#20 – James Rush

#20 – James Rush

May 28th, 2025

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Announcer: Welcome to the LIDAR Magazine Podcast, bringing measurement, positioning and imaging technologies to light. This event was made possible thanks to the generous support of rapidlasso, producer of the LAStools software suite.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Welcome to LIDAR magazine and the LIDAR magazine podcast. My name is Stewart Walker, and I’m the managing editor of LIDAR magazine. My guest today is James Rush, lidar subject matter expert at Allen & Company. James, we’re delighted to have you on board. It’s a great pleasure to be talking to you. Thank you very much for finding time.

James Rush: Yeah, thank you for having me. Look forward to our conversation.

Dr. Stewart Walker: So let me give just a couple of sentences to set the scene. Allen & Company is a family owned business set up in 1988. It’s headquartered in Winter Garden, Florida. It carries out surveys of all kinds, and it’s got a wholly owned subsidiary called Allen3D, which specializes in laser scanning. Let me start by talking about your company. Readers of LIDAR magazine and listeners to this podcast are familiar with companies in Florida that are renown for lidar surveys like Dewberry and Woolpert.

But then we the magazine were approached by Allen3D, which is perhaps a little less well known to some of the listeners. So as I mentioned a moment ago your website says your company began in 1988. It’s got around 150 employees. So let’s start talking about Allen & Company, and we can get to Allen3D in a few minutes. So can you tell us a bit more about the company? For example, how did it start? Why is it located where it is? Who’s the leadership, and what are the company’s big strengths?

James Rush: Yeah so the company was started by Butch Allen. The reason for the location is that’s where Butch was from. It started out as a traditional land serving company pulling chain back in the day and has evolved over time. The main portions of the company are land department, a construction department, we have a SUE department and then recently in a merger with Nexus 3D Consulting, a subsidiary company called Allen 3D was created a couple of years ago. And their focus is on more of the terrestrial scanning and BIM work.

So a lot of the land surveying that Allen & Company does complements the other company. So we work together on projects where we’ll do the land surveying, and they’ll do the terrestrial scanning. And we’ll do some of the airborne scanning. So it’s – so we’re passing projects back and forth and trying to build a group that accomplish anything for a client’s needs.

For the majority of the time Allen & Company was more of a traditional land surveying company. But in the last ten years they’ve seen the growth of lidar and are shifting the company into utilizing lidar to more efficiently perform projects and perform them with less boots on the ground, less invasive procedures and still maintaining that accuracy that the company is known for, for the clients. So a lot of the previous companies that I had worked for kind of are core lidar companies with surveying and accuracy as a secondary, subbing out a lot of the ground control and stuff like that. But Allen & Company kind of is the flip. They started as a core surveying company and have expanded into more of the lidar remote sensing geospatial services over the years.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Okay, I’m getting the picture. So what did Nexus 3D Consulting do before you acquired them? Were they in this area of building, scanning and BIM and so on?

James Rush: Yes, Nexus 3D, they had an office in Bakersfield, California and Boise, Idaho. They were big into the terrestrial scanning and BIM modeling before they were acquired. And it kind of paired well with a department that we had had in our company called our AT Department, which was our Advanced Technology Department. And so those, Nexus and our AT Department separated and created a subsidiary company that focuses a lot on the BIM modeling, kind of the digital twin style surveys where they’re capturing reality in what the site is today and creating a BIM model that can be then used for informed decision making.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Thank you for that. So let’s talk a little bit about yourself. Where were you born and raised? I know that you graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County with a BS in Environmental Science. You then followed that with a graduate certificate in geospatial intelligence applications from Penn State. So it’s always interesting to know how careers develop from there to where you are now. I wonder, for example, after Penn State were you tempted by a career in the defense area or not? So tell us more about yourself.

James Rush: Yeah, so I went to school and got a BS in Environmental Science. The funny thing is in my undergraduate I chose not to take any GIS classes. Not because I didn’t want to. But when I found out about it I was close to graduating, and to take those classes would have delayed my graduation. And so I had kind of wrestled with the decision and decided not to take those classes, and I ended up getting a job with the National Park Service in my region with one of their – they have partner organizations a lot of times for National Park Service where a non-profit will have employees that work directly with the National Park Service through grants.

