Rostyslav Vovk says Kormotech began in 2003 with his father and sister, grew into a company with revenue of $210 million, and became one of the world’s top 50 pet food manufacturers. He became CEO in 2008.
Vovk says the same management style that helped the company grow quickly now holds it back. In his account, he used to make decisions fast and rely on intuition, but by 2021, when Kormotech set the goal of becoming a global company, he realized he had become the bottleneck.
The company’s expansion forced a harder lesson. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kormotech began looking for independent directors for its supervisory board. The board started work in early 2024, and the independent directors received five of nine votes, giving them the power to block even Vovk’s decisions.
He says that was not easy to accept, but it proved useful. In one case, the board blocked a planned acquisition of a Ukrainian company after the term sheet had already been signed and lawyers were finalizing the agreement. Vovk says that sent him back to the negotiating table, where the company ultimately secured significantly better terms than those first proposed.
Vovk also says that a board only matters if the owner is willing to hear 'no.' If the owner can override the board whenever he wants, he says, it is only an advisory panel. He argues that people who did not build the company can still see things the founder cannot.
Today, Kormotech employs 1,500 people across five countries, including the U.S. Vovk says he can no longer afford to make every decision as quickly and unilaterally as before because the consequences reach more people and more processes. He says the company needs to be able to develop without being tied to his way of running it.
That is the core free-enterprise lesson buried in this founder’s account: scale punishes concentration of power. Capital rewards clear rules, not one person’s instinct forever. As Kormotech moves beyond the startup phase, the market logic is the same one that governs every serious business — the company must outgrow the founder if it wants to keep growing.
