I’ve served in several roles at iThemes over the years. At a certain point, Cory came to me and said that he thought the team had grown large enough that I needed a more formal leadership role. In 2011, I became the Chief Operating Officer. For at least the first year, I didn’t even know what that meant. I joked that it mostly meant I was a fire fighter, stomping out problems internally and with customers. That was fitting, seeing how I had plenty of experience starting fires in our organization. But over time, I grew in to my role as a leader. And through trial, error, and guidance, I actually got fairly decent at it.

This month, iThemes celebrated 10 years of being in business. 10 years has seemed like both an instant and a lifetime. Even though it’s just another year, it feels like a marker to look back from and reflect on how we got here, what role I played in it all, and what I’ve learned so far.

First, trust your gut – but make sure you’re feeding it a healthy diet of hard data.

Business intuition is invaluable, and I’d hate to be following a leader who was too scared to listen to their gut. Cory and I both credit much of our success in business to pure gut. But over the last few years, we’ve both learned that our gut calls get even better when we know our business inside and out. Understanding all our costs, knowing how moving one gear will affect another, breaking down all our different revenue streams, and deeply defining who our customers are has acutely honed the edge of our instincts. In the early years of a startup, it’s easier to grow by gut alone. But eventually you hit a plateau of where that can take you, and it’s time to dig and really KNOW your business.

Second, attitude and potential trump current skill set… Every. Time.

There are a lot of very talented people out there who just suck. They may be hard to be around, they may think they’re a rockstar, or maybe they’re just content with where they are because they’re an expert in the latest JS framework (oh, by the way, the “latest” will be different tomorrow).

At iThemes, we’re looking for people who are hungry.

We’re looking for people who want to dig in and passionately make a difference for our customers. Even if that means they’re a little green, we know we can pair them with the senior leaders of our existing team and teach them the skills they need. Teaching someone how to use version management or how to work macros in our support system is easy. I’ve yet to find a way to teach someone to WANT to come to work to get better.

Third, systems and procedures don’t mean the end of startup fun.

There was a time when iThemes didn’t have a PTO policy. We didn’t have regularly scheduled meetings, standard operating procedures, we didn’t even have formal coding standards. And yep, we had a lot of fun during those times. We affectionately refer to those as the “dorm room days.” The thing is, we eventually had a lot of customers who were counting on us. We were hearing stories of people who were using our products to quit the jobs they hated and start their own businesses. At some point, we had to grow the team to keep serving those customers. And as we grew, we realized that knowing how many days off you get is important, as is knowing what you should be working on this week, and writing code in a consistent manner across our products so that when you take vacation someone else can read your chicken scratches.

But we’ve worked hard not to lose the soul of the dorm room days.

We still want our team to feel like more than people who show up in the same place and sit at computers in the same room. We focus on relationships. We eat together, we have regular hangouts outside of work together, we travel with our remote team members, and we have stupid chat rooms where we talk about stupid things. Cory and I love to drop a huge bag of Lego in the middle of the conference room and see how many days (ok, hours) it takes for them all to be built. Our culture – our very DNA as iThemes – has a lot more to do with who we are and how we treat each other than it does with how many policies are in our handbook.

Fourth, just shut up and get out of the way.

When I call in members of my team for a meeting, I never want to be the smartest person in the room.

My goal is to hire people who are way smarter than me, and my job is to blow up the shit that gets in their way so they can be successful.

When decisions need to be made, my job is to put the right people together, listen to their expertise, and then call the play. When the play is a success, all the credit shines directly on the team that was responsible, not me. When the play fails, I’m the umbrella that protects my team from the shit storm that falls down. I can make corrections and coach when we fail, but the blame publicly stops with me.

Fifth, find a coach. For everything.

The first year I was made the COO, Cory introduced me to Michael Smith. Smitty, as he’s known, is a leadership coach, and has been one of the most important mentors in my entire career. When I started working with Smitty, I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. He walked me through the finer points and details of what it means to not just manage a group of people, but to lead a team.

Smitty later introduced us to a “CFO for hire”. He took seat-of-the-pants guys like Cory and me and helped us put together our first real operating budget. He gave us a crash course in business accounting that revealed to us what parts of our business were thriving and which parts were crashing.

Over the years, I’ve had coaches in leadership, accounting, HR, programming, and who knows what else. But arguably the most impactful has been the role that Cory has played in my life.

He’s invested countless hours, dollars, Tom Bihn bags, and gray hairs in to my success.

