Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / From Stay-at-Home Mom to 8-Figure Law Firm CEO with Hillary Walsh

Transcript

From Stay-at-Home Mom to 8-Figure Law Firm CEO with Hillary Walsh · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  Foreign.
• 0:06
  Hillary Walsh, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 0:08
  Thank you for having me.
• 0:10
  Yes.
• 0:11
  We are so excited to talk to you.
• 0:14
  You've got quite an incredible story, Hillary.
• 0:17
  So you've been growing this, this immigration law firm of yours, which is called New Frontier immigration law, since 2019.
• 0:27
  And you've.
• 0:29
  We'll get into how you started it.
• 0:30
  There's a very interesting story there.
• 0:32
  But you scaled it up to 150 employees very fast over just a few short years.
• 0:39
  And I really just want to set the stage for our audience about how you became an entrepreneur.
• 0:44
  Can, can you just tell us that story?
• 0:46
  Yeah, it was, it was a little bit out of necessity because I, I, I think that the moment I became an entrepreneur was when I was, we had just moved back from overseas.
• 0:57
  My husband had been in the Air Force for, I don't know, 15 years at that point.
• 1:00
  We had been living overseas in Korea, we've lived in Japan, and at the time we had just moved back from England.
• 1:06
  And I had been a stay at home mom for many of those years that we were overseas.
• 1:11
  And we had four kids.
• 1:13
  I came back to America and I was ready to work because we had moved overseas right after I passed the bar exam.
• 1:19
  So it was like my moment to really begin being a lawyer.
• 1:23
  Was barefooted pregnant in the kitchen in Korea.
• 1:26
  And it was not what I had expected for my life, but looking back, I'm very grateful for it, of course, but it was not what I expected.
• 1:32
  I wanted like a cool briefcase and stuff like that, and I had a diaper bag.
• 1:37
  So we moved back and I'm like, I'm gonna go finally get to do all the lawyer work that I wanted to do.
• 1:42
  And I had been doing pro bono immigration work from overseas at the time, and so I was ready to go.
• 1:49
  But American daycare, come to find out, is hella expensive.
• 1:54
  And so to put four little kids into daycare was very financially challenging.
• 1:59
  So we had to budget shop and we found the absolute cheapest daycare we could possibly put our kids in.
• 2:05
  And the moment I became an entrepreneur was the day that I walked in from court doing pro bono work for a guy in, you know, two hours away from where I lived.
• 2:16
  And I see my baby and hear my baby screaming on the floor, rubbing.
• 2:21
  He's nine months old, 10 months old at the time, rubbing his eyes.
• 2:26
  And I pick him up and he smells like bleach water.
• 2:30
  And he, they had mopped this, like, the lunchroom tile style floor with bleach water to clean it, and then they had put him back down on it.
• 2:39
  And he was not old enough to crawl.
• 2:40
  And so he had his, like, army crawling around and gotten this bleach water in his eyes, and he was crying this horrible scream.
• 2:48
  And I went home that night, and I said, fuck this.
• 2:51
  I'm going to make money doing this work.
• 2:54
  I have to charge my clients because it's my kids who are paying the price of me doing this work for free.
• 2:59
  And that was the day I became an entrepreneur.
• 3:02
  Wow.
• 3:03
  So that's powerful motivation, for sure.
• 3:06
  So you have that.
• 3:08
  Let's call it an epiphany, really, to where you're so just.
• 3:12
  Just done with.
• 3:14
  With settling for that.
• 3:16
  So what happens next?
• 3:18
  What happens next is my very next day, I let the client know who I was working for pro bono.
• 3:25
  I asked him, do you know anybody in here who was also detained who might need my help?
• 3:30
  And sure enough, that gentleman referred me my first paying client.
• 3:33
  Within.
• 3:34
  Within probably two weeks, I had my first paying client.
• 3:37
  Okay, all right.
• 3:39
  And then you just scaled it from there one by one.
• 3:42
  Keep going, kept going.
• 3:45
  I In the detention center that I worked primarily in my first year in business, it's called La Palma Detention Center.
