Tim Deemter
An interview with Tim Deemter owner of
PlatinumEdge Solutions
“In my mind, if you can’t have fun with the journey then you’re doing something wrong. ”
tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m married to my best friend Renee, going to be 15 years this year, who also owns and works at PlatinumEdge. We have 3 boys which are crazy and fun and a handful, stressful, but we love them. Our oldest is 8, then 6 and then we've got one that's going to be turning 4 here soon. They keep us busy. We live in Dorr. We've got some acreage out there. I actually bought my parents old house that I grew up in so it's kind of fun raising our kids in the same house I grew up in. We are working on remodeling that.
Tell us a little bit about Platinumedge and your role as a leader.
I am the owner of PlatinumEdge Solutions. I have been in business for 2 years as of November of 2018. Prior to that I worked at Configura for 10 years as a software developer. I still consider myself to be a software developer, even as a business owner. The company is a software development company. We make extensions for a software called CET designer. Essentially we make plugins for this software. We work predominantly with office furniture manufacturers and basically develop their product lines into their extension so that they can sell their products in an easier simpler fashion than they're able to right now. My role at the company at this point has evolved from being the only one in the company and doing everything, to now I'm taking less of a role in operations and trying to hand that off to my team so that I can focus on the business's growth and scalability. So that we can get bigger, to help more companies.
how did you start platinumedge?
So I had been debating doing this for a couple years when I was still at Configura. I always had a draw to being a business owner just because my Dad was also an owner of his businesses pretty much his entire life. So I was familiar with it. It wasn't scary to me, in the same way that it is for a lot of people at least. The biggest thing that held me back was the fear of having to work as many hours as my Dad did. But eventually I realize that it's my business, I can make the rules, I don't have to put in as many hours. So I decided to do that. Six months before I left Configura was when Renee and I decided that this is something that we want to do together and so we spent those 6 months planning it. We got everything in order. Jokingly we filed for our LLC July 4 of that year, Independence Day. It was kind of our feeling of independence for ourselves and trying to go our direction. When we decided to open the business, we spent that time doing a lot of planning, vision work, securing funding for the first year in business and just figuring out what that could look like and how that's going to impact our personal finances and our personal livelihood at least in the short term. Making sure that it made sense.
We started with just the two of us, but hired our first employee around two months in. We are now at eight employee and I’ve got a contractor that works half time with me and we’re going to hire our intern, so it’ll soon be nine.
What have you enjoyed about the journey?
The journey is the important part here. In my mind, if you can't have fun with the journey then you're doing something wrong. It's been incredible just watching the transformation of this company. We do quarterly planning and part of that quarterly planning is writing down the accomplishments for the quarter. It's really fun to be able to read through the last two years and just see how far we've come. It goes from we hired our first employee, or we signed our first company to where we are today and that's been really kind of crazy how far its come, so quickly.
What do you think was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?
There was a little bit of fear there and it's comfortable being an employee. I don't know why because it's not like you're any more secure than your company is. As an entrepreneur you are the company essentially. You have to keep the checks coming, keep the employees paid, and run the business. There's some of that, but the majority of it was just I wanted my freedom still. I saw watching my Dad that he didn't have much freedom until he basically shut down his first business. Then he had a lot more freedom, and was starting to figure out what he wanted out of his life. I wanted to live more in the today. Be able to enjoy each day instead of just working all of them, spend more time with my kids and my family and be there for them. That's kind of what held me back. I believed that if you're not doing 60 or 80 hours a week then you're not running it right.
“It’s comfortable being an employee.
I don’t know why because it’s not like you’re any more secure than your company is. ”
What's one thing that really excites you professionally right now?
I think the most exciting thing is just the prospect of the future. We are already doing so much more than I expected. We just finished a new vision for the company and it's bold and it's exciting and I am really interested in seeing if we can do it and what it's gonna look like in a couple more years. I think that's going to surprise even me.
Talk a little bit about your first vision.