A little over a decade separates us in age (I love to remind him of this), and he’s shared his wisdom and experiences with me to make sure that I’m always 5 steps ahead of where he was at my age. I can never fully share my gratitude for his guidance and, more importantly, his friendship.

Oh, and if you can’t find a mentor, just get a Netflix account.

Finally, it’s really about Mario Kart (or Rocket League, or Speed Runner, or Towerfall, or…)

In the front of our office, there’s a giant 3d sign that says “Make People’s Lives Awesome.” We’ve always said that this means three things to us. First, make your families’ lives awesome. Second, make your teammates’ lives awesome. Third, make your customers’ lives awesome. Notice the customer comes third. Not a distant third, but we can’t adequately serve our customers if we aren’t serving our families and our team first.

I don’t need (or even want) to be friends with everyone I work with. But at the end of the day, I want to like these people. I spend more time with most of my team than I do with my own wife. So it’s important to me to like the people I work with, and to enjoy the time we spend together.

I’m passionate about a lot of my work, but I don’t think anyone gets excited about every single thing they have to do every day. So, I like to supplement by spending really enjoyable time with my team. Sometimes that means playing video games during work; sometimes it means going on a walk around the building for exercise together; it means calling a team member to talk about woodworking and how slow he is at putting together his new bandsaw; it means going to scream at the Nashville Predators even though you don’t really watch hockey and aren’t from Nashville.

Our team works incredibly hard, so I think it’s only fitting that we know how to play hard too.

Just so long as we don’t forget that the hard work comes first :).

Flying around obstacles provides several unique challenges. The most obvious one is maintaining visual contact with the Phantom. The law requires that I can see my quad at all times while flying, but my Superman powers are rusty and I don’t see well through trees. That meant I had to be able to move a little bit while I was flying to achieve certain shots I wanted to get. Walking and piloting a fast moving quadcopter will humble you really quickly.

The second major challenge I faced was finding a balance between framing shots on the video screen while visually watching where the aircraft was flying to make sure I didn’t hit anything. When you’re flying straight ahead, you can mostly see what’s coming and what you might hit. But if you’re flying sideways to get a long dolly shot, the camera isn’t showing you anything you might hit. It gets even more complex when you start doing multi-movement shots. For example, moving to the side while rotating the Phantom to get a spiral type shot. The controls to do this are complex by themselves, but to also keep an eye on the video screen to make sure your subject is still framed AND keep an eye in the sky to make sure you’re not going to hit anything… well that’s enough to make you sweat the first few times.

The last major challenge I wasn’t expecting as much: distractions. At its most basic, this included curious people in the park who wanted to come ask me questions about how the Phantom works. At its worst it included a low flying helicopter nearly giving me a heart attack. The FAA rules for flying unmanned aerial vehicles states that you can’t fly within 5 miles of an airport. Seems logical enough. But it doesn’t say anything about hospitals, and it probably should include at least a note about them. I was only a few miles from a large Oklahoma City hospital, and while flying at 400 feet I nearly decided to shut down the engines on my quad and let it free fall from the sky just to make sure I didn’t have an accidental collision with the low flying manned aircraft (who was probably saving someone’s life while flying).

The biggest help I had during this flight was taking my wonderful wife along with me as a “spotter” of sorts. She was able to take over conversations for me when I was approached by other park-goers, keep and eye on me when I was walking and looking up to make sure I didn’t walk in to the creek, and helped me navigate my way out of trouble when the helicopter came by. As a side benefit, having McKalyn with me helped me look less creepy flying a “drone” around the park. There’s undoubtably a stigma around flying cameras. I understand that people are worried about their privacy, and did my best not to put anyone in my shots without their knowledge and permission. I think having her with me helped disarm potentially angry or frightened parents/homeowners/dog walkers. She also made two cameos in the video.

Click here to see my first test.

Click here to see my second test.

Click here to see my third test.

In the US, the FAA has authority over all aircrafts. They’re in the process of setting official rules for using unmanned aerial vehicles such as my Phantom for commercial purposes, but the rules for hobby use are pretty simple and clear. Don’t fly near airports, don’t fly over crowded areas, always maintain visual contact with your aircraft, etc. Most relevant to this post: don’t fly over 400 feet.

400 feet may not sound like a lot, but it’s intimidating to fly that high at first. A small white quadcopter gets quite hard to see even when it’s right above you at that height. Oklahoma, as you know, is where the wind comes sweeping down the plains. At 400 feet, I was worried that sweeping wind would carry my quad all the way to Texas (and I wouldn’t wish Texas on anyone or anything). Finally, on this relatively calm day, I decided I’d take it up to maximum legal altitude.

