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Katapult Pro Training: From New Scope to Healthy Rhythm

Adam Schmehl — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The teams that come to us for training typically aren't new businesses just starting to explore engineering services. They're established engineering firms doing great work across multiple scopes and disciplines, and that reputation is how they landed a new opportunity. Whether it's a new client, a new scope, or a bid they'd been chasing. Now they have to learn Katapult Pro. No matter how talented the team, getting up to speed in a new system when deliverables are due yesterday is a tall order.

We interviewed Trey Sobiech, who has spent about four years running training and certification at Katapult, and he set the scene for how Katapult Pro training supports teams who end up in this spot.

https://youtu.be/NlLmUNW0YCk

When Excitement Turns Into Obligation

Winning the work feels great. Opening the new platform for the first time feels great too, for about a week.

Then the project schedule starts moving. "As teams get into the platform and start playing around with the tools, that excitement starts to turn into deadlines and deliverable requirements and just hurdles that have to be crossed," Trey says. The throughput targets are real, the quality bar is set by someone else's standards, and the team is learning the software in the gaps between billable hours.

Excellent engineers make this harder on themselves in a specific way: they bootstrap. Figuring things out independently is the instinct that made them good at the job, so they apply it to the new platform too. Some of that works. But a platform this configurable has a long tail of capability, and a team teaching itself doesn't know what it doesn't know. Tools sit unused. Workarounds calcify into the workflow. The team is moving, but slower than the deadline needs them to move, and the gap grows quietly.

One path is continuing in the pain and hoping it gets better. The other is bringing in help, which is where Trey's team comes in.

The Process Underneath Every Training Format

We offer several training formats: guided virtual sessions, the OSP Field Bootcamp and Office Apprenticeship in Dillsburg, on-site training built around your projects, and self-paced training that's available to every user at no cost. The format is a logistics decision. Trey's process underneath is the same three steps regardless of which route you pick.

Start with where you actually are. Before anyone teaches anything, the first work is diagnostic. "First just understanding where you're at, what problems you are facing, kind of running some diagnostics," is how Trey describes it. What does the deliverable need to look like? Where is the team getting stuck today? A training built on assumptions about your workflow wastes the hours you're paying for.

Learn the tools as they're meant to work. The platform does a lot out of the box, and most struggling teams are underusing what's already in front of them. This step is awareness and mechanics: what's available, how it's used well, and where the efficient path runs. For teams newer to the industry itself, this is also where OSP fundamentals get woven into the software training rather than assumed.

Map it to your scope of work. This is the step bootstrapping teams almost never reach on their own. Generic proficiency isn't the goal; your deliverable is. The last stretch of every training adapts the tools to your specific outputs, your client's standards, and the way your field and office teams actually hand work to each other. It's the difference between knowing the software and running your business on it.

The endpoint is certification, which puts your team in the same network of certified users and vendors that pole owners and primes reference when they're deciding who to trust with work.

Why We're Able to Help

Katapult has been doing OSP engineering work since 1991, and our services team still serves utility and telecommunication attachers in our own backyard. We were the first team that had to figure out how to make this software a competitive advantage on real projects with real deadlines, which means we hit the traps first, and we still hit new ones as the work keeps changing.

"The reason Katapult is able to help is because the tools have to work for us. Our own internal team uses these tools," Trey says. "If the tools can work for us, they can work for everybody."

Trey isn't reading from a curriculum someone else wrote. He's teaching a workflow our own teams run every day, which is why the advice comes out specific: not "explore the annotation tools" but "here's the move that saves your photo team an hour per job." We've had the failures already. Training exists so your team can have the success without repeating them.

Getting Launched Beats Getting By

The firms that thrive on new scopes aren't the ones that avoided the learning curve. They're the ones that compressed it on purpose, early, before the workarounds hardened and the deadline pressure turned into deliverable problems.

If your team is heading into Katapult Pro for the first time, or you've been in the platform for a while and suspect you're only using half of it, that's exactly the conversation Trey's team is built for. Tell us where you are and what the work needs to look like, and we'll match the format to your team.

Schedule a meeting with our team to talk through training and certification for your crew.

Frequently Asked Questions About Katapult Pro Training

What training formats does Katapult offer?

Guided virtual sessions, the OSP Field Bootcamp and Office Apprenticeship hosted in Dillsburg, PA, on-site training where our expert travels to your team, and self-paced training available to every user at no cost. Every format follows the same process: assess where your team is, build proficiency in the tools, then adapt them to your specific scope of work.

How do we pick the right format for our team?

It depends on team size, experience level, and timing. A small group of newer field technicians often gets the most from the structured Bootcamp setting, while a whole team that needs to train on its own projects and models is usually a fit for on-site. Self-paced works well for teams that want to move on their own schedule or test the waters first.

What does certification get us?

Certification verifies your team's proficiency in the Katapult Pro field or office workflow and places your company in the certified vendor network that pole owners and primes reference when sourcing work.

We've been using Katapult Pro for a while. Is training still relevant?

Yes, and it's another one of the most common engagements. Teams that bootstrapped their way in are usually underusing the platform, and a diagnostic pass often surfaces tools and configurations that change throughput without changing headcount.

Does training cover the industry, or just the software?

Both where needed. For teams newer to OSP work, fundamentals like make ready rules and field practices get built into the training rather than assumed, so newer staff learn the why alongside the how.

The MSA You Sign at 10 Employees Can Sink You at 50: Managing Business Risk as Your Engineering Firm Grows

Adam Schmehl — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

There's a moment every small engineering services firm knows. A utility or a prime contractor sends over a Master Service Agreement, forty pages of terms you didn't write, and the work on the other side of that signature is work you need. Not "would be nice" work. Keep-the-lights-on work.

So you sign it. Maybe you skim the scope and the rates and trust the rest. Because the alternative feels worse: send back redlines, look difficult, watch the work go to the shop down the road that signed without blinking.

That instinct makes sense when you're small. Not landing work can put you out of business, and a clause on page 31 feels theoretical compared to the reality of payroll on Friday. But the math changes as you grow, and the firms that make it from five people to fifty are usually the ones that figured out when and how to start treating contract terms as business risk instead of paperwork.

This guide covers what makes MSA terms uniquely dangerous for engineering firms, the specific clauses worth your attention, and how to right-size contract discipline to each stage of growth. If you're thinking through this because your firm is scaling into bigger programs, schedule a meeting with our team and we'll talk through how growing firms run that work in Katapult Pro.

What Is a Master Service Agreement, and Why Is the Fine Print Different for Engineers?

A Master Service Agreement is the umbrella contract that governs your relationship with a client across every project you do for them. Individual scopes get issued as work orders or task releases underneath it, which means the MSA's terms (indemnification, liability, payment, intellectual property, insurance) apply to everything, often for years.

For engineering services firms, a few of those terms carry a kind of risk that only comes from attorneys, because they interact with how your professional liability insurance works. Errors and omissions coverage responds to negligence. It pays when you fall short of the professional standard of care and someone is harmed by it. But client-drafted MSAs routinely include terms that make you liable without negligence, and those obligations are generally uninsurable. If you agree to them and they're triggered, the firm pays out of pocket.

The American Council of Engineering Companies has been fighting these clauses at the state level for years. ACEC calls broad form indemnification "fundamentally unfair" and describes the contractual duty to defend as "simply put, unacceptable and uninsurable." Several states, including California, Georgia, and Texas, have passed laws restricting or voiding these provisions in engineering contracts, which tells you how seriously the industry treats them.

The stakes are not hypothetical. In Ames & Gough's 2024 survey of A/E professional liability insurers, 53 percent of insurers reported their largest single claim payout of the prior year fell between $1 million and $4.9 million, and 23 percent paid a claim of $5 million or more. By their 2026 survey, 80 percent of insurers said they now consider contractual risk transfer attempts by project owners when evaluating a design firm's insurability and rates.

In plain terms: the clauses you sign affect not just your exposure on that project but what your insurance costs, and whether you can get it at all.

The Spectrum: From Survival Mode to Walk-Away Authority

At one end of the spectrum is the small shop. One or two executives, a handful of field and office staff, and a book of work where a single client might be two-thirds or more of revenue. At this size, the pressure to sign is enormous. The risk you can see beats the risk you can't.

At the other end are the large firms. They have people whose whole job is reviewing agreements. For them, signing bad MSA terms is an unacceptable business risk, full stop. Audit rights, pricing discount clauses, intellectual property assignment, uncapped liability: any one of these gets flagged, negotiated, or becomes a reason to walk away. They can afford to say no, so they do.

In between is where most OSP engineering firms live, and it's where the real question sits. Not whether contracts deserve review, but how much contract discipline is right for a firm your size, and what should trigger the next level. That's the question the rest of this guide works through.

The MSA Clauses That Deserve Your Attention First

You need to know the handful of terms that can end a firm, and where the reasonable middle ground sits on each. Pole owners deal with the mirror image of this problem, since attachment agreements carry their own rates, auditing standards, and liability terms, so both sides of the table benefit when the terms are clear and fair.

