This year H2O Drones celebrates its second birthday! Even though it’s not really old, we are still proud of what we have already achieved!
Slowly we feel that we are a real company and that we are getting closer to our goals. And most importantly, H2O Drones is a name that is slowly gaining recognition.
The Beginning
But before we tell you where we are now, let’s go back to the beginning.
Two years ago everything started slowly. After 30 years of experience in hydraulic engineering, our CEO, Karst Beens, decided to sell his former company and specialize in underwater drones. The reason for this is that underwater drones are versatile and solve many problems that arise in hydraulic engineering, but unfortunately they are not yet known. Here, the main concern is the safety of the divers! Our drones offer more advantages than safety, but you can read more about that in our other blog.
After the decision was made to specialize in ROVs (remote-operated vehicle), the construction started slowly. The first step was to find the right drone. At that time, there were already several models on the market, but they differed greatly in quality. After a long period of testing and trial and error, the decision was made to go with DeepTrekker. DeepTrekker comes originally from Canada, but especially the sonar device has convinced. Because especially in the German and Dutch waters, you have no visibility without sonar.
The cooperation with DeepTrekker went relatively quickly and from then on, more momentum came into the process, with a small team but high motivation. The team itself consisted at that time of two people who shared the inspections and office work. Today we are with 7 people.
In the beginning, we were of course only in the Netherlands because of our location. Here we quickly started to work together with the Dutch Ministry of Hydraulic Engineering and Infrastructure. The results of a test run were very convincing! And so word of our product spread quickly and we started working with various cities. We then found our first case in Germany in Cologne, at Shell. From then on, it went steadily and we were able to find more customers in both countries. In the beginning, it was not important for us to make a lot of money or to sell a lot of drones. We set out to change the way we work and, above all, to improve it.
H2O Drones Today
As already mentioned, our team has grown. In the beginning we started with 2 people, to do our inspections. Now we have two permanent inspectors operating in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. There is not much time left for office work. Therefore, our team has grown especially in the administrative area. In addition, we have a new sales and marketing team and our own media team. But this is only our permanent team. Since we have to do inspections in three countries with two people, we sometimes need extra support. Most of the time we manage without, because the German and Belgian market is growing slowly, but just in case we still have freelancers available. But also in the office we always have interns, who we support during their studies. There is also always the chance to be taken on, our sales and marketing managers have both started as interns in the company. For us it is important that employees grow with the company and our team is a colorful mix of young and old, which makes the exchange of information interesting for both sides. (We also always have room for interested interns!).
Our sales and marketing team operates in Germany and the Netherlands and is mainly concerned with creating awareness for our products and our work. We work on this mainly through LinkedIn and other social media channels. All with our goals in mind.
But what those goals are, we’ll tell you next week!
For more information about us and our products, contact us here.
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