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In the Drone to 1K Podcast, we take an inside look at how successful drone business owners got started and scaled their company to making $1,000 per month and beyond. Whether you're just looking to make a little side cash with your drone or you want to turn your passion into a full-time career, we hope that the Drone to 1K Podcast will inspire you to take the plunge and succeed with your own drone business.
Hey everyone, welcome back to Drone 1K Podcast Season 6, Episode 7.
Excited to have a chat today with Zach Pieper of Quantum Land Design. If you are into data, construction, large machinery, you're going to really love today's episode. Normally we have people on here talking about video production, or maybe real estate, and occasionally some stuff about mapping photogrammetry, But Zach is going to come to us with a perspective for more of a civil engineering approach in how drones are used. So there's a lot of really cool things in this episode about how drones are used to create machine control models, how that works. I just learned a ton. it was really, really fun to talk to Zach.
I think that you're going to learn a whole new side of drones that you maybe haven't heard before. So I'm excited to dive in, but first, like always, if you want a sweet Drone Launch t shirt, feel free to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, screenshot your review, send it to me, David, at Drone Launch Academy, and my assistant and content manager, Daria, will send you a very comfortable Drone Launch t shirt, as a thank you for taking the time to leave reviews.[00:01:00]
I saw a few of your emails come in since the last episode. You guys are saying some very kind things. I always love hearing your feedback, seeing what you like, don't like. Helps us shape the show for future episodes. So, if you want to do that, take the time to do that now. But here we go with Zach. Enjoy.
David Young: All right, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Drone 1K podcast. Today I have with me somebody that I'm meeting for the very first time, Zach Pieper. So Zach, thanks for coming on the podcast with me. Hi David. Yeah. Nice to chat. Thank you. So I just did a straight up cold LinkedIn outreach to Zach.
I don't remember. I was telling him, I was like, I don't remember how I found your LinkedIn, but I really liked it. He's works for Caterpillar. He's in the civil engineering world. He's done stuff, with, like grading and civil engineering and land stuff. So I thought it'd be pretty sweet to have him on the podcast to talk about how he uses drones from that point of view, since we oftentimes get a lot of video production or real estate, things like that.
So it's good to mix it up and have some folks from the other side of the house. Uh, so Zach, I usually start by just having people introduce themselves and give us a little bit about how you even got started into [00:02:00] the business you're in.
Zach Pieper: Sure, sure. Yep. Uh, Zach Pieper, like you said, uh, we have, uh, have two companies, uh, Quantum Land Design and ArrowVue Services.
Quantum Land Design focuses on the contractor facing side of our business. So that's machine control models and drone data for contractors. And Arrowview is our civil engineering facing side. So we work with civil engineers and surveyors doing many of the same deliverables, just for different types of clients.
as far as my background goes, just Iowa kid grew up on a farm, worked for caterpillar for a few years out of college and, in mining and heavy construction. And then, moved back home. I was a earth moving contractor for what? Six, seven years. And then, had an opportunity to get into drones and more of the data side, which I'd seen the value in as a contractor and, got started with that in what?
2015, 16 timeframe.
David Young: as far as drones go, that's fairly early on, you know, back then. More expensive and not as easy to use. when you first started using drones, like, is that, is that when you started the arrow view services business?
Zach Pieper: It is.
Yeah. So arrow view services started then and quantum land design with a, one of my business partners. He, [00:03:00] he'd already started that company doing machine control models. And, Aeroview was kind of born out of an insurance issue. Quantum's insurance wouldn't touch drone flights at the time.
And, it was actually impossible to fly them at first. And then you could get a, section 333 exemption to fly commercially. So that's how we started out. So, Aeroview was born there. We're actually able to get insurance, got the 333s and bought ourselves a trimble.
Are you a pilot? I did get a pilot's license. Yeah. Yeah. At that time I had to get a pilot's license. So that was all kind of part of it.
David Young: License just for the drone stuff.
Zach Pieper: I did. I did. It was something I'd actually always been interested in and, well for time. And I suppose financial constraints, I never jumped on it, I guess flying drones was a good excuse to fly real airplanes, right?
David Young: Yeah. I remember back in 2015, cause I had helped some people like file for their three 33 exemptions. that's kind of how our business started. It's like I got into drones, got into the 333 stuff. I was like, Oh wow, there's, you know, some demand for people need help with this.
And then they came out with part 107. So that's when we did some of the test prep. But, but yeah, no, I, I experienced a significant number of people who are like, yeah, I'm just going to go ahead and get my sport pilot license or get my private just so I can fly drones. And it's like [00:04:00] tons of training and, you know, 10, 20 grand or something like that to get it.
So, yeah, it
Zach Pieper: was around 10 K. So it's a, it's a time commitment too, but it's, it's fun. It's a, it was a good
David Young: experience. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. I was just wondering if you, yeah. All right. So you got your three 33, you got your insurance and what you were talking about, the gear you were getting.
Zach Pieper: We bought a trimble UX five. our target market was the surveying and engineering side that was, that was our experience and our knowledge, and we saw the value in flying drones there too. So, it was just a fixed wing drone, a single purpose really for, taking, you know, topographic surveying type work.