So I wasn’t a federal employee, but I was working with the National Park Service Chesapeake Bay office. They had a need for GIS help. And so I had always been very computer savvy and grew up learning a lot of things. And so I kind of dove into it. Started with ArcGIS and just slowly kind of taught myself everything. And then one of the projects that kind of really started to spark my interest in the industry was a lidar project where they were looking to purchase a parcel of land along a river.

And so I took publicly available lidar data from Pennsylvania. It was on the Susquehanna River, which Pennsylvania, shout out to them, they have one of the most organized systems for publicly downloading data of any state that I’ve come across. And I started doing viewshed analysis from the river using that lidar data in ArcGIS. It was very simple stuff to begin with. But seeing that lidar data for the first time to me was really interesting. And it kind of really got me thinking about my career and what I wanted to do.

And then I kind of was, like, well, this is the end user side. I’m interested in the lidar technology more so than the end product. So I started looking around for jobs, and I came across Leidos. So from there I went to work for Leidos on a very large defense contract where we had everything. I started out with Orion and Gemini sensors, and then we went into Galaxy sensors. We had Leica ALS80. We had an SPL100.

So it was a great place to go and learn since we had access and so many different sensor platforms, and we were a large sensor purchaser. We had access to a lot of the manufacturers that at a smaller company you wouldn’t get. And there they trained me on how to process lidar. But my personality I guess you would call it, I didn’t want to just kind of learn how to press the buttons and get the results. I really was curious about the why and the how of it. And so when I was at that job I leveraged as many people as I could to learn as much about the technology and the science behind it and the theory behind it on proper collection and what happens with a sensor when you change your scan rate or your pulse rate and what’s being divergence.

A lidar – a laser is a footprint on the ground. Like, learning all those things that you kind of – that aren’t obvious when you first start, and they had a great staff there that was very knowledgeable and was able to kind of teach me those things in partnership with the staff that was on that contract. And also talking to the companies that would come out and service our sensors when we would buy new ones or service the old ones and stuff like that.

So I did that for a few years. And that was all for the most part wide area mapping with fixed wing aircraft. And then after that I left that job and went to work for a company in San Diego, California called Flight Evolved. They were focused more on the utility side of things. So we went to helicopters and drones using smaller RIEGL sensors. So that was my first experience with RIEGL at that job. And so we were doing – it went from wide area mapping to corridor and detailed mapping for utilities in California and Washington and Oregon where they wanted such richer detail. They wanted the weather heads going to the houses or the powerlines going to the houses.

They wanted the (sounds like: com) lines. They wanted the primary and secondary conductors. They wanted the poles and the cross arms. And that kind of was my jump into high detailed lidar. I worked there for a while, and then that company was acquired by Aethon Aerial, which is a Canadian based company that had offices in Canada, Australia. We did a bunch of projects in New Zealand. And so with that company I stayed there. So from the time I started with Flight Evolved to the time I left Aethon Aerial I was there for about five years and left as the director of global production for that company.

And it was a great company. We did a lot of really cool utility projects doing full top imagery inspection with retired linemen, creating digital twins for utility clients in Australia and New Zealand. And that job had a lot of travel with it, and I was kind of settling down. And I was also working crazy hours because I had staff in eight different time zones all across the world. And so I kind of – Allen & Company was really getting into the lidar, and I had a friend who was working here and was, like, we could use some help.

And so I took the job here and have been working with Allen & Company now, building the lidar program, applying it to a lot more projects and trying to utilize it to the fullest ability. I was in defense for a little while. But the utility space has been the best balance for me. I love the aspect of – in some cases you’re collecting thousands of kilometers of transmission line. So they’re still large wide scale projects, but also the level of detail that has to be applied to them is another challenge in itself. Dealing with low reflectance powerlines, flying in mountainous areas. It proved to have a lot more challenges and problems that needed to be solved.

