In and out of college and unable to settle on the line of work she really wanted to pursue, Katie Davis found herself transitioning into the role of directional driller for Davis Underground Solutions (DUGS), a family-run business in the Atlanta Metro area that provides utility installation services throughout the state and beyond.
Her brother, Matt, who owns the company, had recently revived the family’s entrepreneurial spirit as he reimagined Davis Directional Drilling, which had shut down in 2010 during the economic downturn. As jobs were lined up with increased frequency, his father, Jim, came back home from work in North Dakota to help out, but that wasn’t enough. It soon became clear that finding the right employees was one of the biggest immediate challenges.
“Any small-business owner will tell you that the hardest part of any business is finding good help,” Matt says. “We were scrambling to find people who would show up to work with a willingness to be trained.”
Working as a cake decorator at the time, Katie noticed that her dad was working long, hard days and DUGS was cycling through its workers. Interested in helping out and taking some of that heavy workload off her father’s shoulders, she joined the business and became one of the very few female directional drill operators in the process.
Jim says he has only come across one other woman in this line of work while spending over 20 years in the industry. And Katie, who is active on social media, says the only female HDD drillers she has encountered are located outside the U.S. – one in Canada and one in Australia. “I’m sure there are other women out there,” she adds, “but I have not found them or connected with them.”
It’s an interesting dynamic, notes her mother, Pam, who serves as the president of DUGS, because she’s not a tomboy at all. In fact, her mom describes her as a beautiful girly girl. “But she loves doing this,” she says, “and she’s not afraid to get out there and get her hands dirty.”
It’s not easy work, Katie admits. The job is physically demanding, it comes with long hours, and it’s not one that you conventionally see a woman taking on. “I am a woman living in a man’s world,” she says. “You don’t come in with that base level of respect that the majority of men come in with. You have to earn your respect and earn your spot, and even then you’ve got to dig better, drill better, and look prettier while you’re doing it.”
Even so, there’s a pride that comes with breaking new ground for women, she adds, and with just a year under her belt there are plenty who’ve already taken notice. Katie has male directional drillers from all across the globe who follow her on Instagram, and Ditch Witch has shared a number of her posts through its own social media outlets on occasion.
Pam notes with pride that when she was at Ditch Witch picking up a drill, a mechanic who had been out to their work site a number of times said he’d put Katie up against any other driller out there. “And the trainer at Ditch Witch commented that she was one of the best he’d ever trained,” she adds.
In fact, it became clear at one point that the family dynamic shifted at least a bit, Pam says, explaining that over the years Matt has always been the one who knows everyone and vice versa. But a few months back when Matt went to Ditch Witch, the trainer there introduced him as Katie’s brother.
“It’s always been, ‘This is Katie, Matt’s sister,’ but this time it was ‘This is Matt, Katie’s brother,’" Pam says, laughing. “She loved that. Katie was eating that up big time.”
