Interested in chatting with Glenn?
See If We’re a FitGlenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, sat down with Peter Malek, founder and CEO of Inbound AV, a HubSpot solutions partner, to pull apart one of the most overlooked questions in scaling: what does your background actually teach you about leading people and growing a company? Malek’s answer … Read more
Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies Reza Mirza’s decade-long tenure at Icelandic Glacial as a case study in what disciplined, market-by-market scaling actually looks like — and what it costs CEOs who skip the fundamentals. Reza Mirza is the CEO of Icelandic Glacial, a super-premium water brand … Read more
Scaling a company is never simple. It demands clarity, discipline, and sometimes courage to take risks others avoid. My guest on The Scaling Executive, Chia-Lin Simmons, has lived this reality across every stage of business—Google, Amazon’s Audible, early-stage startups, venture capital, and now as CEO of LogicMark, a publicly traded company focused on the care … Read more
Scaling is never just about revenue and market share. For some founders, it’s about something bigger. My guest on The Scaling Executive, Ninh Tran, embodies that. Born in Vietnam, raised in the Czech Republic, and eventually building companies in the U.S., Ninh has lived the reality that opportunity often depends on geography. His mission now: … Read more
Some CEOs scale with ideal conditions. Others do it in the middle of war, economic crisis, and market disruption. My guest on The Scaling Executive, 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.
Rethinking What It Means to Scale a Business We think about product, people, and processes when scaling. But what if we’re overlooking something even more fundamental — the building itself? In this episode of The Scaling Executive, I sat down with Allan Lopes, biologist and founder of the Healthy Building Certificate. What he shared completely … Read more
You’ve probably been told that scaling your company means more sales. That’s wrong. On The Scaling Executive podcast, I spoke with Nellie Akalp, founder and CEO of CorpNet. She sold her first company for $20 million. Then she started again and built a second company that has now helped over half a million entrepreneurs. She’s … Read more
You might think impostor syndrome doesn’t affect executives at the top. After all, CEOs are supposed to be confident, decisive, and experienced, right? Wrong. In my work as a CEO coach, I’ve worked with incredibly successful leaders, and many of these CEOs quietly carry the weight of feeling like a fraud, as if they don’t … Read more
As a CEO, you must continually develop your leadership skills. I have seen this firsthand. Over the past decade, I have had the privilege of working alongside CEOs at every stage of company growth: from scrappy startups to established market leaders. And here is the truth. No matter how experienced you are, leadership skills never … Read more
Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of working with CEOs leading companies through vastly different stages of development, some with just a few employees and a big idea, others with hundreds of team members and nine-figure revenues. No matter where a company is on its growth curve, one truth remains: great leadership is the … Read more
