Felipe Vivanco: The Chilean Entrepreneur Solving America's Labor Crisis One Visa at a Time
6th November 2025
Date
Interviewee
Felipe A. Vivanco
From a 5 AM Epiphany to Revolutionizing Immigration Recruitment: The Felipe Vivanco Story
The clock read 5:00 AM when Felipe Vivanco's eyes snapped open. Most people would roll over and go back to sleep, but Vivanco wasn't most people. An idea had struck with such clarity that by 10:00 AM, he was deep in research. By 7:00 PM that same day, he stood in a bookstore, recording videos and studying everything he could find. One month later, his vision had become reality.
This wasn't just another business idea. It was a solution to a crisis that had been quietly strangling American businesses for years: the inability to find workers willing to do the jobs that keep industries running.
Felipe Vivanco: Chilean Immigrant Turned Immigration Industry Innovator
Ten years ago, Vivanco arrived in the United States from Chile, carrying the same dreams and uncertainties as millions of immigrants before him. His first job wasn't in human resources, the field where he'd built his career back home. Instead, he found himself working at a Chevrolet dealership in Indianapolis.
"As every immigrant in the state for the first time, my first job was just trying to improve my English," Vivanco recalls. For six or seven months, he immersed himself in customer service, not for the paycheck, but for something more valuable: connection. "I was looking just to interact with other people, to try to improve my vocabulary and everything."
From Employee to Entrepreneur: The H2B Visa Revelation
Vivanco's trajectory changed when he landed a position at Nature's Partner, a landscape company. There, he encountered a mentor who would alter the course of his career. Vance Campbell, the company's owner, introduced Vivanco to a world he never knew existed: the H2B visa program.
"I didn't know anything about that program when I started working there," Vivanco admits. The H2B program, which has been operating for more than 30 years, allows American companies to bring foreign workers for temporary non-agricultural jobs in construction, hospitality, nurseries, and similar industries.
What started as learning about the program evolved into traveling to Mexico, El Salvador, and other Central American countries to recruit workers. When the company was sold to a larger holding company, Vivanco scaled his recruitment efforts even further. After a couple of years of honing his expertise, he took the leap into entrepreneurship.
"Without even notice or wanted, I end up in this lovely world," he says with genuine affection for an industry that many find complex and frustrating.
The 5 AM Solution: Building a Pre-Screened Talent Pipeline
That pivotal morning when Vivanco woke with his breakthrough idea, he recognized a fundamental inefficiency plaguing the H2B and H2A visa programs. Companies would wait until they received visa approval before starting their recruitment process, adding months to an already lengthy timeline.
His solution? Create a database of pre-screened candidates that companies could access immediately upon receiving visa approval. What traditionally took three to four months could now be accomplished in two to three weeks.
But turning vision into reality meant learning new skills quickly. When developers quoted him three to four-month timelines, Vivanco's instincts told him to act faster. "My guts tell me that I need to do this right away," he explains. So he taught himself, diving deep into the technical requirements. By October, just a month after his September epiphany, he was conducting conferences in different countries, demonstrating how his service worked.
"That sometimes I really can be a really pain in the... for all of my employees because every time I request something, it's like, yeah, I need this, but sometimes I end up doing everything by myself," Vivanco admits with a self-aware laugh.
Felipe Vivanco on the US Labor Crisis: Why Immigration Programs Matter
Vivanco's timing couldn't have been better, though he didn't plan it that way. The American labor shortage, particularly in construction, landscape, hospitality, and restaurants, has reached crisis levels. "I see my couple of favorite restaurants in Indiana shut down because they don't have enough workers in their space," he observes.
The numbers tell a stark story. The cap for H2B visas jumped from 66,000 to almost 140,000 per year in just the last two years. "Programs like the H1B, H2B and everything, they're going to help the companies to keep growing, to keep developing everything," Vivanco asserts. "There is no other solution for the shortage of employees right now. If people in here don't want to work, bring people from other parts."
His perspective is pragmatic rather than political. American businesses need workers. Central and South American workers need opportunities. His role is creating the bridge between them.
Navigating Immigration Industry Changes: The H1B1 Opportunity
When challenges arise in immigration policy, Vivanco sees opportunities. In the last 12 months, dramatic fee increases for H1B visas, jumping from $5,000 to $100,000, have made that pathway prohibitively expensive for many healthcare and IT companies.
