How to Make 7 Figures With a Drone⏐Ep. #229

It's a perfect side hustle business. You don't have to quit your job and go full time. You can start doing a couple of these a month, get the experience and make some real money.

He is doing seven figures a year inspecting roofs.

What?

That's right. These are drones you can buy on Amazon every time there's a storm. He makes 15 to $30,000 in inspections.

Oh, my gosh.

Just knocks them out. He takes 50 to 60 photos. He spends 15 minutes per inspection.

It's about a $23 billion market. It's projected over the next 10 years to grow at an annual growth rate of 15% a year. It's going to 10x over the next.

Nick, do you know my uncle Clark?

Absolutely. Is he the guy that lives in Indiana, Michigan?

Nope. Utah. And as my grandma would say, he's a character. Clark's a character. Love you, Clark. So Clark is a hustler and he lost his job as an engineer a few decades ago. He had 40 grand to his name. He turned it into this rental house empire. But as he was building these rental houses literally by hand, he built these homes by himself.

Really?

He had to like. Yeah, he had to like, pay the bills. And he did so in a very creative way. He is like a huge airplane enthusiast, model airplane enthusiast. And so he had this hobby room and he would build these model airplanes, attach cameras to them. And this was like in the 90s, I think, 80s or 90s. And he would fly them over farmland in northern Utah, Cache Valley, and take beautiful pictures of like, properties, ranches, acreage, right? And then he'd go get them, he developed them himself. He had a dark room, and he would get like these like 2 by 3 foot, gorgeous, high resolution images of this farmland. And he'd go to the farmer's front door, knock on it and say, hey, look at this picture I took of your property. Wow, that's gorgeous. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's $250. It cost him like almost nothing to get it developed because he was doing it himself and he had like a 60, 70% take rate. And why wouldn't he?

Really?

Where else? Yeah, where else are they going to get that image? And they have pride of ownership. Like, that's my farm that. I would love to hang that in my living room, you know? Isn't that smart?

Dude, that's freaking genius. He's a hustler. Is that what that's a hustler? Hustle comes from.

That's. It came from my uncles.

It's funny, you Brought that up because you and I have been deep diving going back and forth. I think this might be the coolest business I've seen in the last year. And it's not AI. It takes advantage of all the things that we always talk about. What are the things that we love when we're looking at businesses, especially for first time entrepreneurs. Macro trends like this. A market that's just going up and to the right. We want it to look like the Bitcoin Chart Circus, 2019 into 2020. We want it up and to the right. Beyond that, what else do we want? We want stuff that's not super operationally complex.

We want things that easy to start, affordable to start. We want stuff that's freaking cool. It's just cool. It just has a cool fact hole in one challenge. That's cool, right? Sandbox RC cars in a coffee shop. That's freaking rad. Right? That's what we want.

Okay, so I think I stumbled upon. I think we have stumbled upon the coolest unsexy market that nobody is talking about. Do you know what it is?

It's kind of sexy though. I. I just want to say it's a little sexy. It's like an 8 out of 10 sexy.

I'm talking about drone roof inspections. I'm going to be honest, I've said that to myself three times in a row and I'm like, drone, drone roof inspections.

I dri. I saw a dri. I'm a DRI dri.

Oh, you're a DRI guy. I'm a DIY DRI guy. You're a dry guy. That's cool. You're a dry guy. I'm a dry guy.

Yeah.

Dude, check this out. Like these stats blew my mind right now. There is a market. There's a currently a market for basically inspection and monitoring. It's about a $23 billion market. Within that market, though, only $350 million are currently of drone rooftop inspections. However, it's projected over the next 10 years to grow at an annual growth rate of 15% a year, 14 and a half percent a year, to 3 and a half billion dollars by 2035. So it's going to 10x. It's going to 10x over the next 10 years. Going in.

Grant Cardone would love this, dude.

Take that number, bro. And freaking 10x that and then 10x it again. So within 10 years is going to 10x. You know what I hear when I hear that? Cha ching, cha ching. I hear the cash registers.

Well, let's just give some context about CAGR, compound annual growth rate on entire industries. Like 3% is solid. 5% good for 15% is nuts.

Here's why it matters. If you're just looking at the general growth rate of the United States. Inflation, right? Oh, with inflation, what's GDP growth typically like? A good GDP growth is like 3%. We're stoked for 3%. So if the rest of the country is going at 3% and the business that you choose is growing at 15%, I'm the mathematician, but it's growing at five times the rate of the rest of the country. Like, that's why it matters. Everybody else is kind of just chugging along. They're kind of raising their prices a little bit, but yours is like a freaking rocket ship. There's so much demand behind it. It's 5x what the rest of the country is growing at. It's nuts.

Sorry, I'm smiling because I just realized how much I love excitedly talking about industries and not selling a course at the end of it. Because. Because I bet you half of the people listening right now are like, oh, let me guess. This is the best industry ever. And for 7,000 measly dollars, you'll show me how to launch in this industry, right? No, bro, there's none of that.

No, no, no, no. For five easy payments of 79.99, we.

Only have room for four more people. Guys, come on.

