Starting With One City, One Client at a Time
When I started CineDrones in 2013, the plan wasn’t to build an eight-city operation. The plan was to get one client, do the job well, and get the next one. That’s still the right way to start, and it’s the advice I give every operator who tells me they want to “scale” before they’ve proven they can consistently deliver in their home market. Growth follows reliability. It doesn’t lead it.
Why We Expanded City by City, Not All at Once
CineDrones now operates in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Austin, Atlanta, Chicago, New Orleans, and Albuquerque, and every one of those markets got added for a specific reason - a client asked us to follow them, a production needed local crew for a shoot we couldn’t service remotely, or we saw enough recurring work in a city to justify building real infrastructure there instead of flying a crew in. We never opened a market speculatively. Each expansion had to pay for itself within a defined window, or we didn’t make it permanent.
What Actually Changes When You Add a Market
The flying doesn’t change much - Part 107 compliance and the fundamentals of safe operation travel with you everywhere. What changes is everything around the flying: local airspace quirks, which agencies you’re coordinating with for permits, which vendors and location scouts you need relationships with, and whether the work in that market leans union or non-union. We run Local 600 crews where studio productions require them and non-union crews for the independent film, events, and real estate work that makes up most markets outside the traditional union hubs. Knowing which one a new city needs before you open it saves you from a lot of expensive guessing.
The Mistake I See Operators Make When They Scale
The most common mistake is treating expansion as a marketing decision instead of an operational one. Adding a second city doesn’t just mean advertising in a new place - it means insurance coverage that actually extends there, a real point of contact who can be on-site on short notice, and either a trained local crew or a travel budget that makes the math work. Operators who skip that groundwork end up with a website that lists five cities and a business that can reliably deliver in one. Clients notice the gap fast, usually on the job that matters most.
How to Know You’re Ready
A simple test I use: if a client in a new market called today needing a crew in 48 hours, could you actually deliver it, insured and compliant, without scrambling? If the honest answer is no, you’re not behind schedule by expanding later - you’re ahead of the operators who said yes to that call and couldn’t back it up.
Work With Me
If you’re thinking about growing beyond your home market, or you’re earlier in the process and trying to figure out how to build a business that can support that kind of growth at all, I’m glad to talk through it with you directly based on what’s actually worked - and what hasn’t - over more than a decade of doing this. Get in touch with CineDrones to book a 30-minute strategy call with me for $99, or a full hour for $189, and we’ll dig into where you are and what’s next. Get in touch with CineDrones.
