The Sky’s the Limit

Mark Binns from Avian Imaging is a past participant of The Rebel Business School and has now set up his own Ariel Imaging Company and Drone Flying School. He catch up with him to find out how he is getting on.

Note: This transcription has been generated with AI and there may be errors present. 

 

Mark bins. My business is based in Redding Thames Valley this far as London, but quite limited to where I can actually do my business. My business is I run a drone school, and an aerial imaging company, we take video and photographs of anything which is difficult to reach by, by a human and is apparently expensive to do by helicopter or light aircraft, we can get access to places like underneath bridges, and we can look for cracks in concrete. We can also add thermal imaging cameras to look at crops. And we can map entire fields and tell them where the crops are failing, where it isn’t obvious to the eye, even when you’re walking through a field to eat. It’s been part of my life since I was about seven, I got into St. Edward’s. And my dad said if I passed the entry exam, then he would get me a glider kit. He said glider he didn’t say kit. So that led to me having to build my own present, which, as it turns out was half the joy. And I really enjoyed that sort of technical side of it, I learned how to construct an aeroplane and I’ve done about 50 in my life, and a lot of them have crashed. But some of them as you can see still survive. When I got made redundant. A few years ago, I just decided it was the time I didn’t really make any money out of the deal. It was just that something had to change. And I started pursuing this as a route with my my childhood passion, the best way to succeed in business, the only way to succeed in business is to actually start being in business to make that that one thing that you know is the one which is committal, this is fine, or you are now actually trading. And it doesn’t mean actually going out and selling something it means you know, getting the loan, getting the equipment, going out talking to clients, and acting as if you are a businessman. And at some point, you’ll realise that people start treating you like a businessman, if you act like a businessman, and you just you kind of pretend to be the person you want to be until you’re then I think I just enjoy the stress flying these things is incredibly stressful, as you’ve seen. It’s got a lot of money up in the air, there’s a lot of heads which you can sump into the ground, below you property everywhere that you doesn’t belong to you huge liabilities Do you know we’ve got to have multiple million pounds to cover for insurance. I think I’m only on 10 mil, but certain criteria insure me up to 25. So yeah, it’s kind of scary. When I go out there, I’m almost scared rigidity of smashing it into something. So no, that’s unpleasant. But it’s when it lands again, and you brought it back. And you know that there was a lot of skill in actually doing that. And the chances of somebody else achieving the same thing in those conditions. Like, you know, the wind that was today, it took a lot of work to get that back down again. And most people could have panicked in that situation. And I did and just through experience. So there’s a lot of pride in that. Make plans, make sure you’re covered up to a point, and then wing it. And life is about winging it, people will support you, if you’re doing this sort of thing, people happy to see you do it, they want to see you do it, because then that gives them the strength to do it. I wouldn’t have done this abidance in other people do it. Avian imaging, which is the photographic and video side of the company, is just one part of it. Then we have AV and Academy, which is actually run as a completely separate company for tax reasons. And all these are just registering a different limited company. And that’s the one that teaches people and produces training manuals and so on. I think for me the money in this industry as it starts to saturate, which will over the next 10 years is going to be in the training. And then after that once there’s 1000s of schools because people realise it’s lucrative, then it will be in being innovative and developing. So the idea would be to learn as much as I can about the industry from flying from teaching, while always keeping a very open mind to where the next Avenue could be when I’ve spoken to you guys and I’ve been to your your open days not to come along to the courses.

Obviously I’ve met you guys and I’ve sat down and sort of spoken one to one with a few and each one has given a nugget. I’ve taken one nugget out of everything that they’ve said, which I think suits my business hands not only that, but feeding off their enthusiasm and the enthusiasm of the people in the room with me and they’ve all got something different somebody is making cake, somebody’s selling pottery and it’s looking at the enthusiasm all these people are they’re just doing it. They’re doing it like this is the most natural thing and well like buy bake at home, I bake and I sell then I real simple AI flow models. Let’s go make some money at it. So yeah, I certainly fed off everybody that was there for enthusiasm, but I’m pretty sure that I will be tapping into you guys a lot more in the future, especially on the sort of marketing side as things are going to get tougher in my industry.