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Welcome to the Confidence Curve with Ashley and Rick Bowers, where personal and professional journeys define the art of scaling with confidence.
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Whether you're a business leader navigating change or someone seeking personal growth, this podcast offers insights and actionable advice to help you thrive.
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Now let's dive into today's conversation with our incredible guest.
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Welcome to the Confidence Curve.
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Myself, ashley Bowers, and my business partner husband Rick Bowers, are here to host.
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We have our guest Sean with New Frontier Immigration.
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We are so excited to have you here with us today and getting to learn a little bit more about you over the last week or so.
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I'm just really intrigued with all of the work you're doing and the good cause that you're fighting as a part of that.
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So if you want, just kick us off.
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Tell us a little bit about you and the business and how you got started.
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Thank you for having me on.
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I'm super excited to be here too.
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Actually, our company just reached out from your last podcast, where it was the Televerde Foundation, and we're going to start partnering with them, so it's really cool.
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So I've enjoyed listening to your podcast, so keep it up.
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My background I'm the CFO of New Frontier Immigration Law.
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We have two locations here in the Valley, in Phoenix, and we're expanding to California later this year, texas next year and we are one of the fastest growing law firms in America the fastest growing law firm in Arizona and one of the top 1000 fastest growing companies in America and our specialty is immigration law.
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We do family based immigration.
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We do a little bit of everything, but primarily family based, and we have about 120 employees family-based.
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And we have about 120 employees.
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Most of them are actually remote.
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I guess we're maybe 50-50 now but as our business grew so much during COVID, we hired a lot of remote employees.
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Now we're about half and half remote or local.
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Prior to this, I was a fighter pilot in the Air Force for 20 years and my wife founded the company when we moved to Phoenix, which was about five and a half years ago or so.
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At that time we'd been living overseas for five years.
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We moved back to America and my wife just said I don't want to have a boss, I don't want to work for anybody, I'm going to open a business.
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I was like, okay, that sounds cool.
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What do we do, you know?
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And she wisely asked for directions.
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So we hired a business coach and started out and I've been kind of with her since day one, helping on the financial side of things, where she is the brains and the genius and the legal, the marketing and all that good stuff behind it.
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As the company grew, I retired from the Air Force and I'm now full time with New Frontier.
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Awesome.
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Well, first of all, thank you so much for your service in the military, but then also everything you're doing now, and I want to dig into, kind of, the cause behind what you're doing and the people that you're supporting.
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But before we do that, you mentioned business coach and when we talked previously, you talked about that being one of the very first decisions that you guys made in your business, and obviously there's a lot of investment and risk and vulnerability that comes along with it.
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So how did you guys decide to take that plunge as your first big decision and, looking back, you know how much do you believe in that decision as a first step for people that are starting their businesses?
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Well, hindsight's easier to look back and go oh, look at that great decision we made, but I can tell you it wasn't easy sitting around.
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We were at this little Formica table sitting in the temporary lodging of Luke Air Force Base and at that time we just moved back from overseas.
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We had no house, no cars, no nothing, and we didn't know anybody in Phoenix.
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We had no business connections, we had no family, we had no clients or anything and the very first thing we did was spend money on a business coach and at that time was the probably single largest investment we'd ever made, except once before we'd bought a house and sold it, but that was like the biggest investment we'd ever made and my wife was all for it.
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She was like we're going to do this, this is going to be great, and I was a bit bit hesitant and I think what finally brought me around was the idea that um and I told you this before even Michael Jordan in his prime and I like basketball at his peak he had a coach, he had more than one coach, and to think that the goat, the greatest of all time, needed a coach and had a coach, to think that I didn't need a coach in business, actually seems silly in hindsight because it's not something I had done.
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I had been in charge of organizations, I was a commander of a fighter squadron with hundreds of people and millions of dollars in assets, but I had never founded a business from the ground up, so to think that I could step into it and do it successfully from day one was just kind of crazy.
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So in hindsight the investment looks minuscule, like wow, we have now, you know, had a return on investment of probably 1000x on that first business coach.
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But it was a game changer for us and it set us up for success from day one.
