October 3, 2025 • 46 mins
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HoldCo Bros are back! In this episode, Nik and I dive into the drone roof inspections opportunity that checks every box for first-time operators. We break down why this market is growing ~15% a year toward $3.5B, how Part 107 licensing works, and the real numbers per job: $200–$400 for residential visual, + $100–$300 for thermal, $300–$700 for commercial, and $500–$1,500 for complex sites. We talk margins (50–70% gross, 20–30% net), the exact six-hour job workflow from airspace checks to delivery, and why you should sell this as roof condition documentation. I share a case study of an operator doing seven figures, including $15K–$30K days when storms hit, plus B2B channels that make this repeatable with roofing, insurance, property management, and construction. We finish with acquisition tactics that actually work: Google Business Profile, city keywords, the “drone facade” keyword angle, and simple land-and-expand upsells like thermal, mapping, and social media clips. If you want a real business with low startup cost, real demand, and no ladders, this is it.
Learn more about Nik here: http://linktr.ee/cofoundersnik
Enjoy!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
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 7 figures a year inspecting roofs.
What? That's right, these are drones
you can buy on Amazon every timethere's a storm.
He makes 15 to $30,000 in inspections.
Oh my gosh. He just knocks him out.
He takes 50 to 60 photos. He spends 15 minutes per
(00:23):
inspection. It's about a $23 billion market.
It's projected over the next 10 years to go at an annual growth
rate of 15% a year. It's going to 10X over the next
10 years. 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.
(00:43):
Love you, Clark. So Clark is a hustler, and he
lost his job as an engineer 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.
He had to like, yeah, he had to,like, pay the bills.
And he did so in a very creativeway.
(01:05):
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, CacheValley, and take beautiful
pictures of, like, properties, ranches, acreage, Right.
(01:28):
And then he'd go get them. He'd developed them himself.
He had a dark room. And he would get, like these,
like, 2 by 3 foot, gorgeous highresolution 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
(01:51):
because he was doing it himself.And he had, like, a 6070% take
rate. And why wouldn't he really?
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
(02:12):
Hustler comes from? That's it.
Came from my uncle's. It's funny you brought that up
because you and I have been deepdiving, 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 lovewhen we're looking at
businesses, especially for firsttime entrepreneurs, macro trends
like this a, a market that's just going up and to the right,
(02:33):
right. We want it to look like the
Bitcoin chart circus 2019 to into 2020.
All right, We want it up and to the right beyond that, what else
do we want? We want stuff that's like 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's just has a cool fact.
Hole in one challenge. That's cool, right?
(02:55):
Sandbox RC cars in a coffee shop.
That's freaking rad, right? That's what we want.
OK, 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 a 8 out of 10 sexy.
I'm talking about drone roof inspections.
(03:17):
I'm going to be honest, I've said that to myself three times
in a row and I'm like, what? Drone, Drone roof inspections?
Adri, check out I saw ADRI. I'm a DRID.
RI Oh, you're ADRI guy. I'm a DIYDRI 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 forbasically inspection and
(03:39):
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 1/2 percent a year to 31/2 billion dollars by 2035.
So it's going to 10X. It's going to 10X over the next
(04:00):
10 years, dude. Take that number bro.
And freaking 10X that and then 10X it again.
So within 10 years it's going to10X.
You know what I hear when I hearthat cha ching, cha ching, I
hear the the cash. Registers well.
Let's just give some context about CAGR compound annual
growth rate on entire industries.
(04:21):
Like 3% is solid, 5% is good, 15% is nuts.
Here's why it matters if you're just looking at the general
growth rate of the United States.
Inflation, right? With inflation, what's GDP
growth typically like? A good GDP growth is like 3%.
We're stoked for a 3%. So if the rest of the country is
going at 3% and the business that you choose is going at 15%,
(04:43):
I'm a mathematician, but it's going 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
(05:04):
course at the end of it. 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 7000 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 7999. We only have room for four more
people. Guys, come on.
(05:26):
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 business 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, dude. I'm like softball.
(05:47):
I'm waiting for Barry Bonds. If we can just hit it out of the
park, OK. 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
(06:10):
for adjusters, claims adjusters,inspectors.
By the year 2038, we will have 400,000 unfilled positions,
right? Because 50%.
Nick, when was the last time youtalked 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?
(06:32):
I don't want an. Estimator.
I want to be an adjuster. Estimator hardly know her.
Actuary. 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.
Less than 25% of the current workforce is under age 35.
(06:55):
They're boomers. Oh my gosh, say that's that one
more time. What percentage is under the age
30? 5 Less than 25% of the current
workforce is under 35. Oh my, that's why it's so
irritating to talk to an adjuster 'cause they're all.
Boomers. Yeah, yeah, I mean, OK, we have
some. We have some boomer listeners we
love. They get it, They get it.
(07:17):
OK, no. So that creates an opportunity
that creates A tidal wave for more efficient ways of of
climbing on roofs. Dude.
And then you couple that with the fact that we have a an aging
infrastructure. Yeah.
Our homes are getting older, andnot 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
(07:39):
inspections. Is that an opportunity for
technology to step in? I.
Don't know that's how that'll doit.
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 that.
Like, are you kidding? Like most dangerous thing you
(08:00):
can do is inspect a roof. Not only that, think about the
insurance companies or the property management companies or
the commercial companies who arelike, 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 teeing me up
for a stat about workers comp inthe roofing industry.
Am I? You ready?
