Today we’d like to introduce you to Brandon Powell.
Brandon, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
As a child born in Atlanta, my sister and I were raised by my single working mother who instilled in us at a young age the importance of education and hard work. I got my first job mowing lawns at age 10 and by age 14 I was working in a local grocery store. I went on to graduate from the University of Georgia with a degree in Management Information Systems, becoming the first male in my family to go to college. That’s when my fascination with technology and improving how things work began.
After college, I spent 16 years in technology consulting and leadership, most notably at AT&T where my team launched more than 100 digital products. While I was completing an executive leadership program at Harvard Business School I felt inspired by fellow entrepreneurs in my class to follow my dreams of starting my own technology company. I started creating my business plan in 2016 which took almost 12 months to tweak until my friends and family basically said you need to stop talking about this and just do it!
In early 2017, I announced the launch of HatchWorks Technologies, a software design and development company that digitally transforms enterprise clients by creating custom software, emerging technology, and data analytics solutions. Today, I have the joy of leading a team of 30+ strategists, designers, and technologists who create custom software solutions for medium-sized companies to Fortune 500 enterprises.
HatchWorks loves helping clients, but we love giving back more. The company was founded with a dual purpose of giving back by donating a percentage of every dollar in revenue to support STEM education for those in less fortunate areas. This focus is mainly due to how I was raised, believing that education is critical to enabling people to create better opportunities for themselves. We support STEM education in the inner city of Atlanta through several non-profit organizations including Bright Futures Atlanta, YearUp, and Girls Who Code.
“I am very blessed for the opportunities that I have been given and strongly believe that you need to help give others similar chances, so they can be successful, and hopefully do the same for others.” Brandon Powell.
Has it been a smooth road?
There have been so many struggles and challenges. I often tell people that I am going to write a book about them one day. The one everyone talks about is cash flow. When you are leading a scaling company you cannot really wrap your head around cash flow.
Because we have grown rapidly and sold to large enterprises, we sometimes do not get paid for 90 days after we have completed the work. We constantly have challenges with the amount of money we are floating. Even though we are profitable and have a strong customer base of reputable clients, we cannot get a true business line of credit from a bank just because of the sheer age of our company.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the HatchWorks story. Tell us more about the business.
At HatchWorks, we solve business challenges for medium-sized companies to Fortune 500 enterprises like AT&T, Anthem, and Stanley Black & Decker by designing and developing software solutions that improve how their customers and employees live, work and interact. Whether a completely custom option is the answer or a combination of off-the-shelf products with custom integrations, we partner with our customers to determine the path needed to improve their business.
Our differentiation is driven by the fact that we are full-stack and agnostic in terms of the technologies we utilize, ensuring we always deliver the right solution to solve the problem. We cover the full product lifecycle meaning we can take a project from ideation all the way to launch. Often we only need a couple weeks to get an MVP (minimal viable product) ready. Our award-winning team averages over 15 years of experience, covers 109 programming languages and has collectively launched over 300 software products in our careers.
What role has luck (good luck or bad luck) played in your life and business?
I feel blessed and lucky to have been born in the United States which just by itself creates many opportunities that other countries do not have. I am a big believer that some amount of luck is needed to be successful in business but at the same time, hard work helps create more opportunities for good luck. We got lucky when we started HatchWorks to get a large client that really enabled us to scale the company in the first year.
Contact Info:
- Address: 5256 Peachtree Road, Suite 140
Atlanta, GA. 30341 - Website: www.hatchworks.com
- Phone: 404.267.1991
- Email: connect@hatchworks.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/hatchworksinc
- Facebook: facebook.com/hatchworksinc
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