The first anniversary of ScanBIM, Geomatik und Vermessung Büro, Zürich

One year ago, after 12 years of working in academia and consultancy, I took the biggest career step of my life- starting my own company, in Switzerland, a country where I had lived for only 3.5 years.

This has been the most challenging job I have ever done. For me, nothing that I did until now compares to being a company owner: the main decision-maker and responsible person for everything.

During the year, the development of the company pushed me to the limits of my knowledge, skills, and dedication. It showed me how much I still have to learn about business, people and my profession. I wanted to quit several times, but through sheer willpower, managed to find self-motivation and discipline not to give up and continue.

From now on, I will use ‘we,’ since there are a couple of people helping run the company.

Looking back, we can be happy with the progress the company made. We established the technical operability, enabling us to offer a broad spectrum of geospatial services, including topographical surveying, construction surveying and reality capture.

But, let me go back to how it all began.

I decided to revive my student dream and open a company after being rejected a couple of times for different jobs and fellowships in academia. I invested nearly all my savings into starting the company.

Although I have no formal education in business, I have been a self-learner for a couple of years, mainly from personal-development literature, business books and video channels. In fact, I have always been interested in industry. Specifically, I was interested to learn why some companies succeed and some do not. But this is a topic in itself.

Before officially opening and in the first months afterwards, many questions came up, and I had to answer them. Every decision is costly and comes with possible mid or long-term consequences. Each decision requires long-time studying and expertise. The main questions were around buying software and hardware, which are the fundamental but huge investments required to start offering services, finding clients, marketing, sales, accounting, etc. Yet I had to make choices and keep moving forward.

After being confident enough that we can do the work we wanted, we quickly came to the main question: how to find clients and opportunities to work?

Firstly, my German skills were limited, so I had to improve them quickly with the help of a private teacher.

The company had no professional connections and was new to the Swiss market, known for valuing long-term relationships and established references, which made it challenging for a newcomer.

Then, for most of my career I was teaching, researching, and consulting. That meant we had required knowledge, skills, and experience, but we did not have so many references. We managed to find a couple of clients and start doing projects. We will always be grateful to them!

Except for projects, over the year, we focused mostly on:

• building a field crew in Zürich,
• building a processing team in Zagreb,
• developing our data collection and processing workflows.

I could write much more about this process. If you’re interested, feel free to reach out.

Otherwise, I will just summarise what I think we could do better and what was good.

What could we do better:

• We could have spent more time connecting with potential clients.
• We had to engage in direct conversations to identify the specific challenges Swiss companies face with geospatial data.
• We could have outsourced more activities, such as marketing and design, to professionals instead of doing it ourselves.

What we did well:

• We built several good connections and partnerships with companies to be able to offer an end-to-end workflow, from field measurements to ready-to-use BIM models.
• We successfully completed several projects, and clients appreciated our work and fast delivery times.
• We launched our website and prepared broschure. Link
• We started our educational and consulting service ScanBIM Geospatial Engineering Academy, offering 100% free educational materials. Link
• We launched a networking event for professionals in the Swiss AEC industry, which was a great success. Link

Next year’s goals and strategy

During the next year we will focus on:

• Reaching out to people through personal communication.
• Open the geospatial data processing branch office in Croatia.
• Offer education workshops and personal consulting.

Our mission is to be a trusted partner. We want to help arcihtects and civil engineers to get the results that they need: precise measurements of buildings, infrastructure, and landscapes.

Closing thanks

We are looking for collaboration opportunities. Please reach us, if you see an opportunity to collaborate.

If you are a startup/company founder or stepping out from academia to industry, I would like to exchange experiences and knowledge.

To conclude this post, I want to sincerely thank everyone who has supported and helped us: family, friends, colleagues, and partners.