(08:21):
Is there a stat about that? 25% of every payroll dollar in a
roofing business goes to workerscomp insurance.
Shut your mouth. Shut your.
Mouth swear on my life. That's insane, $0.25 of every
dollar payroll dollars. Spent on payroll goes to workers
comp insurance in roofing. Like for context if if you don't
(08:42):
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, etcetera, 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
(09:05):
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
(09:26):
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
(09:47):
we have to have technology step in to actually fix the problem.
Not just that, but average grossprofit 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
(10:09):
average ticket price? So like if I'm if I'm going out
and I'm doing an inspection, howmuch 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, 2 to 400 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 $700.00 per job.
(10:32):
Something like a a high rise, something more complex like
industrial, you're looking at 500 to $1500 per job.
They also go by square foot, like 15 to $0.50 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 like4 to $700.00, something like
(10:54):
that. You look at this, it's not a
crazy high sort of, I guess, revenue job, right?
However, the margins are so goodon 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
a really high net margins. Yep.
(11:14):
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 Moat is.
So a Moat is anything that makesit 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.
(11:36):
You 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 7. AFAA part one O 7.
(11:58):
Thank you so FAA part one O 7, 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 actuallyhave 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
(12:21):
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.
If you're taking the right pictures, that the client's
happy. You might even need to do light
(12:42):
editing on the back end. So that may sound like a lot and
I think for most people it wouldbe a big deterrent.
But when I look at that, I'm like, as far as regulated things
go, we're probably talking about40 hours of learning, OK, I got
to 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
(13:03):
license now because I feel 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 keeping 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, butit's not so big that I'm not
even going to try and actually figure this stuff out, if that
(13:25):
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 few grand on a credit card in this business.
(13:45):
Probably the most important things that you're going to need
is obviously you're going to need the drone, you're going to
need insurance because I mean, drones are not cheap.
And I mean, we, we know this in our tree trimming business,
sometimes you mess up and you cut a line or you cut a, a water
main or whatever. So you want insurance that is
protecting you. There's also software.
As I was doing the research, thething that will probably
(14:07):
intimidate me the most is not the licensure for the FAA.
It would be understanding what agood 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
(14:30):
less than 10 grand to really getup 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 or 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 #3 property managers and commercial
(14:52):
real estate, right? You got to find out if there's a
leak or something, you got to keep it maintained.
Then you got home inspection companies, right?
And I smell a piggyback opportunity there.
Then 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
(15:13):
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'smanaged.
That's why I would look at it. Anything that's with real estate
that's managed, there's an entryport.
So it could be HOA, it could be commercial property managers, it
(15:36):
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 dothis.
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
(15:58):
these and be like, I think I know some, but I think I know
Jim in the construction and justwhatever.
I know we'll talk about this later, but that would be makes
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 a listener slash
viewers. You don't want to call it an
inspection, OK? Because if you call it an
(16:20):
inspection in certain states, itcan trigger additional licensing
requirements. So the experts say that you want
to call it roof condition documentation, specifically you
you don't want to put the word inspection in your business name
particularly or you'll be subject to more licensing.
But like that's such a really important for roofing companies
in particular, which is kind of the the main one people target
(16:44):
because they've got it, they've got to go measure everything.
They got to every single piece of it and then they've got to
map it. And then we got 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, I'm not doing inspection.
I'm just like helping you. I'm just helping you like
measure stuff. We're just, hey, we're just
talking here. Hey, hey, there's nothing
(17:04):
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 2 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 managepeople?
How do I manage finances? How do I make sure that there's
quality control of the product? But like in the beginning, in
(17:26):
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
(17:47):
sites where companies farm out drone jobs.
So like you could get paid to goand 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 outsourcingit to you, get some experience,
and then go and do your first job.
(18:07):
So I just think the operational complexity to actually do the
fulfillment is simple enough foran individual to go and do it
like side hustle work into a joblike 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 thatcould piggyback that they could
(18:29):
just like piggyback off of anybody who knows the
construction or, or anyways, yeah.
Yeah. Or how many like roofing
marketing agencies are out thereor 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.
Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Let's not, let's not jump the gun.
(18:49):
We're not doing customer acquisition yet.
Chris, come on, dude. Sorry, got to keep.
We have to stay at 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
(19:10):
actually start these kind of businesses.
Yeah, I, 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, yadda, yadda, yadda.
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 basically
(19:30):
had that moment where he was saying what am I doing with my
life? Why am I getting out of roofs?
So he went out and bought a DJI Inspire 1 Pro.
He took his FAA one O 7 course. He passed it.
It was 175 bucks to take that bythe way.
And now he's doing 7 figures a year inspecting roofs.
What he takes, That's right, he takes 50 to 60 photos per
(19:55):
inspection. He spends 15 minutes per
inspection. He can do 2 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 7 figures?
(20:16):
I think 4. Oh my gosh, that's nuts.
But you know where he makes all his money?
No. Storms.
OK. Every time there's a storm, he
makes 15 to $30,000 in inspections.
Oh my gosh. Well, and it's not only higher
volume, but it's higher margin as well because often times
(20:38):
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 abunch of money to go clear up.
(20:59):
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 ofit to make it like a box trailer
with an open top. And then you just, you go pick
(21:21):
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, a station where you roll yourtruck 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 percent, 45% shut up.
(21:42):
I swear. He's guessing the density of the
trailer and then they'll pay like a dollar, like a certain
dollar amount per pound. I don't remember what it is.
Let's say it's, you know, a dollar per pound.