Being up high was exhilarating, but it made me much more cautious about all of my setup. After one flight up there, I realized it was going to be important to create a preflight checklist to make sure I was consistent with how I prepared myself, my transmitter, and my quad. Right now I only have version one of the checklist, and I know it’ll grow and change as I fly more. The basics:

• Check firmware on transmitter and Phantom
• Secure props
• Secure prop gaurds
• Remove gimbal guard
• Insert SD card in camera
• Attach iPad to transmitter
• Turn transmitter on
• GPS mode active
• Turn Phantom on
• Calibrate compass
• Visually inspect Phantom for obvious flaws
• Confirm GPS lock
• Confirm it’s safe to take off
• Hover for 20 seconds to confirm proper flight

On the back of the checklist, I have a key explaining all warning and indicator lighting meanings on the Phantom. I know them by memory, but it’s nice to have them for backup in case I blank out.

The area I took my first flight in was relatively small, only a few acres. I wanted to fly fast, but I didn’t want to be stupid. So I went to a park north of town where I played rugby in college. I went during my lunch break, so the park was mostly empty. It has a very large space with no trees or obstructions. It was still quite windy out that day, so I only dared 200 ft for my max altitude.

To start, I remembered that setup needs to go very slow. I took my time getting everything set up, even though I was excited to get back in the air with this thing. I double checked that my propellers and prop guards were on correctly, I had good GPS signals, and that the aircraft was in the flying mode I wanted to fly in.

Once in the air, I started out by getting “two mistakes high.” You gut instinct when you start flying is to fly low, so that if something bad happens to your quad it won’t have too far to fall. The problem is that flying close to the ground give you very little margin of error. One wrong move on the controls and you’re hitting the ground. Getting up in the air a little bit gives you a lot more room for error. If you, say, lose a few meters of altitude because you changed flight directions too fast, you’re fine. That same error down low would cost you some money in repairs.

Once I was up a few mistakes high, I started to really open it up. I took long passes and figure eights around the field at nearly full throttle to get a feel for how it flies. The Phantom has “breaks” of a sort, and when flying in a controlled GPS mode, it will reverse tilt to stop itself when you stop applying throttle in a direction. This takes some getting used to, as most quads I’ve flown get momentum in a direction and you can use that momentum when turning and doing other maneuvers (note: you don’t have to fly the Phantom in this mode, but I chose to because I’m still learning this aircraft and felt it was safer).

The only issue I ran in to on this flight was the sun. You control the Phantom with a radio transmitter, but you get real time video and settings control via an iPad you mount to the transmitter. Flying at noon on a hot and sunny day made it incredibly difficult to see the on screen display. In all the video I shot that day, I don’t think I was once able to frame a shot on screen while executing it (which is quite obvious in a few of the shots in the video). I need a sunshade for my iPad, and I’ve ordered one and expect it next week. Once I get it installed, I hope that flying in the brightness of mid-day won’t be an issue anymore.

I learned a lot of what I know about RC flying the same way I learn most new things: I went to YouTube. It didn’t take much time learning on YouTube to figure out that there are several different worlds within RC quadcopters: FPV racing (small, very fast quads flown while wearing goggles that show you real time footage from an onboard camera for a first person view), Game of Drones (think Battle Bots with quadcopters), and finally aerial photography. I studied Photographic Arts in college, and though I don’t shoot nearly as much as I did then, I still have a passion for photography. It seemed like it might be time to see about combining my new hobby of flying with my old one of photography.

To shoot good photos and videos from the air, you need a quad that is big enough to lift a quality camera. For this, I was lucky enough to receive the new Phantom 3 Professional. With good flight times, GPS for added stability, and an incredible onboard camera that shoots 4K video and 12MP stills, it is a great platform for aerial imagery.

My first flight with the Phantom was all about getting my feet wet with the machine. My focus was on taking it very slow and not taking risks. There’s a wide open field not far from my house that is next to some railroad tracks. It’s relatively free of obstructions and private enough for me to focus on flying, so I decided that would be a great place for my first flight.

My biggest take-away from this flight was to take things slow. Not just flying slowly, but taking careful time to set up and take off too. The train at the beginning of the video was coming by as I was unloading the quad from my truck. I desperately wanted to get in the air and get some video of the passing train, but I constantly reminded myself that getting video of a train wasn’t worth crashing my new toy. So I took my time setting up, and the train was long enough that I still got in the air as it finished passing. I almost talked myself out of shooting it at all, but I was already there so I figured I’d hit the record button.