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Coaching is one thing that I never thought I would do and as part of our apex advisory business, I do a lot of coaching.
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It's probably the majority of what I've been doing lately and it's it's really amazing because when you get in with a person that you're coaching and working with that wants to get better, it's it's really just asking the questions and then it's all the words that come out of the person that you're coaching it.
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They have all the words, they.
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And then it's all the words that come out of the person that you're coaching.
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They have all the words.
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They just haven't thought of those things in a certain order and so how you can kind of put that in place and really it's exciting to watch the light bulbs go off above their heads and all of that kind of thing.
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So, as you've kind of built the business, you said you're up to about 120 employees and you had over 300 people when you were in the Air Force with the squadron.
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What are some similarities or differences that you see in managing the two different groups of people?
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It's interesting because people are people and it is something that it takes time.
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As you're in the startup phase, you go through a lot of people to find the right people, and then you reach kind of a critical mass where you can actually afford to hire leadership and people to help you manage and run other people.
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And that's when things really start to take off.
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And we're in a phase right now and that's what we say 2025 is a year of people for us, because that's all that it is.
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We could sit down all day and come up with great new ideas of ways to grow the business and things that we can do, but if we don't have the right people there to help us launch these initiatives, then it doesn't matter.
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And so, between being in the military and now being in civilian life, people management is a lot of the same stuff across the board, but one big difference was coming out of the military.
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You come from an organization that's been around for 100 years or more.
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So when I took over a squadron with 287 people in it, I was given the playbook, and it's the playbook that has worked for decades and decades before I ever took that role, so I could come in and tweak it a little and add my own flair to it and maybe make it 1% know 1% better.
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That is completely different than starting with a blank sheet of paper and saying how do I get all these people on board with what we're about to do?
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How do I make sure they know everything, from the tiniest detail, like what to where to work, to the most important thing like how to correctly file a case to USCIS.
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And so that, I would say, is the big difference is in a startup or even in a civilian business, when you don't have all of this infrastructure in place.
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There's a lot more to it and getting everybody rowing in the same direction.
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Yeah, yeah, I mean, and obviously you guys have done a tremendous job in scaling the organization.
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Congratulations on landing twice on the Inc 5000 of fastest growing companies.
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That's amazing, you know.
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It feels like every year, I know, with leading companies.
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You're working through things, you think you've solved it and then and I think you mentioned this too then all of a sudden you're I feel like you're right back in that circle, solving the same problem and on the surface it's easy to look at it that way, right, that it's the same problem, but you have more people, different people, more customers, you know more policies, so the solve is very different.
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You're really not fixing the same thing over and over again.
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So how have you guys really approached that challenge and that feeling like you're on that hamster wheel that you kind of can't get off as it relates to growing the business?
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Well, we've fought it a lot in the beginning, thinking why is everything breaking, until we finally realized we view our business as kind of a circle or a wheel, and each section of that wheel is a different aspect of our business.
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And as we work our way around it, everything starts for us with marketing.
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We put money into marketing or events or whatever we're going to do, and that brings us leads and brings us, eventually, clients, which is our sales department.
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Those clients are onboarded and now we have to do the work and that's our operations.
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And we work our way around this circle and when we get back around to the end, we have revenue in the door.
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We take a percentage of that and we put it back into marketing.
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We start our way around the wheel again, but what we realize is that it's not a circle, it's more of a spiral, because we started so small where, you know, my wife was the first employee and only employee for a little while, and she was the director of marketing, director of sales, director of people, you know all those things.
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And then, as we went around the wheel, it wasn't that everything was broken, it's just that we'd grown out and our wheel got bigger and so it ended up being more of a spiral, because each time around, instead of having two new employees to manage, now we had 20 new employees, and the policies that worked for two people just don't carry over to 20 people or 100 or more than that.
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So while in the beginning it felt like everything was broken, we came to realize that it's not that it's broken, it's that we're growing and we have to continually revisit those.
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And there have been times where we actually skipped writing an SOP for something, because we said, hey, we're growing so fast that in three months, if we write this SOP, it's going to be completely overcome by events, obe, and so we're just going to skip it right now.
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Here's our general guidelines.
