From Idea to Income: A Practical Guide to Product Development and Manufacturing
- Harvest Growth
- Jan 19
- 21 min read
Updated: Feb 24
In this episode, Jon LaClare sits down with Jim Wilkinson, a multi-patented inventor, author, manufacturer, and longtime mentor to inventors and entrepreneurs. With more than three decades of hands-on experience, Jim has helped bring countless ideas from concept to real products found in homes, and even automobiles, around the world.
Jim shares how his lifelong passion for innovation led him to write "The Practical Inventor," a no-nonsense guide designed to help inventors avoid costly mistakes and follow the correct sequence when developing a product. He explains why rushing into patents, branding, or marketing too early often derails promising ideas and why simplicity, planning, and discipline matter more than enthusiasm alone.
We dive into product validation, profitability, and how inventors can use modern tools like AI and basic market research to determine demand before spending significant money. You’ll also discover why American manufacturing can be more beneficial than many realize when factoring in quality, communication, speed to market, automation, and overall value.
In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover:
Why inventors should focus on sequence and planning before patents or marketing
How to validate product demand and profitability early
The biggest mistakes that prevent inventors from ever launching
Why defining a clear minimum viable product is critical to success
The hidden costs and risks of overseas manufacturing
The value of mastermind communities for mentorship, collaboration, and growth
You can listen to the full interview on your desktop or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Or, click to watch the full video interview here!
If you’re looking to bring an idea to market, to improve manufacturing, or to scale, this episode delivers practical, real-world guidance from someone who’s been through it all. And to learn more about Jim Wilkinson, schedule a conversation, or receive a complimentary copy of The Practical Inventor, visit www.veritek.com.
To be a guest on our next podcast, contact us today!
Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenue? Set up a free consultation with us today!
Transcript:
Jon LaClare [00:00:00]:
Today's guest has spent more than three decades turning raw ideas into real products that end up in homes all over the world. He's helped inventors avoid costly mistakes, accelerate their development timelines and launch with confidence. He also owns a US Based manufacturing company that proves you can build high quality consumer products domestically with shorter lead times, better communication and surprisingly competitive pricing. And on top of that, he leads an inventor group in a powerful mastermind community where entrepreneurs support each other's growth. We're diving into practical invention strategies, smart manufacturing decisions and lessons from a recent Achieve University event. This is an episode packed with insight for anyone building a product or a business. Let's get started.
Announcer [00:00:48]:
Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know Harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Now here's the host of the Harvest growth podcast, Jon LaClare.
Jon LaClare [00:01:08]:
Welcome back to the show. I'm super excited to be speaking with my good friend Jim Wilkinson today. We've known each other for a long time. I don't know, I want to say probably 15 years or something. We go back, we've worked a lot, shared clients over the years. He has an amazing background and a wealth of knowledge that I'm really excited to share with you our audience today. So a quick introduction and Jim will fill in some of these holes because I'm there's so much that he does and has done. I'm sure I'm going to leave some of it out, but he is a multi patented inventor including several patents that are in every single manufactured automobile in the country, at least maybe the world. Lots of patents he's developed as an inventor over the years and actually a published author in that regard as well. I wrote a book called the Practical Inventor and many others since then, but it focuses on helping inventors to succeed with their inventions and a little more recently than some of his very early work at least is. But still, we'll have to find out exactly how long it's been but for many years he has owned a company called Veritech EMP and it's a manufacturing again, he'll fill in the holes, but essentially product development and manufacturing business US based that helps inventors bring their products to market, not only get them ready but actually manufacture them here in America. We're going to talk about American manufacturing as as part of our interview today, I'm trying to look at my notes. If I left anything out. There's so much. But he's a truly an invention expert and a product launch expert, which I'm excited to have on the show today. So Jim, welcome. Thanks for taking the time today.
Jim Wilkinson [00:02:43]:
Hey, thank you, Jon. I'm thrilled to be here.
Jon LaClare [00:02:46]:
Absolutely. So I want to jump in and talk about your background a little bit. So if you could maybe. Is there any gaps that I missed? Anything in your multi decade of experience that I left out that you want to share with our audience in terms of your background?
Jim Wilkinson [00:03:00]:
You make me sound old. Well, you know, I mean you asked me earlier, you know, when did I start, how long have I been doing this? And my answer really was I was born this way. I really think most product innovators are born this way. And you know, I mean my biggest, my biggest move forward, I guess in this realm was when I was nine years old, long, long, long time ago. And I had a vision of a product that really shaped my life. And what I took in college was in courses of study was in support of this and things I shared with you earlier, Stephen Hawking, when he got his PhD, his thesis explained what God showed me in his vision in 1965. That really makes me sound old. I'm not that old, guys.