Indemnification

Broad form indemnity asks you to cover damages "related to" your work even when you weren't negligent, sometimes even when the damage was caused by others on the project. ACEC calls this fundamentally unfair, and your carrier won't cover it. The middle ground is comparative fault language: you indemnify only to the extent of your own negligence, which is what your insurance actually covers.

Duty to Defend

Often buried inside the indemnity section. It can obligate you to pay the client's legal fees from the moment a claim is filed, before anyone has established fault. Strike it where you can, or limit defense cost reimbursement to your proportionate share of fault after the matter resolves.

Standard of Care

Watch for words like "highest," "best," or "free from errors." Agreeing to an elevated standard converts your professional obligation into an uninsurable warranty and makes it easier for a client to prove you fell short. The middle ground is the ordinary negligence standard: the degree of care and skill ordinarily exercised by members of the profession under similar circumstances.

Limitation of Liability

Many MSAs have no cap at all, or a cap gutted by carve-outs. Insurers strongly favor limitation of liability clauses, and some offer premium credits for including one. A reasonable position caps total liability at your fee or your available insurance limits, paired with a mutual waiver of consequential damages so you're not on the hook for a client's lost profits.

Payment Terms

Net 90 through a supplier portal can strangle a ten-person shop, and a pay-if-paid clause is worse: it makes the prime getting paid by the owner a condition of you getting paid at all. Several states void pay-if-paid outright, but don't count on your state being one of them. Push for pay-when-paid with an outside date, and negotiate toward net 30 or 45 with milestone payments on larger scopes.

Intellectual Property and Data Ownership

Client-drafted MSAs often assign all work product outright, including your methods, templates, and standard details, which means you can technically infringe your own tools on the next job. Grant a project-specific license instead, and carve out your pre-existing IP.

For OSP firms there's a second layer. The pole owner's MSA sets the rules for the field data you collect on their behalf: who owns it, where it lives, and what happens at project close. Those answers should come from that agreement, not sit ambiguous until a dispute forces the question. This matters enough to us that we built our own software agreement around it, so the platform terms never conflict with what you've signed upstream. We wrote up the reasoning in The Four Principles Behind Our Software Agreement.

Audit Rights and Pricing Clauses

Most-favored-customer terms require you to give this client your best price offered to anyone, which quietly compresses margin across your entire book and is genuinely hard to monitor. If you can't remove them, narrow them: same service, same volume tier, prospective only. On audit rights, limit scope, require notice, and make the client bear the cost unless a material discrepancy turns up.

None of this is legal advice, and state law varies a lot here. The point is that a targeted attorney review of these specific clauses costs a few hundred dollars and a day or two of turnaround. Set against the claim payouts insurers are reporting, that's the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy.

Growing your firm means growing into bigger contracts, bigger programs, and bigger clients. The teams that scale cleanly run their pole attachment and joint use work on one platform, with one record of what happened in the field.

Schedule a Meeting With Our Team

Right-Sizing Risk Discipline to Your Stage of Growth

The mistake firms make in both directions is mismatching discipline to size. A five-person shop doesn't need a contract approval workflow. A sixty-person firm running utility programs shouldn't be signing MSAs the way it did at five.

Under Ten People

The move here is a one-page walk-away list. Yours might be: broad form indemnity, duty to defend, elevated standard of care, uncapped liability, pay-if-paid, and full assignment of your methods and templates.

Find one attorney who knows design professional contracts and can turn a read around in 24 to 48 hours, and build that relationship before you need it. Watch concentration too: once any single client passes roughly 20 percent of revenue, you're in a danger zone, because that client's MSA terms stop being negotiable the moment losing them becomes unthinkable.

Ten to Fifty People

Bring your insurance broker into contract review so required limits and language are confirmed insurable before you sign, not after. This is also where a controller or dedicated bookkeeper starts earning their keep by owning receivables and cash forecasting, because the payment terms you negotiate only protect you if someone is watching whether clients honor them.

Redlines Rarely Kill Real Deals

The fear that keeps small firms from negotiating is that redlines signal difficulty and the work will go elsewhere. In practice, MSAs get negotiated most of the time, and sophisticated clients expect markup on complex agreements. A procurement team that pulls a deal because you asked for comparative fault indemnity language was going to be a hard client anyway.

This is also where documentation quality becomes a contract issue and not just an engineering one. When a dispute surfaces two years into a program, the firm with photo documentation of every attachment and midspan height, stamped with a date, is arguing from evidence. The firm with a spreadsheet is arguing from memory. Good contract terms and good records protect the same thing: your ability to show what you actually did.

Send the redlines. Keep them focused on your walk-away clauses, offer alternative language instead of blank rejections, and explain each edit in a sentence or two. That comes across as professional, not difficult.

The BEAD Build-Out Raises the Stakes

All of this lands harder right now because of where the industry is. The first BEAD-funded projects are breaking ground with compressed construction timelines, clawback provisions for missed milestones, and a wave of small firms signing prime and sub agreements quickly to grab the work. A single funded route can cross multiple pole owners, each with its own agreement, and the engineering firm in the middle carries risk on all of it.

Make ready costs have climbed sharply over the past several years, which raises the dollar value riding on every scope and every contract that governs it. The updated FCC attachment timelines add schedule pressure on top, and NTIA's 2026 BEAD terms pull subgrantee-owned poles into the FCC framework, so the regulatory clocks and the contract clocks now run together.

Fast-moving markets are exactly when bad agreements get signed, because urgency does the procurement team's negotiating for them. The firms that come out of this build-out as durable businesses will be the ones that treated growth-mode contract decisions with the same rigor they bring to engineering the work itself.

Frequently Asked Questions About MSA Risk for Engineering Firms

What is the most dangerous clause in an engineering services MSA?

Broad form indemnification paired with a duty to defend. Together they can make you responsible for damages you didn't cause and legal fees from the day a claim is filed, and professional liability insurance generally covers neither. ACEC has called the duty to defend "unacceptable and uninsurable," and several states have passed laws voiding these provisions in engineering contracts.

Will sending redlines cost me the contract?

Rarely. Complex agreements like MSAs are negotiated most of the time, and sophisticated clients expect markup. Focused, professional redlines on three or four existential clauses, with alternative language offered, demonstrate credibility.

How much client concentration is too much for an engineering services firm?

Common benchmarks treat any single client above 15 to 20 percent of revenue as a risk to actively manage. Concentration and contract risk compound each other: the client you can't afford to lose is the client whose MSA terms you can't realistically negotiate.

What is the difference between pay-when-paid and pay-if-paid?

Pay-when-paid is a timing mechanism: the prime can wait a reasonable period for owner payment, but still owes you. Pay-if-paid makes the owner paying the prime a condition of you ever being paid, shifting the owner's credit risk onto you. Some states void pay-if-paid clauses, but treat the language as a walk-away item rather than counting on state law.

Who owns the field data an OSP engineering firm collects?

It depends entirely on the agreements involved. The pole owner's or client's MSA typically governs ownership of data collected on their behalf, which is why the work product and IP sections deserve close review. Your software platform's terms should defer to that agreement rather than conflict with it, which is how we structured the Katapult Pro software agreement.

Ready to Grow Without Betting the Farm?

The small shop signing everything and the large firm redlining everything are both responding rationally to their circumstances. The skill is knowing where you are on that spectrum, and moving your discipline up a stage slightly before your headcount demands it.

Talk to your attorney and your insurance broker about your specific contracts and your state's rules, because the details genuinely vary. But don't let the fear of losing work talk you into obligations your insurance won't cover and your balance sheet can't absorb. The work you keep by signing badly can cost more than the work you'd lose by asking.

Contract discipline is one half of scaling well. The other half is running the work itself on a system that holds up as your programs get bigger, which is the problem we've spent years solving for pole attachment and joint use teams across the country.

Questions about growing your business using Katapult Pro? Schedule a meeting with our team today.

Over- and Underestimated Components of OSP Engineering

Adam Schmehl — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Every team has its own culture and DNA, and nobody knows your business better than you do. That said, most teams carry a few blind spots that quietly add risk, usually around where they put their effort and where they assume the value is. This article walks through three parts of aerial OSP engineering that teams tend to overestimate, and three they tend to underestimate. The pattern underneath all six is the same: the industry tends to overvalue what happens at the individual pole and undervalue the planning and collaboration that happen away from it.

If you want the full picture of where OSP hours actually go, our breakdown of OSP design covers the whole workflow from data collection to construction prints. This piece is about where teams misjudge that effort.

The parts of aerial OSP engineering teams tend to overestimate

These are components that probably do not carry as much weight as the industry seems to think they do.

1. Field experience

Twenty years ago, most telecom design decisions were made from the field. Your wheel, your clipboard, your Hastings stick. The most important tool you carried was your brain, and to succeed you finalized the plan before you got home, with enough notes to talk it through with the other plant owners at the rideout.

Today those decisions do not need to be made at the pole. If you keep that as your workflow, your throughput is limited by how fast you can get a design expert to one specific location somewhere across the country. Shift the engineering decisions back to the office using web-based design software, and you shrink the experience a crew needs to capture data quickly and accurately at the pole.

That shift changes who you can hire. Virtual engineering of defensible, accurate data lets you staff field technicians who live closer to the work site and who are the people you actually trust and want on your team, rather than whoever has the most years or whoever you can afford to mobilize across the country. The experience still matters. It just moves to where it does the most good, which is the office, on a big screen, with the whole record in front of it.

