Our Story
We Built This on a Soccer Sideline
Not in a boardroom. Not after a pitch competition. On a folding chair, watching our daughters play soccer, talking about an industry we both loved deeply — and one where we both saw gaps that nobody seemed willing to close. So we set out to build the senior living platform we wished had existed.
How It Started
Two Fathers. One Broken Industry. One Big Idea — and No Referral Fees.
Robert had spent years inside senior living — running communities, leading care teams, watching families walk through his doors overwhelmed, misinformed, and in many cases already steered toward a community that paid the highest referral fee rather than the one that was the best fit. He had seen the bills arrive. He knew what placement agencies charged. And he knew that the families sitting across from him deserved better than a system designed around who paid the most to recommend them.
Mike had spent his career building things — leading missile operations as a U.S. Army officer after graduating from West Point, earning his MBA from Rice University, and then building a career at Goldman Sachs — one of the most demanding and prestigious institutions in the world — where he learned how the most sophisticated organizations think, how trust is built across a table, and how to navigate complexity with clarity and conviction.
Practice after practice, the conversation kept returning to the same place. Families searching for a loved one's next home were being funneled toward communities that paid referral agencies thousands of dollars — sometimes $5,000 or more — per placement. The search results they trusted weren't unbiased — they were paid placements dressed up as recommendations. And the communities on the other end, the ones doing the actual work of caring for residents every day, were hemorrhaging money to middlemen while their sales teams struggled to manage leads on spreadsheets and shared email inboxes.
One afternoon, after hours of conversation and turning the problem over from every angle, something shifted. The frustration became a blueprint. The gaps became an opportunity. And together, they arrived at the same conclusion at the same time — what if we just built it ourselves?
Not just a directory. Not just a CRM. Something that had never existed before — a single platform that served both sides of the equation with complete integrity. Families would get the most comprehensive, fully unbiased senior living search in the country. Facilities would get the most powerful sales and operations platform the industry had ever seen. And nobody would ever pay a referral fee again.
That was the beginning of FindSeniorLivingNow.
Co-Founder
Michael Tatz
Michael Tatz has spent his entire career doing things that require both precision and courage.
At West Point, he learned that leadership is not a title — it is a responsibility to the people who depend on you to make the right call under pressure. As a U.S. Army officer, he held roles that most people will never fully understand — Deputy Director of the 100th Missile Defense Brigade, Army Space Command Operations Officer — positions where the margin for error was zero and the stakes were everything.
After his service, Michael returned to academics and earned his MBA from Rice University, where he sharpened the strategic and analytical instincts that his military career had forged. From there, he built a career at Goldman Sachs — one of the most demanding and prestigious institutions in the world — where he learned how the most sophisticated organizations think, how trust is built across a table, and how to navigate complexity with clarity and conviction.
What followed was a career defined by building. Michael took everything he had learned — the discipline of a military officer, the rigor of a Goldman Sachs career, the strategic clarity of an MBA — and channeled it into building businesses from the ground up. Company after company, he proved that the skills forged in high-stakes environments translate directly into creating something from nothing and making it matter.
When Robert described what was broken about senior living, Michael didn't hear a complaint. He heard the clearest opportunity he had ever encountered. Families who deserved honest information weren't getting it. Facilities that deserved modern tools didn't have them. And the technology to fix both problems already existed — it just hadn't been assembled by anyone who understood both sides well enough to build it right.
We are not building a product. We are correcting something that should have been corrected a long time ago.
Co-Founder
Robert Sanderson
Robert Sanderson has spent his career in the room where it actually happens.
Not in a corporate office analyzing senior living from a distance — but on the floor of memory care units, in the offices of families who had just received a diagnosis that changed everything, and at the desks of communities trying to do right by their residents with budgets that were being steadily eroded by a system that took more than it gave.
He began his career in memory care — working directly with residents navigating one of the most frightening journeys a human being can face, and with the families trying to understand what their loved one needed and who they could trust. That experience never left him. It is the reason he approaches every decision the way he does — not as an operator, but as someone who has looked a family in the eye and understood what was actually at stake.
Over the course of a career spanning Sunrise Senior Living, Nevada HAND, Frontier Senior Living, and Integral Senior Living, Robert rose to Executive Director — a role he has held with a reputation for operational excellence that earned him recognition in Senior Living News and Senior Housing Business. He now serves as Executive Director at Avamere Communities, one of the most respected senior living organizations in the country.
Along the way, he watched the referral agency model up close. He saw what thousands of dollars per placement looked like on a community's budget — money that should have gone into staffing, programming, and the resident experience, redirected to a middleman who had inserted themselves between a family and a community that would have found each other anyway. He saw sales teams doing their best with tools that weren't built for them. He saw families misled by search results that looked unbiased but weren't.
He had been waiting — without knowing it — for someone to build what he knew should exist. When he and Mike arrived at that conclusion together, after months of conversation on those soccer sidelines, it didn't feel like a business decision. It felt like something that was always going to happen.
Every family deserves to find the right community — not the one that paid the most to be recommended. And every community deserves a fighting chance to tell their own story.
The Platform
The First of Its Kind. Built for Both Sides.
FindSeniorLivingNow is the first platform in the history of senior living to combine the nation's largest senior living directory — 61,882 communities across all 50 states — with the most powerful CRM the industry has ever seen.
Families search for free, with expert resources to guide them. Results are 100% unbiased. No referral fees. No spam calls. No steering toward whoever paid the most.
Facilities and senior living providers get a complete resident acquisition platform — leads flowing in directly from the largest directory in the country, a sophisticated CRM to manage every lead from first inquiry to move-in, automated email and SMS follow-up, pipeline management, analytics, and tools that turn a good sales team into a great one.
We charge a flat monthly subscription. We take nothing when a resident moves in. Ever.
The families searching for their loved ones deserve better. The communities caring for them deserve better. We built this for both of them.
61,882
Communities Nationwide
$0
Referral Fees. Ever.
100%
Unbiased Search Results
2
Founders Who've Lived This Problem