Volodymyr Pryadka, 43 years

My name is Volodymyr Priadka, and today I am an entrepreneur in the field of legal consulting for businesses and the founder of CAPITAL LEGAL GROUP — a law firm in Kyiv specializing in legal support for businesses, tax consulting, and comprehensive support for entrepreneurs.

I am deliberately building not a model of “self-employment,” but a systematic law firm that operates as a business system. But my journey to this point began much earlier. I grew up in the village of Velyki Bubny in Sumy Oblast, and from childhood I knew one simple thing: money is the result of a specific action. At 6-7 years old, I would take milk from home and sell it to pensioners who did not have a cow. At 14–16, I worked at a brick factory every summer during the school holidays. In our family, we were always growing and selling something. My entrepreneurial “muscle memory” developed before I had a profession. After graduating from the law faculty of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, I worked as an employee for a while. But I could not shake the feeling of being constrained: in someone else’s company, you will never become a co-owner or fully realize your potential.

That is why I gradually came to the decision to start my own business providing legal services to entrepreneurs. I spent 15 minutes writing an advertisement for my private practice and hit “send.” My hand did not tremble. Looking back from nearly two decades later, I can see clearly that this was one of the key turning points in my life. It was a quick but deliberate decision that effectively marked the start of my journey as an entrepreneur in legal support for companies and business consulting. In the early years, we took on almost every project — even divorce cases. But over time, it became clear that our core expertise was legal support for businesses, consulting for company owners, and support for entrepreneurs. Since 2015, we have deliberately declined projects unrelated to legal support for businesses.

We do not serve individuals for personal matters alone — we build our expertise around business needs. If a client needs help resolving a personal matter, we will organize the process and bring in a strong specialist in that field, but the core of the company is business-to-business. Today, CAPITAL LEGAL GROUP is a team of lawyers and consultants working with entrepreneurs and companies across Ukraine, providing legal support for businesses, assistance with tax matters and court proceedings, and comprehensive legal consulting. Alongside business, charity is important to me. Two of my cousins serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine: one of them works in a medical company handling evacuations. Since the start of the full-scale war, we have regularly helped them with evacuation vehicles — the latest ones had to be brought all the way from Manchester because it was impossible to find them any closer. We also support them with equipment, clothing, and medical supplies — that is no longer even up for discussion; it is simply the natural thing to do.

At the company level, we are financial partners of charitable initiatives. In particular, we support the Khilko Foundation, which cares for the families of displaced people and service members. We are not fond of excessive publicity, but we do share information about major projects. Recently, for example, we organized an evening of Ukrainian poetry in Synelnykove — 50 kilometers from the front line. Children from local schools performed, and we prepared gifts for them. For me, this is about responsibility and the role businesses should play in a country at war. On a personal level, happiness for me is an inner sense of clarity: waking up and knowing exactly who you are working for and why today. Understanding your mission and seeing the way forward. My sense of purpose has changed at different stages of my life. At first, I wanted to become a strong lawyer. Then I wanted to own a strong law firm.

Later, I realized that you can become a hostage to even a successful business if the system works because of you rather than independently of you. My focus then shifted — I started building a company that operates as a system. Today, I am once again going through a period of transformation. The company is established and the system is working, but a new question is emerging: what next? A sense of purpose can change faster than you can formulate a new mission. And I honestly admit that, while this new vision has not yet fully taken shape, my sense of complete happiness is somewhat blurred.

But I know one thing: to move forward, I need to honestly answer the question once again: why am I doing this, and for whom? And that is exactly what I am working through now.

How did you come up with the business idea?

The idea did not come as a sudden flash of inspiration. It had been with me since childhood — as a habit of earning money and taking responsibility for the result. After university, I worked as an employee and gradually felt constrained: you can be a strong lawyer and still have no influence over the system. I realized I wanted to create something of my own. At a certain point, that took the form of a simple decision — write an advertisement for a private practice and get started. It was scary because employment seems like a safe place. But for me, entrepreneurship became a way not to get stuck in the scenario of “a steady 300 dollars.”

What key skills helped you launch the business?

The foundation of my growth is resilience and a willingness to take risks. My resilience comes from my family. My parents grew up in difficult circumstances and raised my brother and me to be ready for pressure and challenges. A willingness to take risks is an ingrained habit of not avoiding difficult decisions. I accepted that I could invest in the company without seeing immediate results. To be honest, for a significant part of my journey, I was driven by fear — of falling back into poverty, feeling helpless, or repeating the limitations of previous generations. It is not a romantic motivation, but it worked. In practice, that meant being ready to work 18 hours a day, endure a lack of money at the start, and get through the stage when the company is still just you, not a system.

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

1. Cash-flow gaps and basic survival. After renting an office and hiring my first assistant, I sometimes had to borrow about 200 dollars from my wife to cover expenses. It was a real test: either you get through it, or you go back to employment.
2. Excessive personal workload. You think your first employee will lighten the load. In reality, you spend six months training and checking their work, and often redoing it — while handling all the client work at the same time. You are effectively working for two people.
3. The risk of remaining self-employed. It is very easy to get stuck in the model of “me and another 1–2 assistants” and call it a business. The hardest thing is to move beyond working as a craftsperson and start building a system instead of simply working more.

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

I experienced the 2008–2009 crisis as a beginning entrepreneur. At the time, I lost a key client that simply closed its business. It quickly teaches you that relying on one client is not a strategy. 2016 was a management crisis for us. My partner and I realized that we were managing everything manually. The system for payments and salaries was especially painful — everything was done by hand. That kills scalability. The deepest crisis came on February 24, 2022. Before the full-scale war, clients from Russia and Belarus accounted for about 40% of our turnover. On February 25, we told them that we would no longer serve them.

Some European clients suspended payments, businesses were closing, and within a few months our turnover had almost fallen to zero. Our reserve fund saved us. We were able to pay the team almost full salaries for about three months, retained about 90% of our people, and kept the system going. By the end of 2023, we had reached the January 2022 turnover level in hryvnias, replacing the Russian-Belarusian segment with Ukrainian clients and, in part, clients who had returned from Europe.

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

The biggest breakthrough came from changing our management paradigm: moving from hands-on management to building a system. We digitized our finances and operational processes, stopped using cash, introduced management reports, and automated compensation calculations. Once the system was up and running, I felt like a CEO for the first time, rather than the lead doer. From my phone, I can see how much the company has earned, which tasks have been completed, each lawyer’s contribution, and how it affects their compensation. It was also important to focus strategically on supporting businesses rather than taking on everything, and to make financial reserves a standard practice.

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

The most valuable lesson was not having a detailed written partnership agreement at the outset. My partners and I did not document our roles, responsibilities, key performance indicators, or what would happen if we parted ways. I made that mistake twice. The company now has its third partnership team, and only now is the agreement properly set out: with a clear division of responsibilities, a mechanism for additional funding, and shares defined not as a formal 50 to 50 split, but down to hundredths of a percentage point, with a clear understanding of how they were determined. This experience has become so practical that drafting partnership agreements is now one of our company’s key products.