So. First clients were civil engineers and surveyors, and we started doing more and more work for contractors as they saw the value in the data too. from that we've grown and taken on more contractors. We sell drone kits and process data all over the, all over the country.
David Young: Wow. That's awesome.
So what kind of a fixed wing drone were you using at the start?
Zach Pieper: Trimble UX5. So that was
David Young: the Trimble drone.
Zach Pieper: Yeah. Yeah. It was actually a triple drone. I was a, what a gate wing prior to that. And then they sense of sold that system to [00:05:00] Delair. So I don't think you can even buy it anymore, but it was a good drone.
Had a, had a good camera, which is, is mostly what matters. It served us well for, for several years,
David Young: Wow. so what are you using these days?
Zach Pieper: these days, we're mostly flying, DJI Mavic 3D for the smaller projects, and that's also what we sell contractors for a drone kit.
And then, uh, we have a Delair UX11 fixed wing drone that we use for, for large area
David Young: flights. Okay, so you had your experience, doing grading, or you said, you know, moving earth and stuff. and you saw some value, or I guess maybe thought that drones could be useful in that.
I mean, did you ever use drones when you were doing, earth moving stuff?
Zach Pieper: Now, I never, weren't even really an option at the time. Yeah, no, I never thought about it. Now we did plenty of our own topographic surveying with our machine control, our TopCon GPS equipment. I suppose the value, and others saw in that, let us grow into the drone side to cover larger areas faster with, more
David Young: detail.
Yeah. Talk about that for a little bit. Cause a lot of people listen to this podcaster can be newer to drones in general sometimes, but a lot of them will definitely not have a certain civil engineering or surveying background. So you talked about some like. 3d [00:06:00] machine control and, doing topographic stuff with machines that you had.
Give us a little overview of what all that is.
Zach Pieper: let's see. I'll start with machine control. So, machine control is a GPS system that you can either carry around with a base and a rover, which would be, the base would be a GPS, receiver that you set on the job site in a permanent location and the rovers and when you carry around.
So that's the one you'll see a surveyor on the side of the road carrying a stick with something on top. That's the rover. he's looking at a screen and he can collect data about that area. Okay. it equates to, you know, latitude, longitude, and elevation, but it's more in local coordinate systems.
you can collect that data by hand and make a topographic 3D survey out of that. Or, as you move into the drone side, you can then, collect that same data through photogrammetry with a drone. So, we'll combine the, the basin rover, the machine control side to take a few points around the site.
And then we'll fly over that with the drone, and then we can make that 3D drone data match up with your machine control data and what your civil engineers and surveyors have done in the past. That way you can measure, volume calculations, distances, stockpile sizes, really anything [00:07:00] you need to measure with that data, you can then do, and every layer of data stacks up from the survey to the engineer to the contractor's machine control model to the, drone flights and, past that.
the other thing with machine control that's interesting is we can take the plan set from a job site. So the construction plans, the blueprints, and then we can also take the CAD file and build a 3D model out of that. So that's a huge part of our business is we build those models and then the contractor will use that model to stake out.
to mark where features are on the site, whether it might be a building or sewer lines, and then there's also the 3D component of that, so they can read their cut fills, how much dirt they have to add, how much dirt they have to remove from an area to get to the engineer's design grade. that data, they can then actually load that in machines, and, the blades and buckets even can be automated on the machines to automatically grade out to the design surface, whether that's the, super elevation on the road, curves, building pads will be flat, anything like that.
So whatever the engineer has in their blueprint prints, their plans, then you have a 3D model of that, that the machine can, automatically grade out and you can check with your rover. And we [00:08:00] can also fly over and check it against your survey data from the drone or even a hand, survey.
David Young: So when you say automatically, like these are fully autonomous, like machines or there's someone sitting in there and the buckets just moving automatically?
yeah,
Zach Pieper: would be the word. So someone's in the machine at all times, you know, controlling it. But they can push a button or flip a switch and the blade will go from manual control with your hand controls in the cab to automatically following that 3d grade model So they'll drive and direct the machine where they'd like it to go and the newer ones You can actually get to steer along lines and follow certain features of the job site And they'll hold the blade at the proper grade to finish out that site.
So it's pretty cool stuff. it's been around for a little while, but it's really grown in some last five
David Young: years or so. to say, I'd never heard about that. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. I mean, it's
Zach Pieper: fun stuff and productive.
David Young: Yeah. not to nerd out too much, and this isn't even about the drone stuff, but like, so if I'm driving one of these machines and you talk, when you say a blade and a bucket, obviously I'm thinking of like, you know, a bucket.
You, you know, bulldozer picking stuff up or whatever. And when you say blade, is that [00:09:00] like the, like long blades that go underneath, uh, those machines, like a,
Zach Pieper: like a blade on the front of a bulldozer or a, when you're saying underneath, I think you're probably thinking of a motor grader. So it could be the blade underneath the motor grader or a, or a bulldozer would be the two most common machines.
David Young: And so the driver's just driving and the blades automatically moving up and down to match whatever the grade is for that
Zach Pieper: spot, whatever the 3d model. Tells it, it needs to be, it'll follow that. Yeah, exactly.