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See you again in six months.
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Keep working on it.
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And so that's kind of how we've handled the rapid growth.
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Yeah Well, and as you start to implement policies and procedures and things like that too, you know you hear the dreaded words of we're becoming corporate right from employees and it's like you can have structure and give guidance which can actually really be empowering and can, you know, give a lot of autonomy to employees and things.
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But we definitely always talk to clients and have heard personally of well, why do we have to do this?
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We didn't used to have to have a PTO policy or we didn't used to have to have that and but when you start to get in that 50, 100, 200, 300, it really makes a big difference in how the operation can run.
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That's so true.
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And when you're trying to add value to your clients, you start out and it's just you and your ideas and you're creating this company and you're constantly finding ways to add value.
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And when you bring people on, you can't just carbon copy your memory into their mind and say do all these things.
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And so, in order to show people what you're trying to accomplish, you have to start putting these policies in place and as you grow and for us, we have a plan, and now it's our 2035 plan, but it goes out 10 years and we've told our whole staff we're a startup.
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For these 10 years, we're five years in 10 more years we're still in the startup phase.
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So expect that the sops we write today will probably be rewritten in another year or two, when we have multiple locations in other states and these you know phoenix-based rules that we have don't work anymore right, yeah so, as you've, as you've built the, the business, um, from our conversation the other day, you kind of were able to build businesses because of the business.
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Can you talk a little bit about that and how the things that you were already doing now you could package that and create a whole other revenue stream?
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Yes, we call it our ecosystem, okay, and we kind of think of it like how they built out the iPhone.
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You know, when they built the iPhone they weren't maybe they were, but they weren't necessarily thinking that they were also going to control the market on music in the world and that they were going to control the market on podcasts and on how you delivered your email.
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They just built a great product that was a phone and everything else added on.
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Apple now has this ecosystem where you can't get your information from anywhere except them, and so that's kind of the concept.
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And we built the law firm as our first business and our largest business.
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But as we had other needs I mentioned we have about 60 remote employees.
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We bring many of them to Phoenix for training or for a set amount of time to come here and do.
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They might appear in court or they might just come for events.
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We were spending a ton of money on hotels and per diem and all those things.
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So we said, why don't we just create a space where our employees can stay, and when we don't need it for the business, we'll rent it out?
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And so from that grew a side business.
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We have 11 Airbnbs, and then we also bought some multifamily.
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After that, we saw a lot of value in buying commercial property that we could then occupy as our company and rent out to other people who need space, and so each one of these things became its own separate business, its own separate enterprise, and we even hired people to help us run that.
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So we don't do anything with our Airbnbs.
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We have a couple employees on that side of the house who handle that stuff.
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We have a property management company that handles our commercial property.
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We now have a university and that one stemmed out of we have 120 employees.
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We you know, when you're in a startup phase, you're going through like five employees a month because we would hire 10 or 20 at a time, train them up, and only 10 of them would still be around in a month because, for whatever reason, so we're training so many people that we just wanted to make it repeatable and simple, and so we formalized how we were training and we built it into an online platform.
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We use Kajabi.
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A lot of people use that for online education.
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But then we realized that there was a need elsewhere for that same education, and so we sold licenses to other immigration law firms who need to train their employees.
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We have a very robust platform to become a legal assistant or paralegal specific to immigration law, and we share that with other immigration law firms and one of the main things and one of our core principles is the belief that there's an abundance and so there is nobody anywhere in America or in Phoenix or anywhere that is our competitor.
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We're not competing with anybody.
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There are more than enough clients for everybody.
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There's more than enough to go around, and that's kind of our view of everything.
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Okay, you know we started the conversation mentioned education.
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Now we started the conversation with the coaching that you guys elected to receive in the beginning of your business.
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How has your approach to education for you and your wife, and really the on the business education, evolved since you started?
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It's evolved a lot.
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We'd always been the kind of people who valued education we both have degrees from university and master's degrees but there's a lot of value to personal growth and that's education too, and a lot of value to personal growth and that's education too.
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And what we found was, as our company grew, if we didn't grow with it, we wouldn't be ready.