Jon LaClare [00:04:08]:
Well, you're in good company sharing an idea with Stephen Hawking for sure. Now I mentioned that you're also an author of the book called the Practical Inventor. Help me understand or help our audience understand what gap in. There's a lot of invention books out there. Yours is, I would say, unique in part because of your experience. Experience having done this for so many inventions over the years, both on the development and patenting side, onto the manufacturing, etc. But just give us a high level description of the book and help us understand how it's different than others.
Jim Wilkinson [00:04:35]:
2008, we're meeting at the Westin LAX. Were you there in that organization then?
Jon LaClare [00:04:46]:
So I wasn't. So we overlapped in an organization for many years, but I started once it moved to Las Vegas, I think just a couple years after that.
Jim Wilkinson [00:04:53]:
So Sunday I had, I had 23 back to back 30 minute meetings. I'm very thankful that a couple of them didn't show up anyway and everybody was talking about their idea, but they were all across the board. Nobody was consistent in terms of where they started, what they had done. And I ended up answering pretty much the same questions over and over and over and over. And it got me to realize that yeah, really there is no real good guidance. I went on a search for books, you know, books on helping with product development, helping with inventions, things like that, you know, and you know, where patents came from in the Sistine Chapel and all this stuff is really nice, you know, feel good stuff. It means absolutely nothing. If you've got an idea and you want to get started, what do you do first, what do you do second? You know, where do you go, you know, how do you. There's things that you should know and things you should do before you really even start working on something as an idea. And so what do you do? You call a patent attorney. And what's the patent attorney going to do? He's going to try to sell you something like a patent. Okay. Boy, you know, even with the first patent change of the patent laws we had, doing a patent is not your friend, is not your first thing to do. And I know a lot of people that never went beyond that because it took all their money. You know, I mean a patent's not cheap. And, and it's a publishing. You're publishing your idea. So, so there's this aspect of sequence. There's a sequence to do things. You don't need a $25,000 marketing plan or a website when you're just starting out with a, with an idea. You need a piece. You don't even need a piece of paper with a logo or a business card with a logo. You need your, you need your, a piece of paper with your name, your phone number and your email and I mean frankly, a post it note with it hand scribbled. So that's readable, please make it readable. But is all you really need to get started. You don't need to waste that money that you're going to need down the road. Let me tell you, you will need that money down the road. Don't, don't spend it now. And so sequence. And then the second thing is planning. You know, I mean you need, you need a plan for your marketing, you need a plan for your prototypes. Otherwise all this stuff you, without having a plan and a clear direction, you're just gonna pour money. Like having a boat and pouring the money in a hole in the water, okay? It's gonna get you nowhere. You need a good plan and you need a proper sequence. I teach a class on keeping it simple and that's an acronym for Sequenced investigative managed approach Prototypes Launching your product and extended learning. This whole thing is a three legged stool. Your product development, your business development and what else? You, your personal development. You miss any one of those, you got a Two legged stool. And you know what happens on a two legged stool? You fall over.
Jon LaClare [00:09:05]:
Yeah, that's great advice. Let's talk about how to validate demand because I think you brought up some great points about how a lot of inventors will spend a lot of money on things that they don't need to do yet in their business. Right. They go too far down these paths and by the end of it sometimes they're out of money and they don't even have the chance to really take it to market. But one of the important things to do, I would say early on, and I think you agree with this, is validating the demand for the product. You've got a great idea as an inventor that you love, but how do you validate that the demand in the marketplace is going to match your personal excitement for it? You know, what would you recommend, I guess is product validation.
Jim Wilkinson [00:09:40]:
Well, a couple of things. First off, profitability. I can't tell you how many people I talk to. They have no idea how they're going to make money with their idea. Come on, man, you know, and what's it going to cost for you to develop your product? What's it, what's your product going to cost? What can you sell it for? What is somebody willing to pay you for it? Do you know what that is? How do you find that out without spilling the beans on your product? You know, this is, this is the stuff that frankly I teach you, you know, and you know, I have a. Today, you know, AI. Oh, man, AI is so cool. Yeah, I don't use search engines anymore. I do all my searching on AI and there's a couple out there that are great because they give you the references that they pulled from to give you the answer, which I find more valuable than the answer that the AI put together. And you know, I had a guy, he's an attorney, had a product idea and he was going to launch me on developing this idea. That was great. He decided, oh, let's do a patent search first. He said that. And I said, why don't you just do a simple web search? So I saw him about six weeks later. He hadn't done anything. So on my phone, five minutes, I did an AI search. And in five minutes I found literally one website with like 25 or 30 different variations of his idea already on the market, ranging in price from $1.98 to $5. Okay. I mean, there's no way we were going to make it for $1.98. So, gosh, people, we have the Resources and that's it. And then we can work through the cost, the sales price, the profit margins. How are you going to make money? Sometimes your product, you're not going to make that much money off of it. You need to sell like 10,000 of them a month. Well, what's our plan to do that? Well, we're going to make off of it in a year. Depends on how many you sell. And you want to spend $10,000 on a patent and then spend all the money you make on it defending the patent when people infringe on your patent or do you just go like crazy on that product? And when the product life is expended, what's next on your plate that you've already been working on and have, oh, maybe they have you working on an infomercial for it.