David Young: You got it. Dude. That's wild. That's awesome. so data is pretty important in it being accurate.
It's very important. So give us real quick. So like if the grade is off or they can't confirm the grade or whatever, right. what problems does, does that cause? And if you ever had an instance where like. Somehow there was an error in data or whatever. And the grade wasn't what it was supposed to be.
sure.
Zach Pieper: So, we've had, actually a fairly recent one. We've processed three or four times for a contractor. We sold a drone kit. So the original topographic data from the site, the engineer had was, was not very accurate, apparently. So the engineer ran volume calculations off of that versus their design.
Well, the contractor got on site and started moving dirt. Like, Hey, things aren't matching up. [00:10:00] they did a survey with the drone. We were able to compare that to their, their machine control model that we built and say, Hey, there's, I don't know what it was, but say a hundred thousand yards that you have to move on this, on this project site.
Well, the engineer only calculated, say, 75, 000 yards, whatever the number was. So there's a 25, 000 yard difference. So the contractor is asking to get paid to move that 25, 000 yards of dirt, you know, and it's six figure numbers there. So, you know, the value is there and doing the work. then they have the data they need to go back to the engineer and say, you know, Hey, these are the current conditions on the site.
Here's what your design is. Here's the amount of dirt we have to move. You know, something was off earlier. So then they've got everything they need to back themselves up and take that case to the owner and the engineer and, you know, say, Hey, we need, we need compensated for what we're, what we're doing
David Young: here.
So bad data means bad money estimates and somebody is going to get screwed one way or the other. If that happens, it does.
Zach Pieper: Yeah. And they're, they're big numbers too. You know, they're not 500, 000 mistakes. You know, these are six figure mistakes. A lot of times it adds up really fast
David Young: Yeah. Wow. I didn't realize that was so expensive.
so how did you, worked for [00:11:00] Caterpillar and then you got into this other thing. How did you get all this experience with like the civil engineering side or knowing coordinate systems and any of that? Like, how did you get into that? just
Zach Pieper: did it, I guess. I kind of grew up and we've done a lot of our own grading on the farm and.
company had a company, our family had had a construction business for a while. And I guess just over time, learned how to read plans and, kind of figured it out. You know, when I got into machine control in our own contracting company, I mean, that kind of forces you to learn about, you know, coordinate systems and GPS and 3d models and all that.
So, you know, just slowly over time, you keep building on that knowledge and you branch out a little bit to the drone side. It's the same base knowledge. It's just a different application of it. So. The main thing is you just have to get out and do the work.
David Young: Yeah, I know. Cause I talk to people all the time who they're like, they enjoy like data and they like that side.
they're like, Oh, and drones are cool. What's some Avenue that I could get involved with drones. And I constantly have to explain to people like flying drone isn't that hard. It's really all about all the stuff you're going to do with data. Once you get it, whether it's like videos, you're going to edit photos or, you know, on this side, like there's so much more to know [00:12:00] besides just.
Going out and flying the drone and having it capture a bunch of photos for photogrammetry, but a lot of people, their big weakness is like they have no idea about any of the stuff and they don't really know how to get experience with it. I mean, so I guess you, learned it through doing some of the contracting stuff, but if you were talking to somebody and they were like, man, that sounds really cool.
I want to work in that field or whatever, cause you don't have any like academic background in like civil engineering, right? No, no, not specifically. No. Yeah. so let's say somebody else, they don't, you know, they didn't like go to college to be an engineer. What would you recommend for them to do if they're trying to figure out how to get experience with that or learn it or whatever?
Zach Pieper: Start small, and just go out and do it. Go out to contractors, ask questions. a lot of times the salespeople, Topcon, Trimble, Leica salespeople will have like demo days and that you can go to those type of things and learn a little bit. There are just loads of resources online.
Your website, we've got things on, you know, YouTube and articles on our website, a lot of good information on LinkedIn. I mean, you've just got to get out there and do it and learn. So the overwhelming part is usually the data side. So the stuff that we do in the office and, and frankly, there's usually more work on the office than the [00:13:00] field for a lot of these projects.
You know, to get good data in a useful format and get the volume calculations. So, contractors tend to get a little bit overwhelmed more on the data side. I mean, their jobs have gotten moved dirt and complete jobs and, you know, submit the pay applications for that, move on to the next one. So we try to, most of them, we train how to fly.
So we teach them how to set up and lay out ground control, how to measure it with their GPS system, and then teach them how to fly. So they already know how to use their GPS system, ground control shouldn't be too hard, and as you know, the flying is not terribly difficult. You just have to, do a good job and take care of details and make sure you take some decent photos.
And then we take the rest of that back in the office and handle the data side. So they kind of move into that one step at a time. I mean, it'd be a big elephant to eat, to try to take on flights and all the data and make deliverables that are good enough for a civil engineering company. So I just start off one piece at a time.
like when we sell a contractor or anyone, a drone, the biggest problem we have is that we'll sell it to them. They won't have an immediate business need for it. Maybe they're going to, well, we'll use it on the next project. Well, and that sits for say three months and they get maybe. You can even say [00:14:00] scared of it, you know, they're not comfortable going out and using it, even though you've trained them.
