Jiří Votava: how Brainmarket's founder nearly sold up, then returned

Jiří Votava, founder of the Czech online food-supplements store Brainmarket, was forced to return to the CEO's chair just a few months after stepping down — without him, the company, whose turnover runs into the billions of crowns, stopped growing, and the entrepreneur himself even began to consider selling the business.

As recently as this past summer, Votava had called handing over management one of the best decisions of his entrepreneurial career and urged all company founders to do the same. In April, Brainmarket's CFO, Tomáš Černý, took over from him as CEO, while Votava planned to focus on strategy and leave day-to-day operations to his colleagues.

Reality turned out differently. Without Votava at the helm, Brainmarket — whose turnover topped one billion crowns for the first time last year, with EBITDA of 120 million crowns — lost its growth momentum. “We basically stopped growing year on year. I kept raising it at meetings, but nothing changed — that scared me,” recalls the 39-year-old entrepreneur, who had been aiming to grow the company to 1.5 billion crowns.

The turning point came with a presentation by his colleague Marek Tomíček, who has been with Brainmarket since its founding and now serves as development manager. He showed Votava data revealing how the company was gradually losing ground, with the team settling into what he called “near indifference.” According to Tomíček, the Ostrava-based firm was missing precisely the “founder factor” — someone who asks when results will come and occasionally pushes the team.

“It was like a final wake-up call when they told me the Votava factor was missing. Something of that old wolf's blood suddenly stirred in me, and I decided I had to come back to steer the company toward the top again,” Votava says of the moment he decided to return to executive leadership.

Votava began his entrepreneurial path as a student in Ostrava, cleaning carpets after borrowing 12,000 crowns from his parents for equipment — and paying it back within two weeks. Later he launched a dating website in Norway, and in 2015 turned to food supplements, even though the market wasn't ready for such products yet and the word “nootropic” left his acquaintances baffled. The turning point was the third version of the BrainMax product, which became a bestseller — that was when Votava decided to devote himself fully to the business.

The entrepreneur spent his four months away from the company mostly with his family, taking walks with his children and reflecting on the meaning of life — whether to devote himself entirely to family or to push the business to its fullest. “I should also say that I thought about selling the company,” Votava admits. In the end, though, he chose to return — and Brainmarket is growing again.