My first vision was, in my mind, it was still aggressive. It was a 5 year vision and it basically described what the company would look like in 5 years and in terms of how many companies we will be working with, how many employees we would have, what our culture would be, what our office would look like, the different positions that we would have available at the company. I tried to do a good job of describing what that would look like. Then it all came down to our annual planning this year and we basically reread the vision and more or less realized that we were already there. So a 5 year vision, 2 years later and we're pretty much done with it. That's pretty exciting for me.
What is your vision for the future?
Well the company vision has changed a lot from when I first started the company. Even my long term vision is quite a bit different. I had thought that I probably only ever have 10 maybe 12 people at the company ever. That was based on essentially an assumption that I would always be the only manager at the company. Basically we would have 10 to 12 people and they would all work directly underneath me. I don't have 10 to 12 people right now and I already realize that I can't run a company, be in charge of the direction and the future of the company, and have that many direct reports. The biggest change in the vision is the fact that we're gonna end up having a Director of Operations in the future, who's going to do most of the work of running the actual operations of the company which is a big change in direction for me, particularly because that's the aspect that I care about the most. I think that it's going to give me a lot more time and give me a lot more freedom to be able to do other things within the company that I'm passionate about. I'll still be a programmer, because I'm persistent and always got to keep my hands dirty. That's the biggest change in direction but what that creates is the ability for us to create scale. If I've got a Director of Operations and I've got leaders of programmers, suddenly I've got an organization that can scale. It is not completely dependent upon me. Which I'm pretty excited about. Then if I'm gone for a week I don't have to worry anywhere near as much as I do right now.
What do you think is something that's really working for you right now?
We are working on creating processes at the company. Essentially defining the way that we want to run our projects and have the employees behave with our customers and those sorts of things. The reason that we're doing that is so we can create scale so we can expand this beyond just what I can keep in my own personal head. We are at a point where I'm still doing that to some degree and we can't do that anymore if we want to grow. I am excited about that prospect. We just hired a project manager who's going to be helping to keep us following our process. Right now I can create the process but I'm really bad at following it. I needed someone else that'll help me out with that. The other thing that works really well is we do quarterly planning and I think that's another aspect of keeping us inline and on track with chasing this vision. It keeps us away from the distractions that can come up and get us off on a different path which would ultimately slow us down.
What was the best advice you ever received?
My Dad was always trying to get me to be a programmer. It took me awhile but I finally listened.
How old were you?
He got me my first computer before I could read, then basically always kept me supplied with books on programming. I dabbled with a little bit but just never really had any interest in it. I just didn't see the actual need. I liked playing the games and using the programs but just didn't have the drive to do it myself. I've never been a programmer that goes out and does his own projects and makes up his own problems that he's gonna solve. I guess I like solving other people's problems. I don't like making my own and then trying to fix it.
What do you think he saw in you?
His mind is wired about the same way that mine is. When he got into it, but he's much more of a self-teacher, he taught himself electronics. We were cleaning out the garage and we found some of his old notebooks from when he was in high school and it was just all circuit boards, like he would just sit in class in high school, designing circuit boards, then go home and then build the circuit boards. That's just kind of who he was. So I mean we're wired the same way in how we think logically, but wired a bit differently in terms of motivations.
What changed, and when? What was the switch that flipped?
It's kind of funny I was in my first year at GRCC because I didn't know what I wanted to go for so I wasn't gonna spend my own money going to an expensive college. So I started at GRCC in one of the little introduction classes, it’s just a little one credit class basically on figuring out what your actual degree should be. I'm sitting there reading through all of these degree programs and all this other stuff that's out there like marketing and sales and business administration and music and artistry and most engineering programs they just didn't really appeal to me. I read about programming and what they do and then it wasn't really until I took the first programming class that I'm like this is fun. This is really fun. So I kinda lucked into it even in spite of him saying this is what you should do. Basically I just took the first class and said wow this is fun.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”
If you had a mantra, or a favorite quote what would it be?
The only thing that's coming to mind right now is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Why do you say that ?