So they'll weigh you trailer, you pull it up on a weigh
station, they'll weigh it. Let's say it's 12 hundred 1200
lbs. And then they unload you.
Then he guesses the density 82%.Then they like basically put a
(22:05):
strap in there and they pull it out with his skid steer.
And then they weigh your traileragain and they're like 0400
pounds. 1200 -, 4 hundred £800 worth of debris.
Cool. And then they take the 800 times
$1.00 per pound, $800 and then they multiply it by the
percentage density, you know, 83%.
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
(22:27):
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 youcan.
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 female weigh station.
You just pull up to the female weigh station.
He's like, hey, what's up? Yeah, that's a 45.
Like. Slip him a 50.
(22:48):
You're like, could you make it? 65 it's about the same
percentage of the Cowboys in theplayoffs, 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 theback of your truck and you're
(23:09):
like, yeah, yeah, man, it was freaking fun.
Danny would drive around and tell us where to go.
Is Danny right? No, it was it was a church
thing. But.
Oh well, if it was a church thing, you did it for free.
No, it wasn't a like, I'm just getting guys from church.
Well, anyways, I, I think the storm thing is super
interesting. Roofing companies do this as
well where they're like, oh, thestorm's hitting in this area and
(23:29):
they've got a weather report andthen 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 it's like. A flip too, right?
Like you could go up and fly it,identify roofs, send leads to
(23:52):
the roofing company and then. No bottoms up approach.
Field bottoms up, of course, in business.
I learned that at UCLA. Classic bottoms.
Up 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.
(24:15):
Yeah, like he, he makes good money without storms, but like
the bulk of his profit comes from the storms.
And he'll, he'll definitely become a storm chaser.
If one hits like 3 hours away, he'll go up there and get it,
get it done. Dude 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?
(24:36):
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 Bahama shirt rolling up inhis flip flop saying, hey,
(24:58):
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 didn't
look like David, and I don't think Bathsheba's up on that
roof. What are you doing over here,
boy? You don't look like you're from
around here, boy. I could totally.
That's a that's a big problem. I could, dude, I could.
(25:20):
Totally see that freaking Cairns.
What they have to do is they'll have like, their iPhone on a
tripod recording, like outwardlyas 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
onlookers will like try to report them and get them in
trouble, even though they're doing nothing wrong, right?
(25:41):
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 usethese Karens as social media
content to grow your business, like get rally everyone on your
side, right? What's the male version of a
Karen Ken the Ken? I don't know.
(26:02):
I think it's Kevin and Karen. So we're talking about Kevin's
here. Sorry.
Kevin's. Yeah, I like Karen.
Better just call him all Karen's.
OK, that's that's fair. Dude, or like legitimately you
would just hire somebody or justask someone you know to be that?
Yeah, anyway, just have a friendfilm for you.
You. Could just hire a friend, have
them stand in like you don't just have.
(26:23):
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. Oh yeah.
I would try to like elicit it. Of course you would you would
show up there with like the loudest drone possible.
You would put like a a Bitcoin mining rig on a drone just so
the fans just and when they cameup to you, you would just be
(26:47):
such a troll 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. 1 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 a there's a ton of things that you
(27:08):
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 andyou 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 $600.00 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
(27:30):
you have to get a permit, and ifit's close enough, then you have
to request a permit and then youneed 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 2 hours,
great. Then you go back, you export all
(27:50):
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 10 roofs a day? You, you can't, you could
probably do make, let's call it 2 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
(28:12):
who can grow their business. It's always more difficult than
you anticipate at the outset. But here are the a couple cool
things 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 expandinto adjacent offerings, right?
So slack my land by being a messaging app and then all of a
(28:36):
sudden they offer, Oh, you can do video conferencing, but
here's an upsell for that. Oh, you can use it as ACRM.
Here's an upsell for that. Oh, you can use it for e-mail.
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 you 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
(28:56):
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
(29:17):
really interesting was inventorymanagement.
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 or the cement or the steel or whatever?
You store it on site. It's not like it's sitting in an
Amazon warehouse, right? Yeah, these drone companies are
(29:37):
actually going and they'll go onlike on a specific day and
they'll fly, capture what materials are actually on site.
And then if anything happens, ifthere's like, hey, you didn't
ever deliver this. It's like actually we did.
We have video footage right hereof 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
(30:00):
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 photographylike that is the lowest hanging
(30:21):
fruit. There's no barrier to entry,
there's no mode. 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 is getting licensed, finding customers like doing
drone roof inspections and then going for the photography thing
(30:43):
because a lot of these guys are going to need photography, like
drone photography anyway. At some point they might as well
be you. But if you leave 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 2 lines of business.
It's kind of like what what do you say?
Sawdust businesses. Yeah, sell your sawdust.
(31:03):
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 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
(31:24):
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, I'm going to 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 Clarkmethod?
Like, let's say you a roofer hires you to inspect a roof,
(31:45):
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.
You say, hey, you get it printed.
I think it's very important thatit's printed just like Uncle
Clark and say, hey, I took this of your house, it's 50 bucks,
you know, thought you might likeit or something.
Why not? Dude, that would be an
interesting business to do residentially, although I bet
(32:08):
people get really weird about that.
If you went and took like drone pictures of people's houses and
just quit out there to them. Yeah, never mind.
I take that back that you get a lot of Cairns.
Hey, weird is viral. Viral is profit.