And so it kind of gelled with what I enjoy in a career. So that’s kind of how I ended up where I am now, and I’ve been loving it, and I can’t wait to see the future of where all of this technology goes. I’ve been doing it for ten years now, and I still think it’s just so cool.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yes indeed. I have to say, I just love listening to what you’ve said, and it’s happened with a number of people in these podcasts. The stories they have to tell about how they got to their current positions, but also the passion for the technology of course. But also the passion for producing deliverables that meet the client’s requirements. And some of these deliverables quite frankly are amazing.

James Rush: When you see kind of a full scanned powerline and everything is digitized and sagged and everything looks correct, and you can kind of view that in different software and pan around it, it’s spectacular.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Well, I was going to ask you, I noticed that Allen & Company at Winter Garden, Florida, it’s located an eight minute drive from the headquarters or RIEGL USA. I was going to ask if that was a coincidence. But I guess it’s more that RIEGL USA pitched up in the same place as Butch Allen.

James Rush: Yeah, it turns out that way. It’s been really cool. Winter Garden has seemingly somewhat become a bit of a hub. TopoDOT’s headquarters is also in Winter Garden. You have RIEGL there. Greater Orlando area definitely seems to be kind of a hotspot for geospatial companies. It’s really cool. We’ve developed a relationship with RIEGL. They were a part of our Tucker Ranch project that we did that we can talk about later on. We’ve partnered with them on a couple of really cool projects that we’ve done and learned a lot from them.

I think that RIEGL is positioned really well in the market currently. They have a really good step of sensors, all the way from small and compact to large scale 50 – with their new 50 and 60 double IS. So I definitely think it’s really nice being located in that hub of technology that’s developing.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yes, it’s maybe a counterbalance to all that’s going on along the front ranges from sort of Colorado Springs north to Boulder and Fort Collins. And I guess it even goes on up into Canada, Calgary and Edmonton. So we got something on the southeast as well. I had the privilege of attending the formal opening of RIEGL USA’s new headquarters, and I’ve had the even greater privilege of going to their central headquarters in Horn in Austria. It certainly is quite an impressive company.

But let’s talk not about RIEGL specifically but about the equipment that you have more generally. What equipment do you have at your disposal for lidar? And I’m talking here hardware platforms and software.

James Rush: For hardware wise with Allen & Company, I mean, we’ll focus on more of the lidar side of things. Right now we have a system from Inertial Labs on a whisper drone. It’s the – I think it’s the MX2 from Inertial Labs with a Hesai pander XT-32 sensor. And then Allen 3D, our partner company that focuses more on the terrestrial stuff, they have a (sounds like: visi) 600I Leica RTC360, a couple of those, VLX2 from NavVis. We have a Trimble X7 as well. They have a DJI L1 on an M300. As our company is growing, we’re currently in the market for a new sensor for drones and helicopter operations.

Dr. Stewart Walker: On the software side you mentioned TopoDOT. Do you use their software or other packages?

James Rush: Yeah, so on the software side we’re using a lot of MicroStation with Terrasolid, TerraMatch, TerraScan, TerraModeler for our processing. For the systems, every system kind of has their own proprietary processing software for the initial processing. But a lot of our deliverables are coming out of Terrasolid. And then for orthos we’re using PIX4D for our smaller sites, and then on the A3D side they’re also using a lot of Revit for the BIM modeling.

Dr. Stewart Walker: It’s a broad range.

James Rush: Yep.

Dr. Stewart Walker: And now for a word from our sponsor, LAStools.

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The LIDAR Magazine Podcast is brought to you by rapidlasso. Our LAStools software suite offers the fastest and most memory efficient solution for batch-scripted multi-core lidar processing. Watch as we turn billions of lidar points into useful products at blazing speeds with impossibly low memory requirements. For seamless processing of the largest datasets, we also offer our BLAST extension. Visit rapidlasso.de for details.

