Three months, two parts + surveyors = solid business
Today’s guest blogger is Georg Rothbucher, founder of Rothbucher Systeme out of Bavaria, Germany. Berntsen has represented Georg’s products for more than a decade. Georg’s focus is on developing high-quality precision products for surveyors.
Georg wasn’t always a business owner. Back in 1996, he was working for a company that sold construction products and had the opportunity to see the problems surveyors faced on construction sites, particularly issues with Finished Floor Level (FFL).
He says “Back in early 1996, I visited a good customer on a construction site and observed him scraping off plaster from the wall to search for a pencil line that marked the Finished Floor Level. “
“Apparently, 2,000 square meters of screed concrete had been poured too high. The only solution was to remove and replace it – and naturally, somebody was going to have to pay for the mistake. He needed to find proof that the mistake was not his, so he was scraping plaster and hoping. He turned to me for help. In the past, I’d always helped him if he needed a solution, so I undertook the FFL challenge - to create an easily accessible, immovable mark that documents the surveyor’s FFL placement.”
“First, I needed to understand why this problem exists. The surveyors on that project were using the best surveying equipment available. I quickly learned that the problem wasn’t the instrument - it was the “survey point” itself. With that understanding, I developed my first product, the Datum Marker RS10 and RS20 for FFL.”
“Soon after, I quit my job and entered the market with these two plastic parts in my hand, a bank loan and a 3-month grace period from my wife.”
Fortunately, the Datum Marker RS10 and RS20 did solve the FFL problem, and Georg was in business.
He says, “Now that I have my own business, I don’t have to represent mediocre products. I have the chance to develop and sell the best products, the most elegant solutions to customer’s problems. There is no greater satisfaction in business. It took me 10 years to gain the trust of the surveying community, but now that surveyors know that I care and that I invest the time and effort to create products they need, surveyors have been incredibly loyal customers. And when I talk to surveyors and they tell me that they solve problems with my products and explain to me what and how they did the job - that makes me happy and a little bit proud.”
Georg’s products are used around the globe, and some of the most unique uses include:
Smart Targets used:
on the launching pad structure next to a NASA rocket
in an under water basin for monitoring
Prisms used:
to align a drill carriage
to monitor one of the largest mobile cranes in the world
Prisms and scanner targets have been used on cars after an accident or at crime scenes, and drone and scanner targets are used in historic excavations, at Heathrow airport on bridges and many in many other situations where accuracy and precision are essential.
In chatting with Georg, it became clear to me that surveyors could use his products to expand their business, especially for monitoring projects. His prisms are designed as a precise, versatile system that works with scanners, drones and lasers; plus, his unique adapters mean that prisms can be mounted in exactly the same place each time a site it monitored.
If you want to learn more about Georg’s products, check out his webinars, or join his upcoming webinar on January 14 at 10:00 CST.
Georg’s previous webinars:
