Read the general business expansion overview
Hypothetical example: a company in Sunbury-York South that manufactures cedar fencing and outdoor timber products has sold into the United States through distributors and now wants its own U.S. sales office, run by its Canadian sales manager. Because the U.S. entity has been doing business for less than a year, the L-1A petition is a new-office case: approved initially for one year, with evidence of secured premises, the financial ability to start paying the manager, and a plan showing the office will support a managerial role within the year. Hypothetical example: a custom-prosthetics manufacturer wants a Canadian executive to establish an American fitting-and-distribution office. Management must assess whether it can show premises, funding, staffing capacity, and a credible first-year managerial structure before seeking approval. A draft plan is useful only when leases, corporate records, and budget assumptions support its stated milestones.
Secure the premises and the corporate structure before filing
USCIS requires evidence that sufficient premises for the proposed new office have been secured; the rule does not categorically require a traditional leased office or bar every shared, home-based or month-to-month arrangement. Form the U.S. subsidiary, issue its shares to the Canadian company so the parent-subsidiary relationship is documented, open a bank account and capitalize it with enough to cover the manager’s salary and the first year’s costs. Assemble the Canadian company’s financial statements, share register and doing-business evidence, together with the U.S. start-up evidence. The foreign qualifying entity must remain doing business, while the U.S. entity is allowed to be a new office that has not yet been doing business for one year. The manager needs a continuous year with the Canadian company in the last three, shown by payroll, and her Canadian role should already be managerial or executive.Assemble an opening binder containing the executed lease, incorporation record, ownership proof, bank funding, and foreign-company operating documents. Each item answers a different question; none can be inferred from the others.
Write a plan that makes the role managerial by month twelve
In a new office the manager will, at first, do everything herself: calling distributors, arranging freight, handling returns. That is accepted for a start-up, but the petition must show that within one year the office will have the staff and structure to make her duties primarily managerial. The business plan should set out the hiring timeline — an inside sales representative, a warehouse coordinator, an administrator — with the revenue projections that justify each hire, and an organizational chart as it will look at the end of the year. Include distributor agreements and purchase orders already in hand; a plan grounded in existing sales is far more credible than projections alone.Turn each hire in the plan into a dated operational dependency: role, compensation, recruiting source, projected start, and revenue support. That makes the transition from hands-on startup work to management testable at the extension stage.
Keep the evidence for the extension from the first day
The one-year approval will be followed by an extension petition that asks what actually happened: staff hired with payroll records, sales invoiced, the lease maintained, the manager’s duties as performed. Set up the U.S. books to capture that from the outset, keep the Canadian company active and trading, and diarize the extension filing well before the year ends. If hiring falls behind plan, document why and what was done instead rather than restating the original projections. Her spouse in L-2 is employment-authorized incident to status. Total L-1A time is limited to seven years, and fees for the initial and extension petitions are on Form G-1055.Maintain monthly evidence from launch: invoices, payroll, bank activity, customer agreements, and current organization charts. If conditions change, contemporaneous records explain the revised path far more persuasively than a recreated narrative.
What else is on your mind?
Does being a business owner or director qualify me for L-1A?What employment history should an L-1 transfer review cover?What makes a new-office L-1A case different?Why does an L-2 spouse’s admission record matter for work?Editorial source review: 2026-09-07. General preparation guidance, not an individual assessment.