No universal statement fits every contract. Review the actual escrow and conditions before relying on them; neither a loose intention nor any document labelled escrow automatically suffices.
Coordinate actual commercial terms
Identify commitment, refund and release conditions accurately. The preferred closing date does not guarantee visa timing or permission to begin operating in the United States.
Useful milestones: guarantee terms settled, funds traced and transferred, premises secured on terms you can live with, business plan complete, packet reviewed, appointment attended. The sequence that fails is a seller who insists on a spring closing to capture the season and a buyer who agrees, then finds that interview availability and administrative processing push the decision past that date. Escrow released to the seller on issuance and returned only on refusal satisfies the requirement that capital be irrevocably committed while protecting the buyer, and it is the standard answer to this sequencing problem. The category is not satisfied by an intention to invest, so the funds have to be irrevocably committed to the enterprise at the time the application is decided, which is why the sequence of closing, funding and applying has to be planned rather than improvised.