It was a Monday morning, and my oldest son was at a listing with a camera in his hand and a problem he couldn’t hide anymore.
He’d done the photos. The next thing on the list was the aerials.
He told Bell he couldn’t do them.
She asked why. And that’s when the whole thing came out.
Friday
Rewind three days.
This was around 2023. My son was about 22, and he’d been working with us for a while by then. I’d trained him myself, on the camera and on the drone, and he was good. Really good. Clients liked him, and his work was clean.
That Friday he was on his own at a property out near Cape Haze. It wasn’t on the water, but it was close enough that once you got up in the air, you could see the Gulf and the Intracoastal stretching out behind it. That’s the shot. That’s why you fly.
He was up high getting it, on our Mavic 2 Pro, when the battery warning came up.
When the battery gets low, the drone wants to come home. It starts flying itself back to where it took off, and you can cancel that if you choose to.
He cancelled it. He had a couple more shots he wanted.
The trouble was the drone was a long way out. By the time the battery hit critical, it didn’t have enough left to make it back, so it did the only safe thing it could do. It landed itself, right where it was.
He watched it go down on the screen, so he knew it hadn’t crashed. He just had no idea where it was.
The weekend
Here’s the part I didn’t know about until Monday.
He didn’t call me.
He called a friend instead, and the two of them drove back out there and searched. They couldn’t find it. They went back again. And again. All weekend, multiple trips, walking the area and coming home empty handed.
They were looking in the wrong place the entire time.
And he still didn’t call me.
Monday
So now we’re back where we started. Monday morning, a job with aerials on the calendar, and no drone.
When Bell heard the story, she was shocked, and she told him the only thing there was to say. You need to tell your father.
So he did.
I’ll be honest about my first reaction. I was stunned. Not that it happened. Drones land in places you don’t want them to. Batteries run down. It happens to everybody who flies long enough, me included.
What stunned me was Friday. This had been sitting out there since Friday.
I finished up my own jobs, drove over to where he was, and asked him for the controller.
Five minutes
Every flight a DJI drone takes gets recorded. The whole path, start to finish, including the exact spot where it stopped. Latitude and longitude.
I knew that. He didn’t.
I turned the controller on, opened the flight logs, and pulled up the last flight. There was the line of the flight path, and there was the end of it, with the GPS coordinates sitting right there.
It took a matter of minutes.
When I showed him, his answer was, “Whoa, I didn’t know that was even on there.”
I drove to the coordinates. There was a little dirt road, and a couple of feet off it, sitting in the weeds, was our drone.
It was fine. Not a scratch on it. It hadn’t rained all weekend, which is not something you can count on in Southwest Florida. And because it had come down in the weeds, it was tucked out of sight. Anybody driving down that road could have spotted it and taken it home. Nobody did.
I’ll call that what it was. We were blessed.
Why he didn’t call
After we got it back, we had the talk. Whenever you have a problem like this, you tell me right away, so we can solve it. It’s my company. Accidents happen, and I can live with accidents. What I can’t do anything about is a problem I don’t know exists.
He took that to heart. These days, if something goes wrong, he calls first, and the problem is usually solved before it has a chance to grow.
But I’ve thought about the why a lot since then, because he wasn’t being careless. He’s a good kid who was great at the job.
He didn’t call because he didn’t want to let his dad down.
That’s it. That’s the whole reason. He’d made a mistake, he was embarrassed, and he was sure he could fix it before anybody had to know. So he spent a whole weekend trying, when the fix was sitting in his hand the entire time.
If you run a team, I’d bet money somebody on it is doing the same thing right now.
An assistant who sent the wrong disclosure and is hoping nobody noticed. A new agent who missed a deadline and is trying to quietly make it right. A transaction coordinator who’s been sitting on a problem since last Thursday. Not because they don’t care. Because they care a lot, and they don’t want you to think less of them.
Rules don’t really fix that. What fixes it is how you react the first time somebody brings you bad news. If they walk away feeling like they got in trouble for telling you, they’ll wait longer next time. If they walk away with the problem solved and a “thanks for telling me,” they’ll call you faster.
What I tell my team now is simple. The sooner I know, the sooner we fix it, and the smaller it stays.
The answer was already recorded
There’s a second lesson in this, and it’s the one that still gets me.
The answer existed the whole weekend. The drone knew exactly where it was. It had written it down. Nobody knew to go look.
Most of us have something like that. The tools you already use are quietly recording more than you think. Your CRM knows who opened the last email and who went cold. Your showing feedback knows why the house on the corner isn’t moving. Your phone knows who called while you were at closing.
Sometimes the fix isn’t something new. It’s something you already have, that nobody told you was there.
What to ask your drone pilot
Now the practical part, because if you list property in Southwest Florida, somebody is going to put a drone over one of your listings.
Anybody can buy a drone. What you’re really hiring is how the pilot handles it when something goes sideways. Here are a few questions worth asking before they fly:
When do you land? A pro has a battery rule and sticks to it. “When it tells me to” is not a rule. That warning is the drone asking to come home, and the right answer is almost always yes.
Do you keep your flight logs, and do you know how to use them? If something goes wrong, the log is how you find the aircraft, figure out what happened, and fix it. A pilot who doesn’t know the log exists is a pilot who’ll spend a weekend searching the wrong field.
If something goes wrong on my listing, when do I hear about it? You want to hear it the same day. Straight from them. Not three days later, from somebody else.
And if you’re still deciding whether a particular listing even needs aerial, I put together a short yes-or-no checklist for exactly that. It’s free, and it’s here.
Our drone spent a weekend lost in the weeds. My son spent it lost in them too, in a different way, carrying something he didn’t have to carry alone.
The fix took five minutes. Telling me was the hard part.
It usually is.
I write a letter every Monday for agents in Southwest Florida and beyond. It’s called The Elevated Edge, it’s free, and every issue we’ve sent is sitting at elevatedaiacademy.com/edge where you can read the lot without giving me your email first.
