E-2 is a business case before it is a visa.

What brings clients here

A national of a treaty country has found a business in the United States, or is building one, and needs the investment to carry a visa. Immigration counsel handles the legal track. What is missing is the business side: a plan that survives review by officers trained to recognise the plans that were written to look convincing rather than to be defended.

Most applications arrive with one of two weaknesses. Either the legal file is strong and the business analysis is thin, or the business is real and the plan describes the industry instead of this company, its costs, its customers and the money actually committed.

What the case actually decides

The officer is not evaluating your optimism. Four questions decide the outcome, and every one of them is answered by documents, not by narrative:

• Is the capital substantial relative to the cost of this enterprise?
• Is it irrevocably committed and genuinely at risk?
• Will the business generate more than a marginal living?
• Can every dollar be traced to a lawful source?

The analysis behind the plan

Substantiality is a proportionality test, not a fixed number. The same amount is substantial for one business and clearly marginal for another, so the plan has to make the ratio between capital and enterprise cost explicit and defensible.

At-risk means the funds are committed to the venture and exposed to its failure. Money parked in an account, held in escrow pending approval, or kept reversible tends to weaken the case, however large it is.

Non-marginal means the business has to do something beyond paying the investor a living. The plan should show the operating logic that produces employment or economic contribution over time, without predicting them as certainties.

What the reviewer will check against the plan

• Lease, purchase agreement or letter of intent for the premises
• Supplier quotes and equipment costs that match the capital figure
• Bank statements and transfer records consistent with the stated source
• Projections whose cost base matches the location and the sector
• The applicant's role and authority inside the company

Failure patterns we see repeatedly

• Capital that is large in absolute terms but small next to the cost of entering this particular sector.
• Financial projections with no operating cost base: no rent, no payroll, no working capital cycle.
• A market section that describes an industry and never names a competitor, a price point or a customer segment.
• A source-of-funds story with one unexplained interval between earning the money and moving it.
• A plan reused from another applicant, or from a franchise template, with names and figures changed.

None of these are legal defects. They are analytical ones, and they are why a case that looks complete can still be refused.

Why the plan matters after approval too

An approved E-2 is granted in increments and renewed. The plan you submitted becomes the baseline against which the business is later read: whether it operated, whether it hired, whether the money went where it was said to go. A plan built only to pass the interview creates a second problem two years later.

The document set

• Business plan written to consular expectations, with the investment logic up front rather than in an appendix.
• Financial model with assumptions tied to the amount actually invested: revenue build, cost base, working capital, break-even.
• Market and competitive analysis with named comparables and stated reasoning.
• Source-of-funds narrative aligned with the bank record and with the corporate structure.
• Sensitivity view: what the business looks like if revenue arrives late or costs run above plan.
• Annex pack that anchors claims to evidence: quotes, lease terms, supplier commitments, licences.

What we need from you

Company documents, the investment structure, whatever market evidence already exists, and access to the numbers you are willing to defend. Where evidence is missing we say so, and we build the plan around what can be proven rather than around what would read better.

Four stages

Discovery: the business, the capital, the structure, the timeline, and the weaknesses you already suspect.

Evidence assembly: what exists, what has to be obtained, and what has to be dropped from the case because it cannot be supported.

Modelling and drafting: financials first, because the plan has to be true to them, then the narrative that explains them.

Review: the draft goes to your counsel, their comments come back, and the document is revised against them. That loop usually runs more than once.

Timelines depend on how much of the evidence already exists. A case with clean accounts and signed premises moves in weeks; one that still has to obtain quotes and lease terms does not.

Who does what

Counsel owns eligibility, treaty nationality, the application and the interview. We own the business analysis, the financial record and the document that carries it. Where the two disagree, we say so before the officer does.

Three things outside the file

It does not establish legal eligibility. Nationality, dependants, consular discretion and timing belong to your immigration lawyer.

It does not tell you whether this business is worth buying. That is an investment question, and it is answered before the plan exists: project and investment strategy.

It does not run the business after approval. Renewal depends on what the company actually became, and that is a growth question rather than a document one: growth strategy.

If the case is still open

If the business has not been chosen yet, or the investment size is still flexible, the sensible order is strategy first and document second. We do both, and we will say plainly which one you need: start a conversation.

Where this work leads

One document answers one reader, but the question behind it rarely stays inside a single direction.

• Project & Investment Strategy

The level above

Documents solve a defined file. Where the decision itself is open, the work moves up a level, into a direction, and eventually into growth strategy.