Your Lithuanian company will be ready in three weeks. Your pipeline will not.

Founders who call us about entering the EU open with the same question. How long does it take to register the company? The honest answer takes about fifteen seconds: the articles are signed with a qualified e-signature, the filing goes through the Lithuanian Centre of Registers, and the company exists within days of the paperwork being right. VAT registration and a payment account add a few weeks on top. Call it three weeks from decision to a working entity.

Then comes the question nobody asks. How long until the entity has customers?

Across the market entries we have supported, the answer sits between four and eight months before the pipeline covers a single salary. That gap between three weeks and eight months is where expansion budgets die.

The paperwork is a solved problem

Lithuania is a good place to hold an EU entity, and the reasons are boring. Full foreign ownership with no local director requirement. Remote incorporation with an e-signature, so you never book a flight. A corporate tax regime that a small company can model on one page. Direct access to the single market, which is what the customer on the other side of the border actually cares about when they check whether they can buy from you.

None of that is a competitive advantage. Every founder who reads a comparison article reaches the same conclusion, and roughly 3,000 new companies register in Lithuania every month. The structure is table stakes. You need it, it costs you a few thousand euros and three weeks, and then it sits there generating nothing.

We have watched clients spend eleven weeks perfecting a holding structure for revenue that did not exist yet. The structure was elegant. The revenue never arrived, because nobody had spent an hour deciding who would buy.

Where the eight months go

Break the demand side into its real stages and the timeline stops being mysterious.

Two of those stages resist money. Mailbox warm-up takes three to four weeks whatever you pay, because the mailbox providers measure behaviour over time and ignore your invoice. Enterprise procurement takes as long as the buyer's finance calendar says it takes. You can compress the list building and you can compress the offer work, and that is the whole of what speed buys you.

The rest of the delay is arithmetic. A cold campaign to a well-chosen list of 1,000 companies returns somewhere between 10 and 40 positive replies. Half of those turn into meetings. A third of the meetings turn into an opportunity. If your close rate is 25 percent, that campaign produces one to three customers, and you needed 1,000 correctly chosen companies to get there. Choose them badly and the same effort produces zero, with no diagnostic to tell you why.

The budget most founders bring us

A typical first-year EU entry budget arrives split like this: 45 percent legal and incorporation, 25 percent brand and website, 20 percent a local hire, 10 percent left over for finding customers. It reads like a plan. It funds everything except the only activity that produces revenue.

The version that works inverts two of those lines. The entity gets what it costs and no more. The website earns its budget by carrying proof, which means case detail, named references and a price signal, rather than an animation. What you free up goes into demand: data, sending infrastructure, and the person who follows up.

A rule we apply to our own clients: if the first-year plan spends more on the logo than on reaching buyers, the plan has not started yet.

Run the two tracks in parallel

The mistake is sequencing. Founders finish the entity, then start thinking about customers, and lose the twelve weeks that the two tracks could have shared. Both tracks fit inside the same ninety days.

Weeks 1 to 3

Incorporation runs in the background: articles, e-signature, registration, VAT application, account opening. It needs perhaps six hours of your attention. Spend the rest of those three weeks writing down who you sell to, what breaks in their business without you, and what evidence you can show. That document decides everything downstream.

Weeks 2 to 6

Buy the sending domains and start warming mailboxes on day one of week two, because the clock runs whether or not your entity exists. Build the target list against a signal that proves the need, not against a job title on its own. Write the sequence. Get the offer in front of five people who resemble your buyer and listen to which sentence they argue with.

Weeks 6 to 12

Send. Hold meetings. Rewrite the sequence after the first 300 sends rather than the first 30, because 30 sends tell you nothing at a 2 percent reply rate. Expect the first signed contract somewhere past week fourteen, and plan cash for that date instead of the optimistic one.

What this means for the number in your model

If your plan says revenue starts in month two, the plan is describing incorporation, not trade. Move the revenue line to month five at the earliest, and fund the gap. The founders who survive their first EU year are the ones who wrote the correct date in the spreadsheet before they signed the office lease.

The entity is a three-week problem with a known price. The pipeline is a two-quarter problem with a variable price, and it is the one that decides whether the entity was worth registering.