Opening a New Office in the U.S. Using an L-1 Visa (Ⅱ)

Writing a Business Plan

Although not as complex and thorough as one that you would submit to investors, a business plan is required for any New Office L-1 petition. The business plans typically range in the area of 8-12 pages and are more what you would consider executive summaries than fully featured business plans. When drafting the business plan it is important to include a personnel plan for the new office in the U.S. detailing how many employees the newly formed U.S. company plans to hire in the first year and over the next five years. Another important aspect is financial projections. It is important to include forward-looking projections of the company’s financials (i.e. revenues, costs, and others), setting out the company’s short-term and long-term goals. To determine whether to grant an extension after the first year, USCIS considers aspects such as the number of employees, growth in revenues, attainment of significant clientele, and other similar elements indicating that the entity has been actively engaged in business activities.

Hiring Personnel
This is another case where typical business practices and USCIS policies and immigration law come into conflict. Many companies looking to expand try to minimize the costs of expansion until they obtain new contracts or the business looks promising. USCIS however requires that within the first few months the U.S. office show a growth in personnel. In order to maximize your chances of getting the first year extension petition approved, we always recommend our clients to hire some U.S. citizens or Green Card holders to fill the required positions. Although many companies want to send specialized knowledge workers to their new U.S. office, the reason why we recommend hiring some local talent is so the company can get a healthy balance of local U.S. workers and foreign workers on the U.S. company payroll and organization chart. Taking this more conservative approach in the beginning will inevitably prove to be a wise decision when the New Office L-1 is submitted for extension and later on when the company needs to send more key personnel to the U.S.

The question that many companies ask when they are told about the hiring requirement is: how many people do we have to hire? The answer is not straight forward, because the regulations do not set out concrete numbers, instead the company should hire as many individuals as is needed to operate the venture in the U.S. successfully and meet its financial goals. Because a New Office L-1 will initially be approved for one year, the company will need to hire some staff before they can file for their one year extension. The reason<