Notable buildings
1918: The Engineers Club, Dayton Wright Airplane Co.
1919: Victoria Theater.
1950: Chaminade-Julienne High School.
1973: Good Samaritan Hospital.
1988: Citizens Federal building.
1997: Springfield Regional Medical Center.
2001-2003: Riverscape downtown Dayton.
2003: Schuster Performing Arts Center (in a joint venture with Messer).
2010: Kettering Medical Center Heart Hospital.
2011: Indu and Raj Soin Medical Center.
Source: Danis.
Milestones
1971: Twenty-plus companies were owned by the Danis family.
1983: Danis sells garbage and waste business to Waste Management. John Danis, today chairman and CEO, joined the company after graduating from Cornell.
1988: Danis sells construction products firm Dayton Superior.
1997: At a point when Danis is owned by 11 cousins, the company streamlines ownership after working with consultant Arthur Anderson.
2016: Centennial celebration.
Source: Danis.
To find more about the company, Danis has re-designed its website, Danis.com, and a new site, Danis100.com, where the company will focus on a different decade of its history each month.
Danis has put its imprint on the Dayton skyline in the past 100 years, raising downtown towers and concert halls, suburban schools, sprawling hospitals, manufacturing plants, college campuses, university hubs and much more — all through a Great Depression, recessions, world wars and technology revolutions.
The closely held, family-owned construction company based in Dayton will celebrate a century of business this year.
As might be expected, that history was at times turbulent. In an interview at the company’s Newmark Drive headquarters last week, John Danis, the company’s chairman and chief executive, recalled that in the early 1970s, the family business owned some 21 different companies in real estate, highway work, waste and manufacturing.
“We were always trying a little bit of this and a little bit of that,” Danis said. “But this is it right now.”
In time, the company streamlined and returned to what it does best. Several family shareholders were bought out in 1997 and the focus returned to building. Tom Danis became the majority owner of the Danis Cos. while John Danis became majority owner of Danis Building Construction Co., two separate companies.
(Tom Danis — a cousin of John Danis and well known Dayton businessman and local philanthropist and volunteer — ran Danis Industries Corp., but today he is retired.)
Now, there is one main Danis company with divisions for building construction, industrial construction and work in other parts of the country.
But all the companies are focused on construction management and general contracting, employing 400 people in Ohio, North Carolina and Florida and about 150 people in the Dayton area.
It’s unusual for a family-owned business — never mind one in a field as volatile as construction — to endure for three generations and beyond.
“It’s just having good people and sticking with what you know,” John Danis said.
He smiled and added, “A little bit of luck helps.”
Project managers today can consult architectural plans on their iPads, of course. But walk through the company’s headquarters, and you still see paper rolls of architectural drawings. The fundamentals haven’t changed that much.
A list of Danis projects reads almost like a “who’s who” of local architectural work. The Engineers Club. Victoria Theater. Sinclair Community College’s downtown campus. The Schuster Performing Arts Center (in a joint venture with Messer). Miami Valley South. Today, the new Dayton Childrens Hospital’s tower. And much more.
Danis recalls driving around as a child seeing construction sites with his family name posted. The experience made a strong impression, so much so that the company remains anchored in Dayton, even though it has offices in Cincinnati, Columbus, Raleigh, N.C. and Jacksonville, Fla.
“It’s where we all grew up,” he said. “General contracting and construction management is a local business, no matter if you’re nationwide or international.”
Danis’ grandfather, B.G. Danis — then in his 30s — started the company in Dayton with partner Robert Hunt after making his way to Ohio from hometown Pittsfield, Mass. Danis and Hunt broke away from a Toledo construction company to start their own firm.
To prepare for the centennial celebration, the company hired a freelance historian, Lisa Curtin, to unearth projects that even the CEO and some employees had forgotten.
“She uncovered a lot,” said Jamie Franz, who works for Danis in marketing. “It was impressive.”
Curtin’s work with Danis started in July. To start, she explored a list of projects the company compiled in the 1970s, moving on to books about Dayton and the Miami Valley, including a collection of biographical sketches of Miami Valley residents from 1919. She also perused old industrial journals that had been digitized — and she relied on Dayton Daily News archives, kept at Wright State University.
There is not a lot of history directly written about construction companies, but she came away aware that Danis has been a Dayton constant.
“They have kind of been there in the background all along,” Curtin said.
Chris Kershner, Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce vice president of public policy and economic development, is impressed with how adaptable Danis has been over the decades.
“Danis is an outstanding company that has strong roots and a long history in Dayton,” he said. “It is by no accident that they have been successful for 100 years.”
And while the company probably could have been successful anywhere, Kershner noted that it never left Dayton.
“Danis is a great example of a company that has not only local development commitments, but has local leadership that lives works and plays right here in the Dayton region,” he said.
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