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So when we, you know, first hit six-figure company, we had never run a six-figure company before, so we had to learn some new things and we had to grow in order to be good leaders of that and good stewards of of that company.
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When we hit seven figures for the first time, we had to learn how to be business owners of a seven-figure business and how to take care of our people and how to correctly run that business.
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And again when we hit eight figures.
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As you hit all these different milestones in your business, you have to grow with it or the business is going to leave you behind.
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And unfortunately that does happen with employees sometimes, where they join at one stage you're still in growth mode and they don't stay around because they don't want to grow with it.
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But I think that personal development and personal growth precedes professional growth.
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And if you want to grow in any industry and anything you're doing professionally, you have got to start by looking inward and working on yourself, and so both my wife and I invest a lot in our personal development.
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We've had now we've worked with three different business coaches, each for about two to three years.
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We both independently work, have coaching, and we also do a lot of offsite events.
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Once or twice a year we'll go to conferences, retreats, those sorts of things just working on ourselves, because you know we wanna keep leading this company for many years to come and we have to grow with it.
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It's so funny you say about you know the six figure, the seven figure.
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I remember I had an executive coach and I was president of the company that I was working at and time was like a $7 million company and our growth goal was to get to 10.
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In that moment, you know, in the near future, what am I going to do?
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How am I going to know what to do?
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And every time we would have that conversation he would just look at me and say did you know how to do it when it was seven, before you did it?
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Did you know how to do it?
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And you do like.
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You learn along the way, and even just fast forward to my days at HomeSmart when the owner was like hey, you know, I want you to take this thing public.
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You are crazy.
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Like, let's hire you a team, I don't know how to do that.
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And he's like hire yourself a team that knows how to do that and surround yourself.
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And I think that's a big piece of the growth right.
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You never want to be the smartest person in the room when you're leading a company.
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You want everyone else around you to be able to lift the organization up and lift your people up and continue that cause and to be able to learn from each other.
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So it is interesting because we look forward and we're like, how are we going to do that?
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And we look back and we're like how did we not know how to do that?
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Because you just, you learn in that journey too, you know.
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I think that's really insightful and we try to not focus on the how, which is where naturally our instinct is to go to how are we going to do it.
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And we try to remove ourselves from that and say, you know, why are we going to do it?
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And and really focus on that and the how will focus on that and the how will will present itself as you go.
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So, as we've talked a lot about people and you brought up the, the hiring and some of the times in the early days where you would hire 10 and you would lose 5 and then you'd hire 20, so how is the hiring process?
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As you've gone over 100 and over the last year or so, have you made shifts in the hiring process or what are some of the things that have really made a difference for you in hiring the right people for the organization?
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I think a big shift is that we got better and, just like working with the coach, you know you start out and you can't make a free throw and eventually you practice enough times that you get better at it.
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So I think that was a key thing is we got better at interviewing and hiring.
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That was a key thing is we got better at interviewing and hiring.
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And then we also got more clarity because we spent more time on the big picture, on what we're trying to accomplish, looking towards the future and really spending time writing out our needs and when we got really clear on what we needed and we still do this.
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In fact, we were doing this last night for a new position that we're hiring for right now, trying to become really clear on exactly what we're hiring for, because until you're clear on that, you're never going to find the right person.
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You'll find plenty of good people there's tons of great applicants out there in every job we've ever put out but if you're not clear on what you're hiring for, then you're not going to find the right match.
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In the beginning it was a little bit of the you know, try to get as many people as we can and find a couple good amongst the group of people and we've really refined that down to trying to find the right people.
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And then the last part is I mentioned earlier that critical mass when we reach the point where we could actually hire a director of people and culture and we could actually hire a recruiter, and we start.
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You know, those people come in and make us exponentially better than ourselves alone could do it focusing a little bit back in on the people that you guys serve.
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Why don't you tell our audience a little bit about that and the critical work that you're doing for a very special group of individuals?
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you bet.
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So at new frontier immigration law we do family-based immigration and our primary clients are actually a T visa, which is for human trafficking.
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We also our two other main case types are VAWA, which is Violence Against Women Act, and U visa, which is essentially if someone commits a crime against you while you're in the United States, you assist law enforcement.
