Meet Ignacio Rodriguez of IR Architects and AVR Studio in San Fernando Valley

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ignacio Rodriguez.

Ignacio, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
A lot of starting my business can be attributed to my dad’s influence and working with him as a kid to bring his business ideas to life. I credit my dad for a lot of my business sense.

Nobody in my family is in architecture, but my dad built tents for part of his career, which inspired me to draw, design and take ideas from paper to reality. He’s had a wide variety of businesses, and to my benefit, I got to learn a lot from it. Initially, I attended Compton High School and later transferred to Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach to participate in their architecture program, with the hopes of going to college.

There, I met a recruiter from Woodbury University in Burbank, and he briefly explained to me how much it would cost to attend college, how much financial aid the government could provide and how much I could get from grants and scholarships. Prior to that, I didn’t have a full understanding on how big of an expense schooling would be.

Thankfully, Woodbury provided me with a full-ride scholarship to attend its architecture school. Through college, I worked summers delivering for IKEA and Costco to pay for semester living expenses. Our route was long, going from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

Sometimes we had to go to Calexico in Imperial County, which was a 3-4.5 hour long trip. And that was in 2004; smartphones were not a thing. When GPS was available, it was super preliminary. We had to deliver everything using stacks of Thomas Guides, covering the areas from Santa Barbara to Imperial counties. It was interesting, to say the least.

In college, I also met my wife, Lauren, who is the CFO of IR Architects and AVR Studio, and she is very business-oriented. Shortly after graduating from college and working at larger architecture firms, I decided that I wanted to take the entrepreneurial leap and launch my own firm.

When Lauren and I agreed to launch IR Architects, and later AVR, we were a balanced pair. I helmed the strategy and creative as CEO, and she manages execution, business, and tactics. We laid the best foundation possible and worked to surround ourselves with the strongest team across all skill sets. Now we have 20 employees and counting, and three divisions within the practice.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
There are a lot of harsh struggles early on when starting a business–specifically with billing, contracts, etc., which were topics I never dealt with before. You have questions like, how do you collect money, bill for money, limit your scope of work? We found these areas to be extremely new, foreign concepts that we had to understand fast.

Most importantly, we had to learn how to negotiate prices in the process. That didn’t come easy, because I had to learn to speak the same language as attorneys, and that can be intimidating at times. I also had to understand accounting a bit more. The general public has a very primitive concept of accounting from the outside looking in. On the inside, however, there’s a much larger world of accounting finances to track, including pending income, taxes, collections.

And then there’s the tax liability–I learned to pay my taxes every quarter without fail. I had a great mentor when I was just starting out, Patrick Cunningham, who explained to me that I would always have a silent business partner. His name is Uncle Sam, and he always gets his money. This means making sure not to live beyond our means, or take on more than we can handle. That’s why we as a company always pay our taxes on time.

We’ve always taken a humble approach to money, and that’s gone a long way. We’ve accomplished a lot in a short amount of time. I’m most proud that we have very little debt; we paid every single bill that we owe, every time. We budget correctly. We’re never in a bad financial position.

IR Architects and AVR Studio – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
IR Architects is the first firm I founded, specializing in contemporary architectural design for high-end residential properties and estates. The firm fuses functionality and creative aesthetics, elevating each project to its fullest potential.

We pride ourselves in providing sophisticated results that deliver real value. At IR Architects, the goal is to guide a client’s vision from ideation to fruition, by helping them interpret, illustrate and transform their dream property into a reality.

Soon after, however, we realized that we could cut costs and expand my business’ technical repertoire with a virtual reality (VR) studio dedicated to building virtual homes for clients to preview their future property–far better than a blueprint alone.

And so, I founded Architectural Virtual Reality (AVR) Studio to follow. AVR Studio develops VR builds for our architecture projects that pioneer ways for clients and developers to preview their properties prior to breaking ground. With both companies, we take a great amount of care in our designs, as I’m sure many studios do.

And we embrace immersive technology the same way we approach our architecture. We continue to find better ways to implement what we’re working on, and never take it for granted. We continue to embrace change. Most of the time, people become complacent, and it’s difficult–business itself is difficult.

Adding new technology to the mix, because it’s an unknown, can make it even more challenging. For me specifically, I embrace that chaos and use it as a driving method for whatever we’re working on, which becomes a huge factor that sets us apart.

For example, you could try and build that technology use as a company, but it takes time. I’m not referring to tech that can be bought. For us, VR was tech that we cultivated for our individual uses over several years, and it grew to solve shortcomings in our business model. You can’t put a price on that.

Contact Info:

• Address: 16800 Devonshire St. Suite 307 Granada Hills, CA
• Website: http://irarchitects.us
• Phone: 1-818-488-9435
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ir.architects/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100011389826643
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ir_architects

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