Real sites, real results: How earthwork teams are winning with Propeller

Saving time with faster data, fewer manual steps, and quicker decisions

Jon Lange runs a surveying business in Colorado. Before Propeller, his team surveyed residential development sites the conventional way: boots on the ground for days at a time, walking grids, capturing data points between markers, and hoping nothing got missed. All too often, this process resulted in unbudgeted earthwork costs, discovered only after work was underway.

When Lange Land Surveys took on the Candelas development for Remington Homes, Jon brought in Propeller and AeroPoints to test them side by side against their current workflow. Accuracy was validated immediately, and the speed made the switch an easy choice.

A 25-acre site that used to take three days on the ground now took half a day to fly. And because the drone captured the full surface, not just points on a grid, the drone survey revealed something the old method couldn’t: there was significantly more dirt per lot than the original budget assumed. Across the 75-lot development, that single discovery saved Remington Homes roughly $187,000.

[popout] “With Propeller’s AeroPoints ground control hardware, and drone-mapping and analytics software platform, we’re able to fly the entire site in just half a day, so it’s saving us two and a half days of boots on the ground.”
Jon Lange, Owner, Lange Land Surveys

Proving progress for greater billing confidence and client trust

Shannon Cheshire found drone surveying on the heels of a $1.2 million dispute. Cheshire Contractors, an earthmoving outfit in Queensland, had just been through a contractor disagreement they couldn’t resolve cleanly because they didn’t have frequent, accurate material quantities backed by a verifiable timeline. Aerial photography wasn’t enough; they could see what the site looked like, but they couldn’t prove what had moved and when.

The next 80-hectare project on the docket would have taken close to 20 days of conventional ground surveying. At $90 an hour for a surveyor and another $90 for equipment, the math came out to $28,880 before a single bucket of dirt was scooped, and they still wouldn’t have the proof of work they wanted.

With Propeller, the same 80 hectares now gets surveyed in four to five hours for $2,400 total. Every flight goes into a visual site history that anyone, including the client, can scroll through. With a single source of truth, no one has to guess when material moved or let disagreements fester until they turn into a dispute.

[popout] “We’ll know if we’re making or losing money much more quickly, and if there is a problem we can fix it straight away instead of letting it fester.”
Shannon Cheshire, Contracts Administrator, Cheshire Contractors

3 top takeaways for winning earthwork teams

After 12 years in business, we’ve spoken to thousands of earthwork professionals who have transformed their daily work with Propeller. With all that data under our belts, we’ve pulled out three takeaways that set winning teams apart.

#1: Frequency changes everything

When a site goes from monthly surveys to weekly or daily capture, the whole rhythm of decision-making changes too. Matt Eklund, GPS Program Manager at Sukut Construction, put it this way: “If something’s going wrong, you don’t want to know a month later. You want to know the next day, if possible.”

#2: Speed and accuracy can go hand in hand

For Menai Civil Contractors, switching to a single-AeroPoint PPK workflow collapsed days of multi-target setup into a workflow where their survey manager flies five sites in one day and gets high-precision data back the next. Middlesex Corporation compressed weeks of survey-and-process time into hours, helping their team catch a design surface error before they broke ground. As their director of survey and construction technology put it, “That alone paid for the system many times over.”

#3: Shared data is the real win

When the field crew, the office team, and the client are all looking at the same live map, conversations get shorter, decisions get faster, and work proceeds without constant re-litigation. Story Contracting in the UK saw this firsthand: their 3D models now back contractor validation conversations, and nearly 5,000 cubic meters of missing stone were found and resolved through daily progress flights, before it turned into a payment dispute.

Dirty work, clean data

The results we’ve shared in this post aren’t outliers. This is what it looks like when teams stop waiting on data and start incorporating it into their real-time workflow. A surveyor in Colorado finds an extra $187,000 in a 75-lot development. A tech lead in the US flags a buried conduit before it creates a massive project delay. An earthmover in Queensland turns a 20-day survey into a half-day flight. A technical director in the UK gets data into the hands of 100 people who need it to do their jobs well.

If that sounds like the kind of business you’re working to build, our virtual door is always open. Request a demo to see what your site data could look like on a single map.