About Us

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Hello and welcome to SWK Drone Services! I'm the owner, Steven Keogh, and I'd like to say thank you for taking the time to browse through everything on the website. I was born and raised out in the country up in north central Nebraska where I learned all of the Nebraska values from hard work starting out as a little kid, respecting those around you, and going out of your way to lend that helping hand to others. I take pride in what I do everyday and I look forward to serving you!

After graduating from college in 2001, I landed in the Columbus area and started working as a surveyor for an engineering firm here and bounced around a bit like everyone out there. Today, I'm still in the surveying profession and I work for a power company based out of Columbus. I do my drone services business on the side in the evenings and on the weekends.

Back in the day, I bought an AR Drone that you connected to your iPhone or an iPad for like $300. It was a lot of fun to fly but if you got too far away, it would get a mind of it's own and fly off who knows where! I couldn't even go maybe 100 feet away from my phone! I was disappointed so I ended up giving it to my little brothers to play with back then. 

Being in the surveying profession, we started seeing drones come into the profession. I'd see various ones at our yearly surveying conference. Back in June of 2018, we started getting a bit more serious about adding one to our surveying department so we had a demo done on a Microdrone. These aren't micro by any means! This got the mind going on the capabilities of drones though. 

In January of 2020, we hired a company to fly a stretch of our powerline and take aerial photos of each structure. The results and resolution of their imagery was quite impressive and it sparked that interest in me again. Management was starting to truly get interested in the possibility of adding drones in the company so I figured I might as well get my pilot's license to fly one legally so I'd be ready. I paid for a training program to study for the test and in February 2020 I passed the FAA Part 107 test so that I could legally fly a UAV for business purposes. What better way to learn how to fly for work than to buy one for yourself? 

So, in February 2020, I also purchased a DJI Mavic 2 Pro to gain experience flying and I decided to make a business out of it to recoup some of those costs. That's pretty much how we got to this point and I'm just having a blast flying and providing aerial imagery for folks in the area. I'd be more than happy to help you out as well!