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Dr. Stewart Walker: An article recently published in LIDAR magazine from a former colleague of yours at Allen3D, Walter Lappert, gave a flavor of lidar’s capabilities. He talked about mapping Alcatraz. He talked about mapping mine archaeology in Chiapas and Mexico. He talked about Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. These were probably not all Allen3D projects. Would you like to talk about some of the projects that you’re currently working on that you’re finding particularly exciting, challenging, interesting?

James Rush: Yeah, I mean, one of the coolest projects that the Allen team of companies has done, there was an old medical building that was stripped out that was getting redone. And they wanted us to come in and survey it. And so we paired our terrestrial scanner with our UAV scanner along with GPR. And so we scanned and modeled the whole building, and then we went through and used GPR to find all of the rebar, because they were going to be doing drilling. And there’s tension rebar cables in the concrete floor, and if you hit those with a drill and break them, it’s a huge expense on the construction side of things.

So we went in, scanned the whole building. We did GPR, and then we ended up creating models that modeled the whole building. It modeled all the rebar locations, merging the terrestrial data, the GPR, the aerial data for the exterior of the building. It was a challenging but really cool project. And we’ve started to see more of that. We just did another project for a warehouse company where we merged all three of those technologies as well to give them BIM modeling for the interiors, a signed and sealed survey for the exterior and modeled all of the GPR data into the BIM model.

So I think that’s probably the exciting stuff for me, is starting to merge all of these technologies together. The most recent incidence of that we did a utility project. It was a combination utility and road survey project. So we utilized a RIEGL mobile scanner to scan the roadway to get all of our data for the road survey. And then we flew it with a fixed wing aircraft to collect all of the powerline data.

And so it was a combined project where they were getting PLS-CADD modeling, all the weather data, the method ones for the powerlines, but also a road survey. And we merged that mode one airborne data together to give them everything in kind of one package. So for me, the cool projects are when you’re merging technologies in together and kind of utilizing multiple technology to accomplish the goal.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yes indeed. You’ve touched on a couple of things there that are interesting to me. One is ground penetrating radar. I find that a fascinating technology, and at LIDAR magazine, sure, it’s centered on lidar. But we like to do occasional pieces on other active sensors, such as synthetic aperture radar, sonar, ground penetrating radar. And I’ve struggled to get articles on ground penetrating radar. But finally I’ve got one in the pipeline from Trimble. So that’s been had because it’s exciting, and being able to use it to find rebar, I hadn’t thought of that. But it’s a natural for ground penetrating radar.

James Rush: Yeah, it worked really well for that use case. I’m not – I wouldn’t call myself a novice on ground penetrating radar. We have a whole team that does that portion of the work. But one of the coolest things I’ve seen from ground penetrating radar lately is there’s a company out there that is taking the ground penetrating radar results and are able to export them as a last point cloud.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yeah, so that then gets into the space that most practitioners in the lidar industry then understand. So it’s crossed that gulf from being something exotic and hard to grasp into something that you can work with on a daily basis.

James Rush: Exactly, and then if you couple that with a co-collective mobile scanner, all that GPR data is instantly referenced to the above ground data. It’s pretty cool.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Indeed. Well, you also mentioned road surveys, and I went to the Photogrammetric Week in Stuttgart the beginning of April. And RIEGL did some demos there, and they were talking about using their mobile mapping systems looking backwards from the vehicle to look at the condition of the pavement.

James Rush: Yeah, that seems to be one thing that we’ve seen pop up a lot more, is pavement and concrete health index studies where you’re kind of finding cracks and identifying cracks. And it seems to be a lot of companies – phase one for a perfect example, I was talking to them at Geo Week. And they’re getting some great accuracy doing concrete surveys and asphalt surveys using only photogrammetry.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Well, I think with the very sophisticated photogrammetry software that’s out there now, but also the phase one cameras. The number of mega pixels is just going up and up and up. So for any given application that means the resolution is increasing and increasing. So you can see all these tiny features on the roads that make our lives as drivers so miserable.

James Rush: Yes.

Dr. Stewart Walker: This next question may not have an easy answer. I was going to ask you, is there such a thing as a typical customer or typical deliverable? Or is basically every project different?

