Atlanta Hobby welcomes AMA youth member for a week of internship

Day 1: My name is Joseph, I am 14 and I arrived to Atlanta Hobby at around 12:30 on Monday, August 1st, for a week of internship. I have been anticipating this week for over a month and was excited to see how a real business operates, and to spend time actually working in the various departments I was told about. My mom had sent a letter to the owner of the business (Cliff Whitney) and told him that I was interested in business. I received a reply to my moms note and was told by Cliff that they would welcome me for the week, but that I had to take notes each day and compile a report on the things I saw and learned during the week and use it as a report for school when I returned. This is my report.

Group-Low

After the 4-hour drive from Charlotte NC to Atlanta GA and after mom dropped me off I was given a tour of the hobby shop. Cliff owns Atlantahobby.com, UAVExperts.aero, UAVexpertnews.com and is partners in UAVgroundschool.com, all of the places are operating in the building. The shop is in a big warehouse and during my tour I saw all of the stations where people work and met all of the employees who I will be working with this week (lots of Mac computers). They all were very nice and I could tell knowledgeable about their jobs and  I felt like this was going to be a fun place to work. After the tour I sat with Cliff in his office, and while we talked about the week ahead of me, he had me stuff envelopes and mail about 50 checks for all of the bills that he had received in the past few days. I also helped process the paychecks for the employees and learned about the taxes that are taken out of paychecks. Over the week I would find out that book keeping and computers play a big part in running a profitable company.

After I did all of that I worked in the shop with Jim, Dalton and Russell and helped with restocking the shelves and getting comfortable with the merchandise and the computer to ring up purchases. I spent about an hour working on stocking inventory and I learned about how they know where to put all of the things that they sell and that there was almost two million in inventory in the shop.

To end the day we recorded some audio and more video in the shop studio for the battery video and I got to see how to edit and uploaded it to the UAVgroundschool.com website.

Day 2:

Today I got to work with Jan. She works in the advertising and marketing department. She taught me all about how she lists things on Amazon and E-Bay. It was all very interesting, and she taught me how to do it and I got to list some items. Listing items was very simple and all you had to do was know all of the correct steps. I think I can now list some things I have at home and make me some money. Kelley was the second person in the marketing department but she works in another city via computer and I learned that she does electronic marketing. I got to learn how Google really works which was amazing! Marketing took most of the day but I also helped with stocking shelves after the daily shipments were delivered. That afternoon I got to fly the DJI Inspire in the back parking lot. It was easier than I thought and was a lot of fun. I learned about the GPS, follow me, and point of interest features on the drone.

Day 3:

I got to the shop early today (around 7:30) which is very early for me. I felt like I had just left but started work immediately. I was working with Jan on a uavexpertnews.com newsletter that had to go out that same morning. UAVexpertnews.com is a daily blog newsletter that I learned goes by email to over 40,000 subscribers who are interested in drone news from around the world. We focused on building the newsletter a lot. Jan was able to teach me how the newsletter software works and I placed several photos in the stories.

For the majority of the day I worked with Jan, (her and Kelley are busy) but when we finished the newsletter I went out into the showroom to see if anyone needed help with anything. Greg invited me to the drone support and repair area where they do drone repairs, upgrades and technical support (this is a busy department).  I sat down with one of the repairmen named Silas. He showed me what he was doing and how he was planning to fix the drone he was working on.

The problem he was having with the drone was the camera. Whenever he connected the tablet to the drone the video feed was always kind of pixelated (it looked like the pixels in the original Super Mario Bros). I watched him work on it and helped him with a couple of other drones and got to listen in on a lot of technical support phone calls for the remainder of the day. That afternoon Cliff started showing me the computer reports on how the business runs. I learned about the P&L (profit and loss report) I learned how to read the report and was amazed how many expenses a company has. I thought companies made a lot of money but learned how most of the products were making about 15-20% gross profit. What I learned is that if a product sells for $100 and cost $85 the store only makes about $15. Out of that they have to pay credit card fees, shipping to them and to the customer, packing supplies, salaries, rent, advertising, taxes and more. I never had thought about all of the individual expenses and am now looking at businesses in a whole different way.Joeslias2-low

 

Day 4:

Today was definitely the most interesting day at the shop. It started out with waking up early running by the shop at 6 am and picking up several of the Inspire 1 drones. Greg, Cliff and I then traveled about an hour to a police department in Cobb County where we got to do a demo to several officers. They were very impressed and interested in adding the new Inspire to many of the officers’ cars.

