{"id":4914,"date":"2022-08-17T02:15:23","date_gmt":"2022-08-17T09:15:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/droneanalyst.com\/?p=4914"},"modified":"2022-08-17T02:17:12","modified_gmt":"2022-08-17T09:17:12","slug":"challenges-and-revenues-for-service-providers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/droneanalyst.com\/2022\/08\/17\/challenges-and-revenues-for-service-providers\/'","title":{"rendered":"Challenges and Revenues for Service Providers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Service provider revenues trend upwards and a breakdown of the challenges these firms face<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The rise of the services market and the “droneprenuer” is nothing new, with a sea of content and forums out there on how to start. Each year we like to distill findings on service provider revenues and where providers are making the most money (find last year’s article here<\/span><\/a>). However, this year we’re changing things up, focusing more broadly on the annual trends and what challenges these service providers face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The goal of this article is to paint a clearer picture for all industry stakeholders on the problems faced by service providers, movement of service provider revenues and more. All backed up by data from our 2021 survey of the market (FYI, our 2022 survey is live here<\/span><\/a>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before we dive into our takeaways for the drone service provider (DSP) market, there are two key things to consider. The first is that service providers don’t operate in isolation, often relying on steady work from the business community. From our findings<\/span><\/a>, business and agency spending on drones and drone related services has accelerated more last year than ever before, but they are also relying more frequently on internal pilots. The second is that a few of our datapoints separate out “sole proprietorships” which are literal one man service shops. While this is a large portion of our respondents, it’s not everyone and we’ve generally seen movement towards mid-sized DSPs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Table of Contents<\/strong>\n\n1. Service Provider Revenues Increase<\/a>\n2. Issues Inhibiting Service Provider Growth<\/a>\n3. Historical Look at Issues Faced by Service Providers<\/a><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Drone Service Provider Revenues Increase<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
As early as 2017<\/span><\/a>, we’ve been sharing survey results around service provider revenues. Historically, we’ve seen individual revenues (and therefore salaries) struggle to grow as the market was flooded with new entrants shortly after the Part 107 rules went into place. Now as the market has matured we’re seeing this race to the bottom end and revenues for service providers have made strong upward progress<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Below is a graph of this data for every year we asked about service provider revenues, and the trend among the “Under $50K” group tells the story the clearest with a 20 point drop as nearly half (46%) of providers made more than $50K USD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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From this we can see a fairly steady concentration of low service provider revenues before a large reversal in 2021. This reflects some larger trends captured in our 2021 findings, which we’ll summarize here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n