Can a foreigner work in their own business in Mexico?
Owning it and being allowed to work in it are two different things, and the gap between them is where a lot of setups go wrong.
Forming a company gives you ownership. You can hold shares, take profit, appoint people. None of that is in question.
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Working in that company requires a temporary work permit. And the permit is not a formality at the end of the process. It is the first link in a chain that most of your setup depends on.
The chain, in the order it has to happen
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The temporary work permit, if you intend to work for your own company rather than only own it.
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Your RFC with SAT. The permit is what allows you to apply for it.
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Your e.firma, which follows from that. It is the digital signature used across government processes here, and very little can be filed without it.
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Everything downstream, which is more than people expect.
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The fourth step is where this stops being administrative. You cannot process anything with COFEPRIS without an e.firma. So an owner who treated the work permit as paperwork to sort out later finds it sitting in front of their operating licence rather than behind it, and the whole timeline moves.
Where it gets much harder: regulated professions
If your business requires a professional qualification, that qualification has to be validated by SEP, the education ministry, before a licence can be issued at all.
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At Satisana Medicine this meant medical licences issued in Hong Kong had to be validated here. Before the validation could even be submitted, every certificate needed official translation and apostille. That is work that happens before the process begins, not during it.
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And one thing almost nobody tells you in advance: some universities are not recognised by SEP. If yours is one of them, the licence may be close to impossible to obtain, whatever else you do and however much you spend on it.
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That is knowable in week one, and it is the first thing I check on any regulated activity. There is no point building a plan, a budget or a lease around a qualification that will not be recognised.
The practical consequence
Plan for two processes, not one, and sequence them correctly. If your budget and your timeline assume that registering the company covers your right to work in it, both are wrong.
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What company registration actually costs
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What COFEPRIS registration involves
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