Profit is good. Why do you use any word when few
word do trick? Speaking of pricing I I learned
(32:30):
that pricing has collapsed in this industry and I do think
that's a good thing. 810 years ago, you could charge 2 to 3000
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
(32:53):
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 growthrate that we talked about in the
beginning. Well, I'm 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
(33:14):
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, 3 to $5000. So because of that movement in
price, it is, it is allowed the the drone operators actually
charge to be compressed because now the cost of it is way lower.
(33:37):
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 woulddrive the price up because
there's no a barrier for operators, but actually because
the price of technology has comedown so much pricing has come
down? Yeah.
Should we talk about customer acquisition, dude?
It's I I've been yes. Oh, why I like that.
(33:58):
I want, I want you to go OK. No go.
Ahead, girl. Good.
Girl, 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
(34:22):
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 andfind 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,
(34:44):
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 fitin to working in one of these
industries. You ready?
Might fit into one of these industries, Real estate agents,
(35:07):
construction management, those could be general contractors, it
could be commercial constructioncompanies, etcetera.
Roofing, insurance adjusters, commercial property management
companies, facilities managementcompanies, solar installation
companies, restoration and remediation companies,
engineering and architecture firms, building inspectors and
home inspectors, governmental agencies, large schools in
districts and colleges, healthcare systems, retail
chains, hospitality and entertainment companies.
(35:29):
The list goes on and on. Anybody with like facilities
management experience? I guarantee if you're getting
into this business and you just started listing out names or you
just listen 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 to this business.
So I would, that's where I wouldstart.
(35:49):
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
(36:09):
get endless referrals from? That's what's so cool about this
industry. It's like a one to many, you
know, you get property management company or a roofing
company and all of a sudden it'slike 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
(36:31):
my way, great, I'll start getting some practice.
I got some alpha on keywords to bid on.
OK, is there an arbitrage on these keywords?
Little bit, little bit of Arby, little ARB.
Yeah, yeah. Drone facade inspections?
That's the keyword. Like drone roof inspections,
(36:53):
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 getting Facebook ads, OK?
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 the Google Business profile would
(37:15):
really move the needle much on this, but it does if you point
it towards drone roof inspectionnear me.
And then on the paid ad side, ifyou're bidding on drone facade
inspection, that seems to be thewinning 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
(37:36):
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, he said he's ranking number
one in Utah. And his secret sauce was I'm
going to go and do Google reviews, reviews on, on every
single customer. He gets A2 Fer.
He gets reviews from the home owner and from the business
owner that refers him for each job.
(37:58):
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, it was good.
Would you be willing to leave mea review?
And the home owner'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, and they do it.And he's like being willing to
(38:21):
be uncomfortable and awkward forlike 5 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.
(38:43):
Where do you think you learn 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 onroof inspections, Plano roof
inspect like city name specifically just because it's
it's more narrow. If you don't do those things,
(39:04):
the cost per acquisition is likeit's pretty high actually 7080
dollars 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?
OK, here was my question about Google Ads.
Like I thought about doing programmatic SEOI also thought
about ranking. But then I in my research at
(39:26):
least, it was like there, it's not a lot of it's not B to C.
So it's like customers aren't necessarily going drone
inspectors. It's it's B to B.
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 I believe it's like it's
businesses searching for this stuff.
Google Ads would be one of your key funnels for getting
(39:49):
business. Yeah, for sure.
And organic. I think.
Programmatic would be great. That's what I was going to add.
OK, 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,
(40:11):
etcetera. 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 3 to 1, five to one, right?
Every dollar in gets 3 to $5 out.
A lot of people write off Facebook ads when it comes to B
to B, but guess what business owners are on Facebook?
(40:31):
Guess what? The algorithm is so good they
know what business owners to show it to trust the process.
Facebook, it has made so many people money just by having Did
you really? Yeah, I said.
Mark Zuckerberg has made more people wealthy than anyone on
the planet. OK now I feel stupid.
I I probably saw that and internalized it, but like I.
(40:51):
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.
OK, so those are your paid acquisition channels.
(41:12):
What would you do on the organicside?
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 andvideos you know, soliciting
reviews. Most of the organic leads are
going to come before people everclick through to your website.
(41:34):
It's going to come from your Google Business profile.
Two things. The first thing is I think that
if 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 SP
mowing power washing on YouTube.These channels get hundreds of
thousands or millions of views just because there's a very
(41:54):
clear before and after and thesedrones 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
(42:17):
you're a founder LED brand, the higher you're going to rank.
So it just compounds on itself. I I think this is a perfect
business for social. You don't have to show your
face, you don't have to like make stupid selfie videos like
you and I do. You should 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
(42:38):
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. OK?
So if you're listening to this, it's basically like steady up
(42:58):
into the right. And then suddenly in December
2024, it went from a 23 relativesearch volume out of 100 to 100.
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.
(43:18):
Like, why would it be that dramatic of a search in December
of 2024? That's crazy, dude.
This is why I love these businesses.
Like, OK, yeah, it's not AI was like, 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 5000%. And so he thought, any business
(43:39):
that's growing that fast, I got to be a part of like, OK, cool,
we get it. That's going 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's not changing overnight on what's required in
a roof inspection. The delivery mechanism might
(44:00):
change, but we all still need roof inspections.
I guess there was a there was a big tornado outbreak in December
2024 and. No way.
Roof claims reached over $30 billion in 2024.
It's crazy. Holy crap.
Is it time for us to talk about our our roofing inspection
course, Nick? Yeah, yeah.
(44:21):
Listen, you don't have to pay itright away.
