Dan Hessler

owner, president

Dan had his first experience growing up, by helping his father paint their house in Cranford New Jersey in the 1960’s. His dad, not comfortable with heights, would only paint up to the second story windows , and then would hire a local painter to paint everything above that , which were mostly the high peaks on the house. His next experience was in college, where his mother worked as an office manager and had him paint their offices. That was in the fall of 1974 when the US was in a severe recession and work was hard to come by. So the following summer now that Dan had all that experience of painting one whole office area, he thought he was now ready to start his own painting business. That summer after knocking on doors and leaving leaflets a small college summertime painting business was born. When Dan went back to school to the University of Florida, he continued his business, by knocking on doors in downtown Gainesville and eventually established a relationship with a local landlord, that kept him busy for the next couple of years until graduation.

After college Dan tried to work for a couple of large companies in sales. When he went to work for his second and last company , Honey Well , he was out to Minneapolis for training. In his free time he spent walking around downtown Minneapolis looking up at the men on swing stages working on the buildings. Believe it or not, that’s when he knew, that he wanted to go back into the painting industry.

After returning to his branch office in New Jersey and getting no sales support, Dan decided that he was not cut out to work for anyone and decided to go back into the painting business. He went to work for one of the largest painting contractors in New Jersey that employed five hundred painters, where he was an outside salesman.
Dan then left that company to go out onto his own and started Stonehill Painting & Decorating. The company was a union shop that focused on new construction build outs in fortune 500 companies, and from there expanded into doing repaints and industrial coatings.
After a decade of running his business and frequenting multiply paint stores in the area, and seeing how the customers were not really being taken care of like he thought they should. Dan got the notion that he could do a better job and would have enjoyment in doing so. So after many years of searching Dan purchased his first store in September of 1994, in Delray Beach, Florida.