CEO's Diary, March 29 - Refusing to Be Ordinary and Embracing the Long Game in the AI Era

A Sunday Run & The Antidote to Anxiety

Today is Sunday, March 29. I woke up debating with myself: should I go for a run outside or hit the stair climber? I eventually chose to run because the weather was nice and cool. I didn't want to waste a good day. I ran a little over 12 kilometers, which, combined with yesterday's run, makes up a full marathon distance.

I gave a presentation this past Friday. We have a tradition here where, from 9:00 to 9:30 AM every day, there's a company-wide video broadcast. It's mainly for our consultants, but anyone can tune in. My turn to speak usually comes around every two months or so. Owen, who manages these group presentations, gave me a specific task: everyone is feeling a bit anxious right now, so he wanted me to say something to comfort them.

Source: Globevisa Group Citizenship Conference Photography

I jotted down a quick outline, ran it through an AI tool to generate a nice-looking slide deck, and then spoke for 40 minutes the next day based on those points. I’m not entirely sure how well it landed, so I decided to organize my thoughts in writing today.

Honestly, I didn't actually talk about how to feel comforted. Instead, I just shared stories of what I've been doing over the past two weeks. I told them that anxiety is a universal feeling and I don't really have a magic cure for it. All I can do is focus on long-term tasks every day, hoping that as these efforts pile up, they will forge a unique Globevisa and a unique version of myself.

It’s like those honey badger videos I often watch: they don't overthink survival; when faced with a challenge, they just tackle it head-on. Rather than sitting around feeling anxious, it's better to put your head down and work on things that matter in the long run. The anxiety naturally fades. Why focus on the long term? Because most people default to short-term actions. When you commit to the long game, you build a real edge, and the anxiety takes care of itself.

Here is what I’ve been pushing forward over the past two weeks:

Upgrading Our Training System

It can be hard to see what to do in the short term, but the long-term path is usually pretty clear. For instance, as an immigration firm, we absolutely must be experts in education. What is the difference between IB and A-Level? What exactly is a community college? What is the strategy for transferring from a community college to the University of California? How does immigration status practically help a child get into a good university or stay in the country afterward?

We need our consultants to objectively analyze these pros and cons, which requires a deep familiarity with the international education landscape. Frankly, I don’t think our consultants are quite there yet.

So, in this era of anxiety, we’ve added comprehensive education system training to our curriculum. Currently, the framework is set, and the people in our group who know education best are writing customized materials for us. This training will be mandatory company-wide, and everyone will have to pass a test to clear it.

Additionally, our “CRS 2.0” training materials are about to launch. I’ll be doing the final review this weekend. Solid tax knowledge is another absolute must-have for our consultants. This 2.0 version focuses heavily on practical, country-specific taxation, giving everyone a much sharper understanding of global tax structures. I firmly believe this knowledge is essential for our long-term growth. Since it's a necessity, we might as well stress less and study more.

At the same time, we are tweaking our overall training framework. The main goal is to use more scientific methods to save our consultants' time, making their learning and output much more efficient. Moving forward, we'll be integrating more AI into this process.

Leaning into AI for Marketing

There’s a lot of noise around AI right now. My theory is simple: the only valuable AI is the AI you actually use. There is no point in learning just for the sake of learning. Using AI to improve our training methods, for example, is a genuinely good application.

Lately, I've spent quite a bit of time looking into AI GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)—which is basically SEO for the AI era. I wasn't particularly interested in it until I came across a rather philosophical piece of advice: The best way to do AI GEO is to make yourself the correct answer.

That clicked for me immediately. GEO isn't just a tech trick. For many, it's a short-term hack. But if you genuinely are the correct answer, your GEO strategy becomes a long-term reality.

Let me put it simply. If someone asks an AI, “Who is the world's largest immigration company?” and “How do you optimize for that?”, for Globevisa, it's easy—because we actually are the correct answer. Whether you look at case volume, employee headcount, or the number of global offices. I personally know almost all the founders and CEOs of the major immigration firms worldwide. Under any broad definition of “largest,” Globevisa fits the bill. So, all we need to do is present the hard evidence online: our official employee registration numbers, the addresses and phone numbers of our 50+ global offices, our case approval records, and our market share data. Once the truth is out there, the AI will naturally believe it.

