Moneyball. It’s a movie about statistics. And baseball. And neither of these is a recipe for a thriller or action-packed adventure. And truth be told: Moneyball isn’t. But it is improbably one of the more interesting films of the 21st century.
Based on a 2003 book written by Michael Lewis, the movie recounts the true story (well, in as much as Hollywood perceives truth) of how Billy Beane (general manager of the Oakland As) and Peter Brand, a Yale-educated economist and baseball nut, leverage statistics to turn the 2000s Oakland As into a championship contender – but on a shoe string budget.
You see, prior to Billy and Peter, baseball teams selected players based largely on irrelevant factors: what did the player’s swing look like? Was the swing smooth? Was the player fast so he could steal bases? Did he get walked a lot (which was perceived as a bad thing)? Did he have a girl friend?
What Billy and Peter discovered was that there was only one key metric that actually matter. Only one key metric that actually predicted whether a player meaningfully contributed to the team’s wins. Only one key metric that ruled them all.
And that metric was this: did the player get on base? It didn’t matter how he got on base. He could get walked; he could hit singles; he could get hit by the pitch a lot. As long as he got on base, then there was a strong correlation to wins.
And, boy, did that work. Using primarily the “get-on-base” key metric, the Oakland As with a $44 million budget competed successfully with teams that had budgets 2-3 times larger, e.g., the Yankees’s payroll exceeded $125 million, and made the playoffs repeatedly.
I hear: what does this have to do with drones? Well, as you know, we’ve liked writing articles where we draw comparisons of drones to things that are typically not associated with drones. Things like toilets, the Ford Model T, and to bacon. But we’ve since sacked the writer of those articles and now have a fresh outlook on life. From now on, we’re only going to make productive articles.
Just kidding.
But we do think that Moneyball does have it right. Every industry needs a key metric that describes a successful operation. For baseball, it’s the “get-on-base” percentage. For hotels, it’s revenue per available room (RevPAR). For airlines, it’s revenue per available seat mile (RASM). The list is endless.
For drones, the “get-on-base” percentage is the “Cost Per (Flight) Minute” (the “CPM”). We’ve talked about this before here and here.
The market is slowly flooding with drone operators. If you are a small drone operator, then you are the Oakland As. You have the $44 million budget and not the Yankees’s $125 million budget. Then how do you win against the Yankees? And if you are a large drone operator, how are you going to fend off the Oakland As?
You need to focus on your CPM. And we mean the total costs. How long does it take you to set up on site? How long does it take you to replace your batteries? How long does it take to do the job? What is the replacement cost of the drone if you crash it? All of these are factors in your cost structure.
And, as you were expecting, this is where we shamelessly promote the Modovolo Lift. Our goal is to radically lower the cost of drone ownership. The airframe should be largely irrelevant. That means it should be minimal cost.
But it’s more than that. If you crash a DJI Matrice 300, it likely means you are replacing the entire drone. Not so with the Modovolo Lift. If a Lift Pod is damaged, you just swap in a new one.
So your CPM is radically lowered. And you win playoffs.
