Hamilton Powell had a friend with a Patek Philippe and a problem. Selling it on eBay brought scam emails. Visiting retailers consumed a Saturday. Eventually, the friend accepted $5,200 for his Gondolo. The same store then offered the watch for $12,500. There was a business in that gap, certainly. There was also a feeling: the uneasy suspicion that everybody understood the transaction except the person surrendering the watch.
Powell would build Crown & Caliber around that discomfort. Years later, he would lead Power Support Partners, an Atlanta-based business in home generators and electrical services. The change in merchandise is enough to give a dinner companion pause. A Patek looks lovely under a shirt cuff. A standby generator presents certain tailoring difficulties.
Yet the two chapters invite the same question. What does someone need before they trust a company with an expensive, unfamiliar decision? Powell’s career offers a practical answer, assembled from valuation, service, people, and the less glamorous business of keeping promises.
The seller’s side of the counter
Powell grew up in Atlanta, a fourth-generation Atlantan, and earned a business degree at the University of Georgia. The university’s alumni magazine records his BBA in 2004. His early career was in private equity, where his work involved finding deals, raising capital, and helping portfolio businesses grow. He approached entrepreneurship with experience on the financing side of the table.
But he also knew the ordinary seller’s uncertainty. In an early interview, he recalled selling a car to a dealership and wondering afterward how much the dealer would make. The price had been agreed. The doubt arrived later. He saw a relationship in which one party possessed much more information than the other.
He had already caught the watch bug. Applying a more transparent selling model to watches brought together a personal interest and a commercial problem. In 2013, he described a service built around historical sales information, an estimated selling price, insured shipping, and a company that would handle the watch’s preparation and sale. Even the packaging had a job: remove one more reason to hesitate.
The early model was consignment. The company would clean, service, photograph, warranty, and market the piece. Its appeal rested partly on the seller being able to understand how the intermediary earned its money. An expensive object could move through a process that its owner could follow. For someone who had spent years looking at investments, that was a remarkably customer-sized starting point.
- 01Value itHistorical sales inform an estimate.
- 02Send itPrepaid, insured packaging.
- 03Prepare itService, photography, and a warranty.
- 04Sell itReach buyers through a managed sale.
A company needs more than a good watch
The early publicity makes the company’s starting date unusually tangible. By May 2013, Powell was describing a business he had begun in January 2012, with revenue that had reached $3 million. The story was still close to its beginnings: an Atlanta entrepreneur bringing his investing background to a specific frustration among watch owners.
Growing the operation exposed another problem. A useful service could sit behind a handsome website and remain undiscovered. Powell later acknowledged that he had paid too little attention to publicity and marketing. Customers had to find the business before they could discover how carefully it treated them. Search, advertising, and a clear explanation of the offer were part of the service’s survival.
The people doing the work mattered just as much. A recruiting partner’s account of working with Crown & Caliber describes the machinery behind expansion: behavioral interviews, onboarding, documented processes, a recruiting program for watchmakers, and training for the staff recruiter. These are unlikely subjects for a luxury advertisement. They are excellent subjects for a growing company’s calendar.
Powell’s testimonial credited that work with giving the young business a firmer staffing foundation. It is a useful glimpse of his operating life. The collector gets the watch. The chief executive gets to think about whether the next person hired can authenticate, explain, photograph, sell, or repair it competently. The beautiful object requires an organization capable of handling it.
“Live for the line, not the dot.”Hamilton Powell’s stated motto
A stopwatch with the smell of oil
There is a more playful Powell in the collector stories. At a New York presentation of the Heuer 100 collection, he enjoyed the range of people who came to see the watches. A Hawaiian shirt and an expensive suit could occupy the same room without either outfit settling the question of who knew more.
The company had spent twelve months assembling the collection. Powell’s favorite was a stopwatch used in the Indianapolis 500. Its appeal included something that could hardly be captured in a sales spreadsheet: he said it still smelled of oil. The detail explains the difference between an object’s specifications and its hold on a person. A stopwatch can carry the atmosphere of a race as well as its elapsed time.
In 2017, he visited Zach Weiss and Blake Malin in Brooklyn for Crown & Caliber’s “Watch Stories” series. The discussion concerned their collections and how they had come to own particular pieces. That kind of conversation gave the company something beyond inventory photography: a reason to pay attention to the owner.
Powell’s own collecting tastes surfaced in a later interview. In 2020, he called a Tudor Black Bay his daily watch and singled out a Heuer/Abercrombie piece for its story. His fondness for watches with a past was plainly compatible with building a business around their next owners. A product could be pre-owned and still have plenty left to say.
The collector and the operator share a desk
Affection for old watches did not make every old watch suitable for the business. In 2019, Powell drew a distinction between collectible vintage pieces and the more repeatable work of handling contemporary pre-owned models. Finding an original hand for a vintage Heuer Monaco could interrupt a repair operation designed to move many watches through the shop.
He was describing an operator’s dilemma with a collector’s vocabulary. The exceptional piece might be fascinating. It could also demand exceptional labor. By that point, he reported 57 full-time Atlanta employees, about 4,000 watches held in-house, and a recently reached milestone of 50,000 transactions. The company was buying watches outright, a development from its early consignment proposition.
Those figures describe a moment in 2019, rather than today’s business. They also explain why the distinction mattered. A company handling thousands of items needs a method that survives repetition. Every unusual component, valuation, or repair has consequences for the next customer waiting behind it.
By 2020, Powell was talking explicitly about the importance of data to pricing. The romance remained on the wrist; market information helped the company decide what to pay. His watch business had room for both a collector’s attachment and an investor’s attention to the numbers.
What the buyer bought
In April 2020, Crown & Caliber obtained a $17 million senior secured credit facility from Second Avenue Capital Partners. The announced purpose was growth and working capital. For a business that bought watches and carried inventory, the financing belonged to the practical side of expansion: valuable stock requires money before its next owner arrives.
On February 18, 2021, Hodinkee announced its acquisition of Crown & Caliber. Its explanation emphasized the process. The company bought the seller’s watch, had in-house watchmakers inspect and service it when needed, and offered the buyer a year’s warranty. Hodinkee was acquiring an operation with a sequence of responsibilities already attached.
Powell described the combination as an opportunity for the team. At the time, the plan was for employees to remain in Atlanta. The city where he had grown up had also become the place where he assembled the company’s work. An online business could reach far beyond its hometown while the actual watch still needed a bench, tools, and trained hands.
A different machine, a familiar responsibility
Powell now serves as chief executive of Power Support Partners. The company is purchasing home-generator and electrical-services businesses across the Southeast. Its listed operating locations include Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida. The strategy gives local teams access to shared resources, with functions including recruiting, training, finance, technology, and marketing.
This is a different kind of customer decision. A watch buyer can admire the purchase every morning. A generator owner buys equipment whose usefulness becomes especially clear when ordinary power fails. In both cases, the organization must make a technical product understandable and provide service after the initial agreement.
The resemblance is an interpretation of Powell’s two operating chapters, rather than a claim that the industries work alike. Their details differ substantially. What carries across is his public emphasis on teams and on the work surrounding a sale. A shared support operation puts those concerns into the structure of the business.
His current biography also identifies an interest outside the balance sheet: study toward a master’s degree in theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. Alongside his long-standing motto about the line and the dot, that gives his career a question larger than its next transaction. What should the work leave behind?
For Powell, the answer has repeatedly involved other people’s confidence: the seller willing to send a watch, the employee equipped to do the job, the local team with more resources behind it. The products have changed. The small moment when a customer decides to trust somebody remains an exacting piece of work.