That one just came up today, because the programmers have a tendency to always wanna rewrite everything, even if it is not quite the way that they would have done that or not quite perfect. If the code works, leave it, just as long as it is not completely unusable. If it's not broke just leave it alone because then you'll end up creating more problems which is what we had fixed today.
Share an obstacle that you had to dig deep to overcome and how you overcame it.
A couple things come to mind immediately. I'll pick one that I'll actually be able to get through. A really good one would be when I took over as team leader at Configura. At the time I basically ended up with it for a variety of reasons. I took over a team of programmers, it was about 12 at the time, and we were running projects with about 15 different companies. We had no actual process. There wasn't much in the way of growth of the team in terms of owning their own projects and realistically just owning their own work. I hit the wall basically because I tried to keep running the projects the same way that they had been running. I took over for 2 team leaders originally and then it was just me. I tried to do the work for both of them by myself. That didn't work very much so I started to basically just have a constant headache that would never go away. The stress levels were crazy. I'd come home a zombie, get to work be a zombie, it was just too much. That's when we had to change something. I actually decided that I was going to sort of shove people off into the deep end of the pool and take a vacation and that was kind of what was absolutely necessary. It kind of worked. I basically wrote down; this is what being a project manager means, this is what you are to your customers, and then these are the project managers, here's your projects, I expect meetings every other week and that sort of thing, then took 2 weeks off. Just before I took the vacation is actually the first time I had a beer with you and you started talking about how to create alignment and vision and basically how do you get the team to all pull in the same direction and want the same thing. I think that was the moment where I started to think beyond just “what I can do” and started to think of “what can my team do”, which is really if you're going to be a leader of teams what you have to do. You can't micromanage them, it creates more problems. I started to really focus on growing the team into more than they were which they were incredibly receptive to you. It's almost like they were wanting it. We worked through that and by the time I left Configura we had two team leaders, we're up to 20-24 developers and I think we had 18 or 20 different companies we are working with and my stress levels were very low at the time.
Have you had a light bulb moment and share how you turned that into success?
That's basically what separates us from the competition. The light bulb moment was, thinking about how to make the extensions that we make, cheaper because they're very expensive and quicker and to do that without sacrificing quality. Which normally you put those things up on a triangle and you say you have to pick 2 you can't have all 3. I wanted all 3. So what I've decided to do basically is to create infrastructure that I can copy from extension to extension to essentially recreate what I already know works without having to spend time creating it a second time or third time or fourth time. That concept we've been using with a few different companies already and it's been proving very successful and it's not even done yet. We're maybe a quarter of the way done with it in my mind, I got a lot of work I can still do on that and it's already proving very successful. Our estimates are about two-thirds of our competition and that's in terms of cost and in time lines we are about half of our competition.
how do you get that cost savings and that acceleration?
Basically through having our own set of code that we can use in all of our extension so if we start with the new company we can just put this code into place and about half of the work is already done. It also prevents us from making common mistakes or common oversights in the extension development because those problem domains are already in there and they're already solved. Whereas typically if we are writing code from scratch or even if we're pulling code from a common source location we're still gonna forget about certain things because they're not highly visible but they're very critical to the user experience. By having it all in there and being defined already means that we don't forget about it.
what was happening when you had the aha moment?
I don't remember the exact moment, most of it came when I was creating the vision for the company, like what's going to differentiate this company from the competitors that are out there. I think it's important that you're not just a goldfish among goldfish. You gotta be different in a good way. Hopefully. Honestly it might have been when I was doing your lean canvas, what's gonna make you unique? I think that's what really made me sit down and think about that. Yeah that's probably where it came from.
What do you struggle with most between time, team or money?
I'd say team because it feels like that's where I spend most of my focus, on growing them. But realistically I think it's time, because I try to hold myself accountable to only working 40 hours a week. Typically the reason that I have to focus so much on the team is because I have to grow them, so I have more time to focus on growing the other aspects of the business. It all comes down to time and just don't have enough of that within the constraints that I set for myself. Which is a good thing because it means that I'm constantly having to change and improve and innovate the way that I run the business because as we grow I continue to run out of time. So we're basically able to scale as quickly as I can scale my time. If we can get to the point where we are a larger organization and I'm still working 40 hours a week then that seems to me like a great level of success.
