How Flint Chimney Sweep Was Born
Hank Delano didn’t set out to build a chimney sweeping company. He set out to fix something that bothered him deeply: a trade where homeowners kept getting burned twice. Once by the fire they loved, and once by the people they paid to maintain it.
Back in 2002, he watched a neighbor in Los Angeles write a check for a chimney job that got priced one way over the phone and a very different way when the crew showed up. The work was rushed. The mess stayed behind. The explanation was jargon nobody could follow. That moment stuck because it wasn’t unusual. It was the pattern. So Hank made a simple decision: build a chimney cleaning company that ran on discipline instead of pressure. Show up when promised. Put the price in writing before anything starts. Do the job right and leave the home the way it was found. That idea became Flint Chimney Sweep, and from a single home base it grew into a network of independent local teams serving homeowners across Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Houston, Queens, Manhattan, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, Fort Worth, Jacksonville, and Austin. Each location runs by the same standard, because a homeowner in San Diego deserves the same certainty as one in Manhattan.
Hank Delano’s Personal Connection to the Chimney Cleaning Trade
The first time Hank Delano climbed onto a roof to inspect a chimney, he was not prepared for what he found inside. It was not a storybook fireplace with a neat little pile of ash. It was a thick, sticky glaze coating the flue walls, dark and waxy in the afternoon light. The tradesman training him scraped a small patch clear, handed Hank a flashlight, and told him to look. That glaze was creosote, and it was exactly the kind of buildup that turns a cozy evening into a house fire. That afternoon changed how he thought about the work. This was not maintenance. This was prevention. A clean chimney means a family sleeps through the night without a fire hazard sitting silently above their living room.
For more than ten years, that lesson has stayed with him and shaped how every Flint Chimney Sweep location trains its people. The job is not glamorous. It involves soot, both simple dust and sharp clinkers, the smell of old smoke and creosote, the scrape of a brush against brick and clay. But every time Hank watches a sweep finish and a homeowner press a hand to a clean flue cap, satisfied the chimney is actually ready for burning season, he remembers why he stayed. He’s drawn to work where the result is tangible. You can see the before, the dark crust and the drips of tar. And then you can see the after, clean liner, clean cap, clean smoke shelf. If he were not doing this, he would probably be restoring old houses, same patience, same respect for the bones of a building. The chimneys just found him first, and they kept him.
Meet Hank Delano – The Person Behind Every Job
Hank Delano is the Owner and Founder of Flint Chimney Sweep, part of the Garrison Partners family of home service brands. He entered the chimney trade the way a lot of people enter a calling: through the side door, as a helper, then a sweep, then a trainer, then the person who decided the standard itself needed to be raised. He has spent more than a decade learning the craft and, just as importantly, learning how homeowners get failed: communication that’s vague, pricing that moves, cleanup that gets skipped. Those failures bothered him more than the soot ever did.
What separates Hank from a corporate franchise technician is something harder to put on a business card. He still cares how the job looks when it’s finished. He still believes a good sweep services the whole chimney, not just the easy part. And he is not in a rush to leave. If you open the door for a Flint Chimney Sweep team, you are receiving the benefit of every lesson he learned the hard way. His commitment is simple: we will treat your home as if the person inside it matters, because they do.
Our Promise to Homeowners
Every job starts with a written price before any work begins. That is not a marketing line; it is policy, part of The Garrison Standard that every Flint Chimney Sweep location follows. The price is for the sweep and the inspection, and if the camera shows something additional is needed, you make the call, with the footage in front of you, never behind a phone screen. That second point matters. We do not recommend repairs off a hunch. We recommend them off visual evidence you can see yourself. If the chimney is functioning and clean, we say so. No upsell, no invented urgency.
The workmanship is guaranteed in writing for a full year. If anything we did fails in that year, we come back and make it right at no charge. That is the promise, and the same promise holds across every location, Los Angeles to Austin, Houston to Queens.
Our Credentials
Every professional working under the Flint Chimney Sweep name is required to hold the licensing their state demands for chimney and venting work. That is not a preference; it is a condition of operating as one of our locations. Every location is also required to carry the insurance and bonding coverage applicable to work performed in private homes, so a homeowner is never asked to absorb someone else’s risk.
Our teams build their reputation one chimney at a time, and we believe a strong local reputation is earned in attics, on roofs, and in living rooms, not in marketing copy. What we can state plainly is that each location is independently owned and operated yet held to the same standard.
Here is why those points matter when you invite someone into your home. A license means the person on your roof has met the state’s bar for the trade. Insurance means if something goes wrong while we are working, you are not left holding the cost. And a guarantee means the work does not end when the truck pulls away.
Rooted in the Communities We Serve
Flint Chimney Sweep does not pretend to be from every town. Our home base is Los Angeles, but our growth has been quiet and deliberate: independent local owners in cities from San Antonio to Philadelphia, each agreeing to run their chimney cleaning business to The Garrison Standard. We value what makes those communities distinct, the old brick chimneys in Brooklyn, the ranch-style fireplaces outside Dallas, the beach-adjacent homes in San Diego where salt air adds its own wear. Local knowledge lives at each location, and it stays there. What travels between us is the discipline: show up, price in writing, work by the book, leave it clean, stand behind it for a year.
Flint is the hard stone that strikes a spark. It is a fitting name for the people who keep your fireplace clean and safe, because that is the whole job. A clean, safe chimney every time.
Written by Hank Delano, Owner at Flint Chimney Sweep. Call (830) 251-4560 to reach the location nearest you.