No, thankfully we're not selling a course. Although we should sell a course because this is like, this is a courseable business.

It's very courseable.

It's a very.

Courseable.

Anyways, that's the high level overview of what this market in this industry is. But the question is, what even is drone roof inspections?

Are you laying me up right here?

Okay, I'm like softball. I'm waiting for Barry Bonds. If we can just hit it out of the park.

Okay. All right. Drone roof inspections. 40% of the market is for insurance companies, right? Can I give you a stat about insurance companies? It's going to blow your mind.

Absolutely.

There is a crisis in the insurance industry. We are projecting. The industry is projecting 400,000 vacancies in the insurance industry. Like for adjusters, claims adjusters, inspectors. By the year 2038, we will have 400,000 unfilled positions. Right? Because 50%. Nick, when is the last time you Talked to a 27 year old? That's like, I'm just fired up to join the insurance industry. I've always wanted to be an adjuster or an actuary, right?

I Don't want to be an estimator. I want to be an adjuster.

Estimator. Hardly know her actually.

That's not what they do.

So 50% of the insurance workforce is retiring in the next 15 years.

Holy crap, man. That's a ton of.

Less than 25% of the current workforce is under age 35. They're boomers.

Oh my gosh. Say that stat one more time. What percentage is under the age 35?

Less than 25% of the current workforce is under 35.

Oh my. That's why it's so irritating to talk to an adjuster.

Because they're all boomers. Worse. Yeah, yeah. I mean, okay, we have some, we have some boomer listeners thing we love. They get it.

They get it.

Okay, now so that creates an opportunity, that creates a tidal wave for more efficient ways of climbing on roofs.

Dude. And then you couple that with the fact that we have an aging infrastructure.

Yeah.

Our homes are getting older. And not just our homes, the commercial properties, the schools. The infrastructure that we have is getting older and older. We have less and less of the people who can actually do the inspections. Is that an opportunity for technology to step in?

Oh, I don't know. I say that'll do it. I mean, just picture a 63 year old insurance adjuster rolling up to a house with a huge ladder, steep pitch on the roof and he's like, what, what am I doing? I'm not doing that.

I'm not doing it.

Like, are you kidding? Like, most dangerous thing you can do is inspect a roof.

Not only that, think about the insurance companies or the property management companies or the commercial companies who are like, I'm going to send this adjuster out. I'm going to have them climb up on a roof. That's a workers comp claim waiting to happen. That's a lawsuit waiting to happen. It's not, it's not worth the risk.

Sounds like you're teaming me up for a stat about workers comp in the roofing industry. Am I? You ready?

Is there a stat about that?

25% of every payroll dollar in a roofing business goes to workers comp insurance. 25.

Shut your mouth. Shut your mouth.

My life. Swear on my life.

That's insane. 25 cents of every dollar payroll dollar.

Spent on payroll goes to workers comp insurance in roofing.

Like for context, if you don't know that, typically anywhere between like 17 and 21 goes to non compensation.

Yeah. Like right. Payroll taxes.

Payroll taxes.

Yeah.

Social Security, Medicare benefits, etc.

Right.

And that's usually inclusive of, of workers comp. You're saying just workers comp is 25 in the roofing industry. That's insane. Here's what's crazy about that. Or here's why I like that. I should say again, we're talking about an aging infrastructure, we're talking about an aging industry that's having people retire. So there's a need both on the demand and the supply side. Right. Supply is going down as demand is going up for this stuff. And then at the, at the same time it's regulated like they are required. Many of these property management companies, school districts, anybody who's doing new construction, they're required to conduct these surveys. OSHA requires them to make sure that they're within compliance. Like this isn't something that is an optional thing. They have to do it. So you couple all of those things. The fact that it's mandatory from a regulatory and compliance standpoint, the fact that we're getting less supply and more demand, it's like, and then that's why it's going to grow 15% a year is because now we have to have technology step in to actually fix the problem.

Not just that, but average gross profit margins on a job. And we'll get into what the job is specifically. But average gross margins are 50 to 70%, net profit margins 20 to 30% and like high end, if you're really efficient, 40 to 50% net profit margin in this business.

What was your research on the average ticket price? So like if I'm, if I'm going out and I'm doing an inspection, how much does it cost on average?

So it depends on what you're inspecting and like the industry. But for like a standard visual residential home, two to four hundred bucks, if you need thermal imaging on that, you're going to add 1 to 300 extra dollars to that commercial. You're looking at 300 to $700 per job. Something like a high rise, something more complex, like industrial, you're looking at 500 to $1,500 per job. They also go by square foot, like 15 to 50 cents per square foot. And then if you want to do like 3D mapping with more expensive drones or AI powered damage analysis, you're looking at like 4 to $700, something like that.

You look at those. It's not a crazy high sort of, I guess, revenue job. Right. However, the margins are so good on it because other than the initial investment upfront, which we'll talk about, it's pretty much your time when you're going out to do these jobs, it's pretty much your time. And so if you can be really efficient, you're going to have really high net margins.

Yep. What does it take to get into this business? Nick?

This part was really cool as I was doing the research. So, first of all, I like businesses that have at least some sort of a moat.

Explain what a mode is.

