INTERVIEW | Make Money by Turning Everyday Problems Into Profitable Products with David Frankel

0:00Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga over 100 degree weather or too much sun, Gator Light with a specialized blend of five electrolytes was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at Retailer's Nationwide. Gator Light hydrates faster than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration, consult to healthcare professional if symptoms persist. You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast. What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast. Where it's our mission to help you make more money on this episode of the show. I have a new friend, David Frankl. David is an inventor, entrepreneur, business owner, networking host and podcaster. All things that are very aligned with who I am and what we talk about here on the show. So I'm excited to have him, David, what's up, man? How much are you, thanks for having me? You know, I can't complain. I can't complain and I've not found it

1:00to be very useful when I do. So, you know, well, let's go back in time, man. First off, let's talk about the first time. So I mean, the first time that you ever made a dollar that was exciting or shocking or meaningful to you. I think back to my childhood, I think every dollar you make in your kid is exciting. My very first job is working in an Italian restaurant, clean and dishes. So when they say you gotta start somewhere, that's a good place to start. I think I was 14, 14 and a half, maybe 15. Wow. And it wasn't luxurious. And you know, it was a sit down restaurant where they actually had dishes and a dishwasher. And I was a dishwasher. Yeah. You know, but you get that first paycheck, you don't have to ask your parents for money anymore. So I think that's exciting, you know, just to have your own money and not be solely relying on which appearance you can spend. Did you, did that idea come from you to get a job or did your parents, you know, kind of push you that way? I think as an entrepreneur, a young age, I just got tired of hearing no.

2:00So it motivated me to, I think I had a paper rod actually before that. And this was a lot of work and crazy hours, again, up early and relying on tips and going north and north and I didn't do that very long. So I think my next opportunity was a dishwasher. I've just always been motivated by money and have my own freedom and independence. And my parents weren't gonna give me a bunch extra money to go play with. So I had to go find my own. What did your parents do? My dad was a computer programmer and my mom worked retail. So I lived in a little class household and you know, they worked hard for their money and I was, you know, I was never poor by you, starts the imagination, but I was never given a bunch extra money as allowance, living in a little three bedroom house and since Nadi Ohio, you know, went to a private school but it was fun to primarily by my older family members and had started a great education. I'm so I'm very grateful for that opportunity and I went to a public high school. So even though I was around people with money, it didn't mean we necessarily had a lot of extra money. So we lived a very modest, conservative childhood.

3:01Tell me about your time post high school. What was the goal? What did you want to do with your life at that time? That's a great question because I went to college at University of South Carolina, Go Gamecocks and my major was pharmacy and having childhood asthma, I was very motivated to find a cure to asthma and other diseases. I struggled many holiday seasons in the hospital with breathing challenges and I just vowed to not let anyone else suffer the way I suffered. And again, comparison to other people suffering with cancer and other horrible diseases, my life wasn't that bad. I just couldn't do the things I wanted to do. I couldn't run track, I couldn't play football. So to me as a child, I felt like I was very limited and missed out on a lot of things. So I was very motivated as a young child to find cure diseases. Unfortunately, as I got older, I realized they make too much money on treatment of diseases and there's no desire to find cure, which is sad. But at that time, I didn't know any better. So I just said, I'm gonna go to college, could be a pharmacy major, I'm understanding how medicine works. I'm gonna find a cure disease, I'm gonna save a lot of people

4:04from the heartache and loss of relatives and family members and children due to horrible diseases. The last of about two and a half years and I changed the business and the rest of the history. So when you changed to business, was it still that focus on innovation, inventing? Obviously that's something that's a part of your, your big through line in your career, was that something that still was top of mind for you? Yeah, I've always had that creative mindset. Even in college, I came up with a elastic neck t-shirt because I was tired of my t-shirts, neck bands wearing out. I think in high school, I came up with a, I was tired of taking the trash out and having a dragway along the driveway. I came up with a, I took a racetrack and put a garbage can on it and showed how builders could put a track in the driveway so you could put the garbage cans on the track, press a button and it would go to the driveway and then hopefully the garbage people put it back on the track, you press a button that comes back. So I've always had that innovative, problem-solving mindset. I just had to figure out how to use it. And you know, once I, I was very devastated.