• 3:52
  And I worked for a lot of amazing guys from India.
• 3:57
  They were fresh to the country.
• 3:59
  They had gotten apprehended at the border.
• 4:01
  They were here to seek asylum.
• 4:02
  They were being tortured in their home country based on their religion.
• 4:06
  Horrible things were happening to them.
• 4:07
  And I did a lot of their cases, and they jokingly called me the queen of La Palma, the detention center.
• 4:13
  So I was like the detention center queen.
• 4:15
  I was in there all day, every day.
• 4:18
  I got very chubby because I was eating a lot of fast food.
• 4:22
  There's an in n out and there's a.
• 4:25
  What is the other place I love along the way?
• 4:27
  There's fast food chick fil a along the way to and from the detention center.
• 4:32
  So I was eating fast food twice a day, going to and from the detention center.
• 4:36
  And that was my hustle.
• 4:37
  I was determined to do a million dollars in revenue in my first year.
• 4:43
  When we ended up at 700,000 in my first year of business.
• 4:49
  And we were very lean, very, very small organization.
• 4:53
  Like, my first little bit of time, I was my own fake receptionist.
• 4:57
  I would have, like.
• 4:58
  It was my cell phone.
• 4:59
  I would answer my cell phone.
• 5:01
  I would pretend to be the receptionist and then collect payment for the consultation and then schedule the consultation because I didn't have any money for staff.
• 5:10
  I didn't have money for Internet.
• 5:12
  I was using a hotspot to do legal Research on my computer.
• 5:15
  So there is an amazing motivation in a mama bear or probably a papa bear too, to help provide for your family.
• 5:25
  And I was not going to keep living like we were living.
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• 5:59
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• 6:05
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• 6:09
  Wow.
• 6:10
  Okay, so you basically scaled this company with very lean, putting everything together with spit and glue, pretending to be your own receptionist because you can't even afford to hire somebody.
• 6:23
  But little.
• 6:23
  But all for the motivation of providing a better life for your family.
• 6:28
  And, you know, it's also to help other people's families.
• 6:31
  That's the beautiful thing about the work that I do.
• 6:33
  And likely the, if we, if we pull it, pull the curtains back, everybody's work that they do helps someone else's family.
• 6:41
  Like the value we add to the marketplace is the value that we get paid.
• 6:45
  But it was so cool to be able to, like the first May.
• 6:51
  Like my twins were born in May and their first birthday party.
• 6:54
  I got to actually have a real birthday party for them because we had a little extra scratch.
• 6:59
  And it was the same week that I had gotten two of my clients out of the detention center.
• 7:03
  And they were so happy because they got to be with their family.
• 7:08
  And so it's this really cool full circle moment.
• 7:12
  Wow.
• 7:12
  Okay.
• 7:13
  And let's just talk a little bit more because, you know, you went, why did you decide to become a lawyer in the first place?
• 7:22
  Oh, man, I was supposed to be a country music superstar and that just did not work out.
• 7:27
  So, you know, the next best thing is to, you know, keep getting spray tans and fit in, dyeing my hair blonde and go be a lawyer, I guess.
• 7:37
  But no, I just.
• 7:38
  When we were stationed in Japan, my husband left to go for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
• 7:46
  And I was kind of alone for six months as a 21 year old.
• 7:51
  I was very frustrated because I had moved around with him for seven years at that point, trying to get an undergrad and all in music education.
• 8:00
  So I had transitioned from, okay, I'm not gonna be able to like, move to Nashville or New Orleans and be able to do my music career, so I'm gonna be a music teacher.
• 8:08
  But then you get stationed in rural Japan, and there's nowhere to do your final stages of, like, your.
• 8:13
  Your teaching, your student teaching aspect.
• 8:16
  So I went to the base.
• 8:18
  This was in 2007, 2008.
• 8:21
  I went on base, and there was University of Phoenix, and there was Troy University, and they both had online school programs which were very new.
• 8:31
  And I said, what's the degree I can get the fastest?
