I built a family business from scratch to $200 million. Now I’ve become its bottleneck

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 majority of the votes – five out of nine – meaning they had the right to block even my decisions.

Agreeing to this was easier than actually sharing power and relinquishing some control.

It was only once the board was running that I realized what this meant in practice.

Here are three things it taught me.

The owner must evolve alongside the company When we were just starting out and looking for a way to get into supermarkets, there were five of us.

We didn’t even have an office, and we’d discuss how to do it over lunch at our first factory.