Scale Like a CEO

Scaling to 280 Employees in 2 Years: Immigration, Hiring & Empathy with Raghu Suram

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 54

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Visa backlogs stretching into decades. Policy shifts that raise the stakes for employers and talent. A founder who turned his own immigration journey into a blueprint for scaling a 280-person services company built on empathy and execution. In this candid conversation with EB1A Experts CEO Ragu Saram, we peel back how extraordinary ability categories like EB1A and O1A are becoming lifelines for high-achieving professionals, especially those from India and China facing chronic delays. Ragu shares why the team invests heavily in education, evidence strategy, and attorney partnerships to help clients move faster with clarity and confidence.

We also get real about the transition from founder to CEO. Ragu went from optimizing product features to owning P&L, hiring, marketing, and culture. He talks through the turning point when nonstop interviews took over his calendar—and how “hire slow, fire fast,” layered decision-making, and trusted leads in sales, operations, and customer success unlocked scale without chaos. You’ll hear how the company blended internal promotions with seasoned leaders from brands like Uber, Nvidia, and ServiceNow to bring proven processes while rewarding internal performance.

Rapid growth created a content-heavy operation, so the team embedded AI at key points to accelerate drafting and review while keeping quality high. Culture isn’t lip service here: empathy and grit drive priorities. Leaders study client personas, map real scenarios, and rank roadmaps by human impact, not just revenue, so high-stakes cases get the urgency they deserve. If you’re navigating U.S. immigration as a skilled professional, or scaling a service business under policy volatility, this conversation delivers a practical playbook—how to stay human, move fast, and build systems that last.

Enjoy the episode? Follow, share with a friend who needs immigration clarity, and leave a quick review so we can bring more conversations like this to your feed.

SPEAKER_00:

This episode of Scale Like a CEO features Ragu Saram, founder of EB1A Experts. He explores the complexities of immigration and shares his strategies for scaling operating businesses. Join us as he discusses overcoming visa challenges and building successful teams in a competitive landscape.

SPEAKER_01:

Ragu, thank you so much for joining me on Scale Like a CEO. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind, give us a 90-second intro to you and your business.

SPEAKER_02:

Thanks, Justin. I'm really excited to be here. My name is Gure B. Suram, and I'm the CEO and founder of EB1A Experts. A quick intro about me. I came to the United States in 2014 to pursue my master's at USC. And one quick thing which I've learned for coming here is starting a company. And that's the biggest problem that I've seen is navigating from my student visa at the time because of the USC and student visa. And then going to the work visa has been difficult. And of course, we'll talk more about that in a bit. But just going back on the quick control, I have bachelor's from ITOT in mechanical engineering, masters in business from USC. Have worked for numerous economics of the project, again, a lot of different skills in AI, in services, in managing people as well, and also building great products and great services over time. But to be honest, that has helped me a lot with my current company, EB1A experts. And talking about the company EB1A experts, we, as the name suggests, we need suggest a little bit more, but we're in the immigration service. We help tech professionals with their EB1A green card have. We have started a little over two years ago. And at that time, thought process just helped professionals with EB1A, but over time we have ventured into other services as well, like ONA and EB2 and IW as the biggest pain point which larger professions, especially if you say Indian-born professionals or Chinese-born professions, is their normal routes of getting a green card is backlogged. It takes for an Indian profession probably could take multiple decades to get a green card if they work a normal route, depending on where the priority is when they have come to the country. And same thing with the Chinese as well. So with the traditional, even for the X-Tor that people who have high achievements, there is only one alternative path, which is EB1. So we are helping professionals educate them in what exactly it is, how do they have to do it? We work with them, we collaborate with them throughout the end-to-end processes, make them and then work with amazing attorneys in the whole path as well. So their dreams is true.

SPEAKER_01:

And I'm curious, immigration is uh an area that's up with a lot of change right now. So I'm curious about the current administration is imposing much larger fees on H1B V says. And so I'm curious how that impacts the people that you work with and kind of helping them with their immigration.

SPEAKER_02:

That's a good question. Just trying to understand about the hundred thousand dollar fees, the presidential proclamation. I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to add an extra fee so that the companies in the US they double think about hiring someone who wants to get an H1B. Instead, they think about hiring the American citizens, American citizens first. So they just want to have that distinction. I know there's a lot of things going on. Everyone has completely different views about it. How does it help? How does it not? But many of the things we'll only see things moving forward, right? Probably error two. We'll see how the things stand out and then people make a decision on it. But for me, though, we're in the skill category, right? So O1A and EB1 are for the skilled professionals. For us, to be honest, I don't think we would see much change, or we would probably even see more impact more because of the decision. Because when one visa category is blocked, scrutinized more, the other permanent visa categories, which is EB1 and O1, is gonna gain more repetition. To be honest, we're seeing more inquiries than last few months. So it's kind of an advantage for us.