Vivanco's response? Pivot to the H1B1 visa program, available to workers from Chile and Singapore, which costs only $3,000. "If you know how to do the process, it will not take you more than four weeks to have the person that you choose and you offer the job in the appointment in the embassy of his country," he explains. "But companies, they don't know that kind of choices that they can have."
The adaptability doesn't stop there. When the U.S. government shut down a competing program in March, Vivanco saw it as validation rather than setback. "That was our biggest competition and they shut it down. So thank you very much," he says with entrepreneurial candor. "Every single problem that we are seeing in terms of immigration in the last 12 months, we are trying to take advantage of that."
Multi-Channel Recruitment Strategy: Meeting Workers Where They Are
Vivanco's approach to recruitment reflects deep cultural understanding. His team maintains personnel in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, and Ecuador, with expansion underway in Panama, Costa Rica, and additional countries.
The channel strategy varies by country and demographic. Between Panama and Mexico, Facebook delivers the best results. In Argentina, TikTok dominates. In Chile, the winning combination is TikTok and Instagram. "You need to be taken care of. Check out which platform is going to be the right one depending on the country and the profile that you are looking for," Vivanco advises.
But technology alone isn't enough. "For the H2B visa holders or candidates, they are not too many tech savvy," Vivanco explains. "They don't trust too much in something that says in the computer or in their cell phones." That's why his company maintains a human presence in each country. People need to see a face, meet someone in person, and receive guidance through the process.
"Using technology is amazing. But we keep, we're going to keep needing people to do these kind of jobs," he emphasizes.
Felipe Vivanco's Entrepreneurship Advice: Trust Your Instincts
When asked what advice he'd give to aspiring entrepreneurs, Vivanco's response is direct and unequivocal.
"Just go ahead and do it. You will never find the right time. The right time is when you do it," he states. "Follow your guts. When you have an idea and you feel that idea is a really good one, you can see yourself making that idea work, essentially you just need to go ahead and do it. Don't make anybody else stop. You don't wait for anybody."
This philosophy extends beyond business strategy to life philosophy. Vivanco embodies the immigrant entrepreneurial spirit: seeing opportunities where others see obstacles, moving quickly when others hesitate, and building solutions rather than waiting for them to appear.
Immigration Advice: Education as Protection Against Scams
Vivanco's advice for prospective immigrants centers on self-education and due diligence. The prevalence of immigration scams throughout the United States and Central America makes research essential for survival.
"If you are looking to get a job in the States, living the American dream, the first thing you need to do is start reading," he urges. "Your phone is not going to be just for WhatsApp, some Reels or some TikTok. Please go ahead, Google the official websites of the government of United States."
He emphasizes that immigrants must educate themselves about visa types and processes to avoid scams. "At the meantime, you try to keep yourself educated in all this process. You're going to avoid a scam."
LinkedIn, he argues, is invaluable for vetting companies. "LinkedIn is the best way to check out if a company is real or not." Research reviews, verify credentials, and use all available tools before trusting any organization with your immigration journey.
Building Bridges: Technology, Human Touch, and the Future of Immigration Recruitment
As Vivanco continues expanding his reach across Central and South America, his focus remains on the human element that technology enhances but never replaces. His database now contains over 3,000 pre-screened candidates, filterable by country, experience, and qualifications. Companies can identify, interview, and hire talent in a fraction of the traditional timeline.
Yet he maintains personnel on the ground in every country, understanding that trust is built face-to-face, especially with populations that have every reason to be skeptical of promises made through screens.
"We're trying to improve everything with technology. Not because something shows up that is more faster, but mean that it's going to give you a better or a faster result," he explains. The technology serves the mission; the mission never serves the technology.
Felipe Vivanco: Final Thoughts on Immigration Industry Innovation
Vivanco's message to the immigration industry is both a call to action and an invitation to evolution. American companies need to embrace new approaches to recruitment and visa sponsorship. Technology platforms should be evaluated on results, not familiarity. Alternative visa programs deserve consideration alongside traditional pathways.
"We would like to have more space to make others to check out what we are doing here," Vivanco says. "People, please just open to new opportunities, new software, new ways to do things, especially right now."
His journey from Chevrolet dealership employee to immigration industry innovator embodies the potential that exists when preparation meets opportunity, when cultural insight combines with technological capability, and when someone decides that 5:00 AM is the perfect time to start building the future.
For Vivanco, the work continues. More countries to enter, more workers to connect with opportunities, more companies to introduce to efficient alternatives. But the foundation is set, built on that single morning when an idea became irresistible, and a Chilean immigrant in Indianapolis decided that the right time was now.
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