John Waldrop and his company, Vie Home Services, help homeowners preserve their biggest asset.
Tell us about Vie Home Services.
The evolution of Vie Home Services was inspired by a family home that we had in Ponte Vedra Beach that was mostly used as a rental property. This was around 2007. We realized the lack of care the home actually had on a regular basis. So, I got trained in home inspections to help oversee and recognize issues with the house. Back then, I also noted the amount of time my mother would spend dealing with home maintenance issues when she came down here from Georgia. She’d come for four to five days but ended up spending three dealing with maintenance issues. It’s an oceanfront home, so it grapples with the elements. The amount of salt air and corrosion so many homes in the Jacksonville Beaches area take on is intense. Over time, in working on my family home, I discovered that in doing that, some preservative and proactive maintenance you can help with the longevity of the condition of your home as an investment. I started Vie Home Services in early 2010.
Tell us about your background.
My background is in remodeling, construction and business management. In construction and remodeling, I’ve worked with sub-contractors to understand what customers want, with clients to grasp what they are looking for from a customer service aspect.
Over my career, I have dealt with property managers, real estate agents, contractors and association managers. They all have different perspectives and goals. I started working in construction and remodeling in 1994 and 1995 in Columbus, Georgia, for a high-end builder and also worked there for a high-end remodeler. Those early experiences taught me how to manage subs and employees.
Now, I know that it’s important to think about what employees are looking for in an employer. They need to make a living to support their family and themselves. If you treat people right, they treat you right.
What do you like best about what you do?
I like working with people and clients and understanding them and providing the customer service experience that’s better than they expected. Vie Home Services customers can always reach out to me if they can’t get what they are looking for out of my employees on the job site.
I like being creative in people’s homes and collaborating with the client to solve home maintenance and repair problems and reduce homeowners’ stress.
What is a typical day like for you?
My day usually starts about 5:30 a.m. when I get up to let our two-and-a-half-year-old dog, Max, go out. He’s a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Then I’ll go to my office in Ponte Vedra Beach until around 9 a.m. to take care of office stuff. Next, I spend a few hours checking on jobs and employees. At the end of the day, I go back to the office and spend hours on business development, researching other ways to serve clients and digging into how we can be more efficient and cost effective.
When I get home, I have dinner with Jennifer, my wife of 27 years. We talk about our workdays, and she usually cooks something great. Then we relax and watch “Big Bang Theory” or “Everybody Loves Raymond” together to laugh. But once I turn on the Atlanta Braves game, I lose her next to me on the couch. She’s more of a football fan than baseball.
Are you from this area originally, or did you settle here from somewhere else?
Jennifer and I are originally from Columbus, Georgia. We moved down here intending to try it for just a year, but we ended up staying. That was around 2006, when we had two very little kids. Even though we were busy with them, we found this to be a small and peaceful community. It seemed like a good place to raise kids, and we sent them to Christ Church, where it was easy for the family to make our first friends here.
What do you like best about living here?
We have lived in three different neighborhoods here in Ponte Vedra Beach and have met really nice and interesting people in all of them. In the past 20 years, Ponte Vedra Beach is busier than it used to be. However, you have to have growth.
How do you like to spend your free time?
I enjoy fishing locally in the St. Johns River or out in the ocean. I have a guy that I go out with in Mayport. We now have two grown kids. Our daughter Wynn is a rising senior at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas, studying interior design. Our son Jake is a recent college graduate from Florida Gulf Coast University who is living in Fort Myers working as a PGA pro at Spring Run Country Club.
We stay busy by visiting them and going on adventurous trips with them, whenever possible. My wife and I are big University of Georgia fans, particularly football. We also cheer for the Jacksonville Jaguars and go to a couple games each year.
Together, my wife and I enjoy walking on the beach, trying local restaurants and hanging out with our friends.
What's next for you and Vie Home Services?
I spend a lot of time thinking about that! At Vie Home Services, we are expanding our overall maintenance programs for individual homeowners. Additionally, we are venturing into the home security space, including alarms installation and monitoring. That’s a good service for primary residents and those with second homes here in town.
An example of our home maintenance program would be doing a monthly pressure wash or window cleaning for a home on the waterfront. We also do things like wipe down cable rails and treat them to help prevent corrosion. We do a lot of exterior cleaning and preservation to prevent corrosion. There are a lot of exterior hardware fixtures and light fixtures in need of cleaning and protection.
One of our most common services are handyman one-off jobs. The most unusual project we took on recently started with determining where water damage in a house was coming from. That turned into ripping up hard pine floors and ripping out drywall. It turns out a wine cellar leak rotted out everything. We also discovered and treated water intrusion from an exterior balcony.
For more examples of the projects we tackle at Vie Home Services, check out our website at https://viehomeservices.com.
