Oksana Kovalchuk – Rebuilding a 70-Person Agency After Collapse and Crisis

In this episode of The Builders, Matt sits down with Oksana Kovalchuk, founder and CEO of a long-running UI/UX agency with a story that feels like a masterclass in survival, rebuilding, and sheer entrepreneurial grit. Oksana founded her company at twenty, grew it to seventy people, and enjoyed years of booming demand… until a perfect storm hit. COVID wiped out more than half of their clients, and the partner supplying 80 percent of their revenue suddenly stopped paying, leaving her with over $100,000 in unpaid invoices and a team she could no longer support.

What followed was a crash many founders quietly fear: blocked messages, disappearing partners, and the realization that her agency had to shrink from seventy people to only five just to survive. Oksana talks candidly about the emotional fallout, the denial and grief that follow a blow like this, and the moment she accepted that she had to fire people she cared about in order to keep the company alive. Through it all, she frames business as an instrument — something that should ultimately make your life better, not hollow you out.

But the rebuild is where the real builder’s mindset emerges. With a tiny team, she clawed the agency back by taking any project she could find, relearning sales discipline, and reestablishing the fundamentals she’d been able to ignore during the boom years. Her honesty about mistakes, trust, cash discipline, and leadership under pressure offers a blueprint for founders navigating their own storms. This conversation is equal parts cautionary tale and reminder that you can rebuild from almost anything if you stay clear-eyed, humble, and willing to do the work.

Key Takeaways (4–6 bullets)

• Growing fast is exciting, but relying on one revenue source is a structural risk that compounds silently.
• Crises force clarity — from financial discipline to team alignment to true client loyalty.
• Cash flow rules everything; a profitable business can collapse if payments stop.
• Leadership during collapse requires emotional resilience and decisive action, even when it hurts.
• A smaller, tighter, more intentional team can often rebuild stronger than a bloated one.
• You can come back from almost anything if you stay humble, rebuild your systems, and start again.

Tune in for a raw, honest story of collapse, resilience, and the real work of rebuilding — a reminder that builders aren’t defined by what breaks, but by what they choose to rebuild next.