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There is a path to a green card that way.
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There's a common misconception about immigration that people can just cross the border.
00:19:54.984 --> 00:19:59.857
You know, come into our office and we'll, we'll be able to help them stay, and that's not how it works.
00:19:59.857 --> 00:20:05.935
You know, for all the politis politicizing of immigration that there is.
00:20:05.935 --> 00:20:09.604
It's actually really, really a net positive for our country.
00:20:09.604 --> 00:20:11.008
And you know we could.
00:20:11.008 --> 00:20:16.059
We could go off on that topic all day, but the point is there's a lot of people out there who really need help.
00:20:16.059 --> 00:20:17.365
I'm a first generation American.
00:20:22.096 --> 00:20:22.417
No problem.
00:20:22.438 --> 00:20:24.144
Yeah, sorry, I love the passion.
00:20:24.144 --> 00:20:34.405
And the people that we help are what it's all about, and our mission and our vision, I should say, for a new frontier is to help one million people live free in the United States.
00:20:35.536 --> 00:20:37.123
Now that's, it's absolutely amazing.
00:20:37.123 --> 00:20:42.968
You mentioned the Televerti Foundation earlier and I always take a chance to give them a plug.
00:20:42.968 --> 00:20:49.535
I'm on the board of the foundation and you know they are assisting people with reentry after being incarcerated.
00:20:49.535 --> 00:21:07.521
And just the number of women you know who are incarcerated, um, over 60% of them have children, and so breaking the cycle and changing things and, uh, a lot of the people you're helping, right, you want to break those cycles and you want to and and point them onto a better life, and housing is a big issue.
00:21:07.521 --> 00:21:10.157
Um, when you said multifamily, I'm like, oh yes, you and Michelle are going to get along.
00:21:10.157 --> 00:21:12.584
Great, it is.
00:21:12.604 --> 00:21:24.307
There's so many misconceptions about different pieces of the population and different situations in our society and if we really dig in deep, there's a lot of perception changes that can happen.
00:21:24.307 --> 00:21:34.436
I was one of those people and went into the prison to tour it before getting on the board and you know, just every interaction you have changes your perception and you really want to.
00:21:34.436 --> 00:21:35.761
You have changes your perception and you really want to.
00:21:35.761 --> 00:21:38.767
You know, do more and and help people who, who want to be helped.
00:21:38.767 --> 00:21:43.028
These are people who want to be here and um and have a better life and have that opportunity.
00:21:43.028 --> 00:21:46.440
So I think it's absolutely amazing of what we're all human at the core.
00:21:46.480 --> 00:21:52.002
You guys said that in your podcast, but we're all human at the core, yeah, you know, and everyone is just trying to live their own version of their best life.
00:21:52.002 --> 00:21:54.468
No one should be judged for the worst act that they do.
00:21:54.468 --> 00:22:05.146
And people who come here so often our main client type being TV says human trafficking Phoenix being so close to the border, we have a lot of people who've been labor trafficked.
00:22:05.146 --> 00:22:16.923
They're brought here to work and then their employer holds it over them, withholds paychecks, threatens to call ICE those sorts of things in order to make them work longer hours and basically they're being taken advantage of.
00:22:16.923 --> 00:22:25.079
So we have an entire population of human beings living here in Phoenix among us that are just disenfranchised because they have no recourse and they're living in the shadows.
00:22:25.079 --> 00:22:28.663
And they're already here and they're contributing to our society.
00:22:28.663 --> 00:22:33.826
They say that if, and I'll give some stats and I'll give some numbers.
00:22:34.375 --> 00:22:46.724
Most of this comes from Peter Zayhan and his research Excellent book called Accidental Superpower Talks about why America is the global superpower and why it will remain that way, and he has an entire section on immigration and he talks a lot about it.
00:22:46.724 --> 00:22:48.862
I like his work because it's very scientific.
00:22:48.862 --> 00:22:52.596
I have a background in engineering and so I'm very much like numbers and engineering.
00:22:52.596 --> 00:23:05.443
But if we didn't have all the undocumented people who are currently here serving our community, that inflation would have been 8% to 10% over the last couple of years because of the lack of a workforce.