I just tell them, take, take the thing out behind your house, go out, look for deer, fly around the neighborhood, you know, do whatever, you know, take it out in the country, fly around a little bit, just, just get your fingers on the sticks and get comfortable with it. And then once you've got a job site, you'll be able to just, just take off.
David Young: I want to talk about your, your businesses for a sec. When you first got started 2015, so it sounds like now correct me if I'm wrong. of your business is working with contractors, equipping them with the drones or training them up on it so they can collect the data.
And then you're providing a service in the processing reports and creating models for their machines. Is that right? Correct. Yeah. Okay. I guess which of those is which company? So the quantum land design is the one working with contractors. So that's where you would create those machine models for them, give that to them so they can plug that into their grading equipment.
So that's the quantum design side. And so the Aero service side. Tell us a little bit about the work you do with civil engineers and stuff on the arrow view service [00:15:00] side.
Zach Pieper: It's really very similar work. So what we'll do for an engineering firm, either they'll fly the drone, same thing as a contractor, they'll fly the drone and collect the data on the site, send us the photos and ground control, or even light our data.
And we'll process that into a format that they can then use in their CAD software. So we'll make a bare earth model for them typically. So we'll take out the buildings, the trees, the power lines, any of those kind of above ground details that are relevant in a topographic survey. And we'll make that into a 3d model and a contour map that they can load in whatever.
You know, civil engineering software. They use, you know, oftentimes it's Autodesk civil 3d, but there's there's several other ones and we can give them whatever formats they need and then they have the data they need to design the site off of, you know, to make the plans for the, for the project that the engineer that needs the machine control model for, we do go out and fly still.
So we'll go out and fly for, Really most of it's within three, four hours at home. I want you to get into overnight. So it starts getting a little more expensive, we'll also go out and fly and, usually we'll lay out the ground control, they'll shoot it with their, uh, with their GPS or even, other types of surveying equipment, and then we'll collect the data in the field [00:16:00] and bring it back and do the same thing.
But our thing with them is we give them data. They can immediately use in their engineering software. They don't have to do any file conversions or processing or invest in any new software or anything like that. It's just immediately usable. In their current process. So they don't have to have to start over with the whole new layer of technology.
David Young: Yeah. I imagine that's a big benefit for them. It's like, they don't just a headache. They don't have to worry about it and they can just implement it right into what
Zach Pieper: they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. They avoid the training, the software, the computers, all that. they just have data they can use and they can hire us to do it three times a year or 20 times a year, you know, whatever, the type of projects they have
David Young: required.
Yeah, that's cool. Now, is it just you? I think you said you had a partner with the quantum land designer. We'll tell us
Zach Pieper: about it. There's three of us that own the business now and there's, there's eight total employees. So we've, uh, we've grown a bit over the year. the majority of employees are involved in the, machine control model side.
that's the higher volume side of our business. So we do that, do that for contractors all over North America, really. Canada even, and did a couple of projects in Australia this year. So that's kind of cool. But yeah, it's coming online. So we'll, we take all comers.
David Young: That's awesome. [00:17:00] the start of the business, was it just you and you know, the, the other business partner or what did it look like when you very, when you first started off and then maybe tell us a little about how you got your very first client, like paying client
Zach Pieper: doing this kind of work.
Okay, sure. it was, Ryan and I and Warren's the other business partner. Now, Ryan and I kind of started the drone side of it. And, our first clients were engineering firms. So both of us had contacts in the industry.
we're able to reach out to people and, you know, say, Hey, this is what we've got going on. We did a lot of presentations to engineering firms. So we'd come in and do like a lunch and learn type thing. It was usually what we did. So we'd show up. Sometimes we even bring the drone and show them, show them what we've got, show them some examples of the data and, you know, try to convince them of the, you know, the value that we could bring to it.
And really a lot of the values in the ortho photo too, to have an updated, you know, overhead view of the job site. Usually the data available online is several years old or, you know, especially at that time was very expensive to gather with a manned airplane. that and cold calls to engineering firms are how we picked up our first clients.
So it takes a little while and then as soon as some of them, buy into the value and they've done a job or two and they. understand what the drone data brings to the table. we've had some of those clients since day one. [00:18:00] Uh, we've had some that have hired us for a couple of years and decided to invest on their own and do their own data, which, which is fine too.
So anything that gets people interested in drone data, using the data and, applying it to their, field is, valuable, it just increases the buy in through the industry.
David Young: Yeah. I think you're very. Smart to on the business model of being like, how do you scale?
You know, it's hard to, if you're going to travel all over the place, right. With actually collecting the data, but at least training them up on that piece of it, and then still, helping them with all the processing. Cause it seems like a headache. They don't want to have to probably deal with, and it allows you to kind of.
Build out maybe a team, of your own to just handle all that other volume. So that's, that was fairly, that's pretty smart.
Zach Pieper: Yeah, no, it's worked out well. We used to travel all over the country, flying that us five and collecting, data for different types of projects. And then after.
I'd say three or four years of that. There were enough people in the part 107 licenses came out and it got a little bit simpler to go out and fly commercially. once that picked up, we've kind of backed off some of the, some of the flying and most of that data comes to us now we process it at house.
