IN THIS GUIDE · L1A planning when the founder still performs client delivery work personally
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
Write down what you actually do in a week
Before anyone drafts a support letter, record how recent months of your own time were spent: billable delivery, client relationships, hiring, pricing, supervision, and the decisions nobody else can make. Include management performed between delivery tasks without assuming it occupies most of the week. A written inventory, with approximate proportions and concrete examples, gives counsel something factual to test. It also shows honestly where personal delivery still dominates, which is the problem to solve rather than to hide.
Name a successor for each operational duty
For each operational duty on that list, name the person or role who will hold it after the transfer, and say whether they exist today. Some duties move to existing staff, some to a planned hire, some to a contractor, and some genuinely cannot move yet. Recording the gaps is more useful than filling the page. A delegation map that dates each handover gives you a hiring plan and a realistic view of when the managerial description becomes accurate.
Describe the proposed position in operational language
Describe the proposed role the same way: which functions it directs, which decisions it makes without approval, which budgets and personnel it controls, and how it sits within the organization. Managerial or executive capacity turns on the work performed, not on ownership of the company or a senior title. If the description still reads like client delivery with meetings attached, that is a finding worth having before a filing is prepared.
Separate changes that must precede filing
Separate changes needed to establish eligibility at filing from developments that the applicable rules permit the company to project. An established operation and a new-office plan are not assessed in precisely the same way. Give counsel the current delegation map, the proposed responsibilities and the dates on which genuine changes will occur. Ask which facts require present evidence and which need a supported forward plan before hiring or filing around an assumed deadline.
Put the seven-year horizon on the plan now
A transfer discussion that only reaches the start date leaves out the arithmetic that matters most to a founder. L-1A stay is limited to seven years in total, and where the receiving business is newly established the first approval is generally granted for one year, with the extension assessed on what the office actually became rather than on what was projected. Those two facts together define the shape of the whole assignment: an evidence-gathering first year, then a longer period during which the founder is running an organisation they must eventually leave or convert. Time spent outside the United States can affect how the maximum is counted in some circumstances, which is a question for counsel rather than a planning assumption. Write down what happens in year six under each of the plausible outcomes — a different classification, a successor in the U.S. role, a sale, or a return — and revisit it annually rather than at the end. Hypothetical example: a founder transferring into an animal-health distribution business realises the successor being trained in Canada is also the person who would take the U.S. role in year six, which changes who gets hired first.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.