Read the general investor planning overview
Hypothetical example: Bianca is a landscape architect who runs a shoreline design-build practice from Trent Lakes, planning naturalized banks, terraces and outdoor living areas for waterfront properties. She wants to open the same kind of practice on an American lake. Her business needs a truck, a small yard, software and people, and almost nothing else, which sounds like an advantage until she meets the substantiality test, where a low total cost demands a very high proportion rather than a low one.
A small total cost raises the bar rather than lowering it
Substantiality is measured against the total cost of establishing or purchasing the enterprise, and the required proportion moves inversely with that total. A business that can be started for a modest sum therefore has to be funded very close to completely, and an investor who arrives with a fraction of a small number is in a weaker position than one who arrives with a fraction of a large one. Bianca's answer is not to inflate the plan artificially but to count the real cost honestly: equipment, vehicles, the yard lease and its deposit, software licences, insurance and bonding, professional registration, and enough working capital to carry payroll through a first season before receivables arrive.
Marginality is the harder test for a practice built around one person
The enterprise must not exist solely to provide a minimal living for the investor and her family. A design practice whose only earner is the designer sits precisely where that test bites, and the remedy is structural rather than rhetorical. Hiring crew and administrative staff, taking on construction work that requires employees, and showing a plan with a present or future capacity, ordinarily within five years, to generate more than a minimal living are what answer it. A staffing schedule with roles, wages and start dates, supported by the revenue that would pay for them, is evidence. A sentence asserting growth is not, and a plan whose only employee is the applicant invites the obvious question.
Commit the money, keep the receipts, and know where the route ends
Capital must be irrevocably committed and at risk, so equipment should be bought, the lease signed and the deposits paid rather than merely budgeted, and every purchase should generate a document. Money still sitting in an account described as available for investment has not been invested. Ownership matters too: she must be a treaty national, the enterprise must be at least fifty percent owned by treaty nationals, and she must develop and direct it through ownership or genuine operational control. The final point belongs in the decision rather than in the paperwork. This classification is renewable while the business continues to qualify, and it offers no direct path to permanent residence.
What else is on your mind?
Is there one minimum investment that guarantees E-2 eligibility?Is holding money or owning an asset enough for E-2?Editorial source review: 2026-09-07. General preparation guidance, not an individual assessment.