IN THIS GUIDE · Explain management when operational support comes from outside providers
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
Read what the provider actually undertakes
Hypothetical example: a provider handles bookkeeping, while the applicant still performs sales, delivery and daily customer support. List the services actually covered and the tasks left with the applicant. Do not describe one outsourced function as if it supplies all the operational support needed for the proposed role.
Identify the management decisions
Explain the applicant’s authority, discretion and responsibilities in directing the operation or relevant function. Distinguish selecting and monitoring a provider from personally doing the work assigned to that provider on paper. Include the ordinary duties that occupy the applicant’s time, not only occasional senior decisions.
Separate commercial contracts from corporate relationships
A provider contract is not itself the qualifying parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate relationship required for L classification. Identify the actual Canadian and U.S. entities and supporting ownership or control records. The applicant’s employment abroad needs its own dated evidence and timing assessment.
Check the support as the operation develops
For a new office, assess how the business would support the qualifying managerial or executive role within one year. No universal employee count replaces that analysis. Identify proposed contracts that are unsigned, limited or subject to change, and keep them distinct from support already operating.
The service agreement’s schedules, not its cover page
Ask for the schedules rather than the signed front page. A commercial services agreement usually carries a scope schedule listing what is performed, a service-level schedule stating response times and hours, an exclusions clause, and a pricing schedule that reveals the volume assumptions behind the fee. Read together, those pages show how much of the operation the provider has actually undertaken. The cover page says a provider was engaged; only the scope schedule says for what. Where the exclusions clause returns purchasing, scheduling, quality inspection or customer escalation to the client, those functions remain with someone inside the company — and if that someone is the applicant, they belong in the description of the role rather than outside it.
Records that prove the relationship, and records that only prove trade
Corporate records and commercial records answer different questions, and confusing them is a common cause of avoidable evidence requests. A share register, subscription agreements, a capitalisation table and board minutes are what establish that the Canadian and U.S. entities stand in a parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate relationship. Invoices, purchase orders and a signed services contract establish only that two businesses trade with each other. A file thick with the second kind and thin on the first has documented a supply chain rather than a corporate group. Assemble the ownership chain first, as a dated sequence showing who held what and when, then attach the commercial material to the separate question of how the operation runs. Gaps in that chain are worth closing before anything else is drafted, because an unexplained transfer of shares invites exactly the scrutiny a clean sequence avoids.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.