James Rush: We do a lot of sealed topo surveys for the land side. But I would say for the application of the other technologies, a lot of our typical projects are the land surveys with topo. But then we do get a lot of interesting projects where I wouldn’t say they’re typical at all. It may be kind of a typical application. Like, we just did a project with a warehouse where they manufactured industrial piping. And we went in, terrestrial scanned the warehouse and modeled it. But they were using it for measurements and plumbness evaluation for all of the columns because they were putting a new crane. And the new crane weighed, I don’t know, but an insane amount of weight.

And so they were having to put in new rails and everything. And so they were scanning the building. But the process is the same, but what people are using the scans to get and to gain is changing and adapting. And I think those are the challenges because it is a basic building scan. But depending on what the client is requesting, you have to scan it in a certain way. So understanding kind of what the client is wanting and what the client is using the data for is always interesting.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Right, well, I’m also interested in the accuracy standards. Do you agree something with a client? Or do you use published standards? For example, we recently had an article in the magazine by John Russo of the US Institute of Building Documentation. He was talking about the recently introduced version 3.1 of the USIBD level of accuracy, which they call LOA specification guide. And then there are the well known ASPRS Positional Accuracy Standards for Digital Geospatial Data. So do you sort of work with a client before you start the project and discuss whether to use these, or maybe the client’s got something else in mind?

James Rush: It definitely depends on the client. Sometimes they’re upfront requested in an RFP that they want it met to these standards. But then in other cases they know kind of the relative accuracy that they’re looking for, for their project. And in some cases ASPRS is a large cost increase on a project to use the ASPRS Accuracy Standards to prove that you’ve met the accuracy on a project, especially on some of the smaller projects. I think the new standard is 30 points under 1000 square kilometers for GCP – for checkpoints. And so if you’re doing a 20 acre survey, that’s – it’s a bit of overkill on something small like that.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yeah, these are difficult topics, and I know that there are a lot of people involved in the preparation of that standard.

James Rush: It’s going to be a balance that will shape out over the next few years I think. ASPRS seems to be rooted in a lot of the large scale government contracting work with, like, 3DEP work and stuff like that. But I think that there needs to be kind of a substandard of ASPRS for the smaller projects. Because with lidar sensors becoming more affordable and the technology becoming easier to process and more companies are using it, there needs to be standards for some of these smaller scale projects that a lot of companies are utilizing the scanners for. There’s only so many statewide collects that go on in these large scale collects.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Well, let’s change the subject a bit now. I noticed in social media that you’ve been involved in a project at Tucker Ranch in Winter Garden in Florida where the same area has been scanned using ground-based technologies by no less than 17 different systems. Can you please tell us a bit more about this?

James Rush: Yeah, so Tucker Ranch was – it’s under construction now sadly. So it’s not repeatable again. But Tucker Ranch is a public park that was located near our office that we had set up first order control on. And we would use it to train new survey techs on for going out in the field. We’d set up total stations. We’d run traverses and use it as a training ground. So we had established really high order control on that site.

And then we were looking at buying a new terrestrial sensor. And so we kind of knew we had really good control there. We were talking with some companies that were wanting to demo for us. And so it started out just us demo’ing sensors and kind of scanning the same thing. But then at the time one of my co-workers who’s not with the company anymore, Shawn Asher, him and I started getting other companies involved more and more and were kind of, like, let’s make this data publicly available to people because it’s very valuable.

It wasn’t just terrestrial scanners. We also had UAV scanners, and RIEGL actually wanted to fly it with some of their fixed wing scanners. But we were, like, it’s kind of not necessarily in the scope. But they came out and flew it with some of their other scanners because they were close. But the goal was originally to kind of compare sensors for us, and then we kind of molded it into information for the industry so that other people can kind of make informed decisions when they’re going to buy a sensor and see comparable datasets of the same sites. Because a lot of times when you request a sample set of data from a sensor manufacturer, they’ll send you a dataset of, like, the Eiffel Tower or some beautiful, perfectly curated dataset that’s not necessarily realistic to what you’re using the sensor for.

