ROMERO

I’ve always been fascinated by how things can work better.

As a kid, I wanted to be the narrator instead of the actor because I wanted the story to make sense. I volunteered to help organize school delivery systems because I wanted things to get where they were supposed to go. As an adult, that instinct never went away.

It started getting serious in the Air Force, where I worked avionics on MH-53 helicopters. Flight-control systems. Navigation systems. Things that have to work. That’s where I learned that the gap between a system that functions and a system that fails isn’t always obvious until something goes wrong. You start paying attention differently after that.

I naturally look for bottlenecks, friction, unnecessary complexity, and wasted effort. Then I start improving them. Sometimes that means redesigning a workflow. Sometimes it means organizing information. Sometimes it means implementing automation. Sometimes it means building software. The tool changes. The objective doesn’t.

I’ve worked across manufacturing, retail, government, public health, real estate, property management, and small business. Different industries, same pattern.

At DeKalb Public Health, I inherited an IT operation with more than 600 unresolved support tickets, years of undocumented systems, and inefficiencies that had simply been accepted as permanent. Nobody had a clear picture of what was open, what was broken, or who owned what. By reorganizing the infrastructure, introducing accountability, and eliminating the bottlenecks that kept tickets from closing, the backlog dropped from over 600 to fewer than 50.

At Porch Property Group, the problems were different but the approach was the same. Redundant listing syndication eating time and budget. Lead routing that sent prospects to the wrong places. Leasing workflows that varied by whoever happened to be working that day. I cleaned up the syndication, fixed the routing, standardized the workflows, reduced the manual work, and automated major portions of the leasing lifecycle. The operation ran more efficiently and the team had better visibility into what was actually happening.

I’m still looking for the same things I always was: the friction, the bottleneck, the process that works against the people trying to use it. I don’t believe inefficiency is inevitable. I believe most systems can work better.