• 8:34
  The gal told me political science.
• 8:36
  And I loved it.
• 8:37
  I loved it.
• 8:38
  I took this international law class while I was volunteering at an orphanage in Uganda.
• 8:43
  My husband was deployed, and I was like, this is the work I want to do.
• 8:47
  I want to help people with my life.
• 8:50
  And I really think that it.
• 8:51
  It's like it chose me.
• 8:53
  I'm a redneck kid from Kansas.
• 8:54
  Like, I never thought that I would do this work, and I really, really think that it shows me.
• 9:00
  Okay, and let's just talk about, like, the immigrate.
• 9:04
  How did you get into immigration specifically?
• 9:07
  So I was.
• 9:08
  I was living in this orphanage.
• 9:10
  Lots of.
• 9:11
  Lots of the little kids had parents who'd either passed away from hiv.
• 9:14
  Some of my little kids I was helping take care of had hiv.
• 9:18
  There were some moms who were American moms who were there adopting children and going through the whole legal process.
• 9:24
  And it was so convoluted and just bonkers to me that people would not be able to adopt these children who were.
• 9:34
  It's like an institution.
• 9:35
  You know, these are little babies who are crying at night because there's not enough people to be able to come in and hold all these babies, and yet we can't get them placed in a home.
• 9:44
  So this is in the back of my mind.
• 9:46
  Meanwhile, I'm meeting kids who are.
• 9:50
  They're street kids.
• 9:51
  They had fled civil war, essentially, in northern Uganda.
• 9:55
  Fled war.
• 9:56
  Come down to where I was at in Jinja, and they were just these homeless little teenagers who lived in a pack.
• 10:03
  And I'm like.
• 10:04
  And I'm seeing people being displaced because of the government not being able to support them.
• 10:10
  They needed better infrastructure.
• 10:12
  And all of this kind of led me to.
• 10:14
  I'm going to go be a lawyer.
• 10:16
  And then I got to law school and took a human rights class from a badass former immigration lawyer.
• 10:22
  And I was like, forget everything else.
• 10:24
  When I grow up, I want to be like her.
• 10:26
  And here I am.
• 10:28
  It's so crazy.
• 10:30
  Wow.
• 10:31
  Okay.
• 10:32
  And with the.
• 10:34
  The immigration specifically, like, just talk about what the typical case is, because it's a Big hot topic right now in 2026, when you hear so much about illegal immigration and here you're helping people get, get citizenship legally.
• 10:48
  Can you just talk about the types of people you typically help and what their situation is?
• 10:53
  For sure.
• 10:54
  I help people kind of from the whole gamut.
• 10:57
  A lot of my clients are here illegally.
• 11:00
  A lot of my clients came to the country, either overstayed a visa.
• 11:05
  They got families here, they've been here for 20 or 30 years.
• 11:08
  Some people entered the country without permission.
• 11:10
  It wasn't that big of a deal.
• 11:11
  Before Clinton was president, it was very common to come and go.
• 11:15
  And then new legislation was passed when Clinton was president that changed all of that.
• 11:20
  And people kind of got trapped because if they left, they were kind of damned if they do, damned if they don't, because they got kids and family here.
• 11:26
  But if they leave, they're never gonna be able to come back kind of a deal, or it's gonna be 10 plus years before they can.
• 11:33
  And so we take the tools that I have in my toolbox, which is just immigration law, we take their lives and we figure out what tool in my toolbox can I use to help you.
• 11:43
  And, and most of my clients, I would say 60 to 70% of my clients, I have about 5,000 clients right now, have experienced human trafficking in the United States while being undocumented.
• 11:59
  And we can, as I start to describe it, it'll all click for you.
• 12:03
  But imagine someone figures out you don't speak English, you're driving a certain kind of truck that makes it look like you don't have a whole lot of money.
• 12:12
  You're coming in asking if I can do your roof or I can PA for you, or I'm mowing your grass, and next thing you know, you are taking advantage of that person.
• 12:22
  Not, not you, not me.
