Katya Velikova

She grew up in Ruse, in northern Bulgaria, and later moved to Sofia when a promotion opened the next chapter of her career.

Her mother was Finance Director of a large corporation, and as a child Katya loved being around her at work: listening to the conversations, watching people arrive with problems, and seeing her mother find solutions, organise, and somehow orchestrate the whole business. Her father was a military engineer. What she remembers of his office are the drafting boards, so enormous that they were covered with floral photo wallpapers when not in use. He was an exceptionally precise and organised man, and she lost him when she was twelve.

“From my mother, the confidence to take responsibility, solve problems and make things happen. From my father, precision, structure and the instinct to see the whole system.”

At school she was a straight-A student and also energetic, mischievous and permanently in the middle of something: class and school leadership, organising committees, the drama club. Sitting quietly on the sidelines was never really her thing.

Away from the work she travels, dances, and is usually learning something new.

At sixteen she started her first business, a small general store, and failed spectacularly fast. So she tried again. Her second venture was a clothing manufacturing business, and she failed at that too.

The lesson landed early: wanting to build a business was not enough. She needed to understand how businesses actually work.

So she went to work while studying Marketing and Management, and used her corporate career deliberately, as a learning ground. She moved through sales and marketing leadership roles, completed an MBA in Finance because she wanted to understand every side of running a company, and held senior commercial roles at major technology companies. Somewhere in the middle of it, she and her mother started an accounting firm in Ruse, her first successful business, which ran until her mother retired.

Years later, already an experienced entrepreneur, she went back to university again for a Master's in Psychology.

“I wanted to understand the human being behind those decisions just as deeply.”

Three degrees, three lenses, and they have become inseparable in the way she thinks. She wants to know why some businesses grow and others do not, and she is equally interested in why some people step into their potential while others hold themselves back.

After ten years of learning inside other people's companies, she went back to what she had wanted from the beginning.

About ten years ago, someone inside her company took a significant amount of sensitive information and used it in an attempt to damage both the business and her personally. Within a single day, everything changed. Clients were contacted, the story reached the media, and a major account was lost.

She was completely blindsided. Her own assessment of what went wrong is not about the attack.

“My biggest mistake was allowing the crisis to consume me completely.”

She fought relentlessly, and the company survived. The cost was elsewhere: her relationships suffered, she lost time with her young son, and her health took a serious toll.

It changed how she thinks about risk. Not every crisis can be predicted, but far more can be anticipated than most founders assume, and scenarios and safeguards can be built before they are needed. She prepares for what can go wrong now, as she puts it, not from fear but from responsibility.

The more important lesson was personal. A company can be enormously important without becoming an entire identity.

“I still fight hard for the things I believe in. I just know now that resilience also means knowing what you are not willing to sacrifice.”

She wants to know who is sitting in front of her before anything else, though she does not spend long on small talk. What are they trying to build, what do they actually want from the business and from their life, what drains them, what are they avoiding? Then the business, seen through their eyes. She listens for patterns and contradictions: what they emphasise, what they skip, and the gap between what they say they want and where their time is actually going.

With a founder stuck on a decision, she slows it down, because very often the decision is not the problem; the fear or assumption underneath it is. If she senses the first answer is the comfortable one rather than the true one, she stays with the question and asks again from another angle.

“I'll keep going until we reach what is really underneath. But I do it with empathy, respect and genuine curiosity, never judgment.”

When a founder becomes emotional she does not rush to fix it. Strong emotion, in her reading, usually signals that something important has been reached.

What she pushes hardest on is ownership: the shift from this is happening to me to what am I going to do about it. Founders usually already know the decision that needs making, or the conversation they keep postponing. What is missing is rarely another analysis.

“I'm supportive, but I'm not very good at helping people stay comfortable with a situation they already know needs to change.”

Founders who understand that transforming a business starts with transforming themselves, and does not stop there. They are willing to stay with a difficult question when the answer is uncomfortable, and they do not need to agree with her.

She is direct about the mismatch. She is not the right coach for someone who wants tools, templates and answers while keeping themselves outside the equation.

“The Scaling Up tools are powerful, but tools alone don't transform a company. People do.”

What she offers instead is perspective built over a career, and she is candid about its limits.

“I know what it feels like to carry the responsibility of a business, to fail, rebuild, navigate crises, lead people, worry about cash and make decisions without knowing whether they will work. I won't walk the road for you. But if we choose to work together, I'll walk it with you.”