Yesterday, Joey Schmit woke up and realized he didn’t work for anyone. He didn’t have to go clock in. He didn’t have to report to any boss.
Instead, a much bigger responsibility lay on his shoulders.
“Every decision I make is now going to have a chain reaction to what happens to my 8-month-old daughter and my wife,” he said. ” What I do now is pretty important.”
What he’s doing is pursuing a dream he’s had for as long as he can remember. He’s starting his own company, a drone aerial imagery service called Flight Pros.
Growing up, Joey worked alongside his Dad at Schmitty’s welding. From there he humored a variety of his own interests; he was a butcher, a metal worker, a cab designer, a teacher in Germany, and then an expert in disc golf course design. For eight years he designed professional disc golf courses at parks, building a company he started at 17 with the memorable name, Frolfsware.
Disc golf lead him to dabble with drones. For years he’d struggled to map out and display the courses, so that disc golfers could see how to make the goals. If he could maneuver a drone to film each airway, he realized, he could post the videos and give a perfect look at the course.
“Right away it didn’t work because I was horrible at it,” he said. “But with lots of practice I was able to pilot these stairways and capture the essence of the work.”
He was hooked. As he learned more and more about the drone industry, he began to see a huge potential for something more.
“All those other things that I’ve done throughout my life, all those things come to a head here in the drone industry,” he said. “I realized it’s something I can do to support a family and still support a business on my own. That’s a dream of mine.”
Stretched before him lay the wide, relatively uncharted plains of the UAS industry; ranging from delivering packages, to search and rescue, to agriculture research. As he laid the groundwork for Flight Pros, he chose to focus on construction and real estate services because of his personal connections with the industry, and to avoid spreading himself too thin, he said.
What Flight Pros will offer is the ability to collect data and close range aerial imagery using drones, he said.
“My goal is to provide aerial imagery for houses or property, and construction, understanding how to best address their projects and get data off those projects,” he said.
He sees doing this work as more of a ‘bread and butter’ job, and a job that is needed to help customers. His personal dream job, he said, would be to do aerial filming in a creative field.
“Dream job would be I get a call from Peter Jackson, and start working with film in a Lord of the Rings type of movie,” he said at 1 Million Cups Fargo.
For now, he keeps his creative juices flowing through building the company and charting disc golf courses – a passion he says he won’t let go.
A few things are still being sorted before Flight Pros can operate commercially, including a pending request for Section 333 certification from the Federal Aviation Administration and a pilot license, which Schmit is working towards through classes at the Fargo Jet Center. But already he has potential customers lined up, he said, and expects to be able to hire a teammate in the near future.
“It’s going to be a wild ride,” he said. “I feel I can get rooted in the drone tuck here. I truly believe in it. If I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t do it at all.”
Photo by Joey Schmit.
