In Pinghu, there is a group of young people who leave home to study, return to their hometowns, and embark on entrepreneurial journeys, forging a promising future as a new generation of business founders. Pinghu Release, together with the Communist Youth League Pinghu Municipal Committee and the Pinghu Young Entrepreneurs Association, has jointly launched a column titled "We Return Home to Start Businesses," documenting their stories of mutual pursuit with their hometowns. Planning: Ma Xinyi.

At a drone training base in Lindai, Pinghu, several drones buzz into the air as a young man born after 2000 stands on the sidelines giving instructions. He is Ji Sicheng, general manager of Jiaxing Yunke Drone Technology Service Company.

Gritting His Teeth and Daring to Go for It

Ji Sicheng was born in 2000 in Xincang, Pinghu. He graduated from Sichuan Chengdu Aeronautic Polytechnic with a major related to drones. During his studies, he also obtained the China Civil Aviation Administration's drone pilot captain certificate and instructor certificate, which are official "hard currency" credentials with legal validity in China's drone industry. After graduation, with his dual certificates, he successfully joined a drone-related enterprise and officially became an industry practitioner. During his years working away from home, he quickly became an "all-around player," shouldering aerial surveying and mapping, client liaison, technical operations and maintenance, and student instruction all at once. Sometimes he would wake up at five or six in the morning and not return home until eleven or twelve at night. This high-intensity, all-encompassing workplace experience allowed him to thoroughly understand the entire industry workflow and gain a clear grasp of training systems, market demand, and industry pain points. During this period, Ji Sicheng keenly sensed that drones had become essential production tools across many industries, yet there was a huge nationwide shortage of professional drone pilots. At the same time, he learned that Pinghu was making a full-scale push to develop its low-altitude economy industrial chain. So in late 2024, Ji Sicheng decided to return home and start his own business: "In my last year at the previous company, I had already built the training department from scratch into something tangible. I figured I knew all this stuff, so I gritted my teeth and gave it a shot on my own." On January 2, 2025, the company's business license was issued. But the road to entrepreneurship was long and arduous. Courage alone was not enough—he needed to build systems from the ground up.

The training base displays various types of drones. Ji Sicheng handled compliance qualifications one by one, obtained official certification from the Civil Aviation Administration, and established Pinghu's first "drone certification plus skills empowerment" platform. To run drone license training, instructors are essential. Ji Sicheng took the initiative to break through, selecting from past outstanding trainees, spending three months cultivating and refining them, personally mentoring a group of certified instructors, and assembling the initial core team. With qualifications, instructors, and venue gradually falling into place, the company's initial operational framework slowly took shape, and he took his first step on the unknown path of entrepreneurship.

Seize Every Opportunity to Try

Entrepreneurship was far harder than Ji Sicheng had imagined. The new company had no brand recognition, and few students came to learn. In its early days, Yunke Drone once fell into the predicament of having a good reputation but no customer base—no brand heritage and lacking market channels. "For about two or three months, I was constantly out on the road. Any place you can think of, as long as the security guard at the door didn't stop me, I went in to look for opportunities," Ji Sicheng said. He proactively sought business connections but repeatedly hit walls. During the toughest phase, business relied solely on referrals from former trainees' networks. Yet even in desperate times, opportunities for a comeback often lie hidden. Just when development hit a bottleneck, an invitation to collaborate with a youth night school became a turning point on Ji Sicheng's entrepreneurial journey. With the mindset of "not letting any opportunity go to waste," he tried offering parent-child drone introductory courses and hands-on drone experience teaching. Unexpectedly, this semi-public-welfare, inclusive course actually opened up the market, broke through a single customer demographic, and let more enterprises and citizens know about and understand Yunke Drone, successfully broadening its customer flow. After gaining a foothold, Ji Sicheng noticed that some training programs on the market only focused on getting certificates, not on practical skills. Drones are a practical, tool-oriented technology. If trainees only learn rigidly, they may struggle to adapt to job requirements even after getting certified. To this end, he took a differentiated approach, launching targeted customized courses for industries such as surveying and mapping and security, refining teaching content to match real operational scenarios. "We hope not only to teach trainees how to pass the exam and get their license, but more importantly, how to make good use of that license and integrate into the industry faster." Now Ji Sicheng has also begun partnering with local enterprises, planning to move practical training classrooms into actual work sites—such as power line inspections and agricultural plant protection—allowing trainees to practice on real projects. After getting certified, they follow engineers into project sites and complete hands-on work under mentorship, achieving "ready to work upon certification, employed upon graduation."

The competition scene of the Zhejiang Provincial Youth Sports Club Model Radio Super League (Pinghu Station). Opportunities always belong to those who dare to think and act. This year, Ji Sicheng also entered a new track in youth drone training by participating in the Zhejiang Provincial Youth Sports Club Model Radio Super League (Pinghu Station). The arrival of a provincial-level event not only significantly raised the profile of Pinghu's drone industry and polished Yunke Drone's brand image, but also marked a key step forward for youth low-altitude technology education in Pinghu. After rounds of refinement and breakthrough, Ji Sicheng's entrepreneurial blueprint is becoming increasingly clear, with this year's output value expected to exceed 4 million yuan. Yunke Drone has cumulatively trained and supplied more than 100 certified professional pilots, with a large number of trainees contributing their skills in fields such as power, agriculture, aerial photography, and emergency response. To continuously supply talent for the industry, in the future, while maintaining drone license training, Ji Sicheng will continue to host more competitions, expand into technology research and development and low-altitude services, and explore new low-altitude application scenarios such as school practical training and logistics delivery, striving to build a professional, standardized, and innovative technology enterprise that truly serves people's livelihoods and empowers industries through drone technology. "Trends come fast and go fast. What truly remains are those who calm down and focus on service," says this post-2000s general manager, who is using each drone to fly out his own entrepreneurial trajectory.