2. Clean poles

Everybody loves a clean pole line, but a clean pole line is not where the competition is. Even with BEAD dollars flowing, the bulk of the engineering work is on the poles nobody else wants: the ones with existing comm attachments, the congested ones, the messy and hard-to-access poles you have to hike to.

If a pole were easy, it would not need engineering, or the whole route would already be handled with LiDAR at 55 miles an hour and an AI engine good enough to navigate the point cloud on its own. The value your team provides shows up exactly where the poles get difficult, so building your process around the clean and simple ones optimizes for the part of the market most likely to shrink.

3. Solo crews

There are situations where sending two people to a pole does not make sense. The catch is that your formula for where that cutoff sits has to be calibrated honestly.

As windshield time and the gas, food, and lodging costs climb, the safety and efficiency gains of a two-person crew eventually stop paying for themselves. For our team, we usually turn any project with fewer than ten continuous poles into a solo job. The further it is from home, the more we try to batch those small jobs alongside bigger projects, sending two solo technicians out to meet up and crush a large route together before splitting back off on their own. Solo versus two-person is a real engineering decision with a real break-even, not a default you set once and forget.

We got into the specifics of how and why we run two-person crews in this breakdown of field data collection.

The parts of aerial OSP engineering teams tend to underestimate

These are the ones that quietly decide whether a program scales and whether the package holds up.

1. Pre-design

A lot of teams still ask their field crews to walk out routes from the field. Most of that work is faster, more accurate, safer, and frankly more comfortable from the office, with a keyboard, a mouse, a big screen, and street view. We recommend designing in as many nodes and connections as you can from the office up front, so your field crews can spend the day getting great data instead of trying to design a route from a phone screen in whatever weather the day handed them.

Pre-design is also where you catch the expensive problems while they are still cheap to fix. A route reworked on screen costs almost nothing. The same change after a crew has driven it costs a day and a tank of gas. Using existing pole owner records as a starting point for that office work is standard practice, even though those records rarely stand on their own as a finished deliverable.

2. Virtual rideouts

The FCC and state PUCs have their own requirements for which parties need to take part in the survey and engineering of pole attachments. On top of that, pole owners, ILECs, design firms, and construction partners all need to get on the same page before anyone builds anything. A lot of teams assume that alignment requires everyone rolling out their trucks to the same pole.

It does not. Most of that coordination can happen online, at a fraction of the cost, without giving up any of the collaborative back-and-forth that makes a rideout useful in the first place. Everyone looks at the same defensible, photo-based record, points at the same pole, and agrees on what they are seeing, from wherever they happen to be sitting.

If your team is still driving out to the site to hold that conversation before work begins, that's a real opportunity for cost and timeline reduction. Book a demo and we will show you what a virtual rideout looks like on a real project.

3. Feedback and review

Because everyone needs everything yesterday, there is a real industry pull toward fixing a mistake the moment you find it and moving on. That instinct gets strongest with your own teammates, where it feels faster to quietly correct the work than to stop and talk about it.

In the context of training, that instinct works against you. There are times when the professional call is to make a small correction on a client's behalf and keep the project moving without turning it into a production. With a teammate who is still learning, silently fixing their work is almost always the wrong move, because the same mistake comes back on the next job and the person never learns why it was a mistake in the first place. Review is not about catching people out. It is how the reasoning behind a good call spreads through a team, which is the same thing that lets you hire for trust and proximity instead of raw years.

Where this leaves your program

None of this is about doing less engineering or trusting your people less. It is about being honest with yourself about where the value actually sits: less in individual field heroics and clean, easy poles, and more in the design, coordination, and review you can do together and up front. Get those three right and the work gets easier to defend and cheaper to run, without leaning the whole operation on a handful of people you cannot afford to lose.

Book a 60-Minute Consultation

Frequently asked questions

What skills does OSP field data collection actually require? Less than most teams assume, once engineering decisions move to the office. With photo-based collection, field technicians capture calibrated photos and documentation at the pole while trained engineers handle measurement, make ready, and quality control back at the desk. That lets you staff crews for reliability and proximity to the work rather than for decades of field judgment. What you need is a strong work ethic, safety sense, and willingness to ask questions. You can see more about what we look for here.

Can pole attachment engineering be done from the office? Most of it, yes. Route design, node and connection layout, measurement, make ready calls, and pole loading analysis can all happen in the office from defensible, photo-based field data. Field crews still need to physically visit poles to capture that data, but the engineering judgment no longer has to happen at the pole.

When does a solo (one-person) pole crew make sense? On small or short runs where the safety and efficiency gains of a second person do not offset the added cost. As windshield time and travel costs climb, that math shifts. A practical starting point is treating short, self-contained jobs (for our team, fewer than about ten continuous poles) as solo work, and batching small far-from-home jobs alongside larger projects.

What is a virtual rideout? A virtual rideout is a remote review of a route or set of poles where pole owners, attachers, design firms, and construction partners look at the same photo-based record together and align before construction, instead of meeting in person at the pole. Much of the coordination that used to require a field trip can happen online without losing the collaboration.

How Davey Resource Group Serves One of the Country's Largest IOUs

Adam Schmehl — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

How a 200-person engineering services team applies the Davey standard across the six utility operating companies, with Katapult Pro as one tool in their kit.

Davey Resource Group is the utility asset management arm of The Davey Tree Expert Company, founded in 1880 and headquartered in Kent, Ohio. With 12,000 employees, top-ten employee-owned standing in the U.S., and nearly a century and a half of accumulated practice, Davey has built a reputation across the utility industry for a standard that gets set inside the company before any client ever enforces it. Continuous improvement is in their DNA, and it shows up everywhere from how the team picks its tools to how they use them on behalf of their clients.

Clark Ristaino runs the engineering services teams supporting six utility operating companies. Roughly 200 people on his team work inside that scope day to day, serving one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the country. The bar for what they deliver is set in three places: by Davey’s own internal standard, by their customer’s distribution standards, and by the operational realities of joint use work at volume.

An operation like that runs on a multitude of technologies and workflows. Designers, field operations, admin intake, and quality assurance each have their own deliverables, and the team is intentional about how technology supports each function. Katapult Pro is one piece of that toolkit, and the platform Clark’s team chose for joint use design, field collection, and quality review across the utility footprint. About 80% of the team is in it daily, and the designers, who Clark calls his “power users,” drive the deepest use.

That choice came after years of running joint use work and pole loading on other platforms. What shifted for his the team was the bar coming from their clients:

“The scope of our clients’ expectations has changed dramatically over the last several years, including requirements that relied on not only a larger amount of data, but also more precise data.”

Clark Ristaino, Area Manager, Davey Resource Group

As clients began asking for more data and tighter precision on every application, the challenge for Clark’s team was to find which workflow would help them deliver at that bar without sacrificing field safety or office output. The move to Katapult Pro was the answer: collection at higher volumes, an annotated photo record they could verify in the office, and a design environment that surfaces client-specific requirements directly to the people doing the work.

“We found that as work volumes increased, the ability to collect work in the field at volume proved difficult due to the inherent level of detail required. Now, using Katapult Pro, we have a safer alternative that also allows for collection at higher volumes.”

What that decision looks like in practice came into focus during a recent week of work. Across nine two-person field teams, Davey Resource Group collected 3,530 poles in a single week, roughly 392 poles per team. Clark notes that throughput wasn’t reachable on the old approach, and with application volume continuing to climb across the footprint heading into the summer of 2026, capacity at that level is what keeps the work flowing for clients counting on it.

“Our Field Operations were able to collect 3,530 poles using Katapult, across 9 teams (2-man teams). This resulted in about 392 poles per team, a number that could not be achieved through our old method of collecting data. Being able to collect data at this volume helps set us up for success with our clients, as we see unprecedented workloads in 2026.”

Equally important is what happens once the data leaves the field. Designers work in a side-by-side, proposed-versus-existing view, with automated violation flagging configured by both equipment type and client-specific requirements. The annotated photo models replaced the CAD-style models the team had previously relied on, which gives QA a verification path that doesn’t hinge on perfect field collection from traditional methods.

“Rather than needing to rely on 100% accurate data collection in the field, Katapult Pro’s annotated models allowed us to catch these things in office, reducing the need for dispatching teams back to the field for additional data.”

When the utility updated their pole loading requirements, plenty of consulting teams in the region had to scramble. They didn’t, because Davey reads the road ahead. The integrated, real-time PLA inside Katapult Pro was already part of their workflow when the new requirements landed, and that wasn’t an accident. It was the result of a team that evaluates tooling against where their clients are going, not just where they are.

“When they rolled out their updated pole loading requirements, we were excited to start utilizing Katapult Pro’s integrated PLA for this exact reason. No more back and forth between programs. This helped to reduce costs to the client, and allowed the team to work more fluidly, increasing overall pole output.”

“It allowed us to have one singular platform to work out of, rather than having to use two or more to get the same product and outcome.”

