About
Built on a Legacy of Leadership, Quality and Community
Committed to helping families and businesses recover after property damage, BUILDBAK deploys a team of miracles workers to get your space back to normal as fast as possible.

Nate Hamel
Owner, BuildBak®
As an entrepreneur from a young age, Nate Hamel started the original incarnation of BuildBak® as Hamel Painters in 2006 while still in college. After graduating from Bentley University with Honors Majoring in Economics and Finance, he began focusing on the insurance and restoration industry. Starting as a subcontractor Nate quickly realized the lack of quality contractors performing rebuilds. Partnering with his brother Matt, the company quickly became the quality reconstruction leader in the Greater Boston Market. Nate is fluent in Spanish and has spent extensive time abroad. When not working he's spending time with his wife and daughters.

Matt Hamel
Owner, BuildBak®
One of the hard-working owners, Matt Hamel is in charge of the company operations, which he’s grown in partnership with both large and small local restoration businesses who needed a reliable construction company to follow mitigation efforts. Matt studied international business and finance at University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. He then got his start in investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in 2009 in New York City. After two and a half years of intense 80-100 hour work weeks, Matt reconnected with his brother Nate to build a construction-centric restoration firm that vows to keep the customer's experience at the forefront.
WE transform the ordinary into the extraordinary — like magic!
Our Mission & Values
Provide families, business owners, and organizations across the nation high quality construction-centric restoration exclusively focused on insurance rebuilds leveraging licensed and experienced construction professionals who make customer satisfaction the priority.
Exceed expectations
Be involved in the community
Treat customers as we’d treat our family
Address problems quickly + transparently
Take responsibility for mistakes
Be solution orientated
Meet Some of the Team
We have a full-time staff who are focused on delivering the highest level of quality service and customer satisfaction. At BuildBak, we strive to be the most friendly and professional reconstruction company around.
From our office staff to the service men and women at your home, everyone is a local and focused on getting your property repaired as quickly as possible.

Paul
Vice President of Operations
A well-respected veteran in the reconstruction industry, Paul has 33 years experience, including working as the general manager for one of the largest Boston area restoration franchises and as a loss consultant representing many major insurance companies. His hobbies include carpentry, hiking and golfing.

RALPH
Construction Supervisor
With over 35 years experience in the restoration and construction industry, Ralph is a critical member of the team. Also active in the community, Ralph has coached youth sports for many years and volunteered as a Little League and Cub Scout leader. He enjoys playing guitar, camping and cheering on the Red Sox.

BILL
Project Manager
With his property/casualty adjuster's license in RI, CT, VT and ME, Bill is an experienced Project Manager who takes pride in his work and loves maki0ng a difference in people's lives. He stays quite busy as he's pursuing his masters in Construction Management. In his free time he loves all things sports!

DANIEL
Project Manager
With experience in both construction and insurance, Daniel brings his marketing know-how and love of construction to BuildBak. He lives with his wife and 1 year old daughter. In his spare time, you'll find him on the basketball court, go-karting or on the mountains snowboarding.

KEVIN
Project Manager
While a newer member to the BuildBak team, Kevin has 14+ years experience in project management, construction and mitigation work. Living in North Pembroke, he enjoys working on his yard, golfing, fishing, playing basketball and spending time with family. He enjoys helping people after a loss.

PABLO
Project Manager
With experience in healthcare and a degree in Computer Science, Pablo is a great addition to the team. He enjoys listening to his clients needs and seeing their vision come to life. Living in Worcester with his wife and three kids, he can be found tending to his marine life in his 500+ gallon saltwater fish tanks.

MIKE
Production Manager
With 15+ years of experience in everything from mitigation, restoration and construction, Mike speaks both Spanish and English. He loves seeing a customer's smiling face at the end of a project. He lives in Methuen with his wire and three kids where he spends time attending their sporting or school events.