Jon LaClare [00:12:40]:
Right, right, exactly. Do you have an example or can you share with us an example of whether it's one of your own products or patents or maybe a client that you've worked with over the years that you know, maybe some insights that you learned from that early ideation stage until a massive success later on or maybe some of the critiques, key turning points in the, in the life of that product.
Jim Wilkinson [00:13:02]:
Well, I'll tell you the one I'm launching right now, okay. I actually took about, since, since you and I were working together before, I kind of took a break from helping other people. I mean I still was a little bit, but to actually launch one of my own products which is, it's actually 12 gauge shotgun that sits on an AR10 platform. So it's basically think of a 12 gauge M16. That's what people can kind of picture in their heads. Right. And you know, I thought be pretty simple to just make that. Yeah, right. Well, a lot of little details there that made it not so easy. And actually 13 years into it now, and we're launching now, the minimum viable, viable product has been achieved. I will tell you that in 13 years, I can't count the number of companies have come on the market, launched a product that from 100 yards away looks like my product. But the closer you get, the less it looks like. And none of them are on the market now? Well, a couple of them are, but you know, they're not doing so great. And so my minimum viable product was a performance standard that I set early on and there was a lot of design intent behind it and I thought I would, I thought I would circumvent all of the launch mistakes that I've helped other people to circumvent yeah. Well, I learned firsthand with those launches what those launch mistakes feel like. There thereby goes, you can't do this alone. Okay. Because, you know, I knew everyone and it was like, oh, yeah, I know about that one. Yeah, well, that's what it feels like. Okay, great.
Jon LaClare [00:14:59]:
You know, yeah, there's a lot that goes into it to make sure something works. And I like how you talked about the minimum viable product. Sometimes that takes a few months. Right. The more complex the product, the longer it takes because as you talked about a performance standard, especially in the firearms, it has to be perfect and others may launch along the way and if they miss out on those issues, their product's gonna fail and not work. So taking the time can be necessary in some product categories for sure.
Jim Wilkinson [00:15:26]:
Well, and the other thing is with the minimum viable product is specify that up early up front what, what it is. I had one client that never launched because, oh, I have this new idea, we just have to put it in. And it's like, no, we'll put that in a year. The next model, we'll put it in. And then the people that bought your first model like it enough that they're going to buy your second one. You have a built in customer base to buy it again with all of these improvements and meanwhile, you've made cash flow profit. But I've seen, I've seen more fail because of that than succeed.
Jon LaClare [00:16:10]:
Yeah, absolutely. So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your manufacturing business. So back to the Veritech business that you own and operate and have for a long time, where you help others manufacture their products again stateside. I mentioned that in your introduction. Help us understand, you know, some people think, and you know, rightfully so in many regards, it's cheaper, can be cheaper for a lot of products to go overseas. Right. If you just look at pure numbers. Right. Just the cost of manufacturing alone, but there's so much more that goes into it that may make US Manufacturing very price competitive when you figure in other factors. You and I had a conversation about this a couple of weeks ago. I'd love for you to share your thoughts on that. You know, what are some of the differences with US Manufacturing beyond just the price of the final product that might be coming from overseas?
Jim Wilkinson [00:16:57]:
Yeah, you have to think about value, number one. And you know, because value can roll up all of your intangibles. So, yeah, I'm actually right now, Jon, working with several companies here in Wyoming that have been having their products shipped, manufactured overseas and won't Mention the name of the country, but they I'm bringing their products manufacturing back to Wyoming and without the tariffs, the rule, my rule is without the tariffs, we have to be cost competitive because the tariffs come and go and we actually on the actual raw cost with automation behind it can be very, very cost competitive. But here are the issues. You run into inconsistent quality. One batch will be beautiful, the next batch can't use it. And they don't stand behind it. You can't go back and say you got to make it again. We're sending this stuff back. They won't, they don't play that game. You know, they don't stand behind their work a lot of times unless you're a big company. But you know, 80% of the population works for small business. And a small business does not have the clout to tell these companies overseas, hey, you got to make this right. They just say, well take it somewhere else if you don't like it and then you start all over again. So inconsistent quality, batch to batch, time zones. This is the big intangible. How do you like getting up at 2 in the morning? Would you like to do this recording that we're doing right now at 2 in the morning?
