The author
Jimenez Julien, the person behind DownsizeRoute
I build and maintain this product, I answer the demo requests, and my name is on the plan every manager hands to a family.
PublisherMLJ, SASU
Why I built software for senior move managers
DownsizeRoute started in a hallway in Rochester, New York, watching a manager named Priya try to explain to three adult siblings why their mother's breakfront could not come to the new apartment. She had a tape measure, a printout of the community's floor plan, and a phone full of photographs that nobody could line up against each other. She was right about the breakfront. It took her four visits and two evenings of phone calls to prove it, and none of that time was on an invoice.
I had spent the previous two years building scheduling and inventory tools for small US service businesses, and I kept meeting the same shape of problem: skilled operators doing precise work with instruments that were not precise. Senior move management was the sharpest version I had seen. The work is genuinely technical. You are solving a volume problem, a grief problem and a family governance problem at the same time, on a fixed date, in somebody's home. And the standard toolkit was graph paper, a shared spreadsheet and a group text thread.
So I spent eleven months riding along. I sat in on assessments in Ohio, Arizona, Georgia and upstate New York. I helped label cartons in a house in Dayton where the client had lived since 1968. I watched a crew lead reroute an entire load order because nobody had confirmed the elevator reservation. I learned that the emotional part of the job, the part everyone writes about, is not what breaks a schedule. What breaks a schedule is an unmeasured door swing, a decision that gets reopened, and an estimate written from a memory of a room.
That is what DownsizeRoute addresses. It draws the destination to the inch first, because the destination is the constraint. It records every keep, gift, sell and donate decision with the name of the person who made it and the date, because that record ends arguments that would otherwise consume a week. It counts cubic feet instead of guessing them, because the mover's estimate is where the family's trust either holds or breaks. And it publishes one plan that the client, the family, the crew and the community move-in team all read from.
I work directly with the managers who run this software. When someone tells me the placement tool fights her on a bay window, I do not route it to a ticket queue, I open the plan with her and we fix the tool. The features on this site exist because a working manager kept a paper workaround for something and I decided that workaround should not have to exist. I am accountable for what the product claims, for what it costs, for the security of the client records inside it, and for the accuracy of every number published on this site.
I am not a senior move manager and I never pretend to be one. My part is narrower and I take it seriously: build the instrument well, keep it honest, keep it out of the way of a professional who already knows what she is doing.
Experience and expertise
- Fifteen years building web software for small operators, the last five focused entirely on US service businesses with field work and scheduled crews.
- Eleven months of ride alongs with senior move managers across four states before the first line of DownsizeRoute was written.
- Ongoing product research with 418 US practices, including quarterly interviews with managers on every tier.
- Working knowledge of the constraints that decide these jobs: elevator reservation windows, community move-in rules, donation receipt requirements, and the way movers actually build an estimate.
- Publisher and product lead at MLJ, SASU, the company that operates DownsizeRoute and answers for it.
How this product is built and maintained
Every claim on this site maps to something measurable. When the pricing page says the subscription can be cancelled at any time, that is one click in account settings and no phone call. When the outcomes section cites 7.4 hours saved per household, that is the median difference reported by practices that logged their hours before and after adopting the software. If a number stops being true, it comes off the site.
The product ships in small, tested increments. Nothing that touches a client record goes out without a rollback path, and no change lands during a Monday, because Monday is a move day for a large share of our accounts. Client data lives on encrypted servers in the United States, it is never sold, and it is never shared with estate buyers, moving vendors or advertisers. Support answers come from people who have been on a job site, and if a live move day is at risk we schedule a call inside twenty four hours.
Editorially, I write everything published here myself. No sponsored placements, no affiliate links to movers or auction houses, no testimonials from anyone who has not run real jobs on the software. The three managers quoted on the home page reviewed and approved their own words.
Published articles
These are the nine articles I have written for The Downsize Route, the DownsizeRoute magazine for senior move managers, each one answering a question that came up on a real job.
- How much should I charge for a full senior move package in my first year of business?
- How do I measure a two bedroom apartment so the furniture actually fits on move day?
- What do I need to know about hiring movers versus running my own moving crew?
- What are the rules when a client wants me to sell or donate their belongings for them?
- Why do so many downsizing jobs run over schedule, and what causes the delay each time?
- How did one team move a fifty year household into a one bedroom without a storage unit?
- What should be on my walkthrough checklist before I quote a downsizing job for a new client?
- What actually happens on a move day when the client has dementia and cannot decide?
- Where are senior move referrals coming from now that communities run their own move in teams?
Contact the author
Write to me at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. If you are quoting a move this month and want a second opinion on the placement, send the community floor plan and I will look at it. You can also start from the request form on the home page.