FRACTAL Story: From an “Accidental Business” to a $3B Mission (III > I)
On June 9, 2006, I set up a sole proprietorship under my name — Borodatiuk — which later grew into Netpeak Agencies Group. Less than a year later, on May 10, 2007, we opened the doors to our very first physical office in Odesa. Until 2010, we ran things pretty much like every other digital marketing agency: caught up in the daily grind with our team and clients.
I’m not really into fairy tales, so I’ll be straight with you: during those first few years, we had zero clue we were actually building a business. We just had client requests coming in, and we handled them. Looking back, my first business was a total accident — an “unplanned pregnancy,” so to speak.
I hired people simply because I couldn’t keep up with all the client work landing on my plate. I even got a physical office for one reason: I didn’t trust my team and wanted to keep an eye on everything they were doing.
Among other mistakes, I was obsessed with controlling the process instead of focusing on results. In short, a lot of things I considered unique features back then turned out to be bugs. Yet I’m deeply grateful for every lesson learned. With zero capital, zero experience, and zero mentors, we managed to build a working company from scratch.
A major shift happened when we hit a real existential crisis: “Why are we even doing this?
That was when I defined our broader direction. Since my core goal was to boost the national economy, I realized we needed to think bigger than a single agency. Under the FRACTAL umbrella — which today brings together groups like Netpeak and fractal ventures — we set out to build a company builder: systematizing the process of scaling multiple successful businesses.
The Mission Pyramid
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We first started talking about our mission — “to move from the third world to the first, both economically and mentally” — in early 2010. By June 13, 2013, it officially appeared on our website, structured as a pyramid:
- Deliver profit to Netpeak’s clients.
- Grow Ukrainian business.
- Inspire other Ukrainians through Netpeak’s work to fight inefficiency, mediocrity, bad taste, irresponsibility, and stupidity.
- Change the mindset of Ukrainians.
- Move from the third world to the first within a single generation — without changing our geographic location (III > I).
For me, Level 5 is my personal mission. To put it in numbers: our goal is to hit $3 billion in revenue across all FRACTAL businesses. That will account for roughly 1% of Ukraine’s GDP. That’s a tangible impact.
Sharing all knowledge and experience publicly is a direct extension of that mission. Raising the standard of management across the board is how we move from III to I together.
III > I