5:04I really, I felt like I was giving up my childhood dreams to not find a cure disease. I felt like I was giving up on the next generation. So it took me some time to really change majors from pharmacy to medical research, or from pharmacy to business because I really wanted to do medical research. That was my real driving factor. And my grandfather, who is a very successful business person, real estate, commercial real estate primarily, said, David, they're very good people. Your true gift is talking to people, building rapport, building teams. You're better off making money and business and sales and donating money to medical research. You make a much bigger impact. And if you had a life of medical research, your family will always struggle. And it's just hard to count on that funds to provide for a family. So I kind of listened to him as much as it was painful to give up on a childhood dream. I realized he was probably right. If I could have made great money, I'd have more money to give. And I could give the money to other people that can go out and do the research and hopefully make an impact in a different way. The most successful business owners

6:05don't do it all themselves. They delegate. Upwork lets you build a team of highly skilled specialists for every function your business needs so that you can focus on what you do best. And that experts handle the rest. Upwork gives your business fast access to highly skilled specialists with deep expertise so you can fill critical skill gaps, launch projects faster, and skill support up or down without committing to full-time headcount. I don't know how many times I've used upwork in the last, I don't know, call it decades since I've started doing stuff online, but it is many, many, many, many times. And then with Business Plus, you can access the top 1% of talent on Upwork as well. AI-powered shortlisting delivers a curated shortlist of top freelancers match to your goals in under six hours. So there's no endless searching required. It also cuts down operational hassle by handling things like contracts and payments in one place, you can spend more time running the business. With over 170,000 freelancers holding five star ratings, you can hire with the confidence

7:05that comes from hiring someone with a verified track record. It's free to sign up and posting a job is easy. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPWORK.com. Upwork.com. Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors, great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going, shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration, consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist. Post-college, did you go more of like traditional path for a while like to go to kind of corporate route or did you immediately start working on businesses?

8:07Yeah, so after my freshman at college it took a photography class. I can't group in a photography world. My mother was an avid photographer. My grandfather owned a camera store in downtown Cincinnati called Ace Cameras, my ant worker, Geetz Photo World. So I was just around to my aunt, my grandfather and my mom all being avid photographers, taking zoo photographs, landscape photographs, whatever they just enjoyed. I took a photography class, my freshman year, enjoyed the black room, the pretty my own black, my photographs. And I got into, I got a job the next summer before my sophomore year doing in-home photography sales. Now ironically, the photography were taking were just a babies. And here I am a baby myself, I guess I was 19 at the time, growing to people's homes, had new babies and trying to connect to the rapport. But I became very good at it. So that was my next every summer I came home for school. That's what I did. I continued to go in. Every summer I was a trainer, every summer I was a top performer. And I just enjoyed the freedom of making my own schedule and I loved the money.

9:08It came with it. I was able to contribute a lot towards my college as a result. And then after I graduated, I asked the owner of the company could I open up my own location in Atlanta, Georgia, or something close to where I was in Columbia? And he said, sure, let's do it. So I opened an office at 22 years old. I was always the youngest person in the company. Every summer I was always the youngest. And then I opened the company. I hired people older than me, because they had the experience in life and so on and so forth. And I built a great company in Atlanta. We just worked at North of I-20, had about a five person sales team. And we quickly climbed to the top three, top five in the country for profitability. And then after about two years, he said, can you take this skill set in this culture of creating Atlanta and go back to Cincinnati where you originally started and change the culture there? It'd be much more difficult because you got to change the culture of 19 salespeople. So four times a team. But right now they're one of the lowest performing offices in the country and I'd love for you to change that. So I took on that challenge for about six years.

10:10Got them top five. Couldn't quite get them in the top three. And I said, okay, it's too darn cold for me up here in Cincinnati. I want to go back down South. He said, how about Charlotte? And I've been here 20 years now. Wow, okay, got it. So this is what I love about, this is what I love about people's stories, man. It's like, you know, there's more than one way to skin a cat. And you don't have to be the one to initially take all the risk and come up with a brand new idea and innovate and start in this world where there's unlimited obstacles when you're first getting started. You don't have a lot of the skills. You don't have a lot of the relationships. It's like, but you figured out that you were pretty good at a couple of things. Just naturally pretty good at those things. Then you worked on those things inside of an organization for several years made some money doing it. And then opened a location for that same place. Like you're essentially an entrepreneur working inside of the context of somebody else's thing. But able to turn that into something that was really profitable for you. So I ended up happening with photography businesses.

