We recently connected with Christine Schubert and have shared our conversation below.

Christine, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.

At Poseidon Robotics, we are a husband and wife team. I understand working together is not always ideal in some marriages, but it has been great for ours. I am truly Peter’s biggest fan and vice versa. We communicate very well with each other and we purposefully encourage each other as often as we can. Our strengths are basically opposite so we’ve established clear roles to divide and conquer! We are hopeful our kids would like to join our business. They are still young, 7 and 8, so they are currently focused on becoming a ballerina and a fossil hunter! For now, we encourage them play and be creative. Our industry needs innovative thinkers so we are doing the best we can to help them think outside the box.
The idea of a family business has always appealed to me. We are able to taylor our products easier than a large cookie cutter manufacturer. Each of our customers and distributors work directly with Peter and me start to finish. We are also able to hand pick our team. It is important for us to have a fun work environment where our team feels valued and appreciated. So many times valuable employees can feel grouped together as a number. We take the time to pour into our team to help them grow and find a healthy work/ life balance.
We feel very blessed to be able to serve our clients and our team!

Christine, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My husband, Peter and I are Co-Founders of Poseidon Robotics. We are an underwater robotics company that manufacturers Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) and other subsea components. Basically, we make underwater drones. ROVs are where drones were about 10 years ago. They are becoming more capable and more accessible. ROVs range from fitting in a backpack up to an SUV size, all with different capabilities. They are used in several industries for inspection, Search and Rescue, exploration, research, seafloor mapping, aquaculture, renewables and the list goes on. We get asked a lot, how in the world did you join this industry? Peter has a background in subsea electronic engineering. Husband brag, he’s one of the best in the world! His background was helping design and build those big SUV size ROVs. He operated them offshore all over the world. That experience inspired him to create our current fleet of 4 luggage sized vehicles. He’s made our fleet user friendly and stable. He’s learned from operating the ROVs that completing tasks in a current needed great stability from an ROV. He’s added extra thrusters for more power in currents and stability in flight. There are also many new innovations in sonars, cameras and DVLs. Our ROVs are designed to accommodate those accessories in our deck space and payload capabilities. Basically, we want our fleet to complete a lot of the tasks larger ROVs perform but with less man power and expense to the operating companies.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Poseidon Robotics started in 2018 and was able to survive a pandemic and still thrive today. With my background in finance, I am conservative with our spending. We used our own capital to start Poseidon Robotics and supplement our income until we were up and running. I will always keep a safety net in case of another dip! Most of the sales we source are in person at trade shows or live demonstrations. That was hindered in 2020 so we had to make some adjustments. Since sales were slow, we focused on improving our fleet and creating new ROVs. We improved our products and quality control to spring us forward to where we are now. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise!

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

While we originate some of our sales in house, we have focused on growing our distributor network. We are very fortunate to have distributors all over the world. With Peter working offshore on ROVs, he’s met many of the best ROV technicians and operators. Once they saw our ROVs, they were excited to spread the word and become our distributors in their regions of the world. Others we met at international trade shows and the rest reached out to us. We are very proud of our worldwide network and how attentive they are to their clients!

Contact Info:

• Website: PoseidonROV.com
• Instagram: @poseidonrobotics
• Linkedin: Poseidon Robotics
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/AaBugcrNdCg?feature=shared