The same instinct shows up in how Davey serves the applicant side of joint use. As Davey Resource Group continues to grow their services for communications providers (the ones submitting attachment requests through utilities), the team applies the same platform that runs the utility-side design and QA work. Applicants get real-time visibility on where their projects sit and can make routing decisions on actual data instead of guessing.

“Katapult Pro’s sharing capabilities have been invaluable for providing our communication clients the most up-to-date and real time information on their projects, and has allowed them to make informed decisions on the most cost-effective routes.”

Davey’s standard comes first. They choose tools that can carry that standard at the volume, precision, and safety their clients require, and they apply each tool with the discipline of a team that has been refining its craft for nearly a hundred and fifty years. Being one of the tools in that kit is a huge honor for us at Katapult. The team supporting the utility’s six operating companies is meeting a bar set in three places at once, and Katapult Pro has to hold up to all three.

“If you want access to the best software in the business, companies need to be looking at Katapult.”

Want to find out if Katapult Pro is a good fit for your projects? Schedule a demo with our team today.

On-Site Training: Built For Your Team

Adam Schmehl — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Rolling out new software across a team is one thing when you're preparing for an upcoming pilot and another thing when your client is expecting the deliverable by next week. The common path is trying to figure it out on your own, which can kick off a vicious cycle of trying to play catch-up and feeling frustrated when you can't figure it out.Better than bootstrapping is to send people away to a training, which means flights, hotel nights, and a stretch of days where your crew is learning on practice poles instead of working on billable work.

On-site training changes the logistics. Instead of your team coming to us, one of our Katapult Pro experts comes to you and builds the training around your workflow and the models your team already works in. If you want to see every format first, our training and certification options lay out the full menu.

Training against your real work, not a sandbox

The thing that makes on-site different is the material. When our expert is in your office or out with your field crew, the examples are your poles, your projects, and your standards. We can watch how your team collects in the morning, then run feedback and training in the afternoon against what they actually captured that day. People pick up Katapult Pro faster when the lesson is attached to work they already understand, because there's no translation step later between a sample dataset and the real thing.

That also means the plan is yours. Before the visit, we scope what your team needs to get better at, whether that's field data collection, back office processing, or a specific part of the workflow that keeps tripping people up, and we build the days around it. We'll make suggestions to help your workflow succeed, especially if there are any obstacles keeping you from potential throughput.

Though teams sometimes struggle to lock in for practice data because the stakes are low, we've found that when the stakes are high, the lessons stick.

Where on-site fits among your other options

On-site is one of several ways to get a team up to speed, and it isn't always the right one. It helps to know the alternatives.

Our OSP Field Bootcamp is an intensive in-person program hosted in Dillsburg, PA, and it's a strong fit when you're bringing on field technicians who are newer to the industry and want structured reps. The Office Apprenticeship does the same for back office workflows.

For teams that prefer to move on their own schedule or want to test the waters before jumping all in, self-paced training is available to every user at no cost, and guided virtual sessions cover specific features one hour at a time. If you already hold a Site License, your Continuous Improvement Hours can go toward any training time without a separate engagement.

On-site earns its place when the value is in the customization and the convenience: a whole team in one location, a workflow specific enough that a generic curriculum would miss it, or a schedule that's hard to interrupt for travel.

What on-site usually looks like

Because every plan is scoped to the team, no two visits are identical. A typical structure pairs observation with instruction. We spend time watching how your team actually works, then use that to shape hands-on sessions against your own models rather than training data. When it fits the workflow, we'll split the day so collection or production keeps moving in the morning and training happens in the afternoon, which keeps your team in its normal rhythm instead of pulling everyone out for a full week.

This is also a great opportunity to evaluate your existing training programs. If you're already running a train-the-trainer approach, our team is happy to observe and provide feedback on the program itself.

The practical case for bringing us to you

The logistics tend to favor on-site once you do the math. When a whole team travels for training, you're paying for every seat, every flight, and every hotel night, on top of the days nobody's billable. Sending one of our experts to you often costs less, and it lets you train more people in a single visit since everyone is already in the same place. Because the schedule bends around your operation, your team loses far less time to travel and disruption than a trip would cost.

None of that makes on-site automatically the right call for every situation. A team of 2-6 newer technicians may get more out of the structured setting of a bootcamp. The point is to match the format to the team, and on-site is the one built for training a group, in place, on the work they are already responsible for.

If you've got a team coming onto Katapult Pro, or a crew that could be getting more out of it, on-site training is worth a conversation.

Tell us what a normal week looks like for your team and we'll build a plan around it.

Talk to our team about on-site training | See all training options

Frequently asked questions about on-site training

How is on-site training different from the OSP Field Bootcamp? The Field Bootcamp is a structured program you travel to in Dillsburg, PA, with a set curriculum. This is a good chance to interact with the rest of the Katapult team and learn more about how our teams work together to support your work. On-site training comes to you and is built around your specific workflow and models, which makes it a better fit when you want to train a whole team in place or focus on parts of the process unique to your operation.

Can you train both our field and office teams? Yes. Because the plan is scoped to your team before the visit, on-site training can focus on field data collection, back office processing including photo classification and make ready work, or a mix, depending on what your team needs. While we won't be completing any of your work for you, the time can be spent helping your team while they work on billable projects.

How many people can we train at once? On-site scales with your team since the training happens at your location. We size the plan to your group and scope during planning so everyone who needs the training can take part.

Do we need to prepare anything ahead of time? We work with you before the visit to understand your workflow and goals, and we may ask for access to your models or recent projects so the training uses your real work instead of sample data.

How do we set it up? Reach out to our team at training@katapultengineering.com and we'll talk through your scope, your timeline, and whether on-site is the right fit compared with our other training options.

Bring training to where your team works

Often, your team does its best learning on the work you're on the hook to complete. On-site training puts a Katapult Pro expert in the room with them, against your projects and your standards, on a schedule that doesn't bring the rest of the work to a stop. When you're ready to make a training plan, we'll help you figure out what a visit should cover and how to fit it around your operation.

Email training@katapultengineering.com to plan on-site training today!

BEAD Broadband Deployment

Adam Schmehl — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

A single BEAD-funded fiber route can cross a dozen pole owners before the first splice. Each owner has its own permit process, its own format, and its own clock. The engineering work gets spread across multiple vendors, each collecting field data to its own standard. And every one of those threads has to come back together cleanly enough to defend the build at a federal funding audit.

If you run engineering for a regional ISP, a co-op, or a municipal provider, you carry the schedule risk for all of it. The team you have was not sized for a build this size, and adding headcount alone does not close the gap, because the bottleneck is rarely the number of people. It is how the work moves between them.

Where a multi-utility build breaks down

The trouble usually starts upstream, in design. Routes get drawn in one tool, handed to an engineering firm, and returned as deliverables that do not connect back to anything. Change a route after that handoff and you restart half the process, because the design, the field data, and the permit package were never living in the same place.

Then there is the vendor question. The firms collecting your field data each bring their own tools and their own QC standards, so you receive finished deliverables you cannot easily audit, aggregate, or correct. That means problems get baked in before you ever see them.

Permits add another layer. Every pole owner runs its own process on its own timeline, so without a system that holds them together you are managing a separate workflow for each one, with no portfolio-level view of where anything stands. This is not a knock on the utilities. They are coordinating their own safety and reliability obligations. It is a structural reality of building across territory you do not own.

When those threads slip, the cost is not abstract. Idle crews and equipment can run $50,000 to $200,000 a month while pole access clears, and a missed deployment milestone can put the funding behind the whole build at risk.

The record has to start before construction does

The part that tends to get budgeted last is the one BEAD ties funding to: the as-built record. When compliance documentation gets assembled from scattered data after construction is done, you are reconstructing the truth instead of capturing it, and a record stitched together at the end is hard to defend.

There is a lot of attention right now on construction tracking and living asset records, and that visibility matters. But a construction dashboard is only as good as the field record underneath it, and that record has to exist before the first crew shows up. A timestamped photo confirms something was there, but it does not show what changed, and confirming that what got built matches what was permitted takes a baseline captured at the pole, before construction, to compare against.

That is the difference between photo documentation and a verified record. A timestamped photo shows you took a picture; a verified record shows the pole matches the permitted design at every location, which is the standard a BEAD audit actually holds you to.

One environment for the whole aerial lifecycle

We built Katapult Pro Broadband Deployment to hold the entire aerial pole attachment lifecycle in one place, from desktop pre-design through post-construction as-built verification. It is not a separate product or a new build. It runs on the same Katapult Pro infrastructure that has been in production since 2017 and became the make ready engineering standard in 2019, with more than 400 subscribing companies across all 50 states and Canada. In practical terms, the contractors you need to run your build are very likely already working on this platform.

The lifecycle is not a straight line. One fiber project spawns multiple permits across multiple pole owners, each moving through its own states independently, while construction gets sequenced against permit clearances in real time. Katapult Pro Broadband Deployment is built to manage that as parallel coordination rather than a single pipeline: native route design or KMZ ingestion from your engineering firms, field collection to your defined standards, office processing tied to your data model, multi-utility permit tracking with portfolio-level status, and construction sequencing that releases jobs as permits clear, down to the individual pole.

The post-construction phase is where verification earns its keep. The workflow freezes a named snapshot of each job at the moment construction starts, marks the existing field photos as the pre-construction baseline, and then calibrates post-construction photos against that baseline pole by pole.

