Della is a former U.S. Visa Officer with over 17 years of experience conducting visa interviews and leading international exchange programs, including academic and cultural initiatives. As a U.S. Diplomat fluent in Spanish and Mandarin, Della served in high-volume consulates across the globe—including Santo Domingo, Guatemala City, Lima, Taipei, Beijing, and Manila.
Her deep expertise in F-1 student and J-1 exchange visas makes her exceptionally skilled at helping applicants navigate the visa process with confidence. At VisaSuperior, Della provides personalized coaching to ensure clients are fully prepared, understand what visa officers look for, and know how to communicate their story clearly and effectively. She can help you prepare for success with U.S. visa practice interviews.
If you want expert guidance from someone who’s been on the other side of the visa window, Della is your trusted ally for a successful interview.
What inspired you to start your business, and what problem were you passionate about solving?
My husband Robert and I are the co-founders of VisaSuperior.com, an online consulting service for U.S. non-immigrant visa applicants. We’re both former U.S. visa officers with over 35 years of combined experience at the U.S. Department of State, where we approved and denied thousands of visa applications.
We launched VisaSuperior after retiring because we wanted to continue helping people—just as we did during our diplomatic careers. I previously managed international exchange programs and saw firsthand how transformative travel and cultural exchange can be. Now, we use our insider knowledge to help clients prepare for the high-stakes visa interview, increasing their chances of success and creating strategies for those facing possible denial.
Starting a business after decades in government service has been both a challenge and an adventure. We’ve learned web development, SEO, and social media from scratch, constantly adapting and growing. It’s been rewarding to reinvent ourselves while empowering others to achieve their U.S. travel dreams.
How has your business evolved since its launch, and what key decisions have helped drive that growth?
When we first started VisaSuperior, we thought it would be relatively easy to attract attention to our website through video posts on social media. We had not previously managed social media marketing and were surprised to learn how difficult it is to rank highly in Google Search so that people who are looking for visa consultants can find our business. I took the free online classes from Hubspot Academy on Search Engine Optimization and learned quite a few pointers that have helped us improve our searchability. One of the key insights has been about the importance of earning backlinks. We have been steadily working at it, but it’s been a slower process than we’d hoped. Nonetheless, we established specific SEO goals and have seen improvement over the past few months. Fortunately, we’re also beginning to see an uptick in customers. It’s not yet where we want it to be, but we will keep working at it.
In your view, what truly sets your brand apart in today’s competitive market?
Did you know that 1 out 4 U.S. tourist visa applications are denied and 1 out 3 U.S. student visas are denied? Those aren’t very good odds.
But why does this happen? It’s not because the applicants are not qualified for the visa. It’s usually because they didn’t prepare well for their U.S. visa interview.
As prior U.S. visa officers and diplomats who have approved and denied thousands of visas and who have supervised visa officers, we understand the decision-making process for visa approvals and denials. We know what factors are most important to the visa officers making these decisions. We use that inside knowledge to help our customers fill out their DS-160 U.S. visa application form correctly and practice for their visa interview. We don’t use templates or generic guides, but instead provide a one-on-one consultation with each of our clients so we can provide them with specific advice for their situation.
Utilizing this approach, we’ve helped students, professionals, businesspeople, and tourists from around the world to successfully obtain their U.S. non-immigrant visa and achieve their American Dream!
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to date, and why do you think it worked so well?
Our most effective marketing strategy so far has been to offer free consultations with businesses and organizations whose customers rely on having a U.S. non-immigrant visa. For instance, there are international exchange program sponsor organizations whose clients need U.S. visas in order to participate in the program. We’ve met with several of them and provided a free overview of the U.S. visa process. In exchange, they’ve provided us with client referrals. This has provided the most reliable and effective source of customers so far.
How do you stay connected to your ideal audience and understand their needs or behaviors?
To understand the current concerns and needs of our customers, we monitor Facebook groups where our target customers tend to go to ask questions about the U.S. visa process. We reply to their questions and then use that information to plan new videos and blogs. We also carefully review any comments left on our social media pages to note trends in what our viewers are asking about the U.S. visa process. We pride ourselves on a timely and thorough response to all audience comments and e-mails.
What’s one branding move or campaign that helped elevate your business to the next level?
One mistake I made early on was focusing exclusively on my target customers, thinking that direct outreach was the only path to growth. I overlooked the power of building relationships with other businesses and organizations that serve similar audiences. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much opportunity I’d missed by not collaborating. It’s the difference between fishing with a pole and casting a wide net—when we pool our networks, we create ripple effects that benefit everyone.
