Start with the E-2 eligibility and application overview
Understand what marginality actually asks
The finding is whether the enterprise has the present or future capacity to generate more than a minimal living for the investor and family. A business producing only enough to support the household, and doing so without employing anyone or contributing beyond it, is precisely what the condition was written to catch. Capacity can be shown for the future rather than only the present, but it has to be shown with figures that follow from the business as it is being bought, not from an ambition to expand later using money that does not yet exist anywhere.
Get the historic numbers before you argue about the future
Ask the seller for three years of financial statements and tax returns, the payroll register with hours, utility and water accounts, machine counts and service records, and the premises lease. Self-serve operations often keep thinner records than other businesses, and thin records are the first obstacle. Where a seller cannot produce them, that is information about the deal as well as about the file. Reconstructed figures based on a broker's summary will not carry a marginality argument, and they are worth even less when the asking price is being justified by that same summary.
Build capacity into the transaction, not into the narrative
If the numbers as they stand are marginal, the answer is to change the business rather than the description of it. That might mean adding attended services, commercial laundry contracts with local institutions, a route collection service, or equipment that supports a genuine payroll. Each of those requires capital, and that capital forms part of the investment, which also helps the substantiality analysis. Set out the positions to be created, when, at what wage, and the revenue that pays for them, and make sure the equipment being purchased can actually produce that revenue.
Keep control, and keep the ownership clean
The investor must develop and direct the enterprise, ordinarily through at least half the ownership or through demonstrated operational control, and at least half the enterprise's ownership must be held by treaty nationals. Where two properties are bought through separate entities, decide early whether they form one enterprise or two, because the analysis is applied to the enterprise actually invested in. Passive ownership of coin-operated equipment managed by a local contractor is close to the opposite of what this condition requires, and it should not be arrived at by accident.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.