TrueNet Communications configured this approach for BEAD compliance documentation on their own, and the as-built verification step is being packaged as a default going forward.

Your build, your data

The piece that matters most over the life of a BEAD program is who owns the record. When a contractor holds the platform subscription, you are a guest in someone else's environment, and the data can leave with the relationship. Katapult Pro Broadband Deployment runs on a private instance that you own. You define the data model and the field collection standards, and your vendors collect inside your instance, to your standards. That keeps the design data, the permit history, and the as-built record yours, from pre-design through closeout and into the next decade of operational decisions.

What this looks like in practice

When TrueNet rebuilt their as-built compliance process inside Katapult Pro, a four-step workflow that had taken six to nine months was completed in under a month, photo documentation coverage went from roughly 5% to 100% of locations, and a two-person field team moved from 20 to 30 poles a day to around 200.

On the setup side, Project Setup delivers a configured environment within 90 days of a subscription start. Our first customer stood up in 30 days and within the first few months had already grown past the user count they started with, which is the kind of adoption you see when a team starts running real projects in a system that fits how they actually work.

Where to start

If you are scoping a BEAD-funded aerial build, the best first step is a conversation about how your specific program runs: your pole owners, your vendors, your reporting and audit requirements, and where a single environment would take the most pressure off your team. We will walk through what setup looks like for a build like yours and where Katapult Pro Broadband Deployment fits against the work you already have underway.

Talk to our team about your BEAD deployment plan.

The 4 Principles of a Fair Software Agreement | Katapult

Adam Schmehl — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

What it means to own your data, hold your pricing, and keep the freedom to leave

Every engineering firm and utility has a stack of signed agreements somewhere, and most of them got signed faster than they got read. Software contracts tend to be the worst offenders, because the parts that matter most to you are usually buried where they are easy to skim past: who owns the data, how much the price can climb, and what it takes to walk away.

We wrote our software agreement so those answers are short, plain, and in your favor. The reason comes down to how our business actually works. We make money when your team does real work inside Katapult Pro, not when we monetize what you collect or trap you in a contract you cannot leave.

That single fact shaped four principles, and each one removes a worry that the standard SaaS agreement quietly leaves in place.

If you want to see how the platform fits the work before getting into the terms, you can book a Katapult Pro walkthrough and we will show you the workflow first.

Principle 1: Your team owns all the data you collect and upload

The first principle is the one that sounds obvious right up until you read most software contracts: your team owns all the data collected and uploaded to our software.

The standard language usually runs the other way. It gives the vendor wide latitude to train AI on your data or sell insights drawn from it, and that grant tends to sit in a paragraph that is hard to find on purpose. Our agreement does the opposite, and it says so plainly. You collect it, you own it. If you leave Katapult Pro, you take it with you. We do not keep a copy, sell it, or use it to build something else.

That ownership matters most when you are an OSP consultant signing an MSA with a pole owner. Their contract sets the rules for the data you collect on their behalf: who owns it, where it lives, and what happens to it at project close. Because our agreement is written so those answers come from your customer rather than from your software vendor, you are not stuck reconciling two contracts that disagree. If the pole owner needs the data migrated to their system, we help migrate it. If they need it destroyed, we destroy it. You sign the MSA without wondering whether the fine print on the software side contradicts what you just promised.

Principle 2: We won't jack your rates

The second principle protects the number you build your budget around. Our agreement specifies that software pricing will not increase by more than 2% per year.

A 2% cap reads like a modest detail until you have watched a renewal come in 30% higher than the year before. Most software contracts give the vendor full discretion over annual increases, so every renewal turns into a conversation with finance and IT about whether to absorb the jump or rip out a platform your team already depends on. Once your people are trained up and the work is flowing through the software, that is not much of a choice, which is exactly what discretionary pricing counts on.

A capped increase changes the math for anyone running pole attachment work on a multi-year program. The number you budget for a seat this year is close to the number you will budget for it three years from now, so your bid holds across a 3- or 5-year window. When your margin on that work is built around an assumed software cost and that cost jumps 30% at renewal, the margin disappears and there is nowhere to recover it. With the cap in place, the productivity your team picks up along the way shows up in your margins instead of ours, which is where we think it belongs. Your growth is a good outcome for us too.

When you are pricing a pilot or a multi-year program, the software line has to hold. Predictable, capped pricing means the bid you win is the bid you can still profit from in year three. See how teams running joint use and make ready programs build their cost model around Katapult Pro.

Principle 3: You can cancel anytime

The third principle was written so that neither you nor your data is ever held captive. You can cancel anytime.

Most enterprise software contracts are built to keep you in: annual or multi-year commitments, fixed seat counts that only ratchet upward, and renewal cycles timed for the moment you have the least room to walk away. Ours runs the other direction, and the flexibility is built into how you use it day to day. Add or remove users any time, change your subscription tier between projects, or cancel altogether. Moving your data out or sending it to cold storage is your call, and it is easy to do.

Your business does not run on a flat line, so your software cost should not have to. A 40,000-pole audit needs a very different user count than a steady annual joint use program. When the work shrinks, your software spend should shrink with it, and when the work disappears entirely, you should be able to step away without negotiating an exit. We win when you win, so we will help you wind down between active projects rather than holding you to seats you are not using.

Principle 4: Protection from being removed

The fourth principle answers a question most teams never think to ask until it bites them: what actually stops a vendor from kicking you off the platform. In Katapult Pro, the only thing that does is breaking the agreement.

This reads like a footnote until you consider what it protects against. Most software contracts give the vendor broad discretion to terminate accounts, and that discretion turns into a pressure point the moment your business and the vendor's start to overlap, or the moment the vendor gets acquired by a competitor. Our agreement spells out the specific terms that justify removal, and they are the ones you would expect: failure to pay, stealing or reverse-engineering our IP, illegal use of the software. Competing with us is not on that list. Switching vendors for part of your work is not on it either, and neither is operating as both our customer and our competitor at the same time.

That protection mattered most back when we were a privately held company that could be acquired, because the agreement meant a customer would never wake up to find their software vendor had been bought by their biggest competitor. We are now wholly owned by an Employee Ownership Trust, which takes that acquisition scenario off the table entirely. The principle stays in the agreement anyway, because the point was never one ownership structure. The point is that your access to your own work does not depend on staying on a vendor's good side.

Why the agreement reads this way

These four principles are not concessions we make grudgingly. They follow directly from a business model built on the belief that you should pay us because we are delivering value, not because you are contractually stuck.

Katapult is run by people who do this work, which means we have seen plenty of one-sided software contracts ourselves. When a vendor's revenue depends on lock-in, the incentive is to make leaving painful. When it depends on your data, the incentive is to keep that data and quietly find more uses for it. We took both incentives off the table on purpose, so the only way we keep your business is by being worth keeping. We view this as an opportunity for mutual wins, and the agreement is where that shows up in writing rather than just in a sales conversation.

Frequently asked questions about our software agreement

Do I really own the data I collect and upload to Katapult Pro? Yes. The agreement states that your team owns all data collected and uploaded to the software. If you leave, you take your data with you, and we help you export or migrate it.

Does Katapult train AI on customer data or sell insights from it? No. We do not keep a copy of your data after you leave, we do not sell it, and we do not use it to build something else. Our revenue comes from your team doing work in the software, not from monetizing what you collect.

How much can my Katapult Pro pricing increase each year? The agreement caps software price increases at 2% per year, so the cost you budget for a seat stays close to the same figure across a multi-year program.

Is there a long-term contract or a cancellation penalty? No. Katapult Pro is month-to-month. You can add or remove users, change your subscription tier between projects, or cancel altogether without an early-termination penalty.

What happens to my data if I cancel? It stays yours. You can export it, move it to cold storage, or have it migrated to another system.

Can Katapult remove my access if I also compete with your engineering team? No. Competing with us, switching vendors for part of your work, or operating as both a customer and a competitor are not violations. The only things that justify removal are spelled out in the agreement: failure to pay, IP theft or reverse-engineering, illegal use of the software, etc.

See the agreement for yourself

A software agreement should make the next few years easier to plan, not harder. When you own your data, your pricing holds, you can leave whenever the work calls for it, and your access does not hinge on staying out of a vendor's way, the contract stops being a risk you carry and starts being one less thing to manage. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and we are glad to walk through it line by line before you commit to anything.

Book a Katapult Pro walkthrough and we will show you the platform and the terms together, or talk to our team about how the agreement fits a program you're running now.

Welcome to Katapult Pro: A Letter From Our Team

Adam Schmehl — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

If you're reading this, your team has probably just signed up for Katapult Pro, or you're doing homework before you do. Either way, welcome! You'll get the login link and the kickoff invite soon. Before all that, we wanted to introduce ourselves, because for the next few months you're going to be working with us a lot, and we've learned a few things about how to make that go well over the past decade.

Most of what follows comes from Seth Miller, our rockstar solutions specialist and currently our interim support team lead. He's been at Katapult ten years and has worked just about every seat there is here: developer, field technician, project manager, designer, configuration specialist, software support, and team lead. When we asked him what new customers should know, he didn't talk much about features. He talked more about culture and approach.