11:10Unfortunately, at that time, this is the late 90s camera started becoming much more prevalent on cell phones and people started losing respect for in whom photography decided business and they could take a lot of photographs of themselves and this value just wasn't there anymore. So once I moved to Charlotte, we had some lead challenges, we had some lead source issues with the hospitals and it just kind of phased out. So then I kind of jumped around to try and figure out well, my next, you know, next opportunity is gonna be. And then I started my company, which is Perky LLC in 2015 when I brought a product a market called the Perky Collar. So I tried to use all of my corporate experiences, my challenges, my work ethic, my drive, my problem solving skills and put all that together. I mean, before I even did that, while I was still in Cincinnati, we did start our own photography studio just to kind of do things that were different from what I was already doing for all those at the deaf for 12 years. We did a lot of really creative photography. We had our own studio. So that was my rule and I first opportunity at building a business on my own, my wife and I, my wife was very creative on the computer. So we did a lot of anguities type photographs with colorine

12:13and I was very patient with it with the children and the babies and we said fun with it. We had lots of cool framing and lots of cool collages and we did that for a couple of years. It was a good experience. But again, I was kind of our first business as failure because again, we realized that people really loved the in-home side. I was kind of tired of traveling from house to house to house and having huge territories. I wanted to have a studio I can go into and people come to me. But I started realizing that people, there were some people that were willing to pay the money to come to me, but they really did appreciate the in-home side of it. And I just, I saw more of my followers that I built a relationship with all those years would come to my studio because they liked me. But truly, they loved the convenience of us coming to the house. So that was a misstep. But you're living to learn. I enjoyed it. We gained some experience from that. And then shortly after that, we moved to Charlotte. And we didn't open a new studio once we got here. So we kind of learned from that experience. Yeah, well, I mean, that's part of the journey, right? Is pivoting when you hit a block wall. And you're speaking to something that I think is really valuable as well, which is,

13:14even if you have a good idea, even if you have a good skill set, even if you know what you're doing, even if you're familiar with an industry, if that particular industry is also shrinking, it's just another obstacle that you have to overcome, which is one that you do not overcome if you'd are willing to pivot and move into a different space. You know what I'm saying? Can you be successful with a magazine in 2026? Like, yeah, you can. But should that be the venture that you take on? Probably not. You know what I mean? We're shrinking industry. The more it's only getting smaller, it's not getting any bigger. It's probably not a good place to plant your feet and say, this is where I'm going to go. So you took this pivot into Topurki, L.A.C., tell me about the colors, more about the colors, where the idea come from, how did you go from idea to prototype? Sure. So I had the idea, probably in 2014, I wear a lot of dress shirts again. I kind of bounced around for different businesses, different types of sales. I wore a lot of dress shirts, a lot of blazers,

14:16and it was just a problem I had myself, you know, after you wear enough dress shirts and you go to a meeting, I think at the time I had the idea, I was actually working in the credit card merchant services, which is a terrible industry. So I learned very quickly that nobody likes you when you're a credit card service company. But it was going to get a good learn. And obviously, I allowed me to pick the right credit card company for me to work with when I had the business. So again, it's a feather free hat. It's a necessary step towards progress. But while I was working for that company, I was going to meet with a car repair company, and I knew I couldn't go in there, wearing a suit, it would just be too salesy looking. Yeah. So I wore a dress shirt and blazer, and I would just be forward to the meeting at nine o'clock. I went to go get a dress shirt out of my closet, and the dress shirt collar looked terrible. It was like drooping and sagging and laying flat, and just didn't look very nice. And I just, I tried another shirt that was just freshly starved to my closet and didn't look any better. So that, my aha moment was I ran down the hall to my daughter's room to see if she had any headbands or anything I could stick in the collar just to make it good enough for that meeting. And sure enough, if I'm a very simple headband

15:17with no butterfly as no flowers, no nothing on it, just a very simple kind of horseshoe shape, headband, and I literally just looked to my collar, stuck it under my dresser collar, and looked in the mirror down the hall. I'm like, yeah, this looks good enough. And her little five year old head was probably a little smaller than my neck, and it wasn't uncomfortable, but it wasn't as comfortable as I like it to be. So I just needed some adjustments on sizing. But the concept was there. The most successful business owners don't do it all themselves. They delegate. Upwork lets you build a team of highly skilled specialists for every function your business needs so that you can focus on what you do best, and that experts handle the rest. Upwork gives your business fast access to highly skilled specialists with deep expertise so you can fill critical skill gaps, launch projects faster, and skill support up or down without committing to full time headcount. I don't know how many times I've used Upwork in the last, I don't know, call it decades since I've started doing stuff online, but it is many, many, many, many times.