“I’m constantly having to change and improve and innovate the way that I run the business because as we grow I continue to run out of time.
So we’re basically able to scale as quickly as I can scale my time.”
what have you learned about leadership the hard way?
I think the hardest thing for me to learn is the timing and the need of when you should let someone go. I think I learned quite a bit about that, I still only ever had let one person go. I know very clearly at this point why I had to let them go. It was because they were not following, at the time it was unwritten, core values that I had for my team. Going forward, I'll know a lot more clearly because I defined who we are, and what I expect from my employees. I think that was the hard lesson to learn because the person I had let go was a friend. It was a really really difficult decision but it was definitely the right decision, after I made it the storm cleared, everything resumed. It was painful in the short term but it was it was the right decision. It shouldn't have gone on that long. We had a customer that was suffering for a long time because of my lack of action basically. I just let it go on even though I knew it was happening.
If you could go back to it again what would you do different?
I would have headed it off a lot earlier which potentially could have changed the whole outcome. If I had been lot more strict at the beginning in terms of these are the rules, this is what I expect from you, this is the process that you're going to follow and held him accountable at an earlier stage, it's possible that it could have turned out differently. It's also possible that it wouldn't have turned out differently. I still would have let him go but at the same time it would have been better for the team and it would have been better for the customer, potentially it would have been better for him also. Because if he wasn't a good fit and couldn’t be a good fit then the sooner he can find a place where he is a good fit the better it is for them as well.
Why do you think people follow you?
Growing up I've never thought of myself as a leader, still don't. I think that might be part of it. I'm not trying to run their lives. I'm trying to equip them with the tools that they need to be successful and find their own fulfillment in the work that they do. I don't want to micromanage them. I don't want them to even really think of me as their boss. I'd rather work with a bunch of friends. For me to be the manager style of a leader, I think is not conducive to that. I like to lead by just saying, Hey here's where we're going, does that sound fun, let's go there. I guess they follow me, because I'm giving them a fun place to go.
“I’m trying to equip them with the tools that they need to be successful and find their own fulfillment in the work that they do. ”
Have you ever had an "I've made it" moment?
I have had a number of them. Probably the first one is when I got married.
Why is that an I made it made a moment for you?
Because I found someone that was awesome. Someone that compliments me. At the same time holds me accountable, constantly tries to make me a better person. There's been lots of those moments. The first time you hold your kid. The first time my Dad came to me for advice.
Do you remember what the advice was?
He ran an online auction. He was debating if he should keep going or shut down.
If you had to start over with $500 and you Knew no one, what would you do?
First thing I would do is find a store was some paper and a pen, because I have to write down a plan. What exactly the plan will be I'm not sure of in this point in time. I mean if you don't have any money then you have to find some contacts in the business world. The first thing I would write down is the plan, write down what this company is, what it's going to be, how it's going to be successful, what the vision is for it. I would rewrite that because I think that's part of your marketing message if you're going to secure funding then you need to know very clearly what it is that you're going to do, because you need to be something that's investable. If you can get to the point where you know what you're gonna do, you know how it's gonna work, and you know that it's gonna turn revenue and be a success, then it's pretty easily to walk up to someone that has the capital to do investments to pitch them an idea and get them to invest in this idea. Once you can secure the funding, then you just have to put your plan into action.
progress or perfection?
Progress. I like things to be right, but working is good enough for me. I like to improve things that are working but I don't ever think that we will get perfect. I just don't think that exists. I think chasing that is something that most companies don't want either. If they want something that works, something that's going to help them in one way or another and as long as they can get to that point quickly, efficiently and solve their biggest problems, that's how they start to make progress. That's how they get to see their ROI, if we don't give them anything until it's perfect that delays their ROI, which makes it harder to justify investment, because you have to put a lot more money in before you start to get any money back. So definitely progress.