Who you'll be working with

Katapult is an OSP engineering firm and software development firm rolled into one team in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania. What started as a small team of three in 2008 has grown to about 100 today. We built Katapult Pro for our own engineering work before we ever sold it to anyone, and we still run our local engineering services out of the software. We’re always dogfooding our own solutions, so we often know about issues and feature requests before the phone even rings.

Since January, the company has been 100 percent employee-owned through an Employee Ownership Trust. The practical version of that: the person on the other side of your email owns a piece of the company, and nobody here is working toward an acquisition or an investor exit. Our business model only works if you keep finding the platform worth paying for, which is also why our agreements run month to month, your data stays yours, and if you ever decide to leave, we'll help you take it with you.

Seth's a good picture of who's on the other end of the line when you call our team. Ask him why he's stayed ten years and he'll tell you it's "just the focus on people." Ask his coworkers why they love Katapult, and they might just say “Seth.”

Our team takes culture and our core values extremely seriously—and you can call us out any time you think we’re not putting our money where our mouth is. When you work with our team, we expect you to feel like we brought maximum value to the table, and were willing to go more than halfway to help your team win.

The hard part about a new workflow

Here's the thing we'd rather say now than have you discover in month three.

"Katapult Pro is an amazing product, but it's also not a silver bullet. If you're expecting this solution to just take away all of your problems, it can, but it's also gonna take work and effort from your side as well. We'll come alongside you. We'll probably even prepare the way for you. We'll set things up for you, we'll ask the questions, but we need you to be involved, we need you to help make decisions, we need you to want it to succeed."

~Seth Miller, Solutions Specialist

We've watched a lot of projects spin up over ten years of supporting Katapult Pro, and when one stalls, it's rarely because of technology. Usually the program got handed down from the top and the people using the software never asked for it, or the team is so far behind the demands of the client that there's no margin left to learn a new way of working.

We'll work hard with you in either situation. But Seth's honest version, the one he'd tell you in a nice way, is that you have to put some effort in too. The platform's good enough that it might work anyway. If you want it to be amazing for your team or your clients, your team will need to create the margin to work ON the new workflow, not just work IN it.

Solving problems

Seth describes his support philosophy as pulling on threads. When something doesn't behave the way it should, he pulls until he understands why, including the big messes where the job data, a configuration, and the code are all a little bit wrong at the same time and the first fix doesn't end it. He's been known to help the support team triage a tough situation by leaving an internal note with sixteen paragraphs on what went wrong and why. The part you'll probably notice most comes after the fix, though.

"We might have pulled you out of the pit you just fell into, but what's the next one? Because of how we just helped you get out of this, we know you're going in this direction, and we know about these two other things you're probably gonna hit going that direction. So we try to give people a heads up. I don't want people to have to reach back out."

So when come across something that isn’t working the way you expected, provide a little extra context so we can also help you avoid the next few bumps.

One more thing worth knowing about the platform itself. Katapult Pro bends a lot of different ways, and Seth calls that a double-edged sword: there are sometimes so many ways to solve a problem that it overwhelms him, and he does this for a living. So if a setup doesn't cover what your program needs, let us know instead of quietly working around it. A lot of the time the capability's already there in a configuration you (or we!) haven't found yet. When it isn't, we can build it through custom services, or add it to our software roadmap. Every once in a while the honest answer will be that we're already building something more general than your exact request, which means you'll have to wait, but it also means you get a say in how the feature turns out.

What we expect

When we sit down for your kickoff, bring two things: what hurts and what you actually want. Seth opens every needs assessment listening for both.

"Hearing where they currently are. What's the pain you're experiencing, what do you wish was better, what's the thing that's most frustrating about what you're currently doing? And then also trying to hear their dreams. Where do you want to be, even if it's not currently possible within Katapult Pro? That always helps to be our North Star."

The pain tells us what to fix first. The dream is the part teams tend to keep to themselves because it sounds out of reach, and it's the part we most want to hear, because untangling a joint use or make ready program takes a while and we'd rather be working toward your version of done than ours.

Past that, give the platform a real owner and some real hours. The teams that struggle usually aren't short on talent so much as time and buy-in. We want to work with your champion. The customers Seth brags about are the ones who get one thing working and immediately ask whether the same trick works somewhere else, the ones who take the platform places we didn't take them. Some of them run so well we rarely hear from them, and when we finally do, the reaction in support is usually "wait, you did what?"

When you need us

We expect you to have a lot of questions. We have a full support team with people who care about you and the impact of your work.

"We have your back. If we're not responding to an email quickly enough, just call."

You can reach us at support@katapultengineering.com or 717.430.0910, and you'll hear from us at kickoff either way. We're glad you're here!

~The Katapult Team

Why Pole Attachment Audits Stall (and How to Run One)

Adam Schmehl — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

On paper, a pole attachment audit looks like a no-brainer. You own the poles, you want to know who is on them and how many attachments each company has, so you hire someone to go look. In practice, these projects stall out constantly: in the RFI stage, in the RFP stage, or in a consulting conversation that quietly dies on the vine.

The reason usually has nothing to do with whether the audit is worth doing. Almost every pole owner would benefit from current attachment records. The reason is that the path to getting one approved, funded, and defended runs straight through four obstacles that have very little to do with poles and everything to do with budgets, agreements, and risk.

This post walks through the four reasons attachment audits stall before they start, then lays out an approach that sidesteps most of them. If you manage joint use for a pole owner, or you run these programs on a utility's behalf, this is familiar territory.

What a pole attachment audit actually is

A pole attachment audit is a project where a pole owner assesses every pole in a footprint to confirm who is attached, how many attachments each company has, and what type they are. You might also hear it called a joint use audit, or an attachments inventory. The goal is an accurate, current record of every 3rd party attachment on the system, which feeds rental billing, safety and pole loading decisions, and the everyday work of make ready engineering and pole replacements.

Why these projects stall before they start

The obstacles below are the four reasons we see attachment audits die on the vine, drawn from nine years of watching them try to get off the ground. None of them is about the engineering. They are all about getting a hard thing approved inside a regulated utility.

1. The accounting problem: O&M vs CapEx

The first obstacle is accounting, and it seems to be an unstated momentum killer for a wide variety of projects. For an investor-owned utility especially, an attachment audit is hard to classify as a capital expense. It does not build or replace an asset; it documents what is already there. That pushes it into the operations and maintenance budget, where it competes with vegetation management, inspections, and every other recurring cost. A one-time, system-wide audit with a large up-front number is a tough thing to defend in an O&M line, so it gets deferred year after year.

2. Ambiguity in the attachment agreements

The second obstacle is that the attachment agreements often have varying details about who pays for an audit or what happens with the results. Most joint use agreements were written to govern new attachments, not to fund a full inventory of existing ones. So when a pole owner starts asking who covers the cost of counting attachments, how back rental is calculated, and what an attacher owes once an unauthorized attachment turns up, the answers are murky. That ambiguity stalls the conversation before a budget is ever requested.

3. Defending the audit and actually collecting

The third obstacle is the worry that the effort will not pay off. Picture doing everything right: you get the budget approved, you confirm your rights under the agreements, you collect the data, you build the maps, and you bring the findings to the attachers. Then you land in a dispute over a few dollars per pole. Will those dollars actually come in, or will they get spent on attorneys before anyone sees a check? When the downside is a drawn-out legal fight over small per-pole amounts, the safe move can feel like delaying until a vendor brings a plan to solve it all.

4. Scope creep

The fourth obstacle is scope creep. Once you know a crew is going to visit every pole, the temptation is to collect everything while they are out there: confirm GPS, capture the pole tag, verify ownership, run a visual inspection, note ground conditions. Each addition is reasonable on its own. Together they turn a fast, fundable inventory into a complicated workflow that nobody wants to sign off on, and the project collapses under its own weight before it starts.

If you have tried to get one of these off the ground, you have probably run into at least two of these at once. They also compound. The accounting problem makes you want to justify the cost by collecting more data, which feeds scope creep, which makes the budget harder to approve, which sends you right back to the accounting problem.

A way to get an audit off the ground without the capital fight

The obstacles above share a root cause: the audit gets treated as one big, up-front, do-everything project. Change that structure and most of the obstacles lose their grip. The approach we have developed flips four things.

Start with what is already there, and move fast

Most pole owners already have a baseline of attachment records and a working make ready program. An audit can build on that baseline instead of starting from zero. Two-person crews photo-document each pole rapidly from the vehicle, capturing a high-resolution, measurable image rather than stopping to physically hug every pole. The field cost stays low because the work is fast and safe, and the deliverable at most poles is simply an updated photo and confirmation that the existing record is accurate.

Annotated pole photo (no height measurements, but attachment order captured)

Solve each cable once, not each pole

In the back office, attachments get traced through the network rather than identified pole by pole. When a line's owner is confirmed at one location, that identification backfills every pole in the run. In practice, a designer is not re-solving the same fiber line at forty poles in a row; they solve it once per cable and move on. That is the difference between an inventory that crawls and one that keeps pace with the field crews.

