Jorge Garcia Alvarez

I am the founder of Roadmap Lodging, a corporate housing operator in Indianapolis. I started it because the people who most need a furnished home for a few months are the ones the market serves worst. A family burned out of their house, a nurse on a 13 week contract, an engineer relocating ahead of their family: all of them get pushed toward a hotel room that was designed for three nights, or a 12 month lease they cannot sign.

Before this, I spent my career on the global internal controls team of a Fortune 200 company, mapping how large organizations actually make and approve decisions. Process flows, hand-offs, stakeholders, and who signs. That sounds unrelated to housing right up until you try to invoice a relocation department, get added as an approved vendor, produce a certificate of insurance on request, or keep an audit trail a claims adjuster can hand to their file reviewer.

That is the part small operators usually get wrong, and it is why we can work inside a company's procurement and approval process instead of around it. I studied business and finance at Indiana University, and the arithmetic side of this business has never been the hard part. The paperwork and the follow-through are.

We still operate homes of our own rather than only brokering other people's. The process only stays honest if you are the one doing it: the same standards, the same turn times, the same guest messages. What I learned running those homes became Roadmap Lodging OS, the software I now sell to other operators, because the alternative was watching good operators lose contracts over a spreadsheet.