Have you ever heard of a firm? A firm 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 of
for drone inspections. You got another tidal wave of
(44:42):
50% of insurance adjusters are retiring.
Sorry, was it 50 or yeah, 50% tops 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.
(45:03):
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.
(45:25):
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 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
(45:46):
sudden you've built relationships with real
businesses, real business owners.
Maybe you find an 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.
(46:08):
It's beautiful. It's a great business.
It's great. So we're starting one.
Right. Yeah, I just did.
Hey, guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably
because you haven't had a chanceto take your air Pods 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
(46:29):
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 today.
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 7 figures a year inspecting roofs.
What? That's right, these are drones
you can buy on Amazon every timethere's a storm.
He makes 15 to $30,000 in inspections.
Oh my gosh. He just knocks him out.
He takes 50 to 60 photos. He spends 15 minutes per
(00:23):
inspection. It's about a $23 billion market.
It's projected over the next 10 years to go at an annual growth
rate of 15% a year. It's going to 10X over the next
10 years. 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.
(00:43):
Love you, Clark. So Clark is a hustler, and he
lost his job as an engineer 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.
He had to like, yeah, he had to,like, pay the bills.
And he did so in a very creativeway.
(01:05):
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, CacheValley, and take beautiful
pictures of, like, properties, ranches, acreage, Right.
(01:28):
And then he'd go get them. He'd developed them himself.
He had a dark room. And he would get, like these,
like, 2 by 3 foot, gorgeous highresolution 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
(01:51):
because he was doing it himself.And he had, like, a 6070% take
rate. And why wouldn't he really?
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
(02:12):
Hustler comes from? That's it.
Came from my uncle's. It's funny you brought that up
because you and I have been deepdiving, 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 lovewhen we're looking at
businesses, especially for firsttime entrepreneurs, macro trends
like this a, a market that's just going up and to the right,
(02:33):
right. We want it to look like the
Bitcoin chart circus 2019 to into 2020.
All right, We want it up and to the right beyond that, what else
do we want? We want stuff that's like 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's just has a cool fact.
Hole in one challenge. That's cool, right?
(02:55):
Sandbox RC cars in a coffee shop.
That's freaking rad, right? That's what we want.
OK, 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 a 8 out of 10 sexy.
I'm talking about drone roof inspections.
(03:17):
I'm going to be honest, I've said that to myself three times
in a row and I'm like, what? Drone, Drone roof inspections?
Adri, check out I saw ADRI. I'm a DRID.
RI Oh, you're ADRI guy. I'm a DIYDRI 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 forbasically inspection and
(03:39):
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 1/2 percent a year to 31/2 billion dollars by 2035.
So it's going to 10X. It's going to 10X over the next
(04:00):
10 years, dude. Take that number bro.
And freaking 10X that and then 10X it again.
So within 10 years it's going to10X.
You know what I hear when I hearthat cha ching, cha ching, I
hear the the cash. Registers well.
Let's just give some context about CAGR compound annual
growth rate on entire industries.
(04:21):
Like 3% is solid, 5% is good, 15% is nuts.
Here's why it matters if you're just looking at the general
growth rate of the United States.
Inflation, right? With inflation, what's GDP
growth typically like? A good GDP growth is like 3%.
We're stoked for a 3%. So if the rest of the country is
going at 3% and the business that you choose is going at 15%,
(04:43):
I'm a mathematician, but it's going 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
(05:04):
course at the end of it. 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 7000 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 7999. We only have room for four more
people. Guys, come on.
(05:26):
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 business 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, dude. I'm like softball.
(05:47):
I'm waiting for Barry Bonds. If we can just hit it out of the
park, OK. 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
(06:10):
for adjusters, claims adjusters,inspectors.
By the year 2038, we will have 400,000 unfilled positions,
right? Because 50%.
Nick, when was the last time youtalked 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?
(06:32):
I don't want an. Estimator.
I want to be an adjuster. Estimator hardly know her.
Actuary. 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.
Less than 25% of the current workforce is under age 35.
(06:55):
They're boomers. Oh my gosh, say that's that one
more time. What percentage is under the age
30? 5 Less than 25% of the current
workforce is under 35. Oh my, that's why it's so
irritating to talk to an adjuster 'cause they're all.
Boomers. Yeah, yeah, I mean, OK, we have
some. We have some boomer listeners we
love. They get it, They get it.
(07:17):
OK, no. So that creates an opportunity
that creates A tidal wave for more efficient ways of of
climbing on roofs. Dude.
And then you couple that with the fact that we have a an aging
infrastructure. Yeah.
Our homes are getting older, andnot 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
(07:39):
inspections. Is that an opportunity for
technology to step in? I.
Don't know that's how that'll doit.
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 that.
Like, are you kidding? Like most dangerous thing you
(08:00):
can do is inspect a roof. Not only that, think about the
insurance companies or the property management companies or
the commercial companies who arelike, 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 teeing me up
for a stat about workers comp inthe roofing industry.
Am I? You ready?
(08:21):
Is there a stat about that? 25% of every payroll dollar in a
roofing business goes to workerscomp insurance.
Shut your mouth. Shut your.
Mouth swear on my life. That's insane, $0.25 of every
dollar payroll dollars. Spent on payroll goes to workers
comp insurance in roofing. Like for context if if you don't
(08:42):
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, etcetera, 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
(09:05):
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
(09:26):
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
(09:47):
we have to have technology step in to actually fix the problem.
Not just that, but average grossprofit 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
(10:09):
average ticket price? So like if I'm if I'm going out
and I'm doing an inspection, howmuch 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, 2 to 400 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 $700.00 per job.