16:18And then with Business Plus, you can access the top, 1% of talent on Upwork as well. AI-powered shortlisting delivers a curated shortlist of top freelancers match to your goals in under six hours. So there's no endless searching required. It also cuts down operational hassle by handling things like contracts and payments in one place. You can spend more time running the business. With over 170,000 freelancers holding five star ratings, you can hire with the confidence that comes from hiring someone with a verified track record. It's free to sign up and posting a job is easy. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPWORK.com. Upwork.com. Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body

17:19with a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration, consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist. With the meeting called a good, and then as I came home from the meeting, I think I really stumbled on something that could have a lot of potential who else has the same problem that I experienced this morning and how big is the opportunity? So at that point, I hired a company here in Charlotte who actually did work with. When I then went to the playground world, I did commercial playground equipment and we shared a space with Inventus and they had a CNC machine. And I reached out to them and I said, hey, is there any way you can help me develop a prototype for a product that keeps a collar up? And I went on about a bunch of dress shirts, looked at all the different packaging support that shirts come with. And then we just kind of sat down with all the different styles of support systems. And I told them I think if we can make this a little stronger

18:21in the right shape and not stick out, be clear. So if it does shift a little bit, it's not obvious. We have a great tool that people can use under a dresser collar and if they decide not to wear a tie, it'll look sloppy. And kind of the rest of the history. I then hired them to do my prototyping, do my research, source-on-manufacturer. We designed the packaging together. And the Perky-Hellers born. We now sold 35,000 units over 366 stores across the globe. And 1.8 million sales since 2015. Which was per year, but that's just lifetime. But from an idea to a reality, that's a still pretty cool story that we took a problem, solved it and made money with it. And it's going Amazon now and it's still in stores now. So it's not my full-time income anymore, unfortunately, but it's definitely a cool thing to say. I invented something and brought it to market and didn't just talk about it. There's a lot of patents that are issued. 3% of patents are ever developed into products, which is really sad. There's a lot of great ideas out there. The three percent?

19:22Or three percent? Wow. Or they go to the grave with these screen inventors. So I was proud that I was able to have the resources to bring it to market, had the right people around me to make it happen. You can't do it all yourself. You have to find someone to help you. And that's the hardest part is who can you trust? The invent helps. These are the things you see on TV. A lot of times they don't even put it in their name. So you have to be very careful. Have the right patent attorney, make sure the patent application is done properly, makes you follow the rules and regulations, makes their skilled and knowledgeable how to write patents for your specific niche industry. And you're going to have a relationship with them for a long time. So the patent's good for 20 years. So if you don't belong with your patent attorney, you're going to have a very long painful experience with them. So find something you can trust. Find something that's going to write the patent for you, not their assistant, the assistant's change. I interviewed 15 patent attorneys and Charlotte. Everyone thought of this crazy. I was like, well, this isn't a very important relationship to me. I want to know this guy as an answer my calls when I call. Right. And then I'm talking to you three, four hundred dollars an hour. So you have to make sure you find the right person.

20:23It's willing to work with you and get the job done for you and do it well because the patent office that they don't like it, you have nothing. And you're spending a lot of money for those patents. So I'm honestly done right. You mentioned that you that is not what you do full time anymore. What do you do full time now? So about six months ago, I, well, actually about a year ago, I decided that I'd close my store in South Park Mall here in Charlotte, where I was working full time for about six years and just allow the online space to take over. That way I wasn't focused strictly on my perky-calor sales and store sales and website sales. And I allowed to be more mailbox money and sell my income versus my primary income. Because it is stressful to have the even flows, ups and downs, the holiday seasons and so on and so forth. So I went on and got a full time job. Initially, it outy didn't like the dealership mentality. I went and thought I was being dishonest. I didn't like that. So now I'm working with a company out of Salisbury, North Carolina doing RVs and motorhomes. And I'm helping people find affordable housing, helping them travel the country, getting people off of video games and out camping and hiking

