Christopher Woods Sr. on the crawl spaces other contractors won't touch

From steel bridges to old houses

Chris spent 27 years in his family’s industrial coatings business, Pop’s Painting, named for his grandfather: sandblasting, surface prep and protective coatings on work like the steel of the Bridge of Lions in St. Augustine. He did his graduate work in historic preservation, got his contractor’s license, and in 2021 started Pop’s Preservation in Lakeland, where he and his wife live in one of the city’s historic districts. The industrial background still shows. Where an old house seems held together by termites holding hands, he’ll run steel channel instead of wood, because steel won’t be eaten and won’t snap.

The jobs nobody else wants

Chris’s rule is simple: if it’s got a crawl space, he’ll work on your home. Most people don’t like crawl spaces, he’d much rather be in one than in an attic in the Florida sun, and the places other people don’t want to go are where a lot of the profit is. The same goes for smaller jobs. Many of the homeowners he talks to had a contractor who never called them back, and those jobs keep the homes in his neighborhood in good shape. A lot of those clients end up as friends.

Being reachable matters to him too. Robocalls got so bad that he stopped answering his phone and missed real customers, who probably thought he’d ghosted them. When he moved his phones to a Verizon business account, his rep pointed him to a call-screening add-on, and for about $25 a month the robocalls and AI calls went away.

Work a machine can’t do

When Chris left the family business, he chose work he didn’t think a machine could do: getting under an old house, working out what it needs and doing it. That doesn’t make him anti-technology. He’s funding the robotics department at McKeel Academy of Technology, a charter school in Lakeland, to build a radio-controlled car with a camera and lights that can drive under a house and keep going if it flips, so he can see what’s down there before he crawls in. Growth stays slow on purpose: the crews stay small and people own their work, because 39 five-star reviews are hard earned.