So yeah, that's more efficient for us to handle. And we're based out of Southeast Iowa. So there's [00:19:00] not a ton of activity right around our area either. So, anything we can do to bring in data that we can handle and send back out, you know, just electronically is, is
David Young: ideal. Yeah, that's cool. you were cold calling people and, doing lunch and learns.
Was that mostly locally at first or was that just all over the place?
Zach Pieper: I'd say within three or four hours. So again, within that, you can go out and find a job in a day and come home that day. So once you start getting into overnight, it starts getting expensive. most of that was within two, three hours at home, just with engineering firms that we knew were reached out to, or it even reached out to us.
David Young: And then, now you do business with people all over the country in North America. Did you expand your sort of outreach efforts or those just people who found you through referrals and online and stuff like that?
Zach Pieper: Yeah, various areas, referrals online. Uh, we get a few come in off of the YouTube or a website of either read a blog post we've put up or seen a video that kind of made sense to them or maybe got them interested.
they kind of come in from all over. I mean, we still do cold calls to good potential clients. That's, uh, just a. Yeah, good way to reach out to people. At the very least, let them know you're there. sometimes you might not hear back [00:20:00] for a year and they might remember you and give you a holler with a new job.
So those are, those are kind of fun to get in. But, you know, and we also leverage the existing client client base of, you know, quantum land design on the contractor site, particularly to, those guys need data for construction. You know, we're the guys they call with questions.
David Young: Yeah, that's cool. I just looked up your YouTube, or at least quantum land designs.
YouTube. Do you have a YouTube account for the other one too, or no? We do.
Zach Pieper: Yeah. Airview does. We haven't posted much on there for a while. most of the educational content we put up is geared more towards the contractor side. I mean, they're the ones with the typically have less experience or, you know, are more curious into, into getting into it.
And that's who we sell almost all of our drone kits to our contractors. Yeah, this is
David Young: cool. Is it called the quantum flight
Zach Pieper: pack? Yeah, it is. It is. Yup. Yeah. It's a DJI Mavic 3E now
David Young: Man, that's cool. I love it.
Zach Pieper: Yeah. Yeah. No, just all kind of basic, simple educational type stuff to help you put the equipment to work.
David Young: that's very, very smart. I don't know how comfortable we are about talking about any numbers, but like when you were first starting out, What was like the exact service that you'd offer to like a engineering firm? And like, how did you figure out what to charge them?
Zach Pieper: it's value based pricing really. [00:21:00] So the service we initially sold and, you know, mostly still do sell is we'll come out, you set ground control. So you measure the ground control targets and get us in your survey coordinate system. We'll come out and fly the site.
We'll process the data and we'll give you a bare earth surface that you can then, you know, load into whatever engineering software you use. So that's the, that was the basics of it. I mean, we've added on things like, planometrics or something we do pretty often now. so we'll take the ortho photo and we'll draw the 2d lines on top of that in CAD and, drawing things like buildings, power poles, street signs, like storm sewer intakes.
We can mark all that stuff off the ortho photo. So then they have that CAD background line work. that they can use to help build their existing conditions, CAD file off of, so those are, yeah, those are the basic things we offered, uh, initially and, and really what we still offer is still a bread and butter.
usually once you get them to do one job, they're, they're calling back for the next, you know, job that makes sense before too long. clients are big for
David Young: us. Nice. That's awesome. clearly it was enough for you. Did you just dive into this full time, like doing all this stuff right off the bat, or did you have to ease into the business
Zach Pieper: or how did that work?
Yeah, ease into it. I mean, it takes a little [00:22:00] time to build out some clients. I mean, it really took us a couple of years to get, you know, busy with it. And at that time, it was, uh, Definitely an outlying technology, you know, a lot of people didn't trust it or didn't know what to think it was, passing fad maybe even, and it honestly, it took a lot longer for both engineering firms and contractors to pick up on it.
I mean, we thought it would pick up faster than it did. So it wasn't a hundred percent full time at first, but, you know, got to that fairly quickly as we grew, you know, both the machine control and the drone side of the business. Yeah.
David Young: so everybody loves to talk about software are using the same software now used at the beginning, right?
What do you use to do all your data processing? We use
Zach Pieper: pics 40 for our basic photogrammetry processing. Yeah, I can't go wrong with it. on the data processing side, after that, I mean, we have a wide range of software. So we've got the, you know, Autodesk products, we have Bentley products.
We have, Carlson, of course, we have global mapper. So we use whatever software package we need to get the deliverables out to that client, the format they need. So it could be even on the contractor side, it might be like a Trimble business center or ag tech. we can deliver in all those formats. our thing is we give people data in a format [00:23:00] that they can just use in whatever software they know and have, or if we need to take it so far as doing all their volume calculations and, even simple design type work for a contractor, we can, we can handle that too.
And deliver that all in like machine control formats that they can put right in their machines and put to work.
David Young: That's cool. Is it get pretty expensive having, having to have all like soft software license for all those different types of. All those pieces of software, those sounds like a lot of expensive.