If I could go back, I’d prioritize strategic partnerships from day one. The boldest move I made was reaching out to a non-profit organization with a similar target audience to co-host a webinar. It felt risky, but it doubled our reach and built unexpected trust with our audience.
One surprising lesson? Your “competitors” aren’t always competition. Sometimes they’re your most valuable allies. Conventional wisdom says protect your turf, but I’ve learned that generosity and shared goals often lead to significant growth.
What does success look like for you, not just in numbers, but in purpose or impact?
Beyond the goal of earning enough profit to fully support my family, my goal is to provide a high quality service that helps our clients to achieve their American dream. I have seen the power of international travel and what it can do to change negative perspectives of another country’s people and culture. Travel opens doors and minds and I’m very glad to do what I can to assist people in their quest to visit the United States.
How do you personally define success, beyond revenue and growth metrics?
Have you ever done anything that caused your friends and family to think you had lost your mind? After two decades of serving as a U.S. Diplomat, I decided to quit my job and start my own business, VisaSuperior.com. This was not an easy decision. I loved my career at the U.S. Department of State where I had the great joy of managing international exchange programs. Every day, I witnessed people courageously traveling abroad, experiencing new cultures, and coming away with a completely altered view of the world and their own place in it. I truly enjoyed my work, and I had many reasons to stay. I was scared to make the change from having a consistent, reliable income, and doing what’s familiar and easy. However, the work was no longer a challenge for me. I was stagnating and needed something to take me out of my comfort zone so I could continue to learn and grow. Since starting VisaSuperior, an online U.S. visa consulting company, I have been learning completely new skills – web development, search engine optimization, social media marketing, and sales and marketing. Much of it has been terrifying because whatever I do, there is no one to blame for mistakes except for myself. At the same time, it’s been deeply gratifying because I have so much latitude to learn, be creative, experiment, evaluate and make changes along the way. Despite the financial risks, I have been enjoying the adventure of owning my own business and I am glad I had the courage to make this change.
Can you share a challenge or setback that ultimately became a turning point for your brand?
When we started VisaSuperior, we did not fully understand the importance of Search Engine Optimization. This was not something we had ever worried about as U.S. Diplomats, so it was a completely new concept to us. Fortunately, we were able to learn more about this from free online courses and we have been able to make significant progress toward moving up in the search engine results.
What daily habits or rituals keep you focused, creative, and grounded as a leader?
Every day, in addition to getting through my to-do list for VisaSuperior, I try to keep in the habit of getting exercise, eating healthy food, spending time with my husband and two kids, learning something new, reading, and getting enough sleep. I find that it can be easy to let work take over everything, especially as a small business owner. There is always more work to do. So it’s vitally important to carve out time for each of these activities each day. On the other hand, if I don’t get to all of these things in one day, which happens often, I don’t beat myself up about it. After all, there are only 24 hours in every day!
How do you approach innovation and risk in your business strategy?
One of the best aspects of owning a family-run small business is that whatever we think of as an approach to our business or new idea for how to market our services, we can try it out. We don’t need to ask permission or get a committee to approve it. If it doesn’t work, then we try something else. We set goals, we measure results, and we adjust our strategy. We love having the latitude to innovate, be creative, and try new things!
What advice would you give to someone starting a business in today’s fast-changing digital world?
On the positive side, in today’s fast-changing digital world, there are many tools and applications that are free or low-cost that are super helpful for small businesses just starting out. It is quite a difference from just five or ten years ago. Also, it’s incredibly easy to make and edit videos and to get them out in front of people quickly and for very little cost. In addition, AI tools can significantly save time on editing and creating graphics. We’ve been impressed and grateful for all these changes which have allowed our startup costs to be quite low. For anyone who is starting a business right now, I encourage you to look carefully into all the free and low-cost options available before you sign up for expensive subscriptions or head right into paying for big ad campaigns. You can get quite a bit done through bootstrapping!
On the other hand, it’s been challenging in this media rich environment to get as much attention on our website and social media posts as we’d like to see. It’s so difficult to break through and get seen by our ideal target market. We are spending our savings to make this enterprise work, so we have been reluctant to pay for advertising. But it’s a direction we need to think about so we can grow our business further.
Where can our audience connect with you and learn more about your work or offerings?
Please check out our website for free information and resources – Visasuperior
If you’d like us to help you practice and prepare for your U.S. visa interview.
For questions, feel free to e-mail us anytime at Info@VisaSuperior.com
We continually release new videos about the U.S. visa process and any new visa policies that may impact you, on all of our social media accounts.
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