So a moat is anything that makes it difficult for somebody to enter into that industry. There's a barrier to entry for a business like this. You can't just show up at somebody's house and be like, I've got a drone. I'm going to go ahead and fly it and I'm going to do can just not legally. You can just not legally. And in fact, a lot of the companies that use drone inspections, like roofing companies, might have somebody on staff who will do their own inspections, but really they shouldn't be doing that. So the first thing you need is you actually do need a license. It's an FAA regulated license. I believe it's called a. I'm saying.

7A FAA part 107.

Thank you. So FAA part 107, it's an actual license. It takes like 20 to 40 hours to actually go and do it. It's a test that you have to pass. It's something that you actually have to do in order to operate these drones. The second thing is there's actually prep work in order to go up and fly a drone. So you need to see whether or not you're in FAA regulated airspace. And if you are, you have to actually submit for approval. And then in order to get the approval, sometimes it takes up to 30 days. So there is some complexity where you have to also understand what's the weather going to look like? What am I looking for on this roof? How do I understand whether or not there's damage and whether there's not damage? What am I looking for? Where am I looking? And then on the back end of the delivery of the product, you have to make sure that it looks good, you're taking the right pictures, the client's happy. You might even need to do light editing on the back end. So that may sound like a lot, and I think for most people it would be a big deterrent. But when I look at that, I'm like, as far as regulated things go, we're probably talking about 40 hours of learning. Okay, I gotta go take a course.

And that slight barrier to entry means it's less likely to have more competitors, right? Whereas 10 years ago you didn't need a license.

No. And thankfully you do need a license now, because I like, nobody wants just random people flying drones over their house. So there is a little bit of time obviously that you have to spend getting up and running in order to start a business like this. But that's what makes it really attractive is the moat is big and there is friction there, but it's not so big that I'm not even going to try and actually figure this stuff out, if that makes sense.

Yeah. And these are drones you can buy on Amazon. Like it. You don't have to need a special license to buy these. Like a good solid drone to get you in business is like DJI Mavic 3. There's an enterprise and a thermal version. They're between like 1200 and 3500 bucks. You can get in business for a few grand on a credit card.

In this business, probably the most important things that you're going to need is obviously you're going to need a drone, you're going to need insurance because I mean, drones are not cheap. And I mean we, we know this in our true training business. Sometimes you mess up and you cut a line or you cut a water main or whatever. So you want insurance that is protecting you. There's also software. As I was doing the research, the thing that will probably intimidate me the most is not the licensure for the faa, it would be understanding what a good or a bad roof is. Thankfully, there's a lot of software already out there that you can go get off of the shelf that you then run your pictures through that helps you identify those things. But you, you still as a human need to understand what you're looking for as you're doing a lot of this work. So the software does cost some, but yeah, probably out the door, less than 10 grand to really get up and running in a business like this.

I don't think I listed out all the different industries that this serves. I think I interrupted myself. ADHD took, took hold of me. So Insurance is number one. That's 40% of the market. Roughly 20% of the market is roofing, which makes sense commercial residential number three, property managers and commercial real estate. Right. You got to find out if there's a leak or something. You got to keep it maintained. Then you've got home inspection companies. Right. And I smell a piggyback opportunity there than construction and solar panel companies, in that order. So what do you like about those industries?

What I really like about those industries Is the fact that there's a lot of them. It's not just new construction inspection. In order for them to get to code. That would be like a really narrow use case. It's not a bad use case, but it's just be a really narrow use case. I like the fact that there's a. Anything with real estate that's managed. That's why I would look at it. Anything with real estate that's managed, there's an entry port. So it could be hoas, it could be commercial property managers, it could be school districts, universities, churches, sporting events. It could be construction companies. It could be like you said, solar companies, roofing companies. Like there's a really broad smattering of businesses that do this. And the reason I like it is because it gives you optionality as you're getting into this to just think about who do I know. Like, I would bet anybody who's entrepreneurial could look at these and be like, I think I know somebody. I think I know Jim in the construction and just whatever. I know we'll talk about this later. But that would be make so much easier for me to understand how to actually get into the market and get a first sale.

I got a little pro tip here as well for our listeners, slash viewers. You don't want to call it an inspection, okay. Because if you call it an inspection in certain states, it can trigger a additional licensing requirements. So the experts say that you want to call it roof condition documentation. Specifically, you don't want to put the word inspection in your business name particularly, or you'll be subject to more licensing.

Like that stuff's really important for roofing companies in particular, which is kind of the. The main one people target because they've got to. They've got to go measure everything they got, every single piece of it and then they've got to map it and they've got to order the roof. By not saying inspection. I guess that that even is a differentiator as you go to those roofing companies. I'm not doing inspection. I'm just like helping you. I'm just helping you, like measures.

Yeah, we're just. Hey, we're just talking here.

Hey, hey. There's nothing illegal is going on here, man. I don't know where Boston came from.

I don't know. I don't know.

