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You said “Economically efficient” instead of “dirt cheap”. First lesson learned! 🙂

Brad Feld (co-founder of Techstars) regularly runs a program called Venture Deals focused precisely on this topic. It's free of charge to attend too. You'll be a bit late on the Fall edition but I am sure you can sign up for the next one which I presume will be in January

Jonathan Sturgeon

As either a contractor or using a Global Employment Organization (www.forum-expat-management.com/posts/66151-what-is-a-global-employment-organization)

Consultant/ Contractor is easy, you just have to claim your US income in Canada.

A consultant can never have a single source of revenue. You need multiple clients. If you do have only one client, the government can prove that you are an employee and you could have significant implications if that happens.

You could also set up your own Canadian entity and hire yourself, while the Canadian entity has a contract with the US entity.

Hi Heather, I'm happy to help you set this up or give you a couple of tips. I'd be careful with some of the tips noted above.

Sole proprietor (easy to set up) but be sure to spell out cessation of services clause (ie minimum of two months notice in writing or payment in lieu)

Goodlawyer.ca. DM me and I can send you a free promo if you’d like to speak with an immigration/employment lawyer. Her name’s Emily and she’s awesome.

If your get most of your income from US contracting, you can be zero rated and get nice GST rebates!

Try Syndesus. They deal with exactly this sort of thing!

I've been in this exact situation before. You can totally be a contractor with 1 client. Even though you don't need to charge GST to the client you'll need to register for GST. You'll also need to make regular (quarterly should be fine) tax payments to the CRA. Track your business expenses. You'll want to use that to reduce your taxes. Especially if you work from home. Lastly, from my research, incorporating really only makes financial sense if you plan on being a contractor for a number of years. There is a cost to setup and maintain a corporation.

Hey Heather, I had the same situation last year post-acquisition of my startup. After much deliberation, we decided to become a sub-contractor and invoice our parent company every month in USD. I also did 2 small consulting engagements to keep CRA happy. At the tax filing time, I wrote off some of my operating costs and filed and paid my taxes. From what I understand, the more tax optimal way of doing this will be to create a 100% owned corporation which invoices the US company. You load up some of your costs of running the corporation (office space, car, etc.), and then from the profits of the corporation, you take dividends that have lower taxes than income tax.

The FAST agreement from founders institute is useful for advisor compensation.

Fred Wilson wrote a great piece on the topic back in 2010. We used this formula religiously. avc.com/2010/11/employee-equity-how-much/

DMd you.

Hugh Carter

I'm down! I run an SEO agency startup. Shoot me a DM!

DMd!

Hillel Hilly Maresky

Following this!

I use RiseHR but it still has to be populated and customized with your handbook and policies. I’ll see what else I can dig up

I'm sure the guys at getaboard.co would love to chat with you (Toronto-based).

Collage

I liked using BambooHR! Great solution for startups.

I don’t know if they also serve Canada. Happy to look at that but I was the impression they are only for US customers

We had the same expectation 3 years ago when we hired bunch of people in Canada, there’s gotta be an automation/app for that, but were disappointed....hey may be its time to get started on this idea.

I am curious though that what takes up the most amount of time from HR functions that is worth investing from automation perspective. Like handbook I can have it created once and updated once a year and employee can read pdf copy that should be okay but employee engagement, onboarding and off boarding along with training, performance reviews, culture enhancement might be all related to finding the right HRIS system with recruitment module that connects with job boards, background checks, screening candidates etc.

AirMason is not a full platform but is a specific solution for employee handbooks. Great Toronto company spun out of Serind Labs. www.airmason.com/

I’ll let you guys know what I end up deciding thanks for your input 🙏🏻

Sorry I have no idea, but sounds like great growth!

Lianne Marie any suggestions?

Hey Atin Gupta we do all of these things Humi !! www.humi.ca happy to help w whatever, feel free to shoot me a DM, or happy to reply here.