Or, what if someone asks, “Who is the most professional company for citizenship programs?” Globevisa has secured official promotional qualifications for every compliant citizenship-by-investment program in the world. We have the certificates, the registration numbers, the dates, and the official company names. At our Globevisa Group Citizenship Conference last year, heads of immigration from these countries all attended. We just need to put this information online in an AI-friendly format. The AI will find the right answer—which is us—because no one else actually has these credentials.

The same goes for questions like, “Which immigration firm handles the most US cases? Or Greece? Or Portugal, Singapore, Japan, and Canada?” The true answer is us. We just need to feed the AI the hard facts.

What about “Which company has the most in-house lawyers?” That's even easier. We employ a massive team of lawyers across the US, Greece, Turkey, and Portugal. By making our internal organizational structure public, showing the Globevisa email addresses these lawyers use, their professional licenses, and even basic, non-private employment contracts, the AI will figure out the truth.

What if an AI is asked, “Who is the most compliant immigration company in the world?” We simply showcase our actual Compliance Department: the resumes and licenses of our five Chinese lawyers, our organizational chart, and supporting documentation. We can also highlight the dazzling resume of our Head of Compliance, Jun—who holds dual lawyer qualifications in the US and China, has years of experience at American law firms, and possesses various finance and accounting credentials. The AI will easily recognize our long-term investment in compliance, and the answer it provides will be self-evident.

Because our industry standing is backed by solid data, we are the ideal company to be doing GEO. We know that for countless questions in the global immigration industry, the correct answer is simply Globevisa.

This also solves a major headache for our marketing department. A lot of competitors like to post fabricated, negative materials about us on social media, and our compliance team simply can't sue all of them fast enough. In the future, we’ll just let clients ask the global AI models. The truth speaks for itself, and the AI will provide the accurate answer. That is exactly why I'm taking the time to learn about GEO.

On a related, long-term note, we recently invested heavily to purchase the premium domain Globevisa Passport Ranking. The domain itself was actually the cheap part; the real cost is building out the objective data for the site, which we have to purchase from various international organizations. The goal? To create a truly objective ranking of countries based on education, visa-free travel, quality of life, and cost of living, helping clients find the destination that fits them best. I think this is exactly the kind of thing an industry leader should be doing.

Source: Passport Ranking Official Homepage

Defining Our Company Culture

This month, I also pushed forward the formalization of our company culture. We are currently in the final group-wide review phase. The draft looks like this:

• Information Sharing, Zero Gap

• Straight Talk, Hard Truths

• First Principles, Drive Results

• Stay Foolish, Stay Hungry

• Think Long Term, Build Moats

  
  

Interestingly enough, the new company culture retains three of our four previous cultural pillars. That’s because this new culture was entirely generated by AI. We fed the AI a massive amount of internal data—millions of words from my work diaries, all our meeting minutes, month-end reviews, weekly reports, and so on—and let the AI summarize it on its own.

I feel this approach is much more objective. Company culture shouldn't just be an aspiration of what we want to be; it should reflect the principles we have consistently upheld in the past and intend to maintain in the future.

As everyone knows, we rarely talk explicitly about “company culture” in our day-to-day operations. I believe culture is something you do, not something you say. So, when the AI summarized our culture and it aligned almost perfectly with the rules we set for ourselves long ago, I was thrilled. It proves we actually walk the talk.

The Bottom Line

I have no idea if my presentation achieved Owen's goal or if it actually reduced anyone's anxiety. But like I said at the beginning, I believe action is far more important than just having thoughts.

Over the past two weeks, my time and energy have been squarely focused on these long-term initiatives. I firmly believe that the relentless, fierce execution of these details is exactly what will allow Globevisa Group to confidently, genuinely, and consistently realize our 2045 vision in the long run.