(10:32):
Something like a a high rise, something more complex like
industrial, you're looking at 500 to $1500 per job.
They also go by square foot, like 15 to $0.50 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 like4 to $700.00, something like
(10:54):
that. You look at this, it's not a
crazy high sort of, I guess, revenue job, right?
However, the margins are so goodon 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
a really high net margins. Yep.
(11:14):
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 Moat is.
So a Moat is anything that makesit 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.
(11:36):
You 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 7. AFAA part one O 7.
(11:58):
Thank you so FAA part one O 7, 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 actuallyhave 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
(12:21):
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.
If you're taking the right pictures, that the client's
happy. You might even need to do light
(12:42):
editing on the back end. So that may sound like a lot and
I think for most people it wouldbe a big deterrent.
But when I look at that, I'm like, as far as regulated things
go, we're probably talking about40 hours of learning, OK, I got
to 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
(13:03):
license now because I feel 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 keeping 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, butit's not so big that I'm not
even going to try and actually figure this stuff out, if that
(13:25):
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 few grand on a credit card in this business.
(13:45):
Probably the most important things that you're going to need
is obviously you're going to need the drone, you're going to
need insurance because I mean, drones are not cheap.
And I mean, we, we know this in our tree trimming business,
sometimes you mess up and you cut a line or you cut a, a water
main or whatever. So you want insurance that is
protecting you. There's also software.
As I was doing the research, thething that will probably
(14:07):
intimidate me the most is not the licensure for the FAA.
It would be understanding what agood 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
(14:30):
less than 10 grand to really getup 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 or 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 #3 property managers and commercial
(14:52):
real estate, right? You got to find out if there's a
leak or something, you got to keep it maintained.
Then you got home inspection companies, right?
And I smell a piggyback opportunity there.
Then 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
(15:13):
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'smanaged.
That's why I would look at it. Anything that's with real estate
that's managed, there's an entryport.
So it could be HOA, it could be commercial property managers, it
(15:36):
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 dothis.
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
(15:58):
these and be like, I think I know some, but I think I know
Jim in the construction and justwhatever.
I know we'll talk about this later, but that would be makes
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 a listener slash
viewers. You don't want to call it an
inspection, OK? Because if you call it an
(16:20):
inspection in certain states, itcan trigger additional licensing
requirements. So the experts say that you want
to call it roof condition documentation, specifically you
you don't want to put the word inspection in your business name
particularly or you'll be subject to more licensing.
But like that's such a really important for roofing companies
in particular, which is kind of the the main one people target
(16:44):
because they've got it, they've got to go measure everything.
They got to every single piece of it and then they've got to
map it. And then we got 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, I'm not doing inspection.
I'm just like helping you. I'm just helping you like
measure stuff. We're just, hey, we're just
talking here. Hey, hey, there's nothing
(17:04):
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 2 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 managepeople?
How do I manage finances? How do I make sure that there's
quality control of the product? But like in the beginning, in
(17:26):
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
(17:47):
sites where companies farm out drone jobs.
So like you could get paid to goand 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 outsourcingit to you, get some experience,
and then go and do your first job.
(18:07):
So I just think the operational complexity to actually do the
fulfillment is simple enough foran individual to go and do it
like side hustle work into a joblike 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 thatcould piggyback that they could
(18:29):
just like piggyback off of anybody who knows the
construction or, or anyways, yeah.
Yeah. Or how many like roofing
marketing agencies are out thereor 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.
Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Let's not, let's not jump the gun.
(18:49):
We're not doing customer acquisition yet.
Chris, come on, dude. Sorry, got to keep.
We have to stay at 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
(19:10):
actually start these kind of businesses.
Yeah, I, 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, yadda, yadda, yadda.
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 basically
(19:30):
had that moment where he was saying what am I doing with my
life? Why am I getting out of roofs?
So he went out and bought a DJI Inspire 1 Pro.
He took his FAA one O 7 course. He passed it.
It was 175 bucks to take that bythe way.
And now he's doing 7 figures a year inspecting roofs.
What he takes, That's right, he takes 50 to 60 photos per
(19:55):
inspection. He spends 15 minutes per
inspection. He can do 2 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 7 figures?
(20:16):
I think 4. Oh my gosh, that's nuts.
But you know where he makes all his money?
No. Storms.
OK. Every time there's a storm, he
makes 15 to $30,000 in inspections.
Oh my gosh. Well, and it's not only higher
volume, but it's higher margin as well because often times
(20:38):
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 abunch of money to go clear up.
(20:59):
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 ofit to make it like a box trailer
with an open top. And then you just, you go pick
(21:21):
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, a station where you roll yourtruck 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 percent, 45% shut up.
(21:42):
I swear. He's guessing the density of the
trailer and then they'll pay like a dollar, like a certain
dollar amount per pound. I don't remember what it is.
Let's say it's, you know, a dollar per pound.
So they'll weigh you trailer, you pull it up on a weigh
station, they'll weigh it. Let's say it's 12 hundred 1200
lbs. And then they unload you.
Then he guesses the density 82%.Then they like basically put a
(22:05):
strap in there and they pull it out with his skid steer.
And then they weigh your traileragain and they're like 0400
pounds. 1200 -, 4 hundred £800 worth of debris.
Cool. And then they take the 800 times
$1.00 per pound, $800 and then they multiply it by the
percentage density, you know, 83%.
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
(22:27):
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 youcan.