Jon LaClare [00:18:51]:
Right. No, thanks.
Jim Wilkinson [00:18:52]:
Or do you have a life? You know, I mean, do we live to work or do we work to live? You know, and you know, we have to have a balance in our lives. And this two in the morning conference calls, don't. Don't float the boat with me very well. But that's what you have to do because you've got time zones and then there's a language barrier. And I mean I've had so many projects that I've told my clients, do not go to this country and have your products made. And they don't understand the drawings. The drawings are simple. Other people understand them just fine. They get their sample products. They don't look anything like the drawing at all. Quality problems with them. Then there's a travel. I have one friend that is not with us anymore because they were leaving the country two in the morning, the plane turned down the wrong one. It was under construction and it just about takeoff speeds, ran into a D10 Caterpillar parked on the Runway and. Yeah, well, anyway, you can guess how that turned out. Not well, you know, and it still hurts even today, you know, talking about it because, you know, it was unnecessary when the supplier that he was visiting was making springs that were constant quality problems and an hour and a half away now actually we were in Boulder at The time that's company I was working with there half an hour away, a great spring company that quoted them and it was like, it was like 5 cents difference per spring. 5 cents per spring. Okay. And they weren't using that many, maybe 10,000 a year, you know, and you know, what's the value of that life versus the spring? Just, I mean, just two trips over to the factory over there offset the cost of the difference of the product and then shipping, shipping time, shipping costs. If you're concerned about carbon footprint, the carbon footprint of shipping, you know, going through customs, the delays you get going through customs, products getting lost going through customs. I mean there's a whole list of disasters there. Right. And then your tariffs and then automation, you know, I mean, we can, we can solve so many problems by automating. When I was doing all the automotive work, we had a circuit board company, north side of Chicago, north side of Detroit, that their, their production line was all automated. And they're producing fantastically good quality product and less cost than we could get it done even in Mexico. And there's some good suppliers in Mexico and you can drive to them and they're in the same time zone and the Spanish isn't that bad. But anyway.
Jon LaClare [00:22:13]:
Yeah, one thing I'd add to that too is the time for development. You kind of mentioned this briefly, but we've had clients over the years. One comes to mind that we just launched on national TV recently and it took over three years to develop a relatively simple product overseas. And part of the reason was it just was you. You make a design change. No, they didn't quite get the communication. It's mostly over email, write a phone call here and there. But there's always a language barrier. Ship a sample to you. It's not quite right. Make these changes and just that step after step after step process that sometimes takes months. Right. It turned into three years where developing something here in the States. If you're listening to our audience from your own home country. Right. It can shorten that development timeline to get exactly what you want and that can save. Think about launching a successful product two years earlier. The difference in revenue that that significantly drives. So there's that piece of it as well. So when I again shift gears, the last topic I want to talk about is there's a mastermind organization that you are a key part of called Achieve. Can you describe that for our audience? You and I overlapped in a previous organization in the past. I'm a big believe believer in masterminds of being around like minded people and learning from people that are ahead of you, where you want to go to. Right. And helping people that might be behind you. Right. They're not yet where you are. But that sort of mastermind process can be very helpful. So talk to us about specifically this Achieve organization.
Jim Wilkinson [00:23:42]:
You bet. Well, Achieve Systems is a invitation only, very elite membership organization that focuses on. Its focus is to connect and collaborate amongst each other so that we can build multiple streams of income. Not. This is not network marketing. Okay. This is. And networking is a bad word. We connect so that we can collaborate, we do business together. And you have everybody listening on this podcast has so many assets in their head that could be monetized and how can we, how can we put that together and then provide the resources to monetize those things and give you those multiple streams of income that will help you to fund your product as you move forward? I funded my shotgun development on my own because of all the product development and other manufacturing work I do. Anyway, we have daily mastermind calls on different subjects every day that you plug in the area that's of interest to you. And all of this stuff is included in the membership. And when you have a mature business or you just have an idea starting out, you still need, you still need that coaching, that mentoring, that. You're like a sponge. A dry sponge doesn't absorb anything. You need to be a damp sponge. Well, absorbing that, you know, is, people have been there and done that and know how to do it and can guide you and help you. And then at some point in time you become saturated, you can't absorb anymore. And that's where, you know, helping the other people who are you, who are starting out where you've been, you know.