SPEAKER_01:

Interesting. Well, let's talk a little bit about your business and kind of how you've been growing your business. So if you think about your transition over the past years in growing and scaling your business, what's one of the biggest shifts that you've had to make personally moving from founder to CEO?

SPEAKER_02:

Great question, Justin. To be honest, I think about this thing a lot of times. So as I mentioned, I've been a product manager for a long time. I've worked at great companies like Salesforce, 24-7 AI, and very small startups as well. And being a product manager, one thing which I was actually learned a lot is I've learned more about technology, managing people, working different things as well. But however, thinking about a big picture was not one of my day-to-day responsibilities at the time. I was just thinking, what about the product, not the company? But being a CEO, now I have to think about much more responsibilities. For example, hiring is a big piece of the whole process. Also, look at the PL, what are the costs, where are the profits, where are the losses. Think about marketing. That was never a part of my whole resume throughout my career. So there are different functionalities. Currently, what I'm looking at is I was a CEO, looking into everything is really, really difficult. Most important thing, which I spend quite a bit of time on hiring. So I have the process of hire slow, do your due diligence, take as many interviews as possible, and then if you don't like them, five fast. So high slow and five fast are my methodology about the hiring.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Um, and talking about hiring, I'm curious, when you're hiring, what are some of the qualities that you're looking for in the people you're hiring?

SPEAKER_02:

One of the most important things, which I'm looking for at that at this time, is relevance in the customer service industry. Most importantly, customer service industry, for industry, compared to other industries, requires more empathy, more patience into the aspects as well. So I'm just looking for relevant experience. That's one thing. The second thing is we are hiring for the roles. We're not a big company like MetaHub or Google that hire channelists, and then they can train for each individual product. But we are trying to look at more relevant experience as well. For example, we as a company, we have a lot of content writers. So we definitely require people who actually have content writers and ability to use a lot of AI tools. We develop a lot of AI tools internally. So we just have the ability, some content writers who are able to use a lot of tools and ability to get the content done really fast. Those are the couple of things. And the most important thing is, of course, the energy. Energy is gonna be the most biggest factor. We just want to see having someone is having that energy, being passionate about the work, what they're doing is a third quality, which I usually do first when hiring some people. Of course, not when you're growing the company, not every decision is about your favorite. But one thing what you say is 90% of the time we're hiring really good people in the company.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. You talk about hiring for some of the experience or skills that people already have. And I can definitely see that in an organization where maybe you don't have enough resources to train, like you mentioned, like a meta has the resources to train the people that they're hiring. And so I'm curious then, kind of along those lines, when you look at some of the leaders that you have in your organization, how often are you promoting from within and grooming those leaders versus hiring new leaders from outside the organization?

SPEAKER_02:

That's a good question, Justin. So we've been only two years old. So at least the majority of top-level exec rules, such as sales, marketing, customer success, and operations, we have to bring in external people. However, within the company, the project managers, the tech leads within each of the teams. Currently, we are kind of doing a mix. We are definitely promoting the people who are doing well in their respective positions. And also at the same time, we're also bringing in project managers who work then the good companies, let's say Uber and then Nvidia. So we have a project manager from Uber, Nvidia, ServiceNow, of being more way to the customer industry as well. So it does both. One is we will have the people who have the knowledge and the positions to guide the team well. At the same time, we will have a lot of processes from other great organizations come to the company as well. So we're kind of doing mix. And to be honest, this process has been working really, really well for us.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And you mentioned you've been building the organization for about two years now. How big is the company? How many full-time employees do you have? Now the second question, Justin.

SPEAKER_02:

So we have 280 people in the company. I mean, majority of them are content writers. And because this is a process where we require a lot of content ranking as well, a lot of collaboration, a lot of high-touch systems. So we have grown 20 right now. To be honest, we haven't been hiring much in the last four to five months. We're just trying to improve the processes and optimize a lot of things, bring AI at every point in the way. When I started the company, of course, we wanted this to be more product. Keep less people, bring more product. But however, for this podcast, it's actually relevant as well. However, we're at a time last year, I think the number of customers are growing rapidly. And at the same time, bringing a lot of tools, a lot of products was valued out. So we focused on bringing a lot of people into the company to have the growth behind the kit, which we are actually getting clients. But that's been the case.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's some incredible growth over in the span of two years. And so I'll bet there's a lot of stressful moments in all of that. And so, you know, I'm curious if you can share a time when you felt maybe overwhelmed by decision making and what helped you to break through that.