Zach Pieper: It's ridiculous. Yeah. It's exceedingly expensive. And now that it's all subscription models, it's even worse. Right. But we're fortunate. We're almost all of the software overlaps on the machine control side too. So yeah, we can use the same software packages on both sides of the business. So we'll do a few thousand machine control models every year, and our thousand.
Yeah. Oh yeah. Quite a few. And our, uh, our drone data side too. So. between those two, we can spread that software cost out over enough work that it works out. All right.
David Young: Yeah. Now, do you, when you use PIX4D, are you using like PIX4D mapper, like on a local machine or using PIX4D cloud?
Zach Pieper: Yeah. We're all local still.
Okay. Yeah. Now we have two processing PCs that [00:24:00] burn through the electricity. So
David Young: Yeah. That's awesome. Now, fun fact. I went to the beach with my in laws and my family and whatever their family this past summer. we're trying to figure out like the place we rented had some type of beach access, but we're trying to find it.
We feel like we were walking on other people's property and this dude's like staring at us. And we're like, Oh my, I think we're not in the right place. And he was, he ends up talking to us and he's a nice dude. we ended up chitchatting or whatever and, asked him about my father and all he'll talk to like a brick wall, you know, so he's asking this guy all sorts of questions and he's like, Oh, what do you do?
Oh, he's like, I own one of these beach houses. Oh, cool. How'd you get in? You know, how'd you pick it up? He's like, well, I sold a company and, you know, got some money, cashed out, bought this beach house. Oh, what company? He's like, Oh, it's Bentley. if you've ever heard of like, you know, like 3d, like I was like, what?
So I'm sure he wasn't like the sole owner, but I don't know one of the people who. Made money on when they sold it to whomever they exited it from. So I just thought it was so funny. I was like, well, I have a buddy who uses it and some stuff. And I texted him, I'm like the guy who owned a small world, right?
I know. Right. So that was pretty funny. so you'll [00:25:00] take something like walk us through maybe for people who are unfamiliar with all these different software packages. And maybe a lot of people have heard of PICS4D and Autodesk and some of these, but, you'd say someone who's unfamiliar.
Walk us through how it might work for like someone who needs, like an engineer who needs some deliverable from a orthomosaic image. You're going to go out and fly it, you're going to process it through Pix4DMapper, what other software might you typically process it through and generally, like, what are you doing?
Like, what's the workflow look like?
Zach Pieper: again, it, it varies quite a bit. the different types of projects, we'll use different types of software to get the deliverables we need. But, for example, on say a smaller site, we'll process that in Pix four D. it might come in a global map or we'll do some cleanup with the point cloud, we'll make the ortho photo, maybe a couple different formats or file sizes or wherever they might need to do a little bit of work in there. And then we'll pull over into the civil engineering side of the software. So we'll bring it in there. We'll build a, we'll build a 3D surface for them.
We'll obviously check that for accuracy versus the ground control and any survey checkpoints we have. We'll build a contour map off of that. They usually, usually like if there's anything like plan of [00:26:00] metrics, we have to draw in 2D features on the site. Okay. we'll do that, you know, with the ortho photo and the 3d data in the, in the CAD software, we'll export that out and, you know, whatever CAD format it is they need.
So whether it's, you know, civil 3d or just some generic formats, like maybe a land XML or something like that. if it's a contractor, we then pulled in a tremble business center and maybe give them tremble deliverables too. They can use their own software.
David Young: Now, when you're doing all this stuff, do you ever run into Issues because I've had people there, they go, they do it and they're like, Oh, they get in there and they're like, Oh wait, this data doesn't look right.
And then they got to go back out. Do you ever have any issues? So like, what's your biggest problem when you're trying to run through these models, you ever had any like data quality issues or is there any kind of recurring theme that you have to watch out for when you're doing this stuff?
Zach Pieper: two biggest problems are ground control and photos.
to do good survey grade data, you need some kind of ground control. Even if you have an RTK, PPK drill and whatever, you still need something to tie that back into the ground and your local survey data. Poor ground control layout or no ground control, maybe ground control that's [00:27:00] not visible from overhead and they'll put it, say, you know, next to a power pole or too close to a tree, something like that.
You can't see the targets in, uh, in very many photos. So poor ground controls, you know, one potential issue that crops up once in a while. And the second one that honestly is probably a little more common are, you know, just a poor flight plan or poor quality photos. So either don't fly the area they needed to fly.
Maybe they fly half of it. Maybe they don't fly far enough over towards the edge, something like that, and we ended up missing part of the site the other one's just photo quality. So photo quality gets to be more of a problem as we get to this time of the year, because it's a darn dark all the time.
So someone will want to go up and fly first thing in the morning. Well, if you go to eight o'clock in the morning and, northern part of the country, now your photos are probably going to be way too dark. So getting flying at the time of day where you have some decent sunlight, making sure your camera is set up properly to get good, clean photos with lots of details, is a bit of an issue, but it's fairly rare to get a data set in that's completely useless.
we're pretty clear about what we need and expect for ground control if they want good data. And like I said, on YouTube and that, and, you [00:28:00] know, we tell them on the phone how to set up their cameras right to get decent photos. So as long as you have decent ground control and decent photos, the data is probably going to come out useful.
