Lawyer Business Advantage

Lawyer Business Advantage


LinkedIn Marketing with Roman Zelichenko

September 04, 2020

In this episode of Lawyer Business Advantage, I have a conversation with an immigration attorney who has become a LinkedIn Biz Dev expert. Roman Zelichenko is the founder of Zelichenko Creative, and his approach is very different from the convention wisdom that you’ll find online. Learn his unique, proven approach that has worked for his clients…coming up next on Lawyer Business Advantage.
Alay Yajnik: It’s my pleasure to welcome to the program, Roman Zelichenko, founder of Zelichenko Creative and an immigration attorney-turned-entrepreneur. Roman, how are you this morning?
Roman Zelichenko: I’m doing super well. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Excited to talk to you today.
Alay Yajnik: Likewise. And thanks for being our guest today. You have a really interesting story. And when we connected, it struck me how unique it was. I would love to hear about your journey from an immigration attorney to an entrepreneur. So take us through that.
Roman Zelichenko: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I never actually thought that I would be an entrepreneur. I studied pretty law basically in college and also studied finance, went to law school because I kind of wanted that challenge. I actually wanted to go into kind of a corporate or business law-type of field and fell into immigration law through my first year internship. And I’m an immigrant. I came to the US when I was a kid, but kind of grew up with living the immigrant experience and immigrant household. And through that experience, I kind of just fell in love with immigration. I realized that it really marries both the business side of life and also the personal side, where as lawyers, we help people start new lives, bring their families over, really kind of make fundamental changes. And it was a really good career. So I really kind of tripled down in law school into the immigration field. I started a club. I took all of the courses and internships that were available. I was lucky enough. I graduated in 2013 and I was not we weren’t still fully out of the sort of economic crisis in terms of job prospects. I was lucky, really lucky to get a great job practicing immigration law, what I actually wanted to do. And so, you know, great! Doing the thing that I wanted to do. And I say this all because, again, throughout this process, I never thought, “OK, let me do this for a few years and then start a company.” But when I moved, I was working at a firm in the D.C. area. When I moved there, I was doing the same type of business / immigration work and turned out that are a lot of our clients were not just your traditional kind of corporate entities, but a lot of tech startups, a lot of, you know, really innovative tech companies that were maybe bigger but still operated like startups: a lot of innovation, a lot of really cool stuff they’re working on. And as I worked on their cases, I just started to see, “Wow, these people are building things! They’re solving problems. They’re finding areas of life that need disruption.” And I know it’s an overused term. And this foundation started being started building in my head .
Alay Yajnik: So, yes, the immigration, you really have a true passion for this. You started practicing law in the D.C. area and got exposure to all these tech startups, these companies that are solving these problems at scale. You make a big difference in the lives of individuals. These companies were doing it for hundreds of thousands or millions of people. So the scale was much bigger and they were running an actual business, an actual national company. So what happened with you, as you saw all of that?
Roman Zelichenko: I think two worlds for me collided. On the one hand, I was just always fascinated by and inspired by these companies. On the other hand, day to day as an attorney,