Jon LaClare [00:25:55]:
Yeah, absolutely. And recently, just I think a couple of weeks ago, there was an, an annual or semi annual event called Achieve University here in the Denver area that you attended. Any, any key learnings that you'd like to share? Like what did you, you went there, I think for a couple of days and, and listened to people that were making presentations and you know, talking about how to get to higher levels and growth in their own business, et cetera. Any key learnings that came out of that for you?
Jon LaClare [00:26:20]:
Jim Wilkinson [00:26:20]:
Yeah, you know, I mean, I go to every one of those because I, I run the inventor division for Achieve and I haven't been doing this maybe, maybe, maybe a year, maybe a little bit longer. Okay. So it's still pretty new to me and I learn a little bit at everyone and I think the biggest thing for Me on this last university, which it's a two day thing, was Rob, our founder, talking about his A5 marketing program. He teaches us how to market our product and how to, how to generate a thousand leads a year. How many people out there doing what they do would like to have a thousand leads, qualified leads every year? How would you like to have a thousand qualified leads, Jon?
Jon LaClare [00:27:17]:
Right, yeah, absolutely.
Jim Wilkinson [00:27:18]:
Yeah. And you know, I mean, quite frankly, I'm not really looking for new business. I have a full plate but, but it's in my bones to help other people, which is why we're having this talk, you know, and I'll make time because that's what you do is you make time for that. And anyway, it was a paradigm shift. My aha moment then was this paradigm shift that went on on the, on how I've been doing my marketing and maybe I could be a little bit more effective with a little bit less time. And well, that's called efficiency. That's not a bad word. You know. And then we go through it. I learn a little bit more on the Ninja Spider every time. It's one of Rob's creations. And that's how we quantitize and organize or probably organize and quantitize our assets. You know, those things we talked about up here. And once you have that, you can put together a plan and start working on monetizing some of that, building that cash flow.
Jon LaClare [00:28:28]:
Love it. So, you know, we only have so much time. We can talk today, unfortunately. But you've shared a wealth of knowledge and I really appreciate that. For our audience that might be listening or watching and would like to get a hold of you, Jim, whether it might be getting advice on inventing, right the early stage of ideation or of especially your core business, I think, or a big part of your business is helping with manufacturing whatever that product might be and, and getting that stage or if they have questions about the Achieve organization. What's the best way to get a hold of you?
Jim Wilkinson [00:29:00]:
The best, best way to reach me is to go onto my website and get a pencil and paper out. I'll give it to you in a second here. But in the upper right hand corner of the website is a contact us. Just move your cursor over the top of that, let it hover there a second and it'll open up my calendar. I set aside specific amount of time every day to talk to people and the rest of the time is set aside. So I should get some work done. Scary concept because you know, I'd like to get done with the work, spend some time with my wife and my grandkids, you know. And anyway, yeah, the reason why we have children is to get to the grandkids. Anyway, my website, veritek.com that's Veritek with a V as in Victor E R I T E K.com veritek.com maybe when you edit it you can throw that up on the screen too. But go there, schedule an appointment with me. There's a couple things going to happen. You're going to get automated. You're going to get like a docusign kind of form, the non disclosure agreement to sign. And so sign that, send it in. And I won't talk to people about inventions or products without that. And that's number one. Number two is you're going to get a complimentary copy of my abridged ebook of the Practical Inventor. So that will come in your mail as a PDF so you get those two things. I would encourage you to please, please, please look through the book before our talk. If you're calling about an invention, for sure, go, just leave through it real quick and look at the things that highlight in your brain as you leave through it. Okay. And I look forward to talking to you guys.
Jon LaClare [00:31:09]:
Well, thank you Jim. I appreciate that and being so generous with our audience. I do encourage everyone to Visit your website Veritek.com and we'll put that in the show notes. So as always, if you're driving, just go back and look at the podcast. You can find it on YouTube, on our website Harvest Growth or any podcast platform. The spelling of that website will be in there. Jim, thanks again. Well, I do want to say to our audience, thank you for tuning into today's episode where we uncover the stories and strategies behind some of the most successful marketers out there. If you're looking to take your own business to the next level, be sure to visit perfectlaunch.com. you can also grab a cop a free copy of my book, the Perfect Launch System. It's packed with the proven principles we've developed over the past 20 years, helping hundreds of businesses launch and grow successfully. Plus you'll also get exclusive one page summaries of some of our most popular podcast interviews. Real world insights you can apply right away. Head to perfectlaunch.com and start building your Perfect Launch today. Until next time, keep learning, keep launching and keep growing.
Comments