21:24and smores and campfires and enjoying family time and having kids' libraries over the years from 30 to 13. I think it's great that people get off video games and get out and enjoy and see the country. So it's been a nice fit for me. My strength is building a poor, listening, asking the right questions and just listening to what they're looking for and then finding the perfect camper for them. So it's been a nice transition. I do also do custom clothing. So I'm a clothing year for suits. And then obviously, I'm always here to help my stores and my online customers. And then my repeat customers I had over the years at South Park Mall will still call me and say, hey, I need a belt. Hey, I need a Fedora. I need a Perky collar. Where can I find one? People still come with fashion questions. So it's neat to see how everything from my portfolio over the years kind of all funnels together. And some weeks I have a great week with a custom suit and a couple of orders from the online. And obviously I still get a city paycheck from one working too. So I think anyone listening to this call, it's a tough jugline act. And it was hard for me to give it my full-time job

22:26when I started Perky. But I was just so obsessed with bringing this Perky collar to market and doing trade shows across the country. It's hard to keep a job and go to trade shows all across the country. So I took an Alipa faith that I was all in. And I even took an Alipa faith to franchise my business. Spent the $50,000 on all the trademarks and all the registrations are necessary for to franchise a business that hire the attorneys to have all the paperwork drawn up. And that end up going by the way side when I close my store. So I've learned a lot. I've spent a lot. But at the same time, it's all feathers for your hat. You learn things, you help other people. And how difficult the retail business is. And as Mal is continuing to close, I think I made the right decision to cut my losses. Get back to a full-time job with benefits and a stable salary and allow Perky to be a nice supplement income from now until the end. This is what I love about the show, man, is like we talk to people all over the money-making spectrum. And I am such a big believer in architecting your life

23:28the way that you want your life to be. And if some seasons call for a full-time entrepreneurship, great, if some seasons call for getting a full-time job and doing something on the side, great. But it's that constant reinvention and constant seeking of the vision that you have for your life that will enable you to stick in the game long enough to see the success and see the wins come in along the way. So David, I appreciate you taking the time, man, working people go to get more from you. Yeah, so the best place to go is the website, which is Perky. D-E-R-K-Y-L-L-C.com. And it's Perky, LLC and all social media from Facebook to Instagram to TikTok to YouTube. You can also find a lot of interviews I've done myself. I have the Perky Color Radio show. That's on YouTube. It's on Spotify, I interview business owners as well. Just to hear their story. I think it's just remarkable which you learn from other people. I think it makes our businesses better when we learn from other people as well. And it's just, it's a lot of fun. And I think entrepreneurs, I also have two networking groups. One's called Charlotte Entrepreneur Think Tank. We meet monthly here in Charlotte and manpreneur

24:30as a mental health support system for men that are trying to juggle being a man, being a father, being a husband as well as being an entrepreneur. And it's a lot. It's hard to be the best at everything. And like you talked about, there's lots of cycles. And sometimes those cycles lead to divorce. Sometimes those cycles lead to challenges being a good father. And you make sacrifices for your business sometimes. And what's the trickled on effect from those sacrifices? Do your kids see you less? Do your wife see you less? How much are you traveling? How lonely are you? How lonely is your family? There's just a lot of sacrifices going through in this journey. And it's nice to have a support system that understands what you're going through and the importance of picking the right spouse because the wrong spouse will make your business go sideways very quickly. So it's a very important decision you make when you see I do makes them understand who they're marrying, makes them understand the instability of an entrepreneur, but you're passionate. And the right woman will understand that and they'll have their own job and kind of help fill in the gaps when your business is light. But it's not easy. I tell you, it's not for everybody. But it's fun to have the highlights. And the same you've done something like

25:30you brought a product to market, now it's in stores and people are benefiting from an idea that you brought to market. David, love the conversation. Appreciate you taking the time. Everybody else tuning in. Remember money only solves your money problems, but it's easier to solve the rest of your problems when you got some money in the bank. So let's start there here on the TravisMakesMoneyPod gassing student in. Catch you next time. Peace. Hello. Look what TJ Max dragged out. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu. We are digital. We are downloadable. We are streamable. The fashion event of the year is certified fresh. Pull yourself together. We have work to do. Critics say it's smart and witty and the perfect sequel. That's all. Get run way ready for the Devil Wears Prada 2 on Disney Plus and Hulu, RID-VG-13.