Now it might not be quite as accurate as it could be, you know, with everything optimized, but, the vast majority of the time we're able to process and get good data. it's the. Late fall, winter guys trying to fly with snow on the ground type stuff, or it doesn't turn out very well.
David Young: That makes sense.
Now you mentioned LIDAR earlier, right? You'll process some LIDAR data sets. when you were starting the business on the drone side, when you were doing kind of like the data acquisition, would you guys fly any LIDAR sensors or is that just more on the processing side that you do that?
Zach Pieper: More on the processing side.
We've never actually owned a LIDAR sensor. So, uh, we just, we get the LIDAR data in from people all over the country again, and then we'll process that, you know, using roughly the same processes to make that into a bare surface. So, we might do something like say they fly a site with photogrammetry in a smaller area on the active site, but they need to tie in the larger area to figure out the drainage.
for a civil engineering firm, so we can take their drone data from the smaller area, pull the state, the free to [00:29:00] light our data from the state for the much larger drainage basin, and we can merge that data together. And then they can do their drainage calcs off of that for, uh, you know, for the state and federal authorities to get the permits they need to complete the project.
So we've done that for large areas like, golf courses or any kind of big drainage basin, large ponds, that type of thing where you have to. You have to prove out the water you have coming in and how you're going to get it
David Young: out. Yeah. What's that? I mean, for people who are not civil engineering people, like I'm not, you know, like I've never even, I don't even know about these processes that are required.
Like, so what does someone have to show if they're, building out something or working on a golf course? what is the drainage even have to do with anything or what are the requirements that they have to do?
Zach Pieper: Well, they want to know how much water is coming onto the site, right? So they can then design.
How the site is, they don't have excess erosion or flooding around buildings or that type of thing. So they'll look at the possible flooded areas. You'll see how the water is coming on to the site. How fast is going off to the site. And then they also have to design the site where the water doesn't leave the site.
Roughly, you could say it doesn't leave the site faster than it did before they developed it. So that's why you see [00:30:00] things like the little detention ponds, next to the fast food place. That's where all those little ponds are around town is to hold that water back and let it drain out at, you know, roughly the same rate that it would have if the land was undeveloped, you know, to help eliminate flooding problems.
So that's a lot of it. And say, if you were doing a project like a large pond, you need to make sure you have enough drainage around the area to fill a pond and, you know, keep it maintained in full. that's another example where they didn't know the drainage for a larger area, you know, and that could be a 20 acre area that drains into it or a 200 acre area or 1000, you know, whatever it is, you can, you can pull that data from the state and tie that into your little more accurate local survey for design.
David Young: So the state, do they do like huge LIDAR maps or something that they make available?
Zach Pieper: Yeah. I shouldn't say most, as far as I know, most States or at least counties do, they hire out, LIDAR and orthographic photo sites every, it varies from every, usually it's about every two years and sometimes it gets strung out as long as 10 years.
So, the counties often, have at least the ortho photos done just for their, uh, you know, their tax folks. They can see if you've added buildings, taken away buildings that, you know, added a bunch of driveway or something like [00:31:00] that and tax you for it. more of a statewide level and, uh, and some counties will fly LIDAR flights.
So then they can get the 3d data for the, drainage type information and design.
David Young: Now, have you ever pursued those as customers like municipalities and in states or, no?
Zach Pieper: Not too much. don't fly large enough areas with drones for, for most of those type of contracts. usually that's done with an airplane.
They're big enough areas that it makes sense to get in a manned aircraft and do it. a manned aircraft can carry very good sensors that, you know, a drone just can't even pick up off the ground.
David Young: Gotcha. no, that makes sense. That makes sense. I don't know how much you know about this, but like if a airplane is carrying a LIDAR sensor, I guess it can travel pretty far.
I mean, I don't know as much about LIDAR as other, you know, photogrammetry I don't know how low do they have to fly to get good LIDAR,
Zach Pieper: returns. Yeah. I don't know exactly. It's fairly high, higher than you'd think. I don't remember the exact numbers, but they can, the LIDAR sensors on manned aircraft are really, really good anymore.
And the same thing with the cameras. I mean, they're really good. So they can, they can fly pretty high and get, you know, almost as good a, you know, ground sample distance, you know, [00:32:00] photo clarity, I guess you could say
David Young: as a drone. Yeah, no, that's awesome. so, you've talked about like the business and how you kind of got started and what led to going from, was it always the three partners or was it the two?
And then you guys added a third.
Zach Pieper: quickly got into the third, with the machine control. So yeah, I started out with two and fairly quickly, uh, or in the, or in the other partner came on and he's focused more on the machine control side, but yeah. So it's, it's the three of us now. And then, Yeah. Eight of us total.
Yeah. And are there
David Young: another one or two next year? Oh, really? Cool. Where do you, uh, are they, are they all local or do you have people that are remote?
Zach Pieper: local. Yeah. For training reasons, we, we tend to bring them in all local. We've had the best luck bringing in, kids out of the CAD program at the junior college and, you know, training them to do what we need them to do.
it works out well, they come in as interns, they get a chance to see if they're interested in what we do and we get a chance to see if they're competent in what we do. And then, uh, if it works out, we hope to offer one or two every year, a full time job.