And so we thought it would be really cool to have all of these sensors, these terrestrial mobile and UAS sensors kind of on the same site. So people can see the differences in data, the differences in the number of returns that the sensor can utilize. They could see the differences in mobile versus terrestrial versus airborne data. The park was a great representation of that because it had a road that looped around the park, so that the mobile sensors could kind of drive the whole around the park. But then in the middle of it was an island covered in trees with a couple of small buildings and a playground.

And so it allowed people who weren’t familiar with the technology to kind of see, wow, this mobile sensor gets really good data on the roads. But it’s not really reaching into the middle of the island where the buildings are or where the playground is. But it was collected in a minute. But the terrestrial scanner took two hours, but it was able to go through and grab everything. But it couldn’t get the tops of things. Whereas the airborne sensor could. So it kind of gave people, in my opinion, a good idea of seeing what the technology’s strengths and weaknesses are.

And then it also showed sensors along a large range of price points. Because not every company needs the most expensive sensor on the market with the highest accuracy for what they’re doing. I’m a big believer of, there’s a right job for every sensor and that it’s not necessarily that this is the sensor you need to buy. It depends on what your job is and what you’re trying to accomplish on what you need.

And so we collected all of this data. We presented it at RCN, which is a conference in Boise, Idaho every year. Shared the data publicly with everyone, and it was really successful. And the feedback from a lot of the manufacturers that participated was good. That they had people reaching out to them about sensors from the project. So I think it was a good balance. It got a lot of data out there for people to see and compare and learn from.

Dr. Stewart Walker: And I like your comment that there are different sensors and each may be suited to a different sort of project, and that’s the skill that people like yourself and your counterparts in other companies can judge.

James Rush: Exactly. I think that that’s where the expertise comes in, is knowing what can get the job done and meet the client’s requirements.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Right. Now your field crews, are the majority of them college graduates? Is it easy to recruit people of the sort of quality and resourcefulness that you need?

James Rush: It’s somewhat of a challenge, especially on the traditional surveying side. I think that we’ve seen a large decrease in the number of kids coming out and wanting to become PLSs. On the lidar side of things it’s even harder because a lot of people – like, I mean, when I was in college I didn’t necessarily realize that this could be a potential career. I didn’t know that much about the industry. And so we’ve kind of been partnering with some of the local colleges in Florida that have geospatial programs to work with students and do internships and facilitate that.

So it’s a combination of both. People that have a background in it or are college graduates or people that are coming in from a survey field crew background where they started on a survey crew and have gone and gotten their Part 107 and become drone pilots and are learning about the lidar on the job, versus prior knowledge and then coming into the job. It’s a bit of a mix.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Sure. Now I think you’re doing the right thing by working with the universities. I think that’s the only way that we can improve the situation. It’s very sad, you know, with all the exciting technology that people don’t know that you can have a career using it.

James Rush: Yeah, I mean, one of the coolest projects we did recently, partnered with RIEGL, was a Lunabotics competition that was hosted by NASA. So all of these robotics teams from all of these universities across the country came, and they built these lunar robots. And they had to move regolith, which is synthetic moon dust, from one pile to another. And they were judged on how much they could move within a timeframe.

And so we used RIEGL’s VZ-600i. They had a scanner set up to scan the starting pile, and then we had our scanner set up to scan the finishing pile so they could figure out what volume the teams moved to kind of award the competition. But one thing that came from that was a lot of the schools were interested in the sensors and the technology to bring it into their programs within the school.

Dr. Stewart Walker: That’s excellent. Now at the end of a project when you generate the deliverables, they need to be signed off by a professional land surveyor, is that right?

James Rush: Depending on the project. A lot of the Allen & Company projects are all signed and sealed by a surveyor. Some of the BIM projects at A3D does. Those don’t need to be signed and sealed. But we’re still giving accuracy reports. We’re still setting survey control. We’re still shooting it in and giving accuracy reports, but they’re not sealed projects. But yeah, we do seal the majority of our projects.

