An Interview With Mohammed Shawky, The Entrepreneur Who Transformed A Hobby Into A Drone Business

Passion with business acumen is the quality of an industry leader. Think Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Shawky started Geodrones at the beginning of the pandemic against the wishes of his family and well-wishers. But he’s managed to prove the nay-sayers wrong. Shawky regularly appears to bend non-negotiable resources like money, time, and gravity to his will using his drones. He works with the biggest brands in the region’s O&G, Real Estate and Construction industry to help them make the most challenging parts of their business more cost-effective, safe, and sustainable. Shawky is optimistic about the future of drone technology without losing sight of the ‘Now’. 

In this exclusive interview with Thirty to Net Zero, Mohammad Shawky talks about his journey, how sustainability fits into every corner of his business, his expansion plans into retail and hospitality as new drone-usage regulations are finalised and his mantra for success.  

Q:  As the founder of Geodrones, how did you see this opportunity in the industry to get involved with the drone business and the aviation business by extension? What are the different industries that you work in, today?  

A: As a techie entrepreneur, I always look into new ventures, the new technological inventions. So, before I started my first startup in 2009, until today, I worked in multiple corporate jobs like in ADNOC and RTA. But still, my mind always works in the back scene to find my second technical or innovative startup. So, I tried some AI initiatives like data science and blockchain. But once I stumbled upon the drones, I just loved it. So, I started as a hobbyist, I was flying it in the air. And I said to myself, a real entrepreneur converts what he loves into money. And this is what I started in 2020

Q: It is interesting because you started this at a time when everybody was shutting their businesses down and you believed in something so much that you started it during the pandemic.  

A:  Most of my friends and families told me clearly, that you will lose the money you're investing as you're choosing the wrong time. I told them, that for any challenge, there is an opportunity out there. So, the pandemic is a challenge. But actually, companies were shutting down or decreasing the number of employees. So, what if you provide a service that saves your employees and increases your safety level. You don't need to have 10 workers, instead, you can have just two and another engineer and a project manager, and then you get the job done. And this is where I started the drones and focused on the drone industry.

Q: What are the different industries that you work with today? Which industries are you servicing by using drones?

A: Basically, we are doing the industrial type of services for drones, such as surveying and mapping, and inspections. For these services, we target the real estate companies, construction companies, and infrastructure and assets management for the oil and gas and energy sector. We do inspections for solar panels and wind turbines, for roads, and for safety for telecommunications companies. So, all these are our dream clients’ databases, where we focus our services to help them digitize their work, monitor their progress, and have highly accurate data out of our data capture.

Q: Since there's an advantage to using technology, could you tell us how your services help these companies in terms of achieving their sustainability goals as well?

A: There are quick wins or short-term wins and long-term gains from using drone technologies. If I'm focusing on the quick wins or the short-term wins, drones will cut your cost and time by a minimum of 50%. If you want to survey an area in two weeks, it can be done in two days. That's straightforward. And inspecting a building or a facility may take you about one month to prepare the paperwork, take permissions, hire the right staff and produce the final reports. While we can do all that in a matter of one week only using drones. We deploy one or two of our personnel to do a quick inspection of the assets, then we use our AI technology to process the pictures. And then another quality engineer will have a final look at the outputs, and finally, updates and recommendations, then we produce a high-quality data report.

Q: It's also probably saving lives when it comes to buildings inspection because your drones can inspect pipelines, or they can do aerial surveillance of very tall buildings without human casualty or human injury.

A: Unfortunately, for facility management companies, inspection companies, and even the oil and gas sector, they have a level a percentage of injuries. And unfortunately, sometimes fatalities, happen during the year. That is acceptable because it's a dangerous job. So, what we have here is that this is part of the long-term strategy that we increase the HSE level of companies who will help them have safer operations and sustain their employee’s satisfaction, without any injuries or human factor damages.

You hear a lot about the digital transformation, or the assets management, or keeping progress on all the projects that are running. So this is where drones can help you in the long run. If you have a construction project, that will take you two years to be built and if you use drone technologies to monitor the progress of the project, as a decision-maker from your seat, you can just open the dashboard and see the intervals of time and see how your project is progressing layer on top of the other layer just by using our progress monitoring technique. So you will see how your project is building up. And you can even have a split-screen comparison of the current status of the project with the drawings to see if you are matching the design by centimetre-accurate if the contractor is following what you had requested them to do online, are they on budget with the same resources and you would visit the location area without violating any rules of the movement or the government requirements. All that can be monitored from your dashboard, as a property owner. So that's the beauty of the drone’s progress monitoring.

