Title: General Manager-Media and Special Projects
Company: Planar
Location: Milwaukee, WI
Overtime: As a dad to a 10-month-old, there isn’t a lot of free time, but Petershack enjoys chess and golfing.
Why You Need to Know Him: He doesn’t like taking “no” or “we can’t do this” for an answer.
Tom Petershack didn’t take your typical road to Pro AV. He wasn’t taking apart television sets as a kid to see what was inside, but instead was big into sports, getting outside, and playing with friends—and still very much is. However, after spending the past decade with Leyard and then Planar, Petershack has become an experienced veteran in the field.
Petershack heads up the media team at Planar, which is focused on projects for traditional broadcast and virtual production projects. But he is versatile. “My second hat is special projects,” Petershack said. “Anything that's large, complex, and strategically important to the company—I typically spearhead those efforts.”
A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Petershack went to school for engineering, and is a civil engineer by trade, focused on structural engineering. His first few years out of college found him working in the power sector doing heavy steel structural design. “I was commuting out to the suburbs, and the commute was awful," Petershack recalled of his time in Chicago. "I saw this job posting for Leyard, looking for an engineer to help with the framing.”
And Petershack’s road to Pro AV was underway. As he recalled, circa 2016 when he was hired, all LED was essentially rear service requiring a custom mount. He was one of the engineers helping with the mounting design. Leyard eventually acquired Planar and Petershack began the transition from engineering to LED expert.
“It's funny,” he recalled. “I look back nine years ago and at the products that we had—1.5mm was a tight pixel pitch and everything was rear service where it took almost 45 minutes to swap a single module. Now we're down to 0.6mm available and the serviceability of all the products is so much better and simpler. I see that trend continuing, making LED easier to integrate, easier to service, and down to those finer pixel pitches.”
Working in special projects and virtual production with all those tightly pixel pitched LED displays and walls, Petershack hears the word immersive regularly. “I do think [immersive is] a buzzword, but I do think some people are doing it really well,” Petershack said. “For example, the Sphere. I think when you get in there, you are lost in that world.”
So, here we are. Petershack has shifted from engineering to the media and LED world, and has had the opportunity to work on some unique and innovative projects that take a lot more creativity than mounting a 16x9 screen on a wall. How did he grow into a leader in his company for one of the largest trends in Pro AV today?
“I think there's always a creative solution to every problem. It's that thinking outside the box and coming up with a different way to do something, even if we're used to doing it our set way, that allows people to get creative and to win projects and to be successful within the industry,” Petershack said. “I would encourage the future generation not to just take an answer that's the norm as viable. Think how you could do it differently to solve a specific challenge, or how to do it better to set you apart from the competition.”