If you could recommend one book what would it be?
Lord of the rings. If we are looking at business books, I'd say Traction was my favorite read. Just because it was my most recent one but it was the most relevant and practical book that I've read. It's not just a book on here's 3 things that you should do, then tells you a bunch of stories about how they were successful with those 3 things. It gives you a path forward. It tells you how to do it, while also giving you why you should do it. I think it's got a good balance of both knowledge and practical application that makes a really good read.
who are your greatest influences?
My parents are definitely up on the list. They influenced my life for the vast majority of it, sent me to a good Christian school, got me an awesome education, taught me to think for myself. My father in law, who has a crazy way about him. He's always outgoing, most of the time he's optimistic and will do anything. Both my Dad and him, they would fix anything, they'll get their hands dirty doing anything. They just have an "I can do anything" kind of attitude. I've got some of that myself I think it's because of both of them. There's just so much. I read a lot of books, those influenced me, I work with Marc here at Balanced Leadership Center and he's a strong influencer. My wife is the one that always keeps me in check and grounded in reality. She's my constant influencer.
What's one core value that is not negotiable?
My first core value is transparency, but that's not really the non-negotiable one. The non-negotiable value is one that is not written and that's honesty. I expect the truth. That's where transparency came from. I expect the truth and I expect you to be more than honest. I don't want a half truth, I don't want white lies. I want the full story. I want the big picture so when I'm talking to my clients I am as open as I can be, give them as much information as I can, so they can make the best decision possible. I expect the same from by employees. I want them to be open with me and honest with me, because if we can't trust each other then I can't work with them and if they can't trust me, they shouldn't work with me, which means you're transparent with them.
“The non-negotiable value is one that is not written and that’s honesty. I expect the truth. ”
Do you have a favorite technology that's catching your interest at the moment?
Right now I haven't been keeping up with the technology which is weird coming from a software developer. I used to follow Solid State Hard Drives because I thought they were gonna be awesome and they are. That used to be my thing that I was like super excited about, 10 years before they became a reality and now they are here. I don't really have a new one. Quantum computing is always been very interesting to me. That hasn't really made any progress in a while, it's there. It's gonna be cool.
What's your favorite hobby?
I love computer gaming. Both me and my wife game together. We just look for games that we can play together. That's our genre.
What about a bucket list item?
I want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane someday.
Do you have a soapbox topic?
The power of knowing where you're going. Thinking about your future and your direction beyond just the well I guess I should stash some money away. Why should you? You should know. Call it vision. Whatever you wanna call it but knowing what you're doing or going to be doing, like today, what you do today you should enjoy it. It should be part of a greater whole. I'm constantly talking about vision. I want my employees to have a personal vision. I want them to know where they're going. I want to them to know why working here gets them to where they want to be. I think that's how you find success in life and if working here isn't the direction that's going to get you where you want to go then I'd like to help them figure out how they can get there. I just love vision.
What do you get out of attending the BLConnect events?
It's mostly just being around people that think the same way that you do or maybe not even that, but they have struggled with the problems that are unique to being an owner of a company. That's even different than being a leader, because I've been in both positions at this point. When I was a leader at Configura it was easier than being an owner because I had a boss I could always go talk to and he could listen and he could help me. When you're an owner it's you. Well me and my wife luckily. Going to the BLConnect gives you more than just you. You can talk to these other guys or girls that own their own businesses and have been there and struggled with the same kind of problems. At the same time, when you're an owner you don't necessarily get to have anyone that can share in your success either. When you pull off something that's really cool your employees just see the results, like hey their life is a little bit better. Fellow business owners can appreciate the effort that went into that project more than your employees will. It's intangible, it's hard to grasp exactly what you get out of it. There's a lot of little things. Nothing specific and big.
To learn more about Tim Deemter and PlantiumEdge Solutions, check out their website @ https://platinumedgesolutions.com/
Or
To meet Tim personally, join him for one of our BLConnect events