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 female weigh station.
You just pull up to the female weigh station.
He's like, hey, what's up? Yeah, that's a 45.
Like. Slip him a 50.
(22:48):
You're like, could you make it? 65 it's about the same
percentage of the Cowboys in theplayoffs, 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 theback of your truck and you're
(23:09):
like, yeah, yeah, man, it was freaking fun.
Danny would drive around and tell us where to go.
Is Danny right? No, it was it was a church
thing. But.
Oh well, if it was a church thing, you did it for free.
No, it wasn't a like, I'm just getting guys from church.
Well, anyways, I, I think the storm thing is super
interesting. Roofing companies do this as
well where they're like, oh, thestorm's hitting in this area and
(23:29):
they've got a weather report andthen 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 it's like. A flip too, right?
Like you could go up and fly it,identify roofs, send leads to
(23:52):
the roofing company and then. No bottoms up approach.
Field bottoms up, of course, in business.
I learned that at UCLA. Classic bottoms.
Up 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.
(24:15):
Yeah, like he, he makes good money without storms, but like
the bulk of his profit comes from the storms.
And he'll, he'll definitely become a storm chaser.
If one hits like 3 hours away, he'll go up there and get it,
get it done. Dude 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?
(24:36):
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 Bahama shirt rolling up inhis flip flop saying, hey,
(24:58):
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 didn't
look like David, and I don't think Bathsheba's up on that
roof. What are you doing over here,
boy? You don't look like you're from
around here, boy. I could totally.
That's a that's a big problem. I could, dude, I could.
(25:20):
Totally see that freaking Cairns.
What they have to do is they'll have like, their iPhone on a
tripod recording, like outwardlyas 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
onlookers will like try to report them and get them in
trouble, even though they're doing nothing wrong, right?
(25:41):
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 usethese Karens as social media
content to grow your business, like get rally everyone on your
side, right? What's the male version of a
Karen Ken the Ken? I don't know.
(26:02):
I think it's Kevin and Karen. So we're talking about Kevin's
here. Sorry.
Kevin's. Yeah, I like Karen.
Better just call him all Karen's.
OK, that's that's fair. Dude, or like legitimately you
would just hire somebody or justask someone you know to be that?
Yeah, anyway, just have a friendfilm for you.
You. Could just hire a friend, have
them stand in like you don't just have.
(26:23):
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. Oh yeah.
I would try to like elicit it. Of course you would you would
show up there with like the loudest drone possible.
You would put like a a Bitcoin mining rig on a drone just so
the fans just and when they cameup to you, you would just be
(26:47):
such a troll 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. 1 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 a there's a ton of things that you
(27:08):
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 andyou 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 $600.00 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
(27:30):
you have to get a permit, and ifit's close enough, then you have
to request a permit and then youneed 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 2 hours,
great. Then you go back, you export all
(27:50):
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 10 roofs a day? You, you can't, you could
probably do make, let's call it 2 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
(28:12):
who can grow their business. It's always more difficult than
you anticipate at the outset. But here are the a couple cool
things 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 expandinto adjacent offerings, right?
So slack my land by being a messaging app and then all of a
(28:36):
sudden they offer, Oh, you can do video conferencing, but
here's an upsell for that. Oh, you can use it as ACRM.
Here's an upsell for that. Oh, you can use it for e-mail.
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 you 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
(28:56):
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
(29:17):
really interesting was inventorymanagement.
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 or the cement or the steel or whatever?
You store it on site. It's not like it's sitting in an
Amazon warehouse, right? Yeah, these drone companies are
(29:37):
actually going and they'll go onlike on a specific day and
they'll fly, capture what materials are actually on site.
And then if anything happens, ifthere's like, hey, you didn't
ever deliver this. It's like actually we did.
We have video footage right hereof 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
(30:00):
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 photographylike that is the lowest hanging
(30:21):
fruit. There's no barrier to entry,
there's no mode. 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 is getting licensed, finding customers like doing
drone roof inspections and then going for the photography thing
(30:43):
because a lot of these guys are going to need photography, like
drone photography anyway. At some point they might as well
be you. But if you leave 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 2 lines of business.
It's kind of like what what do you say?
Sawdust businesses. Yeah, sell your sawdust.
(31:03):
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 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
(31:24):
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, I'm going to 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 Clarkmethod?
Like, let's say you a roofer hires you to inspect a roof,
(31:45):
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.
You say, hey, you get it printed.
I think it's very important thatit's printed just like Uncle
Clark and say, hey, I took this of your house, it's 50 bucks,
you know, thought you might likeit or something.
Why not? Dude, that would be an
interesting business to do residentially, although I bet
(32:08):
people get really weird about that.
If you went and took like drone pictures of people's houses and
just quit out there to them. Yeah, never mind.
I take that back that you get a lot of Cairns.
Hey, weird is viral. Viral is profit.
Profit is good. Why do you use any word when few
word do trick? Speaking of pricing I I learned
(32:30):
that pricing has collapsed in this industry and I do think
that's a good thing. 810 years ago, you could charge 2 to 3000
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
(32:53):
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 growthrate that we talked about in the
beginning. Well, I'm 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
(33:14):
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, 3 to $5000. So because of that movement in
price, it is, it is allowed the the drone operators actually
charge to be compressed because now the cost of it is way lower.
(33:37):
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 woulddrive the price up because
there's no a barrier for operators, but actually because
the price of technology has comedown so much pricing has come
down? Yeah.
Should we talk about customer acquisition, dude?
