From my first sales to a family holding company
My name is Yevhen Polishchuk, and I am building Polishchuk & Sons — a family holding company in Cyprus bringing together technology and AI, real estate, property development and investments.
My journey in business began as a teenager in Israel. At 14-15 years old, I took inventory at pharmacies, worked part-time as a loader and attended school at the same time. Back then, I wanted to earn enough to buy my own CD writer. Once I bought it, I started compiling discs with games and other digital content and selling them to my peers.
A few years later, I moved into sales. After working at Super-Pharm and Ivory Computers, I tried selling mobile phones and contracts door to door. That was when I realized sales was one of my strengths.
At 24-25 years old, I started my own company selling and distributing mobile phones and contracts. The business grew quickly: at one point, I had around 70 agents working for me and 40 cars. But growth also brought my hardest lesson. I knew how to make a lot of money, but I did not yet know how to build a financially resilient business.
Employee fraud, insufficient reserves, a lack of oversight and inadequate insurance led to bankruptcy.
After that, I continued building businesses in different fields — digital, OTT/IPTV, insurance, technology and real estate. I sold companies and left partnerships, while some ventures closed because of crises or my own mistakes.
During COVID, I spotted a new market need and created a multilingual automated insurance service for foreigners entering Ukraine. Later, I added partnerships with laboratories to provide testing for travelers. One of the partner networks eventually grew to 26 branches across Ukraine.
In 2022, my life changed again. On 22 February, I left Odesa for Israel. After the full-scale invasion began, it became clear that there was nowhere to return to. I now live in Cyprus, where I entered a field that was new to me — real estate and property development.
From separate businesses to a family holding company
How did the business idea come about?
Polishchuk & Sons emerged not as just another standalone startup, but as the result of my many years as an entrepreneur.
Over the years, I have built many different businesses, and at some point I realized I did not want to start from scratch every time. I want the results of each successful business to become the foundation for the next. That is why I created Polishchuk & Sons as a family parent company intended to gradually bring together business stakes, technology projects, investments and real estate.
Individual companies can be built, scaled and even sold. But the value they create should remain within the family holding company and work for future generations.
For me, this is no longer just business. It is a legacy.
Sales, systems thinking and the ability to learn quickly
What key skills helped you launch your business?
- The ability to sell and negotiate. From a young age, I knew I could reach agreements and find common ground with very different people.
- Systems thinking. I find it hard to simply accept an inefficient process. I want to understand why it performs poorly, where the weak point is and how to rebuild the entire system.
- The ability to learn quickly. I do not have a traditional university education. I twice began studying programming in Israel, but realized I learn much better independently and through practice.
- How I respond to a crisis. When things do not go to plan, I usually do not panic. On the contrary, a clear action plan forms in my mind very quickly.
From financial immaturity to a resilient business
What were the 3 toughest challenges you overcame in the early years?
The first was learning not just to make money, but to build a resilient business.
My first major business went bankrupt precisely because I was a strong salesperson but still a weak financial manager. That experience completely changed my attitude toward reserves, oversight and risk.
The second was starting from scratch several times.
After bankruptcy, COVID, the outbreak of war, moves between countries and even a transition into an entirely new industry, I had to rebuild my life and business.
The third was turning chaos into a system.
I saw this particularly clearly in property development. When I joined my current company, it was a small family business where some processes literally existed on sticky notes. I began introducing CRM, structured processes, marketing, branding, automation and new business workflows.
Today, the company has a portfolio of 17 projects, six of which have already been completed. Of course, this is the result of the entire team's work, but I am proud of my contribution to that transformation.
Growth begins with finding the weak point
Which decisions proved most effective for the company's growth?
- Systematizing the business and finding the real weak point.
I have seen many companies whose problem is not a lack of people, money or software. On the contrary, they already have too much of everything. Sales operates separately, as do accounting, marketing and document management. Different people have different versions of the same information, and data is often transferred manually between systems. As a result, the company loses money not through one major mistake, but through hundreds of small ones.
So for me, growth begins not with making everyone work harder, but with eliminating unnecessary steps and human error, and making information transparent to decision-makers.
