I’m the majority owner of Adams Surveying Company, where I also serve as Remote Sensing Manager and Head of Technology & Development. Our firm was founded in 2009 by my father, RPLS Philip E. Adams, whose surveying career spans more than four decades across land development, high- and low-rise, industrial, commercial, and infrastructure work. I came up in the field as an instrument man and begain driving the company’s technology adoption, and in 2024 I took majority ownership. Today I run both our day-to-day reality-capture operations and the longer-term technology roadmap.
My focus has been turning our small firm into something that operates like an industry leader. I’ve built a profitable, multi-platform reality-capture program that spans UAS LiDAR and photogrammetry, terrestrial static scanning, and mobile ground capture. The part I care most about isn’t the gear; it’s the decision-making. Which sensor actually fits which job? How do you protect both accuracy and margin? And how do you integrate all of it with traditional field methods so the survey stays in industry standards and the work stays profitable? Those are the questions I’ve had to answer with real money on the line.
That work has made us a regular partner to global technology companies such as MicroDrone and DJI, who bring us in to beta-test equipment and pressure-test workflows before release. On one 800-acre master-planned development, my team delivered in two weeks what conventional methods would take two months — which let the engineer design more efficiently and saved the client substantial infrastructure cost.
As Head of Technology & Development, I’m also an early, hands-on experimenter with AI in the small-firm survey workflow. I build and test automation myself instead of waiting for off-the-shelf tools, and I’m candid about what works, what doesn’t, and what it really takes to modernize a traditional survey business.