There is a particular moment when Valley season officially begins.
Every fall, part time residents return, restaurants book up, events take over the calendar, and holiday plans start coming together.
For Drew Armenta, founder of The Gold Standard Concierge, that means making sure his clients can come home and simply live.
The house is ready. The fridge is stocked. The cars are clean. Everything that needed attention while they were gone has already been handled.
“Our full estate care clients’ properties are often maintained year round and are ready to be used with a moment’s notice,” he says.
There is another detail Drew thinks about before anyone walks through the door.
“The most impactful aspect upon entering a property is the smell of the home. Upon walking into any luxury property is the immediate sense of smell which helps build the anticipation of the rest of the home and how well maintained it is.”
His current favorite is Platinum by Baobab.
It’s the kind of detail you might never think about, but Drew does. And that is essentially his job.
Drew’s background spans hospitality, diplomatic operations, security and estate care, and today those worlds come together in a role that can be difficult to define until you hear what lands on his desk.
One client may need an estate managed while spending the summer out of state. Another needs Drew only when hosting a major fundraiser at home. Full estate care can mean coordinating housekeeping, landscaping and car washes, stocking groceries, overseeing maintenance and even paying household bills.
But managing a private home can get much more complicated than keeping it maintained.
Summer, for example, is not necessarily the quiet season it appears to be. When owners leave Arizona, Drew can use that window to tackle work that would otherwise interrupt their lives.
This fall, The Gold Standard Concierge completed a roughly half million dollar landscaping project, installing more than 250 16-foot ficus columns to create privacy and a resort like setting.
While a client is away, Drew may also be the person meeting contractors, supervising renovation work, checking security, collecting packages and catching the household issues an owner hundreds or thousands of miles away would have no way of seeing.
“Being prepared is the easiest part. Understanding how to solve the problem with the least amount of interference to the client is the challenge we conquer.”
Recently, one of Drew’s clients purchased a new home. The seller was supposed to move into a rental, but there was a problem: the water would not be turned on in time.
Drew found the family another house for the weekend.
By the following week, the water was on and they could move into their rental.
It is a small story compared with some of the requests he handles, but it says a lot about what concierge service looks like at this level. There is no menu of problems to choose from. The problem becomes whatever needs solving that day.
And Drew has had some interesting days.
In October alone, he coordinated valet, food, servers and security for a private roundtable at a client’s home for 50 of Arizona’s top business leaders.
At the same time, he arranged private air travel, logistics and security for a diplomat traveling to Jamaica, including traveling there to provide support on site.
Another 45 person roundtable followed, along with a corporate holiday party and planning for a client’s hospitality suite during the WM Phoenix Open.
For the latter, he is working to secure more than 40 hospitality suite tickets for the entire week of the tournament for the second year in a row.
“No week is ever the same.”
Especially once the holidays arrive.
A Valley home normally occupied by two may suddenly need to accommodate children, grandchildren and overnight guests. Drew starts looking at the house differently. Where will everyone sleep? Does the family need additional accommodations? What needs to be brought in?
Then there is entertaining.
“This is what ‘revs our engine,’ you could say,” Drew says.
A client gives him the vision. Drew starts making calls.
A private dinner can mean finding the chef, building the menu, arranging flowers and rentals, staffing servers, coordinating valet and transportation, handling security and making sure cleanup is covered when everyone goes home.
His advice for anyone considering a holiday party this year is worth noting.
Book now.
“Our preferred private chefs are booking through the holidays already and are filling up fast.”
Drew handles restaurant reservations, private and commercial air travel, hotels, chauffeurs and event access. He recently planned a Scottsdale bachelor weekend that included golf, a party bus through Old Town, multiple nightlife stops, a private room at a high end steakhouse and luxury accommodations.
When a group of women attending a retreat wanted massages between sessions, he brought massage therapists to them.
And then there was the wedding.
A client called Drew with very little notice. A couple was quietly getting married at the courthouse by a chief justice, and the bride’s best friend wanted something special waiting afterward.
Drew got to work.
He found two bottles of the bride’s favorite Champagne. He helped arrange congratulatory signage, confetti and candlelight. A private chef and his team created the menu.
While the couple was getting married, everything was happening behind the scenes.
When they arrived, there was nothing left to plan.
That story might best explain what Drew means when he talks about working with the “least amount of interference” in a client’s life.
The best outcome is not for a client to see how much work went into something.
It is for them not to have to think about it at all.
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