So anytime you're starting a business, there's like two main components to the equation. There's getting business and there's fulfilling that business. That's it. As you grow and as you scale More and more things come into play. It's like, well, how do I manage people? How do I manage financ? How do I make sure that there's quality control with the product? But, like, in the beginning, in the beginning, it's just, can I get business and can I fulfill it? And we are going to talk about how to get business in this. In this type of business. Towards the end, I want to talk about right now, like, the fulfillment of it. The reason I love this business is because you can do the fulfillment of it. Like, it's the perfect side hustle kind of transition into entrepreneurship. And on top of that, there are sites where companies farm out drone jobs. So, like, you could get paid to go and learn how to fly a drone by going and working for a company that just needs a local drone operator to go and capture stuff. So it's even easier than just going in your first job and potentially screwing it up. Like, you can go and practice with a company who's outsourcing it to you, get some experience and then go and do your first job. So I just think the operational complexity to actually do the fulfillment is simple enough for an individual to go and do it. Like, side hustle work into a job like this. You don't have to think, oh, I got to quit my job and go all in on roof inspections.

I think it'd be a good business for a roofer to start or for anyone in home services, someone that's already tangential to it or somebody who has.

The relationships in that space that could piggyback. That they could just, like, piggyback off of anybody who knows the construction or anyways.

Yeah, yeah. Or how many, like, roofing marketing agencies are out there? Or companies that serve the roofing industry. Like, you could piggyback on one of them. Say, hey, totally hook me up with your customers. I'll give you a 30 referral fee.

Let's not. Let's not jump the gun on top.

We're not doing customer acquisition yet. Chris.

Come on, dude.

Sorry.

Gotta keep.

We have to stay till the end so people watch the whole thing. Got it. Sorry. I'm sorry, everyone.

It's called trickle truth. Have you ever heard of trickle truth?

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

Have you seen anybody doing this? I know it's a fairly small industry at this point, but I'm starting to see more and more people kind of pop up and actually start these kind of businesses.

Yeah, I was looking for stories specifically of people that, like, bootstrapped it. I found a couple stories of this Harvard guy that raised a bunch of money, yada, yada yada. But this guy named Tom Powers started a business, and would you believe what caused him to start it? He was a roofing inspector and he fell off a roof and he basically had that moment where he was saying, what am I doing with my life? Why am I getting on roofs? So went out and bought a DJI Inspire 1 Pro. He took his FAA 107 course. He passed it. It was 175 bucks to take that, by the way. And now he is doing seven figures a year inspecting roofs. What he takes. That's right. He takes 50 to 60 photos per inspection. He spends 15 minutes per inspection. He can do two inspections on one battery. And his customers replace half of their manual roof inspections with his drone roof inspection. It's not always possible. Sometimes you still got to get up there. But half is pretty dang good.

Seven figures. How many, how many years did it take him to get to seven figures?

I think four.

Oh my gosh, that's nuts.

But you know where he makes all his money? No storms.

Okay?

Every time there's a storm, he makes 15 to $30,000 in inspections.

Oh my.

Knocks him out. Well, and it's not only higher volume, but it's higher margin as well because oftentimes he'll, he'll inspect half of the homes on a street because the storm's hitting all the same homes. You know, so super efficient for him.

You know what would be a really interesting conversation is the economics of storms. I'm pretty sure it was you. When we were missionaries, you grew up in Florida and you would tell me about these guys who after a storm would just come through with their trailer and like FEMA would pay them a bunch of money to go clear up.

Those guys were me. That was me as a 16 year old. Yeah.

And you would make freaking bank because FEMA needs the cleanup and, and like they're paying out these funds and so so are the insurance companies.

That was a whole game too. You get like a, one of those cheap trailers, you know, and you get these huge sheets of plywood to build up the sides of it to make it like a box trailer with an open top. And then you just, you go pick up all the brush you can, and it's all about density. You just shove it in there as densely as you can. You barely get the door closed. And then the FEMA will have like a station where you roll your truck up and there'll be a guy in like a scissor Lift. He'll be standing way up there and he'll look in it and he'll just yell out. He's like 82%, 45%.

Shut up.

I swear. He's guessing the density of the trailer. And then they'll pay like a dollar, like certain dollar amount per pound. I don't remember what it is. Let's say it's a, you know, a dollar per pound. So they'll weigh your trailer. You pull it up on a weigh station. They'll weigh it. Let's say it's 1200. £1200. And then they unload you. Then he guesses the density. 82%. Then they like basically put a strap in there and they pull it out with a skid steer. And then they weigh your trailer again and they're like, oh, 400 pounds. 1200. 400. 800 pounds worth of debris. Cool. And then they take the 800 times $1 per pound. 800. And then they multiply it by the percentage density, you know, 83%. Really? And then they hand you a check right there from fema. Like they'll print it out and hand it to you. And then you go back to the neighborhoods and it's. You're literally just picking up anything that's in any neighborhood because it's just the government paying for it. And you just work as fast as you can, you fill it up and you go back and you do it all over again until all the. The brush. It's awesome. Isn't that awesome?

Dude, that is nuts. There's just a FEMA way station. You just pull up to the female way station. He's like, hey, what's up? Yeah, that's a 45 year. Slip him a 50. You're like, could you make it 65?