Dr. Stewart Walker: As far as locations are concerned, we’ve talked about Winter Garden. The offices in Boise and Bakersfield, they came out of Nexus 3D. Have you kept them open? Are you still working out of there?

James Rush: Yep, both of those offices are still open and operating so that we can have coverage of the United States and some of the areas in Canada and stuff like that. With the West Coast and an East Coast presence, it kind of gives us coverage of the majority of the United States to be able to fly to clients and get projects done no matter where they are.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Now I think Allen & Company’s privately owned. So its financial results are maybe not publicly available. I did see a number of $95.5 million for I think 2024 revenue. Are you able to say anything about things like profitability and more importantly, growth?

James Rush: So that $95.5 million, I would assume – there’s an Allen & Company financial firm in Florida, that’s an investment firm. So I’m going to assume that that was from them. I don’t have any information on the actual numbers for our company. But I would say that we’re definitely growing, and I would say that utilizing the lidar technology on our projects has definitely improved our ability to complete more projects within a year and to spend less time in the field collecting the data. So we’re able to get our projects faster, more efficiently and maintain the same accuracy. So we’re kind of leveraging the technology to improve our efficiency as a company.

Dr. Stewart Walker: You’re heavily involved in BIM and digital twins. These are both fast growing areas. So hopefully you’re growing in parallel.

James Rush: Yeah, they’re definitely growing fast. People are learning more about BIM, seeing the benefits of it in the VR space and the XR for long-term asset management really. It’s definitely something I’ve kind of seen in my career in the utility space. A large portion of the work was in California, Australia and Western Canada, and that was originally spurred on by wildfire prevention, using it for vegetation management. Finding trees that were growing within the envelopes of the powerlines when they were at max sag and max sway. And we’re now kind of seeing that transition from only being used for veg management and kind of moving into a full asset management with utilities doing true ups and network inventories where they’re collecting their whole entire network and then cataloguing everything and being able to assign work orders to it. And kind of truly creating a digital twin of their utility network so that they can then have a record of where everything’s at in one place. And then later on they’re just doing true up work and RFIs for smaller areas and sub-areas when they’ve done construction work. And it’s definitely something that’s seeming to grow in the utility industry at least, outside of just those regions into the greater country.

Dr. Stewart Walker: So you’re doing work across the United States and also some in Canada.

James Rush: Currently with Allen & Company and A3D we’re focused in the United States right now.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Okay, it’s absolutely clear from our discussion that Allen & Company is applying very modern technology to a variety of intriguing projects and applications that your clients bring to you. You also mentioned that you’re looking at acquiring some new equipment. So how do you envisage Allen and A3D developing over the next let’s say three years? What’s in your future?

James Rush: Over the next three years I think it’s going to be kind of building the brand within the industry and doing more work with more clients and then trying to apply the technology and find that next space for the technology to be used in. Executing the jobs that we already have and the clients that we already have and then seeing what industry maybe the technology could be applied to next for us to grow into. Definitely growing more into the digital twin space. Growing more into the power utility sector and acquiring more capability so that we can execute these unique projects.

Dr. Stewart Walker: You’re going to be busy. James Rush, thank you very much indeed. I really enjoyed this conversation. I’m very grateful that you were able to participate in the LIDAR magazine podcast. We wish you well with your challenging position developing Allen & Company’s lidar business.

James Rush: Thank you very much for having me. It’s been a great conversation.

Dr. Stewart Walker: I’m sure that listeners will similarly have enjoyed your company and comments today. I also want to underline our gratitude to our sponsor the popular LAStools lidar processing software. We hope that you’ll join us for forthcoming podcasts. We’re expecting some guests that we’re pretty sure you’ll want to hear. If you want to ask about our podcasts or make comments, don’t hesitate to write to us. Thank you for listening and good day.

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This edition of the LIDAR magazine podcast is brought to you by rapidlasso, our flagship product. The LAStools software suite is a collection of highly efficient, multi-core command line tools to classify, tile, convert, filter, restore, triangulate, contour, clip and polygonize lidar data. Visit rapidlasso.de for details.

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