Oksana Skoromna, 43 years

My name is Oksana Skoromna. I am the founder of an English school for care’ers and business Career English School. Over the course of my life, I have radically changed career direction three times: from working as an economist in the banking sector, to becoming a co-founder and CEO of an IT startup, and ultimately to founding my own English school. In eight years in this business, I have gone from an empty 85 sq. m office to a complete transition to online learning and collaboration with Ukraine’s most successful fintech company.

Today, I work two hours a day, although at the beginning I could work for 10–15 hours straight. The rest of my time is for my heal’th, sports, family, favorite hobbies, and communities, including YBC. This lifestyle is the result of lessons I learned after an unsuccessful startup and a rare disease that nearly took my life. At the same time, I am not at a point of stopping, but at a point of profound transformation.

I am deliberately reviewing my business model, focus, and scale as I prepare for the next stage of development. This is a period of inward focus and decisions that are meant to form the foundation for my next, much stronger leap forward.

How did the business idea come about?

The business idea came about during a difficult period in my life — after an unsuccessful previous startup and a serious illness — as a temporary format to help me recover, without grand ambitions. Drawing on my experience working in corporate organizations, I clearly saw an untapped niche for specialized professional English.

What key skills helped you launch the business?

Experience in finance, experience as a co-founder of an IT startup, the ability to turn business expertise into practical educational products, project and product management in a corporate environment, and business English in an international business context.

What were the 3 most difficult challenges you addressed in the early years?

1. Finding people — the high standards of our programs and our specialized field made it difficult to find truly strong teachers.
2. Limited resources — at the start, the team consisted of 3–4 people, so I had to do a lot of the work myself.

Corporate clients stretched debt repayments over half a year

What crises has your business faced, and how did you overcome them?

I can’t say there were any “classic” serious crises. But the pandemic had a significant impact on us. We had more individual students, but our corporate clients were affected, which in turn impacted their budgets for English-language training. What’s more, they had to stretch repayment of outstanding debts for services already provided over more than half a year. A similar situation recurred at the start of the war: two companies suspended operations and repaid their debts in installments over several months.

Giving up the office and shifting to business-to-business in 2025

What decisions proved most effective for the company’s growth?

1. Giving up the office in 2021
2. Almost completely abandoning the business-to-consumer model and shifting to business-to-business in 2025. This year was a year of transformation, and I can already say it was the right decision.

I led a startup in a field I knew only in theory

Which of your mistakes do you now consider your most valuable experience?

The decision to lead a startup in a field I understood in theory but did not know from the inside.

From hired CEO to startup co-founder