Ivan Ivanka
Founder & CEO, Markster · San Francisco. I spent 15 years running growth at every scale, and kept seeing the same thing: the business runs on the owner, so growth stops the moment the owner does. I build and run the system that fixes that.
Fifteen years running growth, one conclusion.
From frontline operations at 18 to Chief Growth Officer of a 1,500-person enterprise. I built four agencies along the way. The failure mode was identical at every scale.
Most companies don’t have a growth problem.
They have a key-person problem.
I’ve run growth from the shop floor to the C-suite of a 1,500-person enterprise. The failure mode is the same everywhere: most businesses stall because sales, marketing, and follow-up still run through the owner. When the owner stops pushing, pipeline stops moving.
The work was never the hard part.
Across four agencies, the outreach, the content, the follow-up — none of it was the bottleneck. The bottleneck was that no business had a system to keep that work running once the owner got busy. So growth quietly became a second job nobody wanted, and it broke under the first busy season.
Growth that runs itself.
I built Markster to remove the owner as the bottleneck. Sales, marketing, CRM, follow-up, and pipeline run as one operated system. The owner approves what goes out. We run the rest. I also created ScaleOS, the methodology behind it. I build the fix, and I measure the outcome.
The next generation of great businesses won’t be built by bigger teams. They’ll be built by better systems.
The Operator’s Read.
Most growth advice is written by people who’ve never had to run the thing. I write for the owner who’s still doing it all themselves.
Field notes on operated growth.
What actually moves pipeline for an owner-led B2B company, what doesn’t, and how to build a system that keeps running when you get busy. No hype, no theory — the version I’d give a fellow founder over coffee.
- Written from the operator’s seat, not the consultant’s. I run this for a living.
- Founder-to-founder. Calm, specific, no growth-hacking nonsense.
- Plus the show, Operated by Markster — the same conversation, out loud.