JIMMY
Associate Project Manager
As the right hand man to our Project Managers, Jimmy helps oversee crews at job sites, and makes sure material is ordered and delivered in a timely manner. A foodie, he loves trying new restaurants and enjoying a meal with family and friends. He's motivated by caring for others.
Our Legacy
BuildBak® started as The Hamel Painters back in 2006 and quickly evolved into The Hamel Company, which began offering property damage reconstruction services in 2007. Nathaniel and Matthew Hamel are proud of the legacy of The Hamel Company in the community, started by their grandfather Louis H. Hamel.



Louis H. Hamel, born in August 1898, was the second of the six children of Anthony Joseph Hamel and Agnes Marie Comeau. Born into dire poverty, both Louis and his older brother, Arthur (born a year earlier) had to leave school to go to work in 1909 selling candy and newspapers to support their mother and siblings when their parents split up.
Later, Louis was working as a cutter at Harmann Shoe Company, a very small and sickly (90 lbs.) boy, when a physician told him, in 1916, that he must stop working.He told the foreman he had to quit work, asking for a handful of the scraps leather-cutters left, and the price, and within an hour Louie Hamel had taken an order for a quantity of scraps at about 150% of the price the foreman had named. Customers thought he was a small child (he was actually 18) and pitied him. He earned $25,000 his first year as the L. H. Hamel Leather Company.
The Sales Chart (always "up" and through the Great Depression) starts in 1916 with the attic of a house in the Bradford District of Haverhill which was his first place of business. Next was a small industrial building in Haverhill's industrial district not far from Railroad Square.
In about 4 years he saw his role as a middle-man coming to an end. He hired an alcoholic man who could tan leather and, from a hiding place, observed him mixing the chemicals and applying them, studied more and more and boldly decided that 2 of the conventional steps could be omitted, thereby inventing what he called "Nu Process Kidskin," sold at a price lower than the competition.
His loan from the First National Bank of Boston was called in because the bank could not believe he was earning the profits he was reporting, at his prices. Soon Merchants Bank (later to become New England Merchants Bank) replaced the loan around 1920 and about 20 years later elected him to the Bank's Board of Directors.
L. H. Hamel Leather Company was the world's largest tanner of kidskins (now no longer tanned in the USA) and had an affiliate, Hamel Realty Company, which owned most of the multi-tenanted industrial buildings in Haverhill, starting with the "Tilton Building" on Essex Street whose basement was the "Wet Department," including the "Beamhose" which was too small. Rather than be a vulnerable tenant, he bought the two adjacent buildings, the "Burgess" and "Lang" buildings and thus became the Landlord to other tenants.
Many of the Hamel Realty properties had been derelict old industrial buildings which he restored to use and whose windows he painted a uniform bright yellow, installing a uniform set of black building directories with gold lettering and removing all other signs, improving the industrial district of Haverhill. To three of those buildings he attracted Western Electric (while building its new facility in North Andover) on a 15 year lease, filling about 300,000 square feet of space with excellent jobs.
Not too long after he "stopped working" and went into business in 1916, Louie Hamel became a mobile young successful man with a Model A Ford in which (with his friend Harold A. Lawson) he traveled far up to Freemont New Hampshire where, at a Grange dance (The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry) Louie met Dorothy ("Dottie") A. Berry of Raymond NH, a fresh-air farmer's daughter and lover of all of nature (people, animals, plants, rocks and earth).
The first of their 7 children, born March 25, 1924, was Virginia Dorothy Hamel who is shown wearing nothing-but-the-best in baby outfits in her mother's fashionable arms, in the attached photo. The proud father, now a "family man" to make restitution for his own childhood trouble, looking healthy and dressed more for Manhattan than for the Berry farm, shows off the flag of fatherhood and success in the form of a baby diaper on the laundry line at that farm (which also came to be the location of "Lakeview Inn, E. Berry Prop").
- Louis H. Hamel, Jr.