Atin Gupta I am a Sr HR exec for a FinTech in the start up world and would be more than willing to jump on a call and walk you through all of the different options out there! It can seem overwhelming 😉

Echoing what Jenn Lennox said, I'd be happy to help. I've been in the HR space for 20 years and know the HR tech space inside out. Unfortunately you're not going to find 1 solution that does it all extremely well. If you're planning to grow headcount wise then invest in a good recruitment system like Greenhouse, which would likely integrate into a future HRIS like HiBob, which is my favourite HRIS. Thinking about your future business requirements, employee experience and ability to scale HR are key considerations. Happy to talk further on this.

We do it all with G Suite.

Jeff Waldman is the best! He has been so helpful to so many people in this group. Honest person

Www.futurebalance.ca

I've used Scalability Inc. and LiveCA in two different organizations and also heard good reviews about CPAConnect.

Moore Details and Positive Accounting

Irene May Lee at www.impactaf.co/

Hey Amos - happy to chat and learn more about your business to see if we are a fit to help. You can email me directly at [email protected] To learn more about us, please visit www.connectcpa.ca

www.gtaaccounting.ca

Thank you!!! 😊

Irene May Lee

www.teamtax.ca

Scalability FTW! www.scalability.ca

Irene May Lee ia amazing!

Rui SuPurya Sarmadi

Will Perkins Alan Gruda

Jonathan Sturgeon

Zoë Jessica I'll pm you.

Yes. Some of them are amazing, but I would recommend checking their work and experience first. There are a lot of junior developers.

I am setting up a dev team for my startup in India. Let me know if you have questions.

Depending on what you're building it could be cheaper to hire domestically. With government support programs like SRED you can get up to 90% of your wages back. I've also found the quality of the developer pool in Canada is far superior and more efficient to work with.

From person experience, as well as experience from a few of our clients have been lot of frustration and stress. The time difference of nearly half day adds to it, because whatever you need done gets done only next day.

I can help you bring quality workers to Canada

Check out vanhack.com/ - We've used them in the past and they're awesome.

Approach it with caution and ready to micro manage. Worked with a dozen of them. Owned a dev shop there. Happy to chat.

Exhausting.

From my experience, its only worth it when you hire a team and develop a really good communication line with the manager abroad

Good developers have either immigrated, or work at local offices for international companies or local companies. It is hard to find someone good who is looking. When you do churn is high because they get snatched up by other companies. Wages are not as low as you think either. I have had good remote devs disappear to Cisco, Microsoft offices, local banks and ISPs in thier home countries. Also watch out for remote dev shops. They will say they can do anything.

James Fabiano please check you DM

I tried to hire out to Indian for a few different things, writing, website development, graphic design. I ended up hiring local because the 2ork quality wasn't something I could use

Try hiring from Bangladesh instead, that location has similar talent but not many foreign companies have offices yet and the salaries are manageable.

My friends at Global Skills Hub facilitate this quite a bit globalskills.io

We have a software house and have been working with developers from Asia and East Europe. But what I recommend is eastern Europe.

Unless you have the time and dedication to really micro manage, and have rock-solid requirements, I would strongly advocate that you hire locally. You will end up spending so much time/money doing it over and over and over again until it's correct, you would have been cheaper/easier to just get it done here.

Talk to Enginess

I went with Russia / Ukraine as there was less of an cultural gap on many things and had access to many more hard working senior developers in general. We also had local development to bridge which was a huge asset (especially since we had a few Russian speakers here). As with any overseas development, be prepared to work harder managing and for things to take longer due to timezone adjustment. While things can "get done overnight", don't expect anything to get done during the day ;)

I have hired a tonne of them over the past 10 years. Let me know if you are looking for something specific.

Many over the past number of years. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka mostly.

