mulch in this community every year, and of course, they never removed the mulch because HOAs never want to pay for that. But what ended up happening was mulch bed creep and it ended up that we were spending so much on this community replacing the mulch that the proposal was levied that, "Why don't we re sod these mulch beds so that you spend it?" Now, you're able to address a client's need, "Hey, we want mulch every year," reduce their budget, and sell a job. Everyone's winning and the communication and expectation the whole way.
When you go, "Hey, I think you should re sod your mulch bed," and the client initially goes, "Well, I think they're trying to upsell me," when you can show them the mulch bed creep, now, they trust you, and you're a problem-solver, not an upseller, so being able to go, "Hey, we understand your property, we have a whole snapshot of it. This is what it looks like today. Here's how we think you could improve." With the client that ordered this one prior to the hurricane, their initial thing was we just want to get on board with them because we find so many clients will say, "Well, we want to be a perfect community." Well, your current community looks really far from perfect and your current budget looks far from perfect, so let's talk about what can realistically be done because we don't want to just be another one-year contractor for you because that's not going to solve your problem, right?
Jack Jostes:
Mm-hmm. I really like this. A key part of selling, especially in landscaping, is visual, and especially with these HOA communities, these huge communities where there might be a property management company who's now selecting the contractor, and they could even be out of state, they may never see it, right? When I'm getting proposals from people that look exactly the same, and then there's this one that has these photos, and it demonstrates things that I didn't even know were an issue, that's how you're then able to charge more, and win the sale, and earn that trust. I really like what we've talked about here. I'd love to continue chatting and I hope to again. We've got to wrap up, though, Andrew, so tell us a little bit: Where can we connect with you and learn more?
Andrew Kobza:
Absolutely. Our website, prodrones.com is a perfect place to find more information about us. Personally, I'm at andrew@prodrones.com. It's nice and short. That's prodrones.com. That's probably the best way to get a hold of me. I often only have five emails in my inbox at the end of the day. That's how I roll. I like to keep a clean inbox. I like getting back to people. I'm a big proponent of that emotional touchpoint where people aren't waiting on me for a response. That's where you can find me. You can find information about our company, as I said, on our website. It was great talking with you as well and we look forward to many more years in the landscaping industry.
Jack Jostes:
Excellent. Well, Andrew Kobza from Professional Drone Solutions, prodrones.com. Thank you so much for coming on The Landscaper's Guide.
Thanks so much for checking out today's episode of The Landscaper's Guide. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend. Send them a link to landscapersguide.com/podcast. Just take a quick screenshot of whatever app you're listening to this on and send it to a friend in the landscape industry. My name's Jack Jostes and I look forward to talking to you next week on The Landscaper's Guide.
I look forward to keeping in touch with you.
Andrew Kobza:
Absolutely.
Jack Jostes:
Keeping in touch with you and speaking clearly on the podcast. All right. Thank you, Andrew.
Andrew Kobza:
Excellent.