Trace view

Drive each discrepancy to resolution through channels you already have

The point of the audit is not the count; it is resolution. Each discrepancy the inventory turns up falls into one of three buckets: a clerical error to correct in the records, an unauthorized attachment the owner agrees to remove, or an unauthorized attachment that goes through the make ready process to ensure safety and grid reliability. Virtual rideouts with each attacher, using the photo data, move those discrepancies to closure through the same removal and make ready channels the program already runs. Defensible photo evidence makes those conversations far less likely to turn into a fight.

Sample unauthorized attachment map

Fund it from what it recovers

Because resolution generates real dollars, in recovered back rental and in make ready application fees, the audit can be structured to pay for itself. In a receivables-based approach, we invoice against the dollars the resolution recovers rather than asking for capital up front, and the invoice is designed never to exceed what comes in. That removes the single biggest barrier, because there is no large up-front number to defend in an O&M budget. The work is funded by the value it creates.

When you need to know who is on your poles and what they owe, the answer should come from one place: the photo-verified record your audit already produced.

Talk to Our Team About an Attachment Audit

What current records actually get you

When the records are current and defensible, the everyday work that depends on them gets easier. You can bill rental against counts you trust. You can hand an attacher a photo and a map instead of an argument. Pole relocations and storm restoration move faster because you know who is on each pole and how to reach them. And because the inventory leaves a recent photo at every pole, your staff and contractors can check conditions from their desk instead of rolling a truck. The mess of scattered records and unknown attachers turns into an organized, current picture of your system that keeps paying off long after the audit closes.

The double wood payoff

Current attachment records are also the fastest route to resolving double wood. The double or triple poles that sit for months or years, waiting on a transfer that never finished, are mostly a records problem: nobody is sure which poles are resolved and which still have attachments to move. The same field pass that confirms attachment counts can confirm the state of suspected double wood at those poles, so transfer tickets get created, updated, or closed based on what is actually in the field. As BEAD funding and aging-asset replacement push more pole replacements through the system, that backlog only grows, which makes accurate records worth more, not less. (For the mechanics of clearing a backlog once you have the data, see our double wood resolution workflow and how Transfer Management drives transfers to closure.)

What stale records cost you

Out-of-date attachment records are not just an administrative gap; they carry real risk. Unauthorized attachments skip the make ready and pole loading checks that keep poles within safe limits, which raises the odds of a failure in a storm. Relocation and restoration projects stall while crews track down plant owners who are not in the records. Rental revenue that could fund reliability work quietly goes uncollected. And the longer unauthorized attachments sit, the more make ready cost the pole owner absorbs that should have been the original attacher's responsibility. None of these show up as a line item, which is exactly why they are easy to keep deferring.

What an audit like this costs

The biggest driver of audit cost is whether crews can work rapidly from the vehicle or have to physically stand at every pole. A rapid, photo-first driveby is a fundamentally different cost than a survey-grade effort that confirms a tag or birthmark at each pole, so the first question to settle is how much certainty you actually need at the pole level. From there, the receivables-based structure changes the budgeting question entirely. Instead of asking what the audit costs up front, you are asking how much of the recovered rental and application revenue covers the work, with the rest staying with you. We are happy to walk through the specific economics for your footprint, including where a pilot makes sense before a full ramp.

Frequently asked questions

Is a pole attachment audit a capital project or an operations expense? For most utilities it lands in the operations and maintenance budget, because it documents existing assets rather than building or replacing them. That classification is a big reason these projects stall. A receivables-based structure sidesteps it by funding the work from recovered rental and application fees instead of an up-front capital request.

How accurate is a driveby audit compared with standing at each pole? A rapid, photo-first driveby typically yields submeter location accuracy and a complete, measurable photo of each pole, captured without entering the power space. It is not survey-grade GPS, and it does not confirm pole ownership by reading every tag. For attachment counts and billing, the photo record and cable tracing are what matter, and those hold up under scrutiny.

Do crews have to climb poles or use bucket trucks? No. The work is done from the ground using a photo-based method, so crews stay out of the power space. That keeps the field portion safe and fast, which is part of what keeps the cost low.

How do you identify unknown or "mystery" attachers? Most unknown attachments resolve through cable tracing: once a line's owner is confirmed anywhere along the run, every pole on that run is backfilled. For the rare line with no identification at all, we do the detective work, which can include calling local businesses along the route or sending a technician back for a closer look or to tie up any loose ends.

Can an attachment audit pay for itself? It can, when the audit is built around resolution. Recovered back rental and make ready application fees from unauthorized attachments generate real dollars, and a receivables-based invoice is designed never to exceed what comes in. We do not promise a specific recovery figure, because the number depends on what is actually on your poles, but the structure removes the up-front budget risk for the vendor.

How long does an audit take? It depends on footprint size and how you sequence it, but the field inventory moves quickly, often thousands of poles per crew per week, with back-office annotation following close behind. Resolution timelines depend on your agreements and how fast attachers respond. We usually recommend starting with a pilot of around a hundred poles to lock in the workflow before ramping.

What do we actually receive at the end? At minimum, updated attachment records and a recent, annotated photo tied to each pole, plus status and attacher maps you can act on. Every photo is linked to a specific pole, with a log of when it was collected, annotated, and resolved, which is what makes the records defensible for billing and regulatory review.

Does this help with permitting and applications too? Yes. The current records and photo data feed directly into the rest of the program, from pole permitting to the application visibility a healthy joint use program depends on. The audit is not a side project; it is the foundation the rest of the workflow stands on.

Getting an audit moving in your footprint

A pole attachment audit does not have to be a capital project that waits five years for budget, or a legal gamble over a few dollars per pole. Built around the records you already have, funded by what it recovers, and aimed at resolution rather than just a count, it becomes a continuous way to keep your records accurate and your grid documented.

We run this work on Katapult Pro and alongside utilities every day, so we can help you scope it honestly, start with a pilot, and ramp only when the throughput is there. If you own the poles or manage programs for the owner, let's talk through what an attachment audit would look like in your footprint.

Talk to Our Team About an Attachment Audit

Utility Pole Field Data Collection: Why It Starts At The Pole

Adam Schmehl — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

How two-person, photo-based field crews collect faster, collect safer, and produce a record you can defend.

Field data collection matters more than any other step in the workflow. Everything downstream depends on it. Make ready engineering, pole loading analysis, permitting, the deliverable a utility actually accepts, the attachment record a joint use team relies on for years: all of it inherits the quality of what came back from the field. Clean field data means clean designs, clean submissions, and fewer of the conversations nobody wants to have. Bad (or indefensible) field data means rework, rollbacks, disputes, and rejected packages that push construction past the date you promised.

There is a lot of conversation in this industry right now about how to make field collection cheaper, faster, and further from the pole. Some of that conversation is worth having, and we will get to the scopes where collecting from a distance genuinely makes sense. But as of today, the foundation has not changed: for most distribution engineering and attachment work, the data you need still lives at the pole. The safest, fastest, most reliable way to capture it is to get a crew on site using Katapult Pro.

For more information, check out how our field data collection workflow fits the rest of a project. Or, see the workflow in action here.

The Data That Only Exists at the Base of the Pole

Start with what a make ready or attachment package actually requires, because that is what determines how close you have to get.

You need attacher-level detail: who owns each line, what equipment is hung where, the tag and birthmark that identify the pole, the grounding, the down guys and anchors. You need accurate heights for every attachment in the communication and power space so the loading analysis means something. And you need midspan information, because your proposed adjustments on the pole will have an impact over critical crossings, too.

A fair amount of that data simply does not exist anywhere except at the structure. The birthmark stamped into the wood, the inspection medallion, the groundwire (or lack thereof) at the base: none of that reads from an aerial pass or a corridor scan. It reads when someone is standing close enough to photograph it. This is the part of the job people are describing when they talk about "hugging the pole," and for the data above, there is no shortcut around it. You can move the measurement and the engineering into the office, which is exactly what a good workflow does, but the capture happens where the asset is.

The question, then, is not whether to collect at the pole. It is how to do it so the trip is fast, safe, and produces something you can stand behind later. That is where the method earns its keep.

See how field data flows into the rest of the Katapult Method, from collection through deliverable, without re-entry or format conversion.

Why We Send Two People, Not One

The most common pushback on our approach is the headcount. A second person in the truck is a real cost, and any honest comparison has to account for it. So here is why we run two-person crews on purpose, and why the math works out in the customer's favor.

The crew splits into two defined roles. The Crew Lead handles height and context photos, verifies the pre-designed route on a mobile device, and marks each pole and midspan as done before moving on. The Crew Partner handles the close detail shots, the tag, birthmark, grounding, and the up and back angles, and holds the calibration stick flush against the base of the pole while the Lead captures the height image from a distance. Two people moving as one coordinated unit is what lets a crew clear poles quickly without skipping anything, because one person is never trying to frame a height shot and read a birthmark and track progress on a map all at once. When looking to capture every anchor and downguy, every bolted reference, and looking out for downed conductors, a buddy can really come in handy.

That coordination shows up in throughput. Our own field services team tracks working pace closely, and the benchmarks are not theoretical.

"If we are in the city, I think 50 poles an hour is a good number to shoot for. I schedule at least 150 to 200 poles in a city day."

