so this came kind of out of nowhere. ive been freelancing for about 18 months, nothing crazy just weddings and some commercial stuff for a marketing agency near me. a mid-sized construction company in my area reached out — apparently they found me through instagram — and they want to talk about bringing me on as like an in-house drone operator. they said its a full time salary position with benefits and everything.

part of me is excited because the stability sounds nice honestly. ive been grinding the freelance thing and some months are great and some months are slow and its just kind of stressful not knowing. but another part of me is worried about getting locked into one client and losing all my other work, plus i dont know what construction surveying even involves day to day. i fly a mavic 3 classic right now, no idea if thats even the right gear for what theyd need. havent had the actual meeting yet but trying to think through it before i go in. anyone been in a similar spot?

construction is actually a really solid industry for drone work, like there's a ton of variety — progress documentation, volumetric surveys for stockpile measurement, site mapping, inspection of hard to reach areas. it's not just flying around getting pretty shots. they'll probably want you to use Pix4D or DJI Terra or something similar for the mapping side so if you haven't messed with photogrammetry software yet thats worth looking into before your meeting.

the mavic 3 classic is fine for a lot of that stuff to be honest, though depending on their scale they might already have or want to get an enterprise platform. I'd go into the meeting and just ask a lot of questions before committing — what does a typical week look like, do you have to travel to job sites, who owns the footage and the data, stuff like that. salary with benefits in this industry is actually pretty rare so if the number is reasonable i wouldnt dismiss it too fast just because freelance feels like freedom. freelance also means no paid sick days and buying your own insurance which adds up

honestly the grass is always greener thing cuts both ways here. i left a stable job to go freelance and i love it but man the first year was rough. if you haven't built up a big enough client base yet that steady paycheck might be worth more than it looks on paper. just make sure you ask if they'd let you keep doing outside work on weekends or whatever, some companies are weird about that and you dont want to sign something that locks you out of freelancing entirely