• 12:24
  But people do this, they take advantage of folks and they threaten them that they're going to call immigration.
• 12:29
  They threaten them that if they don't come back and work more, that, you know, they're, they know where that they, they live and it's, they're never going to see their family again.
• 12:37
  This is the sort of stuff that happens so commonly for a large majority of my client base and through this experience or experiences, we help them get their papers and then they're on.
• 12:52
  Then they're, then they're here legally.
• 12:54
  And that is really, really incredible work to get to do.
• 12:58
  And so what's the process like too, especially today when there's so much going on with ICE and you know, all the people that have come in illegally over the past, like, what's the process when someone comes to you,
• 13:11
  like, how long does it take?
• 13:12
  How difficult is.
• 13:15
  Yeah, it really varies.
• 13:16
  So sometimes it can take 25 years in total.
• 13:21
  So I probably.
• 13:22
  I won't see most of those cases all the way through.
• 13:25
  You know, it'll be after I'm retired that some of those cases that we're filing now will come to fruition.
• 13:31
  Other cases, it takes three or four years.
• 13:33
  Some cases it takes as little as like, 18 months.
• 13:35
  Like, if you came in with a visa and you marry a US Citizen and you don't have any other complications, it can be pretty quick.
• 13:42
  But for a lot of folks, it is a very, very long journey.
• 13:46
  And even if you're not here, let's say that I am a US Citizen and I want to petition for my sister, and she's.
• 13:54
  She lives in Mexico.
• 13:55
  I grew up in Mexico.
• 13:56
  Let's say it will take over 20 years for that petition process to work, period.
• 14:02
  No cut in the line, no shortcutting it whatsoever.
• 14:07
  Okay.
• 14:09
  Is that surprising for you to hear?
• 14:11
  Yeah.
• 14:12
  Yeah.
• 14:12
  Because you hear so much about.
• 14:14
  Right.
• 14:14
  We want people to immigrate, but we want them to do it legally because we need more people and things are growing.
• 14:19
  We need people to come in and work.
• 14:20
  But you're saying if someone starts over, like the right way, so to speak, in terms of it's going to take 20 years to.
• 14:27
  To get a.
• 14:27
  To immigrate legally.
• 14:28
  20 years.
• 14:29
  Yeah.
• 14:29
  I have, I have clients who once your kid turns 21, they get put into this other bucket.
• 14:37
  And it's like the talk about the back burner of back burner.
• 14:41
  But if I am a mom, I'm a lawful permanent resident, and my kid is 21, when I get my green card through my new US citizen husband and I immigrate to the United States, it's going to take 20
• 14:53
  something years for my kid to be able to come live with me in the US because he was over 21 when I got my green card.
• 15:02
  Same rules for if I am here and I want to petition for my sibling and they're from Mexico, it will take over 20 years.
• 15:14
  And that's just the way it is.
• 15:17
  So, yeah, people talk about going about it the legal way, but they don't know that the rules are crazy.
• 15:23
  Wow.
• 15:23
  Okay.
• 15:24
  So switching gears, let's just talk about scaling your firm so you finally get to get out there and really start doing your law work.
• 15:33
  You have this powerful motivation with your family.
• 15:35
  You have a Great first year, albeit very lean.
• 15:38
  And you did what you had to do.
• 15:39
  What's been the process thereafter in terms of scaling, scaling this firm over the past six, seven years?
• 15:48
  Sometimes I don't think that we've really scaled.
• 15:50
  We've just added on more and more weight, not only in clients, but in terms of.
• 15:55
  I think that scaling is where you stay pretty lean.
• 15:57
  And I don't know that we're necessarily lean.
• 16:00
  So I think that that's just a sincere observation of the work that I'm doing.
• 16:05
  And I'm working to be more scaled and less.
• 16:08
  Just kind of, you know, in a hamburger you can just keep adding delicious toppings and then the burger becomes so big you can't fit your mouth around it.
• 16:17
  Where I think scaling would be like, you just pack more flavor into whatever it is.
• 16:21
  The couple things you're adding.