Joefly-Low

For the past year this police department has been using a small drone for traffic and accident investigations and wanted to learn more. We showed them how it worked complete with a demonstration of a new Flir XT camera. The Flir camera is infrared, with this camera on your drone you can detect heat and see what temperature the thing you’re looking at is giving off. During the demo we were able to find people walking down a trail in the woods that we could not see with the daylight camera. We could also see the tracks of the police care on the pavement after it had passed and were able to see the engine heat even after sitting turned off of 30 min. I also learned what a GEO Fence was because we were flying near an airport. I learned that Cliff is a pilot and has what is called a 333 exemption and I learned about the new Part 107 FAA rule. With the software in the drone it was cool that it would not fly near the airport.

After we got back to the shop I worked with Jesse in the repair department and learned how to update the software on a Phantom drone. I also worked on a small drone called Zeyrok. It took me two hours and lots of testing but I finally got it fixed. After that I got to fly it around a little and experiment with it in the shop.

Then at the end of the day I went into Cliff’s office and he taught me how to make an animated Gif file for a banner advertisement using Photoshop. He showed me how to link it to a web page and then loaded it to RC Groups, a big website where RC Pilots hang out online.

That afternoon I got a real treat. Cliff lives on a small airport. At his hanger I learned about grass runways and got to see different kinds of planes. Best of all I got to go for a ride in a Stearman Biplane. Mr. Cal who is a retired Delta 767 Caption and a Vietnam Veteran lives on the airport and is a neighbor with Cliff and he owns the Stearman. His Hanger was very cool filled with model planes, the Stearman and a Sailplane (called a 1-26) that I got to sit in. I learned that Mr. Cal flew the F-104 in the war. Cal told me all about the history of the Stearman. It was so fun to fly in it and he let me do the flying for part of the flight. We got to stay up for about an hour and Cliff flew his Citabria (airbatic spelled backwards) next to us so we could get some photos and video.

JoeStearman1-L0w

Day 5:

Today I worked with Carlton in the purchasing department. He taught me how he controls the company inventory using software called Posim. Posim stands for Point of Sale, Inventory Management. Carlton is very smart and taught me about the min/max inventory system which he adjust for the various seasons. I learned that they do not make much money on each product and have to have tight controls on how they buy so they can stay profitable. He taught me how to calculate the profitability on a new product and that you can’t have too much or too little inventory. You have to know when to order, and how reliable your supplier is for shipping orders to not run out. Carlton works with over 400 vendors each day and really knows the computer. My time with Carlton was limited to the morning and then I got to work with Dan in Internet sales and order processing. Dan taught me how to take orders and box them up properly. He told me the #1 rule is when you pack a box “You are the last quality check and the first thing the customer sees” so it has to be right. Then he taught me how to ship them and print off labels with the shipping computers. Finally he taught me all about detecting fraud. I never realized how crooked people could be trying to rip off stores on the Internet. The Fraud software was cool and Dan showed me some of the ways people try to steal products using stolen credit cards.

This afternoon I went to the companies lawyer’s office and had a conversation about business and a new website that is in the planning stages. I learned all about law stuff and the office had a ton of books. Then we headed back to the shop.

I started working with Dan again and we packed more boxes. Then we worked on an order for the government. They wanted almost $45,000 worth of stuff. So we dealt with that and then I walked around and helped customers in the shop.

At the end of my last day Jan took a big group picture of all of us that were there that day, everybody here is crazy so we had to do it several times.

Then at the end of the day before I left to go back home Cliff gave me a Zeyrok drone with camera included to take home with me and even gave me a check for $200 working with them all week. It was the perfect end to the day and my week of internship.

I really want to thank my Uncle Cliff, Carlton, Jan, Kelley, Greg, Jim, Russell, Joel, Dan, Silas Jesse, Cal, Tyler and all of the other people I met while working at Atlanta Hobby and UAV Experts. I learned so much and it was a great week that I will not forget!

Joesit-LowVisit Atlanta Hobby’s website HERE

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *