Forty years in business is a milestone worth celebrating, but for Butch Isensee, the co-founder and sole owner of Valley Design, the anniversary isn’t really about the number. It’s about everything that went into earning it.
As we celebrated 40 years of Valley Design in 2026, we also celebrate the blood, sweat, and tears of everyone who’s helped shape the company into what it is today.
Where It All Started
When Butch Isensee and his business partner Tim Bremseth founded Valley Design in 1986, it looked like most great things in their earliest form: small, unpolished, and fueled almost entirely by the belief that if they worked hard enough, they could build something that lasted.
Their small, contracted powder coating operation was housed in a 2,000-square-foot vacated auto body shop with four people “on staff” and a willingness to do whatever needed to be done.
Butch and his wife, Brenda, alongside Tim and his wife, Roseann, built the company from nothing.
No departments. No management layers. No clear division between whose job was whose. One moment they were pressure washing parts, the next they were spraying powder in the paint booth, and after that, packing orders for shipment.
Betting on Themselves
For the first eight months, both Butch and Tim held onto their full-time jobs. Their wives worked during the day while the two men continued on during the evenings and weekends, slowly building something they weren’t yet sure would hold. Eventually, Butch made the move to part-time for a bit before leaving his employer for good in 1987. Tim followed not long after.
These weren’t men with nothing to lose — they had families to support, financial obligations to meet, and a business that was still finding its footing. Walking away from a steady paycheck was a real risk, taken on the strength of a conviction that they had spotted a genuine need in the furniture industry and had what it would take to meet it.
They didn’t know that the discipline and work ethic they were pouring into those early years would become the very thing that carried the company far beyond what any of them had originally imagined.
Building Something Together
As Valley Design found its rhythm, so did the two men leading it. Butch became the face in the field, spending his days making sales calls and persuading customers to take a chance on a small, unknown powder coating company.
Tim stayed closer to the floor, sharpening operations, refining quality, and making sure every finished product made its own case for why customers should come back.
They leaned into what they each did best, and together they built something steady, customer by customer, year by year.
As the company evolved from Valley Coating into Valley Design, new opportunities arrived alongside new challenges. Butch shifted his focus toward product development, engineering, and operations, while Tim channeled his energy into building sales relationships and bringing new products to market.
The investment in their future became concrete in 1998 with the purchase of their first robotic welder — a clear signal that this operation had grown into something that deserved to be taken seriously. By the close of the ‘90s, a company that had started with four people was employing nearly 150 and running 20 hours a day.
The Cost of Building Something
Growth, as Butch will tell you, comes at a cost.
He remembers the long hours, the weekends that didn’t feel like weekends, the conversations that got postponed, the moments at home that slipped past while his attention was elsewhere. He remembers the realization of how quickly time had passed and how much of his children’s youth had passed with his focus being on the growth of the company.
The years had moved quickly, steadily consumed by the work of building something he believed in.
That realization pushed him to think differently — not just about how to grow the business, but about building a team that could help carry it.
He began investing more deliberately in leadership and support, creating the internal structure that would allow him and Tim to step back a little, and reconnect with the families they had worked so hard to provide for. When Tim retired in 2012 and Butch became the company’s sole owner, that same support structure was what allowed him to lead the transition with stability and confidence.
A Family Legacy in the Making
As time passed and Brenda and Butch’s children got older, they also spent time working at Valley Design. It became a natural extension of growing up around the family business — a chance to step inside the day-to-day, learn the work firsthand, and better understand the business their parents had built.
Being there gave them a real appreciation for how the company operated. They saw the pace, the expectations, and the pride that went into every part of the process.
While Isensee’s daughters went on to build careers outside of the company, their son, Luke, returned after college to begin his own professional path. Today, he serves as VP of Sales, continuing to grow customer relationships and carry forward the business his family started, with the plan of taking over following Butch’s retirement.
More Than a Business
Through every phase of Valley Design’s growth, one thing has remained unchanged: people come first.
What started as a commitment to care for their own families gradually became a responsibility to an entire “Valley Family.”
Through the financial strain of the 2009 recession and the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, that commitment never wavered. When things got hard, the priority was clear — protect jobs, take care of the people who made the company what it was, and trust that the business would be stronger for it.
40 years in, Butch can still name the first employees who joined after the original four. He remembers their faces, their effort, and the particular way each person showed up and contributed to something larger than any one of them.
When asked to reflect on what he’s most proud of, he doesn’t reach for revenue figures or facility square footage. He talks about people because he knows, more clearly than anyone, that Valley Design was never built by just him, Tim, and their wives. It was built by everyone who worked hard and chose to believe in what they were helping to create.
Forty Years In, Still Writing
Over four decades, what began in that 2,000-square-foot auto body shop has grown into a 113,000-square-foot facility spanning multiple buildings. Ask Butch today whether he imagined Valley Design would grow into what it has become, and his answer is refreshingly honest: “No.”
In 2026, Valley Design operates across two shifts with just over 80 employees, a team that may be leaner than the company’s late-1990s peak but is no less committed to the work ethic that started it all.
The story of Valley Design isn’t one of overnight success or fortunate timing. It’s a story of steady progress and hard choices; of quiet determination and the kind of courage it takes to bet on yourself when the outcome isn’t guaranteed.
It started with four people, a small shop, and an unwavering belief that hard work and a quality product could be enough. Forty years later, that belief has built something remarkable — and the story is still being written.