Olena Vovk

Olena Vovk is so accustomed to the sounds of war that she barely acknowledges the air raid alarms blaring in the background as she is being interviewed over Zoom. “It’s relatively safe here where we are in Lviv,” she insists.

Vovk has lived in Lviv, Ukraine, for much of her life. She studied linguistics at Lviv National University and earned an MBA in international marketing at Lviv Institute of Management. Her CV includes a variety of jobs, such as assistant to attaché for culture and information at the Japanese embassy in Ukraine, junior consultant, and investment trainee with the Dutch Government Technical Assistance Program.

Later in her career, Vovk joined her father and brother in the family business — a yeast plant — and helped launch a pet food division. She headed up sales and marketing until 2012 when they restructured Kormotech as a separate business unit.

Vovk then became director of corporate development at Enzym Group until her father’s death in 2014, when she stepped into the role of CEO. In 2018, she became chair of the board.

Under Vovk and her family’s leadership, Enzym Group has grown into a biotech company developing yeast and yeast-based ingredients used by producers of food, alcohol, and animal feed. NV magazine included Vovk on their 2021 list of the top 30 most successful and inspiring businesswomen in Ukraine.

What aspect of biotech excites you the most?

We are working on what biotech can do in the food industry itself and the agri-food industry. The biggest challenge for humanity is to feed the world, which will have a population of about 10 billion by 2050, and not kill the planet.

We’re finding ways to make what we eat healthy, functional, affordable, and tasty. We’re working on clean-label ingredients and alternative proteins and microorganisms that can help ferment other functional foods or food ingredients.

At Enzym, the key microorganism that we work with is a yeast cell. Our R&D has been working on the possibilities of the yeast cell and different strains since 2015. We’re really trying to extract from the cell as much potential as we can both from the core of the cells and from the cell walls.

The possibilities are limitless. We produce ingredients that can substitute MSG in chips and in ready-to-eat meals. They can also reduce salt substantially but also keep the flavor in foods. We’re also able to bring ingredients that are fortified with some functional possibilities like vitamins.

Enzym Group is a family business. What lessons have you picked up from the previous generation of leaders?

Our father was the founder. Our business is 30 years old this year, which is quite a substantial age considering that Ukraine only became independent in 1991, so we are almost as old as the country itself.

Not surprisingly, a lot of our values are in the DNA of both our family and in the business. Probably the most predominant is we set ambitious goals as a family and a business. Now we have a goal in front of us to become a global biotech business.

Another thing that both my brother and I bring into our leadership styles is curiosity. Our father was always extremely inquisitive about new productions, new markets, new people. He passed away 10 years ago, but we can’t help noticing that in ourselves. We are always looking for new opportunities. We’re always curious, we are ready to start from scratch on something we don’t know.

Why was that shift towards innovation important to you and what has been your biggest challenge?

It’s this feeling of necessity to always be a step ahead and think critically in advance, looking for possibilities, but also mitigating threats. We realized that our market is not growing that much. People don’t eat that much bread anymore, and we were looking for opportunities to diversify.

Our next step was creating a completely different business in pet food in 2003. There was no pet food production at that time in Ukraine. It was all imported. Now we are one of the biggest pet food producers in Europe, and we are developing globally in that business as well. It has been a very successful diversification effort.

This transformation into biotech has been driven by the same mixture of opportunity and threat. We started looking at wine yeast and beer yeast and probiotic yeast. That required a whole new expertise, so we started investing in R&D and building a factory.

When the Russians invaded in 2022, our Spanish engineers couldn’t come to work on the factory with us, so it was done completely by our team. It was a good decision not to stop our development and not to stop this transformation in the face of uncertainty because it kept our team together.

Has the war impacted business operations in any other ways? Any other examples of how you’ve worked through those challenges?

Luckily, our factories are located in western Ukraine, very close to the Polish border, so we are relatively safe. We prepared the bomb shelters at the end of 2021 and stocked our key raw materials so we wouldn’t be disrupted.

The first thing we immediately thought of is our people and how to help them and their families feel more secure. We felt an immediate need to take care of their families.

Together with our long-time Polish distributor, we arranged a rotation of the children with their mothers to go to Poland. More than 200 people were hosted in the town where our distributor is located, and the children went to school. Most of the families returned in half a year or so. But this first effort was very important for everybody to feel that the company takes care of them.

We really understood the responsibility to provide yeast and bread to the whole country, especially considering that two other producers were in the eastern part of Ukraine very close to the front lines. They stopped for a few months, and we had to supply the whole market. We’ve never stopped, even for a day. There is no lack of supply of yeast for home baking or for bakeries.

Are there any failures that you’ve learned from?

Probably the biggest is not a failure, but it’s definitely an underestimation. Before the war started in February 2022, the leadership team was pushing me to prepare for the worst-case scenarios, and I was sort of agreeing but not really believing.

If you take the worst-case scenario seriously, you are always better prepared, even if it doesn’t happen and it will always help you to pivot or persevere. The structure is in place, which really works well in a crisis. We had this crisis team who were working on operational issues and humanitarian issues. That’s the main lesson — take the worst-case scenario seriously.

What drew you to Stanford Executive Program, and what did you take away from that experience?

When I applied, we were at the early stage of our transformation to biotech, so I saw this opportunity at Stanford, which is a mecca for innovation and a mecca for transformation. When I applied, my main idea was getting the knowledge of transformation into new markets with the new products.

I postponed my program for one year because I really felt that in the summer and spring of 2022, I had to be with my team to show support that I’m there. So SEP was really kind in suggesting that I can postpone it to the next year. That was actually a very good decision because I already knew so much more when I went there.

I also knew I could trust my team, and I could feel sure that everything would be okay when I went away for six weeks in 2023. Plus, I had even more questions of how to do this transformation successfully, considering that we have all these circumstances around us and there is even more uncertainty.

But the program really met my expectations. It was very important that we took this three-layer approach to look at societal-economic factors, community factors, how they affect the strategy and transformation. Then we were looking at the organizational level and on the individual level, how to work with yourself as a leader and how to improve your own skills. That was quite powerful for me.

One of the key elements of the program is networking, and they’re bringing together unique people from all over the world from different industries and different bubbles. The experience you share is invaluable because you would never meet those people in other circumstances. We’re actually having a reunion of our cohort in Iceland.

Photos by Anastasiia Sapon