Why I started
this
company.
By Tim Deemter, Founder & CEO, PlatinumEdge Solutions
How we got here.
Dense, malleable,
and worth paying
attention to.
It wasn’t a good paper. I didn’t enjoy writing. But I remember the research — that platinum is incredibly dense but malleable, non-reactive but capable of acting as a catalyst. I didn’t fully understand what those words meant at the time. I just remember thinking it sounded like something worth paying attention to.
I didn’t think about that paper again for decades until I needed to name a company.
Ten years in my dad's
repair shop.
My dad ran his own business for most of my life — a computer, VCR, and camcorder repair shop in Grand Rapids. He was a man of genuine integrity: high standards, stood behind his work, never made excuses. What he didn’t have was a blueprint for what he wanted the business to become, or what he wanted his life to look like on the other side of it.
I worked for him for nearly ten years, starting in high school and carrying it through college. I answered phones when I was too shy to talk to strangers. I carried heavy televisions before I had the muscle for it. I filed warranty claims, reconciled accounts, repaired computers, and mopped floors. He pushed me into every corner of that business, most of them uncomfortable. I’m grateful for every one of them.
What I found there — and
what I saw was missing.
After college, I joined Configura — a Swedish software company just establishing itself in the United States. Their product, CET Designer, was built around a deceptively ambitious idea: that complex, configurable products deserve software that actually understands them. Not just a viewer or a catalog, but a platform that knows your rules, enforces your constraints, and guides users toward designs that can actually be built and ordered.
I saw the potential immediately.
Over the years, I grew from developer to project manager to team lead, eventually coordinating the entire North American extension development portfolio. I loved the problems — the panel systems, the demountable wall systems, the complex storage configurations. The more complicated the product, the more I wanted to be the one building the logic for it.
When I became team lead, the scope of the role hit me harder than I expected. I was coordinating every project, developing people who weren’t ready, and operating well outside my comfort zone — with no formal leadership training to lean on. A friend pointed me toward a business coach named Marc. We met after work at The Woods, sat down with a couple of beers, and within the first hour he drew a distinction that stopped me cold: the difference between delegation and abdication. It was the beginning of understanding how much I still had to learn — not just about leading people, but about managing my own time, my own priorities, and working on the business rather than purely in it. That relationship has continued to this day.
Working across the ecosystem, I could also see a clear divide in how manufacturers were experiencing CET development. The larger ones had built their own internal development teams, their own project management, their own QA. They controlled the process, and it showed in the results. The smaller and mid-sized manufacturers who relied on outside development resources were navigating a different reality — cost overruns, timelines that stretched well beyond projections, and occasionally, extensions that didn’t quite match what they’d asked for. And the impact cut both ways — money spent building, revenue lost waiting.
I knew what it would take to fix that. Rigorous estimation. Embedded QA. A communication cadence tight enough that you never arrive at the end of a project surprised by what you built. I wanted to bring that standard to the manufacturers who needed it most — the ones who couldn’t build it themselves — and make it accessible at a scale that worked for them. That wasn’t something I could do from where I was standing.
May 2016
Perspective.
That spring, weeks after the birth of my third son, my dad was struck by a car. He was in a coma for three months before passing in hospice.
The timing is the thing that stays with me. He had just started to figure out what retirement was going to look like — how to slow down, how to fully reconnect with his wife, his kids, his grandkids. He never got there. He worked hard his whole life and didn’t quite make it to the part where he got to enjoy what he’d built.
I don’t share this to be dramatic. I share it because it clarified something I had been circling for a long time: a business doesn’t have to look the way I always assumed it had to look. You don’t have to sacrifice everything now in exchange for a life you’ll live later — if you’re lucky enough to get there.
Decision
That spring, our family gathered at my mom and dad’s house for Easter — a house with a golf course behind it and a lake out front. The kids had just finished an Easter egg hunt. Lunch was done. My wife Renee and I were sitting in the back three-season room while the kids ran around outside.
I told her I wanted to start a company.
She said, “Let’s do this.”
That’s who she is. She has always believed in me more than I’ve believed in myself. She’s a co-owner — 50/50 — and her influence on everything we’ve built is deeper than most people realize. Our logo design? She made that.
Before we filed any paperwork, I needed to know the plan was sound. My uncle Gary had started more businesses than I could count — a serial entrepreneur who had seen what works and what doesn’t from every angle. I sat with him on the back patio of his lake house one afternoon and walked him through everything: the financial model, the number of billable hours I’d need, the point at which I’d know it wasn’t working. The contracts, the legal framework, the runway. I wasn’t asking him to believe in a dream. I was asking him to evaluate a plan.
At the end of an hour, he said, ” If your mom won’t back you, I will.
She did.
On July 4th, 2017, Renee and I mailed the LLC paperwork for PlatinumEdge Solutions to the state of Michigan. Cautiously optimistic about independence.
Opening day.
My last day at Configura was October 31st. There was a Halloween party. People dressed up. It was a warm send-off.
The next morning, I was a founder.
We opened in the back of a storefront in Dorr, Michigan — a space belonging to one of my dad’s closest friends, Gord, who rented it to us while we found our footing. A front room, a back room, a coffee maker filled from the bathroom sink. We called it the Radio Shack break room. Stocked with hand-me-down furniture from Configura’s old office. We were grateful for every piece of it.
One week after we opened, two manufacturers reached out to me — companies I’d worked closely with at Configura, who had been watching for the moment I left. I drove to Toronto and met with both of them. I came home with two signed contracts.
I learned something on that trip I hadn’t fully understood about myself: the reputation I’d built wasn’t because I was the loudest voice in the room. It was because I showed up, did what I said I’d do, and didn’t make excuses when things got hard. That’s what those clients had been paying attention to.
One of those clients became our longest-running relationship. When we took over their CET extension, roughly 80% of the development effort was going toward maintenance: chasing regressions, patching things that had been band-aided rather than fixed. We don’t band-aid things. We find the underlying issue and resolve it. Today? That ratio has nearly inverted — on one of the largest, most complex extensions in our portfolio.
That’s the work I came here to do.
Not the biggest option. The best one.
I wanted to build a software company that was genuinely good at developing software. That sounds obvious. It isn’t.
Dedicated QA embedded in every project. Documented standards so knowledge doesn’t walk out the door when someone leaves. A foundation of proven, reusable code so we’re not reinventing the wheel on a client’s budget. Project management treated as a discipline. And a culture with a ceiling of forty hours a week — for everyone, including me — because I watched my dad pour everything into his work and not quite make it to the life waiting on the other side of it. I wasn’t going to build something that asked the same of the people who work here.
We stay small on purpose. We take on complexity other firms avoid. We do what we say we’ll do.
The name came back to me from that grade school paper. Platinum: dense but malleable. Non-reactive. Rare. A catalyst that accelerates a reaction without being consumed by it.