I built a family business from scratch to $200 million. Now I’ve become its bottleneck
Source: Fortune ·
The hardest thing to accept is that people who didn’t build this company alongside you can see things you don’t.
From the source
In 2003, my father, my sister and I founded Kormotech, a Ukrainian family-run company producing cat and dog food; in 2008, I became its CEO. I made decisions quickly, trusted my intuition and didn’t believe in lengthy approval processes. Over 23 years, the company has grown into a business with revenue of $210 million, and we’ve become one of the world’s top 50 pet food manufacturers. When, in 2021, we set ourselves the goal of becoming a global company, I realized that my management style, which had helped Kormotech grow, was now holding it back. I had become the bottleneck in my own business. In the spring of 2022, at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we began looking for independent directors for the supervisory board. It wasn’t the best time for a major transformation, but we had only two options: to globalize or to disappear in the face of the new challenges posed by the war. The board began its work in early 2024. We gave the independent directors the…