And the government's now looking to have digital asset management of every asset in the country, like roads and bridges, and historical places. All that can be done by using the technology of drones, which helps transform the current buildings into a digital twin, into a 3d model, or into the repository of the government. So that's a longer-term objective that helps the drones can help to sustain.

Q: You have so many multifaceted advantages to using the technology and this seems to be something that will only grow.

A: Still, drones are in the early stages. And AI and machine learning are coming into space because after we captured the area, taking pictures and videos, you can pass it to the machine learning and AI components so that it can process your pictures and data and identify the objects or count the number of people or read number plates or detect violations. It's a big, big topic to talk about with collaboration with other service providers. Of course, we're not doing everything, but we collaborate with the right companies with the right data processing teams so that we can provide the final output as required by the client.

Q:  How did you create that nexus from being a technologist, a retailer, to an aviation expert?

A: Actually, I'm a computer engineer. I'm not an aviation, graduate or construction engineer. But I believe one aspect of an entrepreneur is really important if you love what you do, you will be an expert in that. I have just shared a tip with all my colleagues, if you learn one tip every day, after a year, you will be an expert on that topic, compared to everyone else who's only doing his normal job. Just dedicate 5 or 10 or 30 minutes of your busy day to learning something new.

Q: It’s impressive that you've made, something that you are passionate about, into a successful career.

A: Yes, “Passion Creates Miracles”.

Q: What magic are you creating within your company? How many people do you have? How do you work towards sustainability within your company?

A: In the past one and a half years, our company resources were limited, because it was funded solely by myself. So, I was trying to be wise, in where I'm going to spend my money. I was almost outsourcing everything. I outsourced the web development and SEO of the website. Another team for social media and another team for marketing. I have my own pilots registered in the company. Because these are required to be on the ground, and they're just there under the company name. So, whenever the resource needs to be resident, and here, I hire them. Otherwise, I just outsource. So, I tried to keep the tools for the sustainability thing. I try to avoid being a bottleneck. Because for start-ups, you should run the business, the business shouldn’t run you. I know I should drive it. Otherwise, I will be dragged and I will not be able to achieve the vision that I'm looking for. And I'm using an intelligent project management tool that allows me to have all the people available. It’s transparent. Everyone sees what's happening in the company. And tasks are there with a start date, end date, and urgency. Everything's available to everyone. And it's a collaborative environment. It's a flat and smooth environment.

Q: And as you're doing this digitally, there is no carbon footprint because people do not have to come to the office.

A: Face-to-face meetings are not required and driving to clients is not required. Everything is virtual and online. So, this will avoid any damage to the environment. Drones themselves are not using fuel, it’s using intelligent batteries. So, our business itself does not produce any carbon for the environment.

Q: Given the level of accuracy, is there any point in time where you are willing to compromise on the work or compromise on the sustainable element? Or is it always “no compromise”?

A: What will set us on the market and gives us an edge compared to others, is the accuracy of data that we provide. So, for that, it's no compromise on the quality of our data. The requirement from the clients for us is our Bible. We can even provide them with better data. But we never compromise the quality of data or on time because this is our reputation.

Q: Where do you see drone technology and Geodrones in the next 10 years? 

A: Drones have started to be a part of our day-to-day lives and everywhere. You see them in agriculture, rescue, firefighting, and delivery, plus in the industrial services that I talked about before, which are surveying, mapping, and inspections. Of course, filming and production or promotions is a big market for drones. So, drones are going to be part of everyday life, we are going to get used to seeing them flying around us normally delivering food or transferring documents. So, the next venture for drones is to allow for BVLOS which is an abbreviation for Beyond Visual Line Of Sight. Now as regulatory authorities, they only allow us to fly but you need to keep the drone in your visual line of sight, but very soon, once the risks factor are solved, when the regulations are solid, then the BVLOS will be very much allowed everywhere in the world. So, I can be in the control room, control the drone, hundreds of kilometers away go flying and do a specific operation and then come back. That operation can be an industrial operation or consumer operation or delivering something and then coming back and posting the latest news and deuterons that we have. We have come up with a 5g module. It took us two years of development. This 5g module allows us to control the drone not using the remote control and radio frequency but using a normal joystick, or the laptop, so that you can use the 5g technology, fly the drone, anywhere to do that specific operation, and then saving the data on the cloud, and then coming back on the spot without being visible or being a resident as a pilot on-site, close to the drone.

And this is going to happen in the coming three to five years. To be honest, my vision cannot visualize what may happen in 10 years. But maybe we'll see what's happening in the movies that flying cars are on layers everywhere.