About the same percentage of the Cowboys in the playoffs. 0%. I. I totally forgot about that experience until you asked me about it. That was. Those were good times. I would skip school to do that.

I remember you telling me about that on our mission, and I was like, shut the freak. You just drive around and like cut stuff up and throw it in the back of your truck. You're like, yeah, yeah, man, that was freaking fun. Danny would drive around, tell us where to go. It was Danny, right?

No, it was. It was a church thing. But.

Oh, well, it was a church thing. You did it for free.

No, it wasn't like, I'm just kidding, guys from church.

But well, anyways, I think the storm thing is super interesting. Roofing companies do this as well where they're like, oh, the storm is hitting in this area and they've got a weather report and then they'll like cold message people who are in that area to go and find business. If you were to do this as a drone company, though, I don't understand, like, would you fly your drone up and just look for houses with damaged roofing roofs?

I think it's a matter of having the roofing business contacts already in place when a storm hits.

So flip too, right? Like you could go up and fly it, identify roofs, send leads to the roofing company and then little bottoms up approach field. Bottoms up. Of course, in business I learned that at ucla.

The classic bottoms up.

Classic, classic bottoms up.

Yeah, I learned that at Alabama when all the guys would just get drunk every night. Bottoms up.

Oh, Alabama University. No, no, no, no. Just living in Alabama.

Yeah. Life. Yeah. Like he, he makes good money without storms, but like the bulk of his profit comes from these storms. And he'll, he'll definitely become a storm chaser. If one hits like three hours away, he'll go up there and get it.

Get it done to that seven figures in four years is, is insane to me. Do you know if he has any like a ton of employees or is it just him?

He's got a few employees. I think he has like two or three crews. A couple things to look out for. Metal roofs. It's just a whole different animal because you get interference with the signal. So that was a learning curve for him. And confrontational onlookers. That's a thing. Karen's male Karens. Can you just picture like a 68 year old dude wearing like a Tommy Bahamas shirt rolling up in his flip flop saying, hey, what's that drone? What's that drone? Are you from the deep state? What's that? You are not authorized.

I'll tell you what, you do look like, David, and I don't think BA is up on that roof. What you doing over here, boy?

You don't look like you're from around here, boy.

I can totally.

That's a big problem. I could.

Dude, I could totally see that freaking Karen.

What they have to do is they'll have like their iPhone on a tripod recording. Like outwardly as they're standing on the sidewalk filming, they'll have a tripod out to like cover their butts in case there's an onlooker. Because the onlooker lookers will like try to report them and get them in trouble even though they're doing nothing wrong. Right. And they don't want to do anything wrong or they'll get their license revoked. So it's. It's very costly to them if they get reported. But I was thinking, like, what an opportunity this could be to use these Karens as social media content to grow your business.

Oh, that's.

That's like, get. Rally everyone on your side. Right? What's the male version of a Karen, Ken? Is it Ken?

I don't know.

I think it's Kevin and Karen. So we're talking about. Kevin's here. Sorry, Kevin's.

Yeah, I like Karen better.

It's a male version.

All Karens.

Okay, that's. That's fair, dude.

Or, like, legitimately, you would just hire somebody or ask someone, you know, to be that.

Yeah. Anyway, just have a friend film for you.

You could just hire a friend and have them stand in like you. It doesn't have. You just manufacture it. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And then just try to have it go viral. That would be a really, really good organic social market.

I would try to elicit it.

Of course you would. You would show up there with, like, the loudest drone possible. You would put, like, a bitcoin mining rig on a drone just so the fans just. And when they came up to you, you would just be such a troll. You'd be like, what?

I can't. What. It's like spraying pesticides everywhere. It's one of the pesticide drones.

Here's a couple things that I found interesting. One is what it takes for a job to be completed. And the other thing is the old land and expand. After you start doing these drone inspections, there's. There's a ton of things that you can kind of expand into. So first, the actual job itself. I didn't realize this. It's not just you show up. You fly the drone for 45 minutes and you get 600 bucks. So it's not just show up, show up, and 45 minutes later, you're done with the job and you get 600. And that's all you have to do. You actually have to do some prep. So you need to. First of all, even before the weather is this close enough to an airport where you have to get a permit, and if it's close enough, then you have to request a permit. And then you need to look and see what's the weather going to be like. Then you need to pull up the roof on Google Maps and just kind of understand the layout so that when you show up, you know exactly what you're shooting for then you show up early, you just make sure you do the equipment check, you roll out, you actually do the video. You're there for like two hours. Great. Then you go back, you export all the data, you upload the files, you upload it to the software, you do your analysis. So I thought that was interesting because it's not just, oh, I'm going to go up and do, you know, ten roofs a day. You can't. You could probably do maybe, let's call it two roofs a day, given all the other administrative work that you have to do. So there is kind of a, a ceiling, if you will, on an individual who can grow their business.

It's always more difficult than you anticipate at the outset.

