A large customer can be a surprisingly expensive thing to win. Robert Meltzer learned this while building VISANOW, the immigration services business that became Envoy Global. A substantial telecom account encouraged his team to pursue more large companies. The commissions were attractive. The sales cycles were another matter. Eventually, he took the company toward smaller customers, and new business doubled annually for three consecutive years.
There is a pleasing inconvenience in this story for anyone who enjoys putting famous corporate logos on a presentation. The prestigious customer and the suitable customer can be different people. Meltzer's career keeps returning to the suitable one: the employer trying to hire someone, the applicant waiting for an answer, the lawyer with more work than hands.
The lawyer who wanted the file to move
Before he built an immigration business, Meltzer studied political science at the University of Colorado Boulder and earned his law degree at Northern Illinois University in 1985. Further study in Europe extended his interest in international law. He returned to the United States in 1986 and entered private practice, working on international matters before adding immigration.
His university connections remained practical. He employed Northern Illinois graduates across legal, management, sales and technology roles, served on the law school's Board of Visitors, and supported its Moot Court Society. He also taught international law at Chicago-Kent. These are useful details in understanding his later work: legal education, legal practice and running a business have repeatedly overlapped in his career.
At Arnstein & Lehr in Chicago, clients doing business across borders needed immigration help as well. Meltzer developed a practice to serve them. Repeated questions and repeated administrative work became the irritant that led him toward an online service. An email answer could be reused. A process could be redesigned. A client might be spared another call asking where a file had got to.
The proposed platform required a $10,000 investment. The firm declined. Meltzer proceeded outside it, working with immigration lawyer Melissa Garber. VISANOW was founded in 1998. An idea that began inside a law practice was now a business with its own demands, its own customers and a reason to question how much legal work really needed to happen over the telephone.
The platform investment Meltzer requested from his law firm. When it declined, he pursued the business independently.
Immigration, with fewer rounds of telephone
The service addressed an unglamorous but consequential problem. Immigration applications require information, documents, professional judgment and coordination. Applicants want to understand the next step; employers want to know whether a hire can move forward. Repeating information makes the experience slower without making it more reassuring. A complicated process provides plenty of opportunities to make someone feel forgotten.
VISANOW combined attorney services with an online process. By 2014, its offering gathered required documents, generated personalized applications and let customers check progress and answer attorney questions online. It charged a flat fee for the relevant application or service, without additional charges for attorney time, customer service calls or a software subscription. The price and the communication system were parts of the same proposition.
Meltzer put the ambition rather cheerfully in a 2014 interview: “we were looking to make it enjoyable”. Immigration and enjoyment make an unusual pair at a dinner table. His explanation was more grounded: improve the experience of receiving legal services. At that point, he reported more than 50,000 applications processed. Those figures describe the business at the time, rather than a running total for today's Envoy.
“we were looking to make it enjoyable”
Robert Meltzer, on the immigration process, 2014
There was a human test for the machinery. In a 2008 account, Diebold's international HR representative Carrie Ball recalled an employee needing an application prepared on a Friday afternoon for a deadline the following morning. She contacted VISANOW despite knowing it already had hundreds of cases. The documents reached the team by day's end, and the application went in on time.
The episode resists the easy promise that software makes effort disappear. Someone still had to respond, assemble the material and do the work. What mattered to the customer was having a team that would try, with a system that could support the attempt. Meltzer's business made responsiveness something a customer could experience, rather than a reassuring adjective on a brochure.
When the biggest account bends the business
The temptation to pursue bigger employers is easy to understand. One successful contract appears to offer a repeatable route to substantial revenue. Yet a purchase inside a large organization has more participants, more existing relationships and more opportunities to stall. A promising meeting can become a long apprenticeship in someone else's internal procedures. The calendar, regrettably, continues to charge rent.
VISANOW's shift toward smaller businesses around 2010-2011 changed that equation. An owner or busy manager could recognize the need and make a decision. The product had a clearer route to the person who benefited from it. The resulting growth is the central turn in Meltzer's business story: changing the buyer could matter as much as improving what was being sold.
In November 2014, General Catalyst funding brought a new group of directors into the company. Karen Mills, the former Small Business Administration administrator, joined as vice chair. Former Zipcar chief Scott Griffith became chairman, and General Catalyst's Brian Shortsleeve also joined the board. The composition suited a company selling a service to smaller employers while preparing for further expansion.
In January 2015, Richard Burke became president and CEO. Meltzer moved to chief immigration strategist and retained a board seat. A founder's company had reached the point where its next stage would be managed by another executive. Meltzer exited management in 2016; VISANOW adopted the Envoy name that year. The change of name can obscure how long the original business had already been operating.
A second business for the smaller desk
His next venture, Lawyer Exchange, applied an online marketplace to legal project work. A firm could seek help with a defined assignment; an available lawyer could offer the relevant skills. The software delivery team at Forte Group describes research with both job-seeking lawyers and smaller practices before development. Its case study records six months from idea to launch.
The product's features reveal where the friction was. Lawyers needed profiles and proposals, messages, invoices and payments. Each side could review the other after an assignment. A payment integration handled transactions. These details are less picturesque than a founder's origin story, but they determine whether a marketplace is usable after the introductory conversation ends.
“Forte feels like a partner,” Meltzer said of the development relationship. His praise focused on the team connecting expectations with delivery and identifying things he had not considered. Having a business idea and getting a working product into people's hands are different jobs. He had reason to appreciate a builder who could follow the argument all the way through.
In his own writing about project work, Meltzer emphasized control and flexibility for small and solo practices. A firm could choose the lawyer doing an assignment and stay involved as the work progressed. It could seek specialist experience without immediately creating a permanent position. The attraction was a more adjustable way of matching available work with available expertise.
EsquireX announced the acquisition of Lawyer Exchange's member base in December 2022. The wording matters: the announcement concerned the community of users being brought onto another platform. It was a reminder that a marketplace's value includes the people who agree to use it. A website can be built to order; a working network requires their participation.
Now the business owner gets the questions
Meltzer now leads Vital Edge Coaching, advising law firm owners and legal technology executives. Its services include strategic planning, operational efficiency, leadership, team development, sales and marketing support, and planning for an owner's exit. The work puts him alongside people wrestling with versions of the questions his own companies raised.
His public advice has become especially interested in the changing role of an owner. In a LinkedIn video post, he describes the progression from doing everything yourself to hiring other people and reconsidering where your own time belongs. “Scaling means more than adding people,” he writes. Delegation requires the person who built the business to let the job change.
The coaching practice asks owners to examine the difference between increasing revenue and keeping more income. It also addresses the awkward experience of hiring help and finding that the owner has acquired another job: answering everybody's questions. These are specific operating problems. More customers, more employees and more activity can leave the person in charge wondering why the business feels harder to run.
Viewed alongside VISANOW, the connection is clear. A service needs a workable route from demand to delivery. Someone must decide which customers to pursue, what the team should do and how the results will be measured. Those decisions remain consequential after the software launches.
That is a particularly apt subject for someone whose career includes a law firm partnership, an immigration platform, a lawyer marketplace and coaching. Each calls for a different relationship with the work. The person handling a client's matter needs one set of habits. The person building a system for many clients must decide which habits the organization can carry without him.
Vital Edge listed an October 8-9, 2026 law firm growth workshop in Oak Brook, focused on organizational performance, legal production, marketing and sales. The subject is recognizably close to the old VISANOW problem. There is work to deliver, a customer to understand and a business model to make sensible. Meltzer's current classroom has business owners in the seats. The file still needs to move.