• 16:23
  In any event, we have gotten to be quite the big hamburger.
• 16:26
  And the process for getting there though has been being very focused on advertising and marketing.
• 16:35
  I've always believed that if I truly think I have a life changing service that I offer, and I do believe that, it's pretty criminal of me not to tell people about it, especially in this environment where people need
• 16:47
  an immigration lawyer who's so fired up and really, really wants to help, it would be really wrong of me not to invest in marketing.
• 16:54
  So people know that we're here.
• 16:56
  So I catch some heat.
• 17:01
  Sometimes clients will be irritated that it's like, well, people will grumble.
• 17:06
  I'm paying for all of these billboards and I'm paying for all this radio time.
• 17:09
  And it's like people are, they are paying for that so that I can tell other people that I can help you.
• 17:15
  Because if you don't know about us, then you might be living a life in fear that this is our only life.
• 17:22
  We gotta live free.
• 17:25
  Wow.
• 17:25
  So that's interesting.
• 17:26
  So you literally have people complain because I.
• 17:29
  Where I'm at, there's all kinds of billboards.
• 17:31
  That's just normal where lawyers.
• 17:33
  It's a lot of personal injury I see around where I'm at.
• 17:36
  Personal injury.
• 17:37
  Yeah, but, but you're saying clients are angry with you and they're saying that their fees are going toward pay for billboards.
• 17:43
  I have had people say that.
• 17:44
  I have had people say that.
• 17:46
  It's not the majority, the majority of people, but I think that anyone who knows how business works know that someone's paying for that and it's expensive.
• 17:54
  And if they're paying the firm for their case, then some of that money is going to pay for those billboards.
• 18:00
  So I think that it's a very fair thing to see.
• 18:04
  Whether they like it or not is all up to them.
• 18:07
  Has nothing to do with me.
• 18:09
  But yeah, mostly it's PI lawyers who advertise.
• 18:12
  And I actually made the conscious choice to kind of advertise like a personal injury lawyer, where I'm everywhere so that people can associate immigration lawyers with not being like our offices.
• 18:25
  I made a very conscious choice to have really beautiful offices, like a beautiful environment for people.
• 18:31
  Because a lot of immigration law offices are kind of like old crappy, glued down carpet, a plastic table and chairs, like just a very low end experience.
• 18:43
  And I'm like, these are VIPs.
• 18:46
  These are people who've been through harder stuff than I'm ever going to go through.
• 18:49
  I want to give them a roll out the red carpet experience.
• 18:54
  Interesting.
• 18:55
  Okay.
• 18:56
  And what's been the hardest part about this whole journey for you?
• 19:01
  Thinking that it's gonna be easier when.
• 19:04
  It's gonna be easier when I break seven figures.
• 19:08
  It's going to be easier when we are at eight figures.
• 19:12
  It's going to be easier when I have a great marketing team.
• 19:17
  It's going to be easier when I have a managing attorney that is all this destination thinking.
• 19:22
  And yes, it absolutely gets easier in the sense of like I used to check my bank account and hope that payroll would go through and now I don't have to worry about that because now we have a line
• 19:33
  of credit and so you have this cushion, you know, and.
• 19:36
  But the destination thinking is it's real hard to not get into destination thinking that, oh, it's going to be easier when it just from what I can tell, it's just never easy.
• 19:49
  The problems just change.
• 19:51
  Yeah, that's such an interesting observation because I hear that all the time.
• 19:55
  Kind of like the I'll be happy when syndrome.
• 19:58
  Right.
• 19:59
  When in reality each new level is just going to present or bring you different challenges and different types of problems that you have to solve.
• 20:06
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 20:08
  A friend I was talking to the other day, she said, you know, what you're describing sounds like parenting, because parenting is never easy.
• 20:15
  It's just parenting an infant has different challenges than parenting a teenager compared to parenting, you know, a 25 year old.
• 20:23
  They're just.
• 20:25
  The work is always there because it is our responsibility.
• 20:28
  And so the problems just present differently.
• 20:33
  And given the, the life that you detailed earlier from moving around all of, you know, Japan, Korea, England, and as a young mother.