But here are a couple cool things that I thought were really interesting for these types of drone businesses. In software, there's this concept called land and expand, which means you get into a company with a product offering and then once you're in that company, then you kind of expand into adjacent offerings. Right. So slack my land by being a messaging app and then all of a sudden they offer, oh, you can do video conferencing. Here's an upsell for that. Oh, you can use it as a CRM. Here's an upsell for that. Oh, you can use it for email. Here's an upsell for that. So for these drone companies, and I thought these were really cool ideas. One of them would be you go and you obviously do the inspection for a roofing company, you give them their package and then you say, hey, do you want to use any of this video for your social media? Like, what roofing company would say no to that? Like it's, you went up, you shot it, it's already there. It's easy for them to post boom, right there. So potentially you could just shoot social media as an add on for each one of these companies. I thought that was really cool.

It's like Uncle Clark, dude.

Yes. Yeah. Full circle. Another one that I thought was really interesting was inventory management. I know that sounds weird, but think about it. When you are going and doing a commercial project and you're building these massive buildings, where do you store the lumber, cement, or the steel or whatever? You store it on site. It's not like sitting in an Amazon warehouse, right?

Yeah.

These drone companies are actually going and they'll go on like on a specific day and they'll fly capture what materials are actually on site. And then if anything happens, if there's like, hey, you didn't ever deliver this it's like, actually, we did. We have video footage right here of when it was delivered on this day. And you might offer that as like a weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever, for these construction companies, but that way it protects them from a risk management standpoint on their inventory.

Well, especially you might already be contracted with them to, like, inspect the building as it's going up. Right. So it might be a great land and expand moment. I'm glad you mentioned the social media aspect, because a lot of what I researched is, was like, drone operators saying, don't get into drone photography. Like, that is the lowest hanging fruit. There's no barrier to entry, there's no moat. And I quote, it's easier for a photographer to learn drone craft than for a drone operator to learn photography. So to your point, that strengthens your point. Start with the more difficult thing. It's getting licensed, finding customers, like doing drone roof inspections and then going for the photography thing, because a lot of these guys are going to need photography, like drone photography anyway. At some point, it might as well be you. But if you lead with that, then you just look like everyone else. But if, you know, you offer that once you already have their trust, then you get two lines of business.

It's kind of like, what do you say? Sawdust businesses.

Yeah, sell your sawdust.

Like, you, you already have the images, you already did it for the inspection.

You're.

You're making money off of your sawdust. Yeah, I think that's a really cool way to expand. I like the idea that you just had, though, of like, when you're on site and you're doing for, like, these construction companies an inspection, you're like, hey, for an extra 50 bucks, I could just really quickly do an inventory management or inventory check for you. Is that cool? Oh, yeah, that sounds fine.

Cool.

I'll. I'll shoot that over to you. It's like, it's almost like a impulse buy at, at the supermarket. You know what I mean?

Like, oh, I got.

Didn't need this gum, but I'll go ahead and grab it. I would bet that those construction companies would be like, yeah, you might as well. I mean, you're already up there.

Well, dude, why not do the Uncle Clark method? Like, let's say you, a roofer hires you to inspect a roof, right? You do that. Then you get some good pictures while you're up there. Then you go knock on the homeowner's door, you already sold the imagery to the roofer and say, hey, can you get it printed? I think it's very important that it's printed just like Uncle Clark and say, hey, I took this of your house, it's 50 bucks, you know, thought you might like it or something. Why not?

Dude, that would be an interesting business to do residentially. Although I bet people would get really weird about that if you went and took like drone pictures of people's houses and just went out there to them. Yeah, nevermind. I take that back. You get a lot of Karens.

Hey, weird is viral. Viral profit is good. Why use any word when you word do trick? Speaking of pricing, I learned that pricing has collapsed in this industry and I do think that's a good thing. Eight, 10 years ago, you could charge two to 3,000 a day for your drone skills. And then licensing happened and then everyone got involved and then social media short form video drones went crazy and now pricing has like collapsed or stabilized, depending on how you look at it. And believe it or not, the number of licenses every year has been dropping recently. So I feel like this industry, like it got really hot and it kind of peaked and then it came down and now it's stabilizing and starting to get hot again with this compound annual growth rate that we talked about in the beginning.

Well, what I'm surprised you didn't mention is the fact that the pricing has compressed has been accelerated by how much cheaper the technology has become. So these cameras, so like the thermal imaging cameras or the drones that the cameras fly on, obviously they've come way down in price from like $20,000 to, you know, three to $5,000. So because of that movement in price, it is, it has allowed the, that drone operators actually charge to be compressed because now the cost of it is way lower. If you're just looking at it from the outside, it'd be like, wait a second, they introduced the licensing, Wouldn't that mean that it would drive the price up? Because there's now a barrier for operators, but actually because the price of technology has come down, so much pricing has come down.

Yeah. Should we talk about customer acquisition?

Dude, this. I, I've been. Yes. Oh, I like that. I want, I want you to go.

Okay, no, go ahead.

No, you go.

This is not a big industry. But I just thought it was really cool. The coolest application of drones that I found in my research is the drone deer hunters. So there is a company out there that are constantly going viral on social media that uses thermal imagery drones to find deer that have been shot by hunters, ran off and who knows where, like trophy deer. And they'll pay them thousands of dollars to drive wherever they are, to drive to wherever they are in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and get their drone up there and find a deer just hanging out in the brush that's been shot like in the leg or something.

