Some CEOs scale with ideal conditions. Others do it in the middle of war, economic crisis, and market disruption. My guest on The Scaling CEO, Vladyslav Podoliako, has done the latter.
As founder and CEO of Belkins, he’s built one of the most effective B2B growth agencies in the world—scaling to 300 people across multiple locations and landing on the Inc. 5000 list.
What makes Vlad’s story unique isn’t just the numbers. It’s how he thinks about resilience, people, and the daily choices CEOs must make when none of the options look good.
Scaling a People Business
Belkins doesn’t scale through code. It scales through people. For Vlad, that means the CEO cannot outsource culture. Even at hundreds of employees, he insists on staying involved in hiring.
“You actually need to be involved in… what we call a culture interview. You need to calibrate people around how they would fit for working with you and how you would contribute to their goals.”
Most CEOs talk about hiring for company goals. Vlad flips it—he hires for personal goals too. Employees perform at their highest level when they see their own growth tied to the company’s success.
Building Through Crisis
Growing a business from Ukraine meant facing COVID-19, war, and recession. Vlad told me,
“Our clients actually helped us to adapt, helped us restructure all the processes… and we didn’t lose almost any of our clients.”
Clients became more than customers; they became partners. That level of trust, built through years of relationship-first work, carried Belkins through events that would have crushed less resilient companies.
Systematizing Sales Starts With Follow-Ups
When asked where CEOs should begin systematizing sales, Vlad’s answer was immediate:
“Follow-ups. You definitely need to create a system that will help you to follow up on the next day and follow up after if you haven’t seen any response.”
In his experience, the deal is rarely won in the first meeting. It’s won by the CEO who keeps promises, tracks commitments, and stays present in the buyer’s mind. A reliable follow-up system is more powerful than the perfect pitch.
The Sales Pipeline Blind Spot
Many CEOs assume hiring an expensive salesperson will fix a weak pipeline. Vlad has seen otherwise:
“Sometimes the problem is within the product or in the business model… without foundational understanding, you cannot hire people in the hope they will scale it if you didn’t have a chance to try it by yourself.”
His view is clear: founders must sell before they scale. Closing early deals personally not only proves product-market fit but also sets the standard for future sales teams.
When Revenue Stalls
I asked Vlad what to do when revenue looks like a roller coaster—high one month, low the next.
He explained that CEOs need to examine each acquisition channel individually. Word of mouth, for example, is valuable but unscalable. Cold outreach or ads may deliver different economics, but you need to know the numbers.
“We pivoted to working with enterprise companies… and found that cold outbound for this segment just didn’t work. The cost of closed deals was more than $40,000.”
The discipline is in choosing profitable channels and cutting the rest—even if they once seemed promising.
The Street MBA
When I asked about his own journey, Vlad laughed and called it a “street MBA.”
“The work of a CEO is basically having five bad decisions on your table and understanding which one will have less damage at the end that you can deal with.”
It’s not about avoiding mistakes. It’s about choosing the ones you can survive and learn from. That perspective is what kept him experimenting, recalibrating, and moving forward.
Learning the Hard Way
Belkins is primarily a services company, but Vlad also tried to build a product—a deliverability platform. Early results looked good: $2M ARR in nine months. But the architecture couldn’t scale.
“We created a monolith product that we could not scale… and the technical people said we needed to rebuild the entire system from scratch.”
That setback cost him momentum and months of frustration, but it left him wiser. Growth on a shaky foundation eventually collapses. Rebuilding may be painful, but it’s sometimes the only way forward.
Listen to the Full Episode with Vladyslav Podoliako Today
Vladyslav Podoliako’s story is a lesson in resilience. Scaling isn’t about avoiding mistakes—it’s about making the right ones, building trust with people, and staying disciplined when conditions are far from perfect.
As CEO, your job isn’t to find a risk-free path. It’s to choose the best failure, learn from it, and keep building.
I’m Glenn Gow. I coach CEOs who want to scale without limits. On my podcast, I uncover the exact strategies top CEOs use to grow bigger, faster—and still keep their sanity.
Listen to the full episode of The Scaling CEO with Vladyslav Podoliako for a candid look at building predictable growth under pressure.