It's I I've been yes. Oh, why I like that.
(33:58):
I want, I want you to go OK. No go.
Ahead, girl. Good.
Girl, 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
(34:22):
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 andfind 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,
(34:44):
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 fitin to working in one of these
industries. You ready?
Might fit into one of these industries, Real estate agents,
(35:07):
construction management, those could be general contractors, it
could be commercial constructioncompanies, etcetera.
Roofing, insurance adjusters, commercial property management
companies, facilities managementcompanies, solar installation
companies, restoration and remediation companies,
engineering and architecture firms, building inspectors and
home inspectors, governmental agencies, large schools in
districts and colleges, healthcare systems, retail
chains, hospitality and entertainment companies.
(35:29):
The list goes on and on. Anybody with like facilities
management experience? I guarantee if you're getting
into this business and you just started listing out names or you
just listen 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 to this business.
So I would, that's where I wouldstart.
(35:49):
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
(36:09):
get endless referrals from? That's what's so cool about this
industry. It's like a one to many, you
know, you get property management company or a roofing
company and all of a sudden it'slike 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
(36:31):
my way, great, I'll start getting some practice.
I got some alpha on keywords to bid on.
OK, is there an arbitrage on these keywords?
Little bit, little bit of Arby, little ARB.
Yeah, yeah. Drone facade inspections?
That's the keyword. Like drone roof inspections,
(36:53):
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 getting Facebook ads, OK?
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 the Google Business profile would
(37:15):
really move the needle much on this, but it does if you point
it towards drone roof inspectionnear me.
And then on the paid ad side, ifyou're bidding on drone facade
inspection, that seems to be thewinning 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
(37:36):
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, he said he's ranking number
one in Utah. And his secret sauce was I'm
going to go and do Google reviews, reviews on, on every
single customer. He gets A2 Fer.
He gets reviews from the home owner and from the business
owner that refers him for each job.
(37:58):
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, it was good.
Would you be willing to leave mea review?
And the home owner'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, and they do it.And he's like being willing to
(38:21):
be uncomfortable and awkward forlike 5 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.
(38:43):
Where do you think you learn 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 onroof inspections, Plano roof
inspect like city name specifically just because it's
it's more narrow. If you don't do those things,
(39:04):
the cost per acquisition is likeit's pretty high actually 7080
dollars 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?
OK, here was my question about Google Ads.
Like I thought about doing programmatic SEOI also thought
about ranking. But then I in my research at
(39:26):
least, it was like there, it's not a lot of it's not B to C.
So it's like customers aren't necessarily going drone
inspectors. It's it's B to B.
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 I believe it's like it's
businesses searching for this stuff.
Google Ads would be one of your key funnels for getting
(39:49):
business. Yeah, for sure.
And organic. I think.
Programmatic would be great. That's what I was going to add.
OK, 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,
(40:11):
etcetera. 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 3 to 1, five to one, right?
Every dollar in gets 3 to $5 out.
A lot of people write off Facebook ads when it comes to B
to B, but guess what business owners are on Facebook?
(40:31):
Guess what? The algorithm is so good they
know what business owners to show it to trust the process.
Facebook, it has made so many people money just by having Did
you really? Yeah, I said.
Mark Zuckerberg has made more people wealthy than anyone on
the planet. OK now I feel stupid.
I I probably saw that and internalized it, but like I.
(40:51):
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.
OK, so those are your paid acquisition channels.
(41:12):
What would you do on the organicside?
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 andvideos you know, soliciting
reviews. Most of the organic leads are
going to come before people everclick through to your website.
(41:34):
It's going to come from your Google Business profile.
Two things. The first thing is I think that
if 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 SP
mowing power washing on YouTube.These channels get hundreds of
thousands or millions of views just because there's a very
(41:54):
clear before and after and thesedrones 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
(42:17):
you're a founder LED brand, the higher you're going to rank.
So it just compounds on itself. I I think this is a perfect
business for social. You don't have to show your
face, you don't have to like make stupid selfie videos like
you and I do. You should 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
(42:38):
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. OK?
So if you're listening to this, it's basically like steady up
(42:58):
into the right. And then suddenly in December
2024, it went from a 23 relativesearch volume out of 100 to 100.
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.
(43:18):
Like, why would it be that dramatic of a search in December
of 2024? That's crazy, dude.
This is why I love these businesses.
Like, OK, yeah, it's not AI was like, 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 5000%. And so he thought, any business
(43:39):
that's growing that fast, I got to be a part of like, OK, cool,
we get it. That's going 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's not changing overnight on what's required in
a roof inspection. The delivery mechanism might
(44:00):
change, but we all still need roof inspections.
I guess there was a there was a big tornado outbreak in December
2024 and. No way.
Roof claims reached over $30 billion in 2024.
It's crazy. Holy crap.
Is it time for us to talk about our our roofing inspection
course, Nick? Yeah, yeah.
(44:21):
Listen, you don't have to pay itright away.
Have you ever heard of a firm? A firm 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 of
for drone inspections. You got another tidal wave of
(44:42):
50% of insurance adjusters are retiring.
Sorry, was it 50 or yeah, 50% tops 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.
(45:03):
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.
(45:25):
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 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
(45:46):
sudden you've built relationships with real
businesses, real business owners.
Maybe you find an 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.
(46:08):
It's beautiful. It's a great business.
It's great. So we're starting one.
Right. Yeah, I just did.
Hey, guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably
because you haven't had a chanceto take your air Pods 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
(46:29):
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 today.
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