00:23:05.443 --> 00:23:16.431
And when you talk about mass deportations or the number of people who are here undocumented, I think what it comes down to is that America is a nation of rule followers, and I get that.
00:23:16.431 --> 00:23:17.330
I was in the military.
00:23:17.751 --> 00:23:18.491
Where else do you find?
00:23:18.531 --> 00:23:30.463
more rules than the military, and every person I have talked to, no matter where they are on the political spectrum or whatever their personal beliefs are, to a person they have said I'm fine with immigration as long as it's done legally.
00:23:30.463 --> 00:23:40.416
And so I think that there's kind of this block around the idea of illegal immigration, somebody who came into this country illegally versus somebody who came here legally.
00:23:40.416 --> 00:23:45.836
But the misunderstanding there is that there really isn't a way to come here legally.
00:23:45.836 --> 00:23:48.426
That's because our system is broken and needs to be fixed.
00:23:49.170 --> 00:23:56.861
My wife and I went to Washington back in December and we met with numerous senators from Arizona and other places to talk about immigration.
00:23:56.861 --> 00:24:02.220
And to a person, both sides of the aisle, everyone agreed yes, 100%, we need immigration reform.
00:24:02.220 --> 00:24:04.105
And we said this is amazing, this is so great.
00:24:04.105 --> 00:24:04.946
Are you going to do anything?
00:24:04.946 --> 00:24:07.855
And they said no, no, it's too politically charged.
00:24:07.855 --> 00:24:09.622
We're not going to touch that topic right now.
00:24:09.622 --> 00:24:22.201
So it's interesting that on both sides of the aisle, everyone's in agreement that we need to fix it because our rules are a mess, but nobody's willing to do anything about it, and so that's what we're trying to do yeah.
00:24:22.241 --> 00:24:25.377
Hopefully you'll have some some luck in that case, because it's just.
00:24:25.377 --> 00:24:31.218
It doesn't make any sense when you can agree on something but don't do it for political reasons.
00:24:31.218 --> 00:24:33.924
It just we don't want to go to political here.
00:24:33.964 --> 00:24:35.528
We find that in our businesses too right.
00:24:35.528 --> 00:24:48.558
You'll have team members sitting around a boardroom table and everyone will be looking at what the problem is and whether it's a people problem, whether it's a long-term process problem or my favorites were always like well, the Ashley said thing and it's like well, when did I say that?
00:24:48.558 --> 00:24:49.241
Five years ago?
00:24:49.241 --> 00:24:50.579
Why don't we address that again?
00:24:50.579 --> 00:25:02.800
And when everyone can agree and then have that safe place to move forward and ask questions and kind of create some of that change in organizations or anything that we're doing right, it can be really powerful.
00:25:02.800 --> 00:25:10.866
But we do tend to paralyze ourselves, I think paralyze ourselves in agreement, which is a very interesting human behavior.
00:25:11.295 --> 00:25:12.037
Yeah, that's so true.
00:25:12.037 --> 00:25:18.442
You know, when you look at jobs in America, right we're at, joblessness is pretty low right now.
00:25:18.442 --> 00:25:20.807
We actually we need more people to work.
00:25:20.807 --> 00:25:24.843
But there's an interesting thing is that there is no limit to the number of jobs.
00:25:24.843 --> 00:25:28.281
So America has 150 million jobs or something.
00:25:28.281 --> 00:25:29.185
I don't remember the last number.
00:25:29.185 --> 00:25:31.997
But China has like 700 million jobs.
00:25:31.997 --> 00:25:37.644
It's not because they have more industry, they have more people, and with more people it creates more jobs.
00:25:38.255 --> 00:25:49.263
And if an engineer moves to the middle of nowhere in Wyoming and starts a business out of his or her garage and they start making widgets and then they hire someone to come work with them, well, that person moves there and now you have two houses.
00:25:49.263 --> 00:25:55.223
And then someone else moves there to help them package and ship and they have kids, and now you need a school and doctors.
00:25:55.223 --> 00:25:56.515
You can literally build a city out of nothing with an idea.