• 20:45
  Right.
• 20:46
  With four kids and not really having stability And a place you could settle down for a long time.
• 20:51
  And such a.
• 20:53
  Let's just call it challenging time parenting your kids.
• 20:58
  Do you think that experience helped you when you finally got the opportunity to become an entrepreneur and you, you know, forced to, you know, scale this business on your own?
• 21:08
  Absolutely.
• 21:09
  I love working with other military spouses because you talk about someone who is able to think three years in advance and plan for it right now, or, hey, we got to pick up and move and we got to
• 21:19
  pivot and go here, there, everywhere at any moment's notice.
• 21:23
  We're a very adaptable bunch.
• 21:26
  Kind of by, again, necessity, but it's a skill set that really has translated into, I think, motherhood even.
• 21:35
  Again, I've never been a dad, so maybe that's just parenting, but motherhood has really taught me, like when I had four kids who were all still on a nap schedule and I still had to make dinner and clean
• 21:46
  house and also have time to relax and take a shower and all these other things.
• 21:51
  Like, you talk about mapping out your whole day and everything has to happen when it has to happen or it ain't happening.
• 21:57
  Those are all things that really help you when you're in the hustle of growing a business.
• 22:02
  Okay.
• 22:03
  And looking back now, right, when going through all that and starting the way you did, and now, like you said, you've.
• 22:11
  You've built some success and you've.
• 22:14
  You're seven years in business and still growing.
• 22:17
  What would you say has been the best part of this whole journey for you?
• 22:23
  Yesterday I got to see a family who.
• 22:27
  They hired me seven years ago.
• 22:28
  They were, I won't say one of my first clients, but it was a very, very memorable experience.
• 22:34
  I remember when they hired me.
• 22:36
  I remember the consultation, and it was because they had brought in their daughter, who at the time was maybe four or five years old, but she was teeny tiny because she had a.
• 22:47
  And has a very serious heart defect.
• 22:51
  And the dad had just been ordered to be deported, and they were basically preparing to have him go back to Mexico and the rest of the family figure it out here, but they didn't know how they were going
• 23:03
  to make this work.
• 23:04
  When the little girl needed to have a caretaker at home.
• 23:07
  They just literally didn't know what they were going to do.
• 23:09
  Fast forward seven years of fighting and everything else for them.
• 23:14
  We were able to.
• 23:16
  I was able to tell them that, like, your cases are approved.
• 23:19
  You no longer have a removal order.
• 23:21
  You're free.
• 23:22
  You don't need me anymore.
• 23:23
  I'm your friend now.
• 23:25
  I'm not your lawyer anymore.
• 23:27
  And that little girl, like, had little press on nails, you know, like, she's such a big girl now.
• 23:31
  She's a little tween.
• 23:32
  I think those are the things that keep you going.
• 23:37
  There are all these material things that come that we aspire for as entrepreneurs.
• 23:43
  We want to put this much in the bank or we want to be able to buy whatever.
• 23:47
  But those are the experiences that, for me, had I worked at a different firm, had I worked for somebody, I don't think I would have been able to take their case.
• 23:56
  I would have been told, that's too complicated.
• 23:59
  They don't have enough money or whatever it may have been.
• 24:02
  But I was able to say, I'm taking this case and I'm going to fight to the finish for them, and I got to do that.
• 24:10
  Wow.
• 24:12
  Okay.
• 24:12
  And Hillary, if people are out here listening to this and they want to learn more about what you do or potentially have a need for your services, what's the best way people can reach out to you online?
• 24:23
  Yeah, New frontier immigration law.
• 24:24
  Just give me a Google.
• 24:25
  And then I talk a lot about immigration law stuff on TikTok, and I'm just Attorney Hillary on TikTok.
• 24:32
  Okay.
• 24:32
  All right.
• 24:33
  And we will link all that in the show notes for everyone.
• 24:35
  All right, well, Hillary, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing all this incredible wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 24:42
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 24:43
  Thanks so much, Dave.