Balancing Profit and Social Responsibility with Brandon Powell

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Tulio Serguza** (0:15)
So today, today she's three, your daughter?

**Brandon Powell** (0:18)
Yes, she turned three yesterday actually.

**Tulio Serguza** (0:20)
What's her name?

**Brandon Powell** (0:21)
Isabella, we call her Isa.

**Tulio Serguza** (0:23)
Isa, what a beautiful name. Well, they grow up way too fast.

**Brandon Powell** (0:27)
Yeah, way too fast, three years like that.

**Tulio Serguza** (0:29)
Yes. Lightning in a bottle sometimes. Hard to bottle that lightning. But anyway, we're really glad to have you with us. Welcome back, everyone. Welcome back to The Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore purpose-driven leadership, innovation and impactful change. I'm Tulio Serguza, joined by my co-host, Mike Liske. Today's topic is one that every forward-thinking leader must consider, balancing profit and social responsibility. In fact, businesses today face growing pressure to not only achieve financial success, but to contribute positively to society. The question is, how do you strike that balance? Mike, why don't you please introduce our guests and tell us more about what we'll be diving into today.

**Mike Liske** (1:17)
Yeah. Excited to you, Tulio. Thanks for that, and then welcome as well to our followers today and joining us live as well. Joining us today is Brandon Powell. You might know him as the CEO of HatchWorks AI, which is a leading software development company that prides itself on delivering innovative solutions. You'll want to note this while fostering a strong commitment to social impact, which we know is an important topic to our followers.
Now, under Brandon's leadership, HatchWorks AI has become a shining example of how businesses can integrate both that purpose and profit. Brandon's vision emphasizes the importance of aligning financial goals with social responsibility, which has allowed the company, and quite honestly, to create value, not just for stakeholders, but clients, employees, and the communities alike. So Brandon, we're super excited to have you here today to talk about this with us. Welcome to the show.

**Brandon Powell** (2:21)
Thank you guys so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

**Mike Liske** (2:24)
Yeah. So Brandon, maybe to just kick things off a little bit, share with us maybe a little bit around your journey, what led you to HatchWorks, and then maybe we can get into after that, talking a little bit about that balance between profit and social impact.

**Brandon Powell** (2:42)
Yeah. So I started HatchWorks. Probably it's been just over eight years ago now. And for me, I spent most of my career in consulting, doing a lot of outsourcing, software development, product development. And eventually I ran product for Cricket Wireless, which is about a $10 billion wireless company. And so I got a lot of experience, kind of building and launching products. And HatchWorks really was kind of the culmination of my career between services and building products. And we started the business, or I started the business eight years ago, bootstrapped it, really just focused like we are today on building digital products for customers. And we started very local, so just in Atlanta, where I'm from. And then we opened up in Chicago, and then we opened in Dallas. And from there, we expanded into Latin America. So I had a lot of outsource offshore experience, and we decided to go very early into Nearshore. And so added in delivery centers in Colombia and Costa Rica, and spent a lot of time down there. And two years ago, we probably made our biggest pivot, which is we went all in on AI. And that's where we are today. So you've got a company that we focus on helping companies adopt and scale AI within their organization. And typically, that's some sort of digital product or data engineering that we do. And we're helping them scale those businesses with AI. And it's been a wild ride.
The last two years since we really went all in, but it's been a really exciting one.

**Mike Liske** (4:10)
Yeah, to say the least, right? You got to be a busy, busy man. So just follow up on that in terms of like, you have the idea of trying to balance that profit with social impact. And that essentially being, I think also we can say, a cornerstone of maybe your leadership style.
How do you do that? How do you go about making sure that you're thinking about both? Yeah.

**Brandon Powell** (4:37)
So I think a lot of it for me as a leader, right? Everyone has a superpower that they're really good at. And I obviously have a lot of blind spots. And I've spent a lot of time over the years between CEO coaching and life coach, and YPO, and all these pieces of really getting comfortable with where are my strengths, and then more importantly, in understanding where my weaknesses are. And one of my strengths is definitely around empathy, and believing that purpose is really, really important to any business. And I've really leaned into that. Like when I started HatchWorks, like where we are today, very focused on making sure that not only we're doing amazing things for our customers, but we're also doing it for the community. And so we launched a nonprofit called Hatch Futures, which is our giving arm of HatchWorks. And we'll dig in that to the second. But that purpose piece is really important. And I think for me, that was instilled really just at a young age. I was raised by a single mom. I started working when I was 12 years old, and I started my first business when I was 14 And so a lot of those pieces, and it was out of necessity. And so I kind of knew, like I didn't grow up super poor, but it also definitely weren't rich. And so I saw the fact that entrepreneurship and more importantly, that businesses, even at a young age, they could provide not only for individuals, but also in the community. And so that for me, I think it was born at just that young age. And so as I've started companies as an adult, including HatchWorks, I knew that I really, some people will call it like a double bottom line or a double thing. For me, it's about having a purpose that's got two different meanings to it. One, for what you do for your customers or your clients, and the other one, what do you do for your community that's given so much to you as a person. So very important to me.