"We are all born with the genetic entrepreneur gene, however, it lays dormant until an individual decides to activate it"
Meet Peter Drakulich – Co-Founder of 52Launch, LLC, a company that helps inventors and entrepreneurs with the A through Z process of getting their ideas from napkin to revenue. Turning products into businesses, manufacturing, marketing, sales revenue generation, growth & scalability.
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Table of Contents
Thank you for joining us today. Please introduce yourself to our readers. They want to know you, some of the background story to bring some context to your interview.
Peter Drakulich: I’m Peter Drakulich, I am one of the founders of 52Launch, a product development, and marketing company. Being an entrepreneur and business builder all my life, I recognized a market gap between a great product idea and the execution of getting it to market. Prior to 52Launch, entrepreneurs and inventors never had a clear path of what is needed to get an idea to market. Our focus and process were clear from the start, find great product ideas that solve problems, design them to look incredible, manufacture them through our networks, market them and repeat.
Prior to this, my career has been in the Retail Automotive industry in various capacities of Ownership, Management, and Executive Consulting. I’ve been married for 23 years, with 3 kids all in midst of finishing college or high school.
You are a successful entrepreneur, so we’d like your view point, do you believe entrepreneurs are born or made? Explain.
Peter Drakulich: We are all born with the genetic entrepreneur gene, however, it lays dormant until an individual decides to activate it. What makes a person decide they are going to be an entrepreneur is the biggest factor in how successful they are going to be. Most of the time those motivators are, “I don’t want to be poor anymore” and “I need to be my own boss”
If you were asked to describe yourself as an entrepreneur in a few words, what would you say?
Peter Drakulich: I’m an all-or-nothing entrepreneur, which means I’m all in from the beginning, or I”m out. Success takes that type of commitment to step beyond your comfort zones and take the risks that others won’t and even when failure seems imminent, you find a way to pivot to succeed.
I”m also a sell first and answer questions later type of entrepreneur. The biggest question that needs to be answered is “Are people going to pay for this?” and I don’t know why you would wait to find that out when you can do that from the start.
Tell us about what your company does and how did it change over the years?
Peter Drakulich: 52Launch has always been a company that helps entrepreneurs get their ideas to market (sales) as fast as they can. That core is the same, but what has changed is we’ve realized that the A through Z process had more letters in it than originally thought.
Thank you for all that. Now for the main focus of this interview. With close to 11.000 new businesses registered daily in the US, what must an entrepreneur assume when starting a business?
Peter Drakulich: I’ll sound like Mr. Wonderful when I say, “How does my business or product make money?” I know companies that are 10 years in pre-revenue stage and here I”m launching 50 to 60 companies a year and hitting profitable revenue in that time frame.
My advice, go and make sales.
Did you make any wrong assumptions before starting a business that you ended up paying dearly for?
Peter Drakulich: Of course! Everyone will make a lot of wrong assumptions. I didn’t pay a price for those wrong assumptions because I adjusted quickly. Again, it goes back to my focus was sales first, and when I learned that my assumption was wrong, I adjusted my sale to reflect what my customer wanted and delivered.
The moral of the story is the customer’s opinion is the only one that matters.
If you could go back in time to when you first started your business, what advice would you give yourself and why? Explain.
Peter Drakulich: My style and where my success comes from is saying yes to customers and delivering them what they want. You should always offer a product that people want. For me, it’s hard to go back and advise. The business I’ve built is unique and there is no one that does what we do, the way we do.
The only advice I’d give is we should have started to spread our marketing message earlier.
What is the worst advice you received regarding running a business and what lesson would you like others to learn from your experience?
Peter Drakulich: If you are an entrepreneur, you are going to get a lot of advice. I will defend the advisors as they all mean well but they are not advising as entrepreneurs. The advice they are offering is from a safe mindset.
I don’t think I’ve made any unsafe decisions, I’ve taken calculated risks that others wouldn’t and that is what makes us get to different heights than others. Don’t take advice from regular people…
In your opinion, how has COVID-19 changed what entrepreneurs should assume before starting a business? What hasn’t changed?
Peter Drakulich: No. If you are an entrepreneur, covid does not exist. It’s out there, and it’s something that has to be navigated, but it can’t stop me from achieving my goals. We’ve had to adapt, adjust and attack.
The business hasn’t changed and the fact that people are still buying products every day means nothing has changed.
What is a common myth about entrepreneurship that aspiring entrepreneurs and would-be business owners believe in? What advice would you give them?
Peter Drakulich: I’m going to get some flack here but I think the term entrepreneur is thrown around too loosely. People with side hustles, or product flippers, or weekend sellers are not entrepreneurs! If you call yourself entrepreneurial or have been told you have entrepreneurial tendencies, please sit down, you are not an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurs create jobs, industries, disrupt the status quo, and risk everything to achieve it.
What traits, qualities, and assumptions do you believe are most important to have before starting a business?
Peter Drakulich: Tenacity, patients, and decisiveness are where I’d start. These can all be developed. I think overall keeping an open mind to the fact that others may have an easier approach or way is good.
How can aspiring leaders prepare themselves for the future challenges of entrepreneurship? Are there any books, websites, or even movies to learn from?
Peter Drakulich: You don’t prepare, you decide. You decide to jump in and figure things. I’m sure there are several books that can help along the way, however, those can be very dangerous if you think you can be an entrepreneur without making the decision to be one.
You have shared quite a bit of your wisdom and our readers thank you for your generosity but would also love to know: If you could choose any job other than being an entrepreneur, what would it be?
Peter Drakulich: Been there, done that and there’s no going back. I’ve decided that for the rest of my life I will be an entrepreneur.
Thank you so much for your time, I believe I speak for all of our readers when I say that this has been incredibly insightful. We do have one more question: If you could add anyone to Mount Rushmore, but not a politician, who would it be; why?
Peter Drakulich: The new Rushmore right now would be Musk and Bezos as they have both tacked huge industries that were cemented in deep institutions and broken them with better products.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Peter Drakulich for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Peter Drakulich or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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