Ran an office in india for 5 years. DM me if you have any questions

Yes in India Love my team there

I have had teams numbering in the thousands in india and china, as well as smaller teams in romania, mexico, argentina, and a few other places im not thinking of right now. Great people can be found anywhere. Just make sure you take the time to understand and adapt to the cultural differences between working with people in each country.

The question is "do you have boots on the ground?" If you don't have a local stakeholder or aren't commuting there regularly yourself then it'll likely be a challenge. Very large organizations are able to make this work because they put in place local leadership. This is a game that doesn't downscale easy.

Only hire if you get a referral from someone trustworthy . I hired a team in india , their work mired with poor quality, slow delivery to mention a few issues . Fired them and hired a team with local presence

Literally working on an article about this as well! I’ve found very little for free.

Netflix party. Not a game but you can watch together and chat

You might find good stuff in here: noproscenium.com/immersive-for-indoor-kids-3-17-20-6824411d6731

Though you’re right with the limit (most games are max. 8 players) Jackbox is SO fun! I’ve been playing with my improv community while our classes and shows are cancelled What I’ve found works is the top four scorers stay for the next round, and four new ones join. The games are pretty short, so it goes by fast And when you’re not playing, you can join as “audience”, which means you can vote on the current game I’ve been streaming with Zoom by pointing a camera at my TV, then joining the Zoom with another computer. I tried with FB Live, but it had a lag that affected the game and having everyone talking and laughing while we played was the best. It’s been really helpful!

We've got remote workshops your team can do. It's like jackbox games but for learning. www.mybenji.com/lunch-and-learn

We've been enjoying spyfall.adrianocola.com/ and skribbl.io over video during lunch.

Hi Deb Ghosh - My team and I started doing a weekly "Friday Puzzles" session a few years ago and have always thought about turning it into a fun, freemium side project. Maybe it's time to make it a reality with all this forced remote work. At any rate, here are the basics: Each week, a teammate is designated "Puzzle Master" and tasked with creating or finding 3+ puzzles of any variety they choose. Every Friday at 4, we all hop on a Zoom call together and the puzzle master posts puzzles one at a time in a dedicated Slack channel with folks submitting answers via Slack DMs. It's pretty unstructured beyond that but it's super fun and we all look forward to it as a lovely way to close out the week together Let me know if you're interested in trying it out and I'll send you websites to source puzzles from to get you started. Here's a teaser puzzle from last Friday :)

You could ask Stewart Butterfield to create one but he will probably fail and instead accidentally produce a multi billion dollar enterprise software firm. Again.

I recommend Kahoot

We had a lot of fun with it at Aurora.

You should check out Wavy! They lead interactive virtual sessions, from cooking classes to yoga, cocktail making, games, beer tastings, and meditation: joinwavy.com/

We have had a comedian entertain us - was a good change.

Hi Roger, we use SEP.ca and they're great. Send me a PM with your email and I can make an intro.

Delta Growth

Hey Roger Beharry Lall I run a design studio with a writer, photographer, and developer/SEO specialist in Toronto. While we typically run both the creative and SEO side, we are more than happy to work with you on the SEO side first and then include creative into a more holistic approach after (if it suits your needs and goals). You can find our work at fookcommunications.com or @fookcomm on Instagram.

Jocelyn Butler

Some of best creative minds are in a basement somewhere right now.

I’d chat with Meg & Affan at Nuscreen Inc.

Hey Roger Beharry Lall I work for a client <> agency matchmaking service that can help with your search for this - sent you a dm!

Can't recommend the gang at Delta Growth enough! dg.agency/

Jess Joyce isn't an agency, but could help or point you to one she trusts

We are launching our SEO agency in couple of months, will send you PM

Zia F

I consult for b2b SEO mainly, but if you are looking for a "done-for-you" instead of "done-with-you" , I'd recommend Moe at themarketingagency.ca!👍

Talk to Mike Khorev at www.mikekhorev.com. I worked with him and he does great stuff.

You should chat with Jess