-Seth Morris, Field Services Team Lead, Katapult Engineering

Spread the poles out into rural routes with brush and access challenges, and that drops to 20 to 25 poles an hour, with 125 to 150 scheduled for the day. Because each day also contains travel, breaks, and walking back to the vehicle, not every hour is spent actually collecting data.

Backyards run closer to the country pace, with adjusted expectations on midspans and access. The numbers move with the scope and the terrain, which is the point: a crew that knows its workflow can move fast where the work allows it. When you compare a two-person crew that clears 150 poles in a day against a single-person setup collecting far fewer, the second seat stops looking like doubled labor and starts looking like the reason your cost per pole and your cost per finished deliverable come down.

There is a second benefit that matters as much as speed, and it is one of the quieter reasons our model holds up. Because collection is a photo workflow rather than an engineering exercise in the field, a new crew member does not need years of design experience to be productive. New fielders reach roughly 85 percent of veteran production within a few weeks, which is what makes it realistic to scale a team up for a BEAD-driven surge instead of waiting months for people to ramp. We have written more about how we build and run field teams if you manage fielders yourself.

The Safety Case People Skip Past

Safety is usually argued as a reason to get crews away from the pole. It is worth walking through carefully, because the ground-based photo method exists in large part for safety reasons, and the details matter.

The old way of getting accurate heights meant climbing, or reaching a hot stick up into the energized space, or running a bucket truck. For high-volume attachment surveys, those methods put a person in a hazardous position at every single pole. Ground-based photo collection was designed to remove that category of exposure. The crew works from the ground. The calibration stick is held flush against the base of the pole, not raised into the power space, and the top section is lowered when there is any chance of contact with live wires. The stick is not rated for energized contact, and our crews treat it that way. Nobody is reaching toward the neutral to get a number.

And on the risks that actually injure fielders day to day, traffic and public interaction, a second set of eyes is a safety asset rather than a liability. One person can watch the road and the surroundings while the other concentrates on the capture. We plan field operations around those exposures with marked vehicles, high-visibility vests, and many other precautions, because a crew standing on a road shoulder is far more likely to be hit by a car than by anything coming off the pole.

In brush and heavy vegetation, the Katapult approach is a major asset. The collapsible stick can easily get under tree limbs, and with 17 feet of usable calibration markers, it’s extremely rare to come across a pole you can’t measure with precision, even in overgrown summer months.

Defensible by Default: The Record the Photo Leaves Behind

Here is the part that pays off long after the crew has left the site. A calibrated field photo is not just a measurement. It is permanent, reviewable evidence of what was on that pole the day it was captured.

Every photo is time-stamped and tied to its location through the workflow, then uploaded to a shared cloud database. The measurement itself comes out of calibrating the image in the office against the height stick, which produces accuracy within about 3 inches at 50 feet, with relative heights between bolted attachments tighter still (+/- ¼”). When a utility questions a clearance during engineering review months later, you do not relitigate it from competing field notes. You pull up the photo, show exactly what was there, and the conversation is over.

This is especially true for midspans, which are notoriously hard to defend after the fact. A perpendicular midspan shot captures the clearance and the conductors in a way a written measurement never can, and because it is dated and stored with everything else, it holds up when an attacher or a pole owner disputes what was actually spanning the road. The same record makes virtual rideouts possible: every party reviews the same photos from their own desk instead of scheduling a truck to roll back out so three people can stand under the pole and disagree in person. For a joint use team managing thousands of attachments, that shared, photo-backed record is the difference between a defensible program and a filing cabinet of assumptions. It is the backbone of how joint use management actually works when the volume gets real.

When a reviewer questions a midspan clearance, the answer should come from one place: the calibrated, time-stamped photo your crew already captured. That is the record Katapult Pro is built to produce, store, and share with every party who needs it, so a dispute gets resolved with evidence instead of a recollection.

Book a field data collection walkthrough | See how the Katapult Pro platform fits together

Why We Shoot With Cameras You Can Replace Anywhere

People are sometimes surprised that our crews carry a high-quality consumer camera rather than a single proprietary field device. That is a deliberate choice, and it comes down to two things: where the accuracy actually comes from, and what happens when something breaks at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Our measurements do not depend on the camera's GPS or on any survey-grade positioning built into the hardware. They come from calibrating the photo against the height stick in the office, and the photo-to-location association comes from time-stamped buckets the crew creates as they mark each pole done, not from coordinates baked into the image. That design is what frees us to use off-the-shelf cameras. In addition to a lens that produces high accuracy when combined with the Katapult Pro photogrammetry algorithm, approved cameras and lenses also need great zoom and a good sensor, so an engineer can zoom in later to read a conductor spec, identify an attachment type, and trace ownership across a span. Consumer mirrorless cameras do this well.

The practical payoff is uptime. If a camera fails in the middle of a project, a crew can drive to the nearest electronics store, the kind of store within driving distance of most towns in the US, and have a replacement in hand the same afternoon. There is no waiting on a replacement unit to ship, no proprietary part to source, no days lost. The value of the system lives in the method and the software that turns photos into calibrated, connected data, not in the camera itself. Treating the camera as a commodity is what keeps a field program running when hardware inevitably has a bad day.

One Trip, Every Deliverable

The reason all of this is worth doing carefully is that a single, well-run collection trip should feed the entire project. That is the economic argument that the headcount conversation usually misses.

The data a crew captures does not stop at collection. It flows into make ready engineering, into pole loading analysis, into deliverable generation, into pole attachment application tracking, and into the long-lived attachment record, without re-entry or format conversion. The same photo set that proves a clearance also exports cleanly into the standard pole loading engines, including SPIDAcalc, O-Calc Pro, and PoleForeman, so the loading analysis runs on the field reality rather than on retyped numbers. It also documents the awkward field conditions that cause the most trouble later, like double wood, stub poles, and the historical attachments that never made it into a utility's records.

When you measure a field program by cost per finished deliverable instead of cost per crew-day, the picture changes. A two-person crew that clears 150 poles a day and produces a dataset that needs no re-collection and no reformatting is doing the work of more than the seat count suggests. This is the same labor producing a dramatically different result than other methods, because the data only had to be collected once and it was trustworthy and engineering-ready when it came back.

When Hugging the Pole Is Not the Right Call

There are lots of situations when a two person, boots-on-the-ground field crew is not the answer.

LiDAR is genuinely useful for corridor-level work and vegetation management. Drone or mobile LiDAR can lay down a spatial baseline across a long span of right-of-way faster than a crew can walk it, and for transmission corridors, vegetation programs, and broad clearance modeling, it can be the right tool. The honest limitation is what it does not deliver. LiDAR does not read the birthmark, the tag, the grounding, or the attacher-level equipment detail at the base of the pole, and in vegetated or congested environments, canopy penetration and airspace restrictions get in the way. The field acquisition is fast, but for attachment scopes the path from a raw point cloud to usable engineering data often is not. We have laid out the full set of tradeoffs around LiDAR for pole surveys separately, because the nuance matters.

One Note:

It is worth being precise about which poles a remote pass actually leaves for the crew, because that is where the cost lives. The poles a scan cannot resolve are not a random sample. They are the difficult ones: bases buried in vegetation, attacher detail and grounding that only reads from a few feet away, heights that need a clean line of sight the canopy will not give. Those poles were always going to be the expensive part of the job under any method, because the open, accessible poles are inexpensive to capture however you collect them. What a remote-first plan changes is when you discover the difficulty. If the scan was supposed to carry most of the work and the remaining foot visits turn out to be a large, scattered set of the hardest poles, you are re-bidding or re-mobilizing a separate field effort under a compressed timeline, often after the easy data already created the impression the project was nearly finished. A crew that captures everything on the first pass folds that difficulty into one mobilization instead of surfacing it as a second one later.

There are also many scopes that only need a simple data capture, and do not need full photogrammetric measurement at all. Underground facilities, simple inventory passes, joint use audits, and rapid non-pole collection are well served by quick photo capture without the calibration workflow, and 360-degree capture has a place for certain documentation tasks. Katapult Pro can be used for these, though many other solutions have simple data field and photo capture, too.

For the standard distribution attachment survey, the make ready package, and the pole loading analysis that depend on accurate heights and attacher-level detail, the data still lives at the pole, and a disciplined ground-based crew remains the most reliable, most defensible, and most economical way to get it.

Ready to Build a Field Program You Can Defend?

The field trip is the part of the workflow everything else inherits. Done well, it produces fast throughput, removes the most serious safety exposure from the routine, and leaves behind a record that holds up when a utility, an attacher, or a federal reviewer asks what was really on the pole. Done poorly, it produces the rework, the rollbacks, and the disputes that quietly erode margin and push construction past its deadlines.

We collect this way because we run it ourselves, every day, on our own customers' projects, and we have refined the method against thousands of real poles in real conditions. That is also why our software works the way it does. The platform is built by the people who do the work, and the field method and the system that turns photos into connected, defensible data were designed together.

If you are scoping a make ready program, a BEAD build, or an attachment audit and you want to see how disciplined two-person photo collection actually runs, book a walkthrough of how we collect, calibrate, and defend field data.

If you would rather start with a conversation about your specific scope and terrain, talk to our team about standing up field crews for your next program.