Canadian home-services company longs for freezing pipes in foray into California

Toronto-based home-services company Setter's co-founders, Guillaume Laliberté, left, and David Steckel.At Setter’s office, located in the slightly grittier part of Toronto’s rapidly gentrifying west end, 48 mostly millennial employees of the home services firm are serving their Toronto customers, a group that totals approximately 1,000.

A $10-million investment by Sequoia Capital and NFX in the company’s Series A round prompted the startup’s foray into the U.S. market.The upside is the higher value of the jobs Setter lands in California. “The average job size is double,” says Mr. Steckel, and it’s the reason the firm is continuing its push into the home services market in the sunny state.

“We were doing really well in Toronto,” says Mr. Steckel. “But the question was ‘Can Setter scale?’ We had to prove that everything was replicable.” Mr. Steckel also faced hurdles on a personal level. “Not being a citizen made it difficult to get my first car, my first credit card, a lease,” he says.Then there was the need for expertise, given he wasn’t an American citizen. Setter hired lawyers on both sides of the border, who assisted with terms of services and privacy policies. The firm is also working with KPMG to help navigate Californian regulations, which abound.

He also warns that the United States can be overwhelming, and that companies entering the country look at it as a “series of regional markets, rather than a large country. From a strategic perspective, it’s a good idea to shrink that world.”As Setter’s U.S. office enters its second year, it continues to navigate regulatory and tax issues. While corporate taxes have fallen under U.S. President Donald Trump, there is the ever-shifting landscape of local and federal tax laws with which to deal.

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