Vladyslav Havryliuk

Vladyslav Havryliuk is the founder and CEO of V.J.Coffee, a coffee shop chain he built from scratch in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, starting in 2019. Over seven years, he grew it to five operating locations with a hybrid to-go and dine-in format, a net profit margin of 30–35%, and annual revenue of approximately 10 million UAH across the network.
That growth happened entirely through a period that tested every assumption a business owner could have. COVID-19 restrictions, a full-scale war, sustained power outages, and the permanent background of economic uncertainty in wartime Ukraine — V.J.Coffee operated through all of it, without stopping and without losing its margins.
What made that possible was not luck or a particularly forgiving market. It was a management model that Havryliuk built deliberately from the beginning: standardized preparation processes, a consistent service format, structured staff training, quality control across all locations, and a management layer that allowed him to step back from daily operations without losing control. When crises arrived, the system had enough structure to adapt — changing formats, cutting costs, implementing autonomous operation at individual locations — without the whole thing coming apart.
Havryliuk’s own framing of what he built is worth noting. He describes the turning point not as a revenue milestone, but as the moment a business stops depending on its owner for every decision. V.J.Coffee reached that point, which is why it survived what many similar businesses in the region did not.
The results today: five stable locations, a reproducible operational model, a government grant of approximately 250,000 UAH in recognition of the project’s viability, and employment across all five sites. Two additional locations are in planning for 2026.
In a market where most coffee shop closures come not from bad coffee but from absent systems, V.J.Coffee is a case study in what disciplined, owner-led management can sustain.