No way.

That's a thing. Yeah, that's a thing.

Here's why I love, love, love, love, love, love this industry. And it's because of the customer acquisition. Like I said, there's two parts of the business. There's the fulfillment and then there's the acquiring of the customers. What I would do after I've decided, yep, this is for me, I've got my license, I'm ready to roll. I would just sit down and I would start writing out names of people who I know that might fit in to working in one of these industries. You ready Might fit into one of these industries. Real estate agents, construction management, those could be general contractors, it could be commercial construction companies, et cetera, roofing, insurance adjusters, commercial property management companies, facilities management companies, solar installation companies, restoration and remediation companies, engineering and architecture firms, building inspectors and home inspectors, governmental agencies, schools, districts and colleges, healthcare systems, retail chains, hospitality and entertainment companies. The list goes on and on. Anybody with like facilities management experience, I guarantee if you were getting into this business and you just started listing out names or you just listened to me list those off, there's got to be one person who's come to your mind that's like, I think Greg works for Sandy. I, I think I could talk to him about potentially going into this business. So I would, that's where I would start. I would just start by thinking who can I piggyback off of to start getting my first taste of business so that I can, as a side hustle, launch this business. What do you think?

I love it. I mean, you could spend the same amount of mental energy finding thinking of like one person, you know, that could be a customer. Why do that when you can spend the same energy thinking of one person, you know, that you could get endless referrals from?

That's what's so cool about this industry. It's like a one to many. You know, you get a property management company or a roofing company and all of a sudden it's like, I've got sustained business. It's not a one off. It's going to be recurring revenue that I can piggyback off of and I don't have to do it full time.

Cool.

I can, I can do it as a side hustle. Throw me a business, throw me a Job. When you have a job that comes my way.

Great.

I'll start getting some practice.

I got some alpha on keywords to bid on.

Okay. Is there an arbitrage on these keywords?

Little bit. A little bit of Arby.

Little arb.

Yeah. Drone facade inspections. That's the keyword. Like drone roof inspections, it's too expensive of a keyword. Drone facade, less expensive, same results.

Can I ask a really dumb question? When you say keywords, we're talking specifically about Google. We're not talking about Google Facebook ads. Okay.

Correct. Yeah. Basically trying to rank organically for drone roof inspection near me. Like, if you build your website and your Google business profile, I didn't think that Google business profile would really move the needle much on this, but it does if you point it towards drone roof inspection near me. And then on the paid ad side, if you're bidding on drone facade inspection, that seems to be the winning ticket here.

Dude, that's a really smart combination. So you. Because you could build out your Google business profile, that just takes time, energy, right? Be operating this as a side hustle, finding customers as you go. Probably making sure, like, we saw this with Tyler, making sure that every single person that you do drone footage for gives you a review. Tyler, who's doing stump grinding, he said he's ranking number one in Utah, and his secret sauce was, I'm gonna go and do Google reviews. Reviews on every single customer.

He gets a twofer. He gets reviews from the homeowner and from the business owner that refers him for each job.

And my. My favorite thing that he said is he's like, I go knock on the door after every job, and I'm like, was the job good? And they're like, yeah, yeah, it was good. Would you be willing to leave me a review? And the homeowner's like, yeah. And then Tyler's like, I just stand there. And then they're like, oh, oh, right now. He's like, yeah, would you pull your phone out right now and do it? And they do, and they do it. And he's like, being willing to be uncomfortable and awkward for, like, five seconds. Moves the needle on every review. I just thought that was so beautiful.

You know what that brings me back to? Hey, if you read the book and find it to be true, would you be willing to be baptized? Oh, for sure. How about. How about Thursday? I'm sorry, what? Like, Thursday the 7th? Where do you think you learned that from?

Oh, my. Dude, that is such a missionary tactic. But it's so true. Like, just Being willing to be awkward for a few extra seconds pays massive dividends.

Very profitable. Yes. Also, bidding on not just like roof inspections, but bidding on roof inspections. Plano roof inspect. Like city names specifically. Just because it's. It's more narrow. If you don't do those things, the cost per acquisition is like, pretty high, actually. 70, $80. You're looking at like 30 to $40 per lead and 50% close rate. The big differentiator is how recurring are these jobs that you're getting with Google Ads?

Okay, here was my question about Google Ads. Like, I thought about doing programmatic SEO. I also thought about ranking, but then I. In my research, at least it was like, there. It's not. A lot of. It's not B2C. So it's like customers aren't necessarily going drone inspectors.

It's.

It's B2B. So are these businesses like, these roofing companies? Are they the ones who are actually googling? Are you getting a lot of business from Google or are they just going out to their network?

I believe it's like, it's businesses searching for this stuff.

Google Ads would be one of your key funnels for getting business.

Yeah, for sure. And organic.

Before we get to organic, I think.

Programmatic would be great.

That's what I was gonna add. Okay, that's what I was thinking for it. Which also ties into your organic. Right, because, like, if you're. If you're posting organic content onto the social media platforms, you can also just cross post onto your programmatic SEO sites, which then builds more history, backlinks, authority, et cetera. Would you do any paid on Facebook?

