Three things before you read a word of this post:
- Wet Dog Drone Services is not a licensed surveying business. We're a Part 107 drone mapping outfit. We fly the same job site every two weeks, hand the GC an ortho and a 3D model the morning of the OAC meeting, and let a licensed surveyor handle the boundary, control, and ALTA work when there is one. Rami Tamimi — the guy in the video — is a P.S. (licensed Professional Surveyor). His business is built around his license. Ours is built around ours not being one. More on why that matters below.
- We are an affiliate of the Survey School community. Rami runs it. Michael is a member. The link to the Survey School elsewhere in this post is an affiliate link, and Wet Dog Drone Services may earn a commission if you sign up through it, at no cost to you. We did not commission, pay for, or otherwise compensate Rami or the Survey School for the making of the linked video. We did not pay for, sponsor, or otherwise receive compensation for this post beyond the standard affiliate relationship described above.
- The title is a little clickbaity. “Inside a $100K/Year Drone Surveying Business” sounds like a surveyor's playbook. The actual video spends most of its 20 minutes on the boring parts of running a mapping business: parking in the same spot, throwing checkerboard targets, swearing at excavators, running UgCS missions, telling a story about a 970-foot state plane offset that almost broke his brain. The title sells the credential. The video shows the work.
If you're still here, let's talk about what the video actually shows and where Wet Dog plays differently.
What Rami Gets Right
Rami is generous with the technical detail. Most YouTube drone-business videos are 80% hype and 20% substance. This one is the other way around. A few things in particular that line up with how we run Holly Hills too:
- The same base, every visit. Michael walks through setting up the Emlid over the same monument he's been using since February. Two-hour static log, a post-processed solution every third visit, 60-mile baseline to the nearest CORS. If you move your base every flight, you introduce variance you can't see. Rami calls this out: “That's the benefit of using the same base every single time.” This is the single biggest reason week-over-week orthos line up.
- Five GCPs per visit, four corners and a center. 10 to 17 acres is the typical site. The four-corners-and-a-middle layout isn't a hard rule, but it's a clean one — table-leg geometry, “all four corners and then that middle support just to hold everything up.” Michael runs 23 GCPs in the surrounding network and shoots them on rotation to confirm the local control is still good. Cheap insurance.
- The 12-hour turn cycle. Arrive 6:15. On site 7 to 1. Process overnight. Email at 6 AM. Ortho on the OAC table at 8. Rami walks through this in the first three minutes. It's the operational backbone of a weekly progress-monitoring contract. Without it, you're a photographer. With it, you're the guy the superintendent calls first.
- The “voodoo blackmagic” of processing is downstream of the field work. Michael doesn't talk about Pix4D much in the video. He talks about where he parks, what gear he carries, how the targets are oriented, what the base-station log looks like. The drone is the easy part. The work is everywhere else.
- “I don't want to be the smartest guy in the room. I don't, because I'm in the wrong room.” Michael says this near the end, after Rami catches the modified-state-plane offset in five minutes and Michael has spent weeks trying to figure out what he was missing. It's the most useful line in the video, and the most underpriced.
Where Wet Dog Plays Differently
Rami is a licensed surveyor. He can stamp plats, set control, run an ALTA. That license is what makes the “Drone Surveying Business” framing in his title technically defensible. Wet Dog doesn't have a license to defend. We're Part 107 — we can fly commercially, we can deliver decision-grade mapping for GCs, and we cannot produce a legal survey. The line is hard, and it matters.
What that means in practice:
- A pre-con baseline ortho is not a legal survey. It's evidence. It's a timestamped, georeferenced, undeniable record of what a site looked like on a specific day. We use it to settle disputes before they become change orders. We don't use it to establish a property line. A licensed surveyor comes out, sets the control network, and never comes back. We use the same control network and fly every two weeks.
- A progress-monitoring ortho is not a legal survey. It's the morning-of-the-OAC evidence that the GC needs to decide whether the paving sub's claim holds up. A surveyor doesn't do that work. We do.
- A volumetric delta is not a legal survey. It's a number a GC can use to bill against an earthwork contract, with the audit trail to back it up. The number is decision-grade. It is not stamped.
- A 970-foot state plane offset is a great story but not our problem. Michael tells it well in the video — engineer gave him points on a modified state plane, he was using straight state plane, the math stopped mathing, Rami figured it out in a five-minute conversation. We don't have to deal with that class of problem because we don't do control. The GC's engineer and the GC's surveyor handle the geodetic reference frame. We deliver against it.
If you're a GC reading this, the takeaway is simple: the data we hand you is evidence, not a legal document. The metadata doesn't lie. The metadata also doesn't replace a PLS stamp. If you need a stamp, call a surveyor. If you need to know whether the paving sub's claim is real, call us.
The Michael Lilley Moment Worth Naming
Around the eleven-minute mark, Rami asks Michael why he doesn't cut his on-site time down. Michael is on a 5-hour on-site, 12-hour-all-in cycle, with 8% of the time being actual flying. Rami: “why wouldn't you try to figure out how to cut down your time on site?” Michael: “Okay, so I could cut down on my time on site if I talked less.”
[The group laughs. Someone says “I don't think anybody believes you.”]
That's Michael. He is a genuinely effective drone operator. He is also, on a job site with a busload of Survey School members, fully prepared to spend four hours not flying the drone. The 12-hour turn cycle is real. The reason it's a 12-hour turn cycle and not an 8-hour turn cycle is partly the work and partly the man. We tell you this because if you hire us, you're hiring the man. He's good. He's also a chatterbox. Plan accordingly.
Bottom Line
Rami's video is the best free walk-through of a real drone business we've seen. Watch it. Send it to anyone who thinks drone mapping is just flying a drone.
But the title is doing a small amount of work the video doesn't do. “Drone Surveying Business” implies a credential Wet Dog doesn't have and a category of work Wet Dog doesn't do. The video is mostly about the parts of the business the credential and the category don't cover: parking, targets, base stations, processing, turnaround. Those parts are reproducible. The credential is not. And the parts of the business that are reproducible are the parts that actually save GCs money on Monday morning.
Pro tip of the day: if a drone provider shows you a video, ask them which parts of the work in the video are their own and which parts are somebody else's. The honest ones will tell you. We just did. If you want to see what our work actually looks like on a paying job, the services page shows the deliverables; everything in the post above is a description of how we get there.
If you want more on how we think about the licensed-surveyor question, read The Single Source of Truth — it has the longer version of the “not replacing surveyors” argument. The same Michael-from-the-video moment shows up in The 2:30 AM Architect — different framing, same man. And if you want the SHARE S20 story Michael tells in the video about pulling the scanner out of the truck and scanning the vault, that's here. Rami's Survey School community is here — affiliate link, may earn us a commission at no cost to you.