SPEAKER_02:

No, that's a good question, Justin. So especially on the hiding part, right? This prompt me in the first six months to one year of the company where I was taking more interviews. I was taking first two rounds of interviews for each of the persons who joined in. At the beginning, when I had probably a couple of people a month, it was easy to take the calls. But later on, it became too much overwhelming to zone my calendar, had at least eight to ten hours of meetings, just meetings every day, nothing else. And then there were like two to three hours of work. So to be honest, I was spending 20 to 14 hours, 80 Saturdays and Sundays, and those are really crazy days. But one thing what we have done, we built a system where different so what I did was we do have different decision makers at different points, and and bringing the trust and just ability to trust them to do well and have a clear reporting structure across the company is actually worked wonders for us. That's one thing, more than the hiring part. But then I think also the same mentality which was actually also presented across different teams as well. Our sales team, I was always lean on the second call, third call, defining the strategy and everything. But later on to scale the company, so I start trusting, having layers within the sales team and also giving more trust, more confidence along the process as well. So, in a way, just uh hiring the peak the right people and also at the same time having those decision makers at different points has actually helped us pretty well, Justin. We made so many decisions, some of them worked really well, some of them did not as well. I'm happy to talk about the others as well. I know I spoke about worse things worked well, but I'm happy to talk about the others as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Well, I'm curious, what as you've grown and you've grown so quickly, what's been the hardest part of maintaining alignment and culture as you grew? Well, that's a great question.

SPEAKER_02:

The major thing on the alignment is the training of different members and setting the expectations. As I mentioned earlier, this is a very high-tech process which we have. I mean, we're kind of going a completely different route than everyone else in the world. So it's a high-tech system. So we just need to provide that empathy, trying to understand the customers, their needs as well. When we're growing fast, it became definitely difficult to invite that sense of culture, empathy at every point in the way as well. So that's a goal we have identified definitely inquiries and customer issues. So our goal was to identify and just go with the product management mentality and local prioritize. Number one, actually, the problem which we have seen, there is the two things, like lack of empathy and lack of sense of urgency as well, which is kind of what we have seen. Now we have built some processes within the company to move those things forward. It's very important to understand our customer really well, and at the same time, deliver on the services, what we have promised, within the timeline, what we have promised as well. So we're just bringing that. We're not up there yet, but we are those are the things which we're adding back down to.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And how do you define the culture of the organization that you want to carry into the future? How many immigrants to the country?

SPEAKER_02:

And one thing, and especially a lot of a lot of my friends who are immigrants as well, they want to be heard of, right? They continue to be a lot of empathy about the problems. And these problems are unique, and sometimes you kind of everyone cares about the problems. So we just want to build a culture with a deep empathy, something which we want to do. And that's one thing. The second important thing is a lot of times everyone asks, What is your strategy? What is your strategy of the company? I mean, there's definitely being an immigration space, there's a lot of problems to solve. But one of the biggest strategies which I would say is great. We want to do this thing, there's a market for it, but just have the grid, have the climb and do achieve these things. And to be honest, that's one of the strategies for us. Grid is a strategy, what we are being using as artists.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I love the focus on empathy because I could imagine the thing that you're helping people with is so stressful to navigate. And so that empathy is so critical to make sure that you have it. And so I'm curious, what are you doing today to help prepare your leaders to continue building those things like the empathy and the grit into the future?

SPEAKER_02:

So, what we're trying to do with our leaders, especially Justin, is trying to go into the scenarios. So most of our leaders currently probably are six months or eight months or one year old with the company. So it's very important for them to understand different customer personals, the problems they are facing. Yeah, even though every immigrant problems are different, every person's problems are different. Let me tell you one example. I was meeting a client of first over the weekend. He's from India this year, but he hasn't traveled to India in nine years. There's a lot of lot of different reasons. One was pandemic, one was there's many times. There's some visa issues. I can go into the whole problems, but in short, there's been a lot of different types of problems. I know at high level those problems, so I can actually empathize with the situations. So one important thing, what I'm asking our leaders, is try to understand different persons. Try to just think about them, just put yourself in their shoes and see how would actually feel how you would solve it. That's one important thing which we're trying to do, Justin. The other thing is we are also adding empathy as an important factor when we prioritize what you're gonna do for next quarter. So we have just completed what are you planning for the next quarter, and we have prioritized based on the empathy. It's not always based on the revenue, it's not based on the market, based on the empathy, right? This is the biggest problem, probably, just focus on that rather than just thinking much about the revenue, much about the other things at the moment.

SPEAKER_01:

I love that. Well, I love any organization that is that focused on being human and the human traits of empathy and connecting with others. That's really great. Regu, I've really enjoyed having a conversation with you today. If folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do so?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, they can connect with me on LinkedIn. So we can just search EB1 and find me on LinkedIn. I think that's the best way. I'm on LinkedIn all the time, a few hours every day. I try to respond to my messages as well as possible. So emails, I've been getting a delusion of emails, probably 100 to 300. There's always a chance of people things getting lost out. So LinkedIn is the best way.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, great. Well, Ragu, thank you so much for the time.

SPEAKER_02:

Thanks so much, Justin. It's been a pleasure to speak with you.