David Young: that's smart. Yeah. That's a cool opportunity for them too.
Like, you know, being from there and getting to put actually practice and use what they actually learned in school, which is rare for a lot of people.
Zach Pieper: It is. Yeah. Yeah. Me included. Right. [00:33:00] So that's the
David Young: truth. what did you go to school for originally?
Zach Pieper: I went to school for agricultural business got a minor in construction management.
Yeah. I got a minor in construction management.
David Young: So you're at least like somewhere in the family of what you had, you know, studied in, in school. Yeah. In the
Zach Pieper: stadium, I guess. Something like that. Yeah. In the, in the ballpark.
David Young: Not directly. No, that's cool. So as far as the future of the business goes, where are you guys trying to go from here?
It sounds like you're doing thousands of these machine control models and doing stuff all over North America. Like what's the plan to just do more of the same, or do you have any exciting things in the works? we're sticking
Zach Pieper: with our core competence, so we'll keep growing the, you know, the machine control side of it.
You know, contractors, there's more contractors every day buying into 3D machine control and existing ones that are, you know, growing that part of their business. as folks like that and engineering firms need drone data, either, you know, flown or processed, we can handle that too. So, I mean, there's plenty of work out there.
I mean, we're always keeping an eye out on new technology and what's developing and, you know, evolving the different types of software we use and how we deliver our data. now, as far as our basic core business, I don't see any, you know, [00:34:00] huge changes, you know, coming in the, in the near future. there's plenty of growth in what we're doing.
Yeah, no, I just, just stay out there. If it's
David Young: not broke, don't fix it.
Zach Pieper: That's just it. Yeah. You can, you can burn a lot of time trying to do some specialty that maybe doesn't really have that big of a market, but seems fun to you.
David Young: that's so true. have you ever read the book, the, or heard of the book, the one thing by, Gary Keller?
I have, but I haven't read it is basically what you're talking about. part of it's like, basically don't get so scattered that you're going to drive yourself in so many different directions or try to work on too many different things at once. Cause you'll end up just like not really doing well.
I don't even just like stay focused on like the one thing that matters. That's making a difference in whatever you're trying to accomplish. So she reminds me a little bit about your, your statement. No stick.
Zach Pieper: We've dabbled around the edges and tried different things and some have worked and some haven't.
I mean, you don't, you don't know if you don't try, right? But, I guess one example for us would actually be agriculture. So, of course, being in the Midwest, everyone expects us to be flying agriculture type projects. Well, our core competence and knowledge is in the, civil engineering type side of the work.
So, we've kind of stuck with that and, you know, stayed away from that agriculture work and, you know, it's worked out fine for us. [00:35:00] Agriculture is a whole different market, whole different round of people to sell to. I mean, honestly, it'd be a whole different business for us. we've actually avoided that right or wrong.
and kind of stuck with what we know.
David Young: we just made like a really good effort and point of really understanding contractors and engineers and what problems they have. And so it sounds like you have no problem getting repeat clients, which says a lot to how effective you are at working with them.
Man. Well, this has been a great convo. I'm sure we could talk even more, but I don't wanna take up too much of your time. sure. I appreciate it. but if people wanna find out more about, you know, either the Quantum Land Design business or the AirView services business, or find out more about you, I guess, what are the best places for them to look?
I, I see you have a YouTube channel. I know that for sure.
Zach Pieper: I guess the quantum land design.com and AirView services.com are our two websites. I have a lot of free educational content on quantumlanddesign. com, uh, from written articles to, you know, YouTube videos and YouTube videos that compliment the written articles.
that's really probably the best place to start no matter what your industry is, if you're kind of interested in the type of work we do. obviously that can be found on LinkedIn. 3D grading is my Instagram handle. try to post some more content from the field, the shorter type stuff on there, or, I [00:36:00] dunno, sometimes just things that are fun and then, our YouTube channel.
So we keep kind of growing that most of the things we add to the YouTube channel are done through the winter as we have a little more time, but we've got some plans for that. This, uh, this winter, there's a good range, I think, of drone things, uh, mostly educational type content to learn how to. Fly and collect good data.
we have a pretty good stock of, machine control videos to how to do some basic things on your basin rover for a contractor, basic stakeout stuff, how to set things up. we have a pretty good number of videos on, excavators and bulldozers, how to use the machine control on those, uh, in those systems too.
So if you're interested in that type of stuff might be a good place to start and just kind of get a basic understanding Of what it is. And you know, there's plenty of good resources out
David Young: there too. That's awesome. Who does your YouTube video stuff?
Is it you? Nice. Awesome. Cool. Yeah. We'll link all that up in the, show notes or description but yeah, Zach, I really appreciate your time and, and walking us through all this. I know a lot of people love hearing all the kind of technical side of things announced and other things besides, you know, just like what a lot of people think about when they think about drones, I think real estate or, video production, but it's [00:37:00] cool to hear about how it's actually applied in a lot of the more like technical trades and, you know, engineering.
So very, very cool. Well have a good one, Zach, and I appreciate you coming on.
Zach Pieper: Hey, thanks a lot, David. Appreciate you reaching out.