IN THIS GUIDE · Weighing a low-overhead service business against the substantiality and marginality tests
Start with the E-2 eligibility and application overview
Cost the business honestly before calling it cheap
Low overhead is not the same as low cost. Price the software subscriptions, insurance, licensing, professional fees, a marketing budget, a workspace, and the months of operating cash needed before invoices are paid. Add the cost of the first hire if the plan depends on one. Many service ventures look inexpensive because their real inputs are unpriced hours. Writing the true number down makes the later conversation about substantiality concrete rather than theoretical.
Show a real, operating enterprise
A treaty investment must sit in an active commercial undertaking, not an idea or a passive holding. For a service company that usually means registration, a bank account, contracts or engagement letters, insurance, a tax registration, a website and, ideally, early clients. Retained personal belongings pressed into service, such as a laptop already owned or a spare room, carry little weight as investment. Distinguish assets bought for the business from possessions that simply exist.
Answer the marginality question with a plan, not a promise
An enterprise that will only ever produce a living for the investor and family raises marginality concerns. There is no universal ten-job minimum to hit, so the answer is a credible account of capacity: the pipeline, pricing, delivery hours available, and the point at which work must be delegated. Show the arithmetic that turns billable capacity into revenue, and be candid about the assumptions a reviewer would test first.
Develop and direct, not simply deliver
The investor must be in a position to develop and direct the enterprise. In a one-person consultancy the two roles blur, so describe them separately: which hours go to selling, hiring, systems and finance, and which go to client delivery. A founder who is entirely booked delivering has no time to build the thing being invested in. Structure, however small, should show direction over the business rather than only labour inside it.
Cost the business from the work it has to do
A low-capital venture is not a weaker case by definition, but it is one where the numbers have to be built rather than asserted, and the most reliable way to build them is from the work outward. Start with what the business must actually do in a week to serve its customers: the hours, the travel, the materials, the tools and subscriptions, the insurance and licences, the workspace arrangement, the administration nobody enjoys. Price each honestly, including the things founders habitually absorb personally. Then add working capital sufficient to survive the gap between doing the work and being paid for it, which in a service business is frequently the largest single requirement and the one most often omitted. That total is what the enterprise costs, and the meaningful figure is how much of it has actually been committed rather than intended. Two further requirements follow from the same exercise. Non-marginality asks whether the business has the present or future capacity to generate more than a minimal living for the investor and family, which a staffing and capacity plan answers far better than a revenue projection. And develop-and-direct asks who runs it, which in a one-person service venture means being clear about the difference between performing the work and directing the business. Hypothetical example: a founder planning a photography studio prices twelve cost lines from the work and finds three that no earlier version of the plan had contained.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.