Yeah, actually, I. I was reading from a couple guys that their return on ad spend, their ROI for Facebook ads was like three to one, five to one. Right. Every dollar in gets three to five dollars out. A lot of people write off Facebook ads when it comes to B2B, but guess what? Business owners are on Facebook. Guess what? The algorithm is so good, they know what business owners to show it to trust the process.

Facebook has made so many people money tweeted by having. Did you really?

Yeah, I said, Mark Zuckerberg's made more people wealthy than anyone on the planet.

Okay, now I feel stupid. I probably saw that and internalized it. But, like, I don't know, dude. Like, it's a cheat code. It's literally a cheat code. Oh, I don't want to go and spend $500,000 to. To understand whether or not there's a market there. I can go spend 500, see what the demand is like, adjust my message pivot and then launch again. It like it's anyways, it's incredible. Okay, so those are your paid acquisition channels. What would you do on the organic side?

Just best practices for SEO? Just building out your website with good SEO practices. Meta tags, the right keywords, listing out specific city names on your website, fully optimizing your Google business profile, like adding all the pictures and videos, you know, soliciting reviews. Most of the organic leads are going to come before people ever click through to your website. It's going to come from your Google business profile.

Two things. The first thing is I think that if, if you're somebody who understands social media, this to me is a no brainer business for you to post about. It's not that you're going to blow up, but we've seen like SB mowing power washing on YouTube. These channels get hundreds of thousands or millions of views just because there's a very clear before and after. And these drones like doing drone footage. It's just mesmerizing to like watch the drone. So if you take a small clip and post it online like you have content every single day, you don't have to be creative and think up content. So just by putting it out there, Google is ranking YouTube video higher and higher in their search results. It's becoming the new SEO. So the more video that you're putting out there, the more that you're a founder led brand, the higher you're going to rank. So it just compounds on itself. I think this is a perfect business for social media.

And you don't have to show your face, you don't have to like make stupid selfie videos like you and I do. You just freaking post the drone videos.

I totally agree.

Here's your tidal wave. This is the Google Trends data for drone inspection.

Oh my gosh, that's. Dude, that's insane. I can't quite see it. Is that five years or all time?

This is 20 years. But it really started picking up in 2014, which makes sense. Like that's when drones started getting really popular. Wow.

Dude.

If we do roof inspection. Look at roof inspection. Okay, so if you're listening to this, it's basically like steady up and to the right. And then suddenly in December 2024, it went from a 23 relative search volume out of a hundred to a hundred. A hundred. Why right now it's like what happened in December of 24?

I don't know.

Fires like I don't know.

But this is all time like why would it be that dramatic of a surge in December of 2024? That's crazy, dude. This is why I love these businesses. Like, okay, yeah, it's not. AI would say, oh, AI is growing at 500,000% a year. I heard this story about Jeff Bezos when he was looking at Amazon and he saw the Internet was going at 5,000%. So he thought any business that's growing that fast, I got to be a part of. Like, okay, cool, we get it. That's growing fast. But it's kind of easy come, easy go, right? Like you get these companies that can come out of nowhere and they can crash out of this steady growing. It's a real business. Like, sign me up all day. Technology is not changing overnight on what's required in a roof inspection. The delivery mechanism might change, but we all still need roof inspections.

I guess there was a. There was a big tornado outbreak in December 2024.

No way.

Roof claims reached over $30 billion in 2024. It's crazy.

Holy crap.

Is it time for us to talk about our roofing inspection course, Nick?

Yeah, yeah, listen, you don't have to pay it right away.

Have you ever heard of a firm affirm Klarna.

I think we've said it a number of times, but do you want. Do you want to just like recap like why we love this business?

Yeah, you got a tidal wave. Extremely fast growing market for drone inspections. You got another tidal wave of. 50% of insurance adjusters are retiring. Sorry, was it 50 or. Yeah, 50%. Yes, 50% of the industry is retiring. You got the other tidal wave. It becoming more approachable. Drones are more affordable. The technology is better than ever. You can start it with not that much money. Net margins between 20 and 50% depending on what model you choose. The piggyback. The piggyback ability of it to have one customer that can refer you tons of jobs. You want insurance, Go insurance. You want roofing, commercial, residential, solar. There's all kinds of verticals here. What did I miss?

Pretty much have everything that I have. These. The only two I would expand on are. It's a perfect side hustle business. You don't have to quit your job and go full time. Like you can. You can start doing a couple of these a month, get the experience, make some and make some real money. I love that fact of it. And then the only other thing to add on other than what you've said, I also love the land and expand nature of this business because you're building relationships with property management. Companies and commercial real estate companies and construction companies. And even if this doesn't become your forever job now, all of a sudden you've built relationships with real businesses, real business owners. Maybe you find a new need or a new niche or it opens up another door for you. Like, it just gets you in the game in an industry like real estate, which has so many opportunities built within it. So I love kind of that nature of land and expand, the side hustle and then everything else you said, the macro trends in particular.

It's beautiful. A great business. It's great.

So we're starting one, right?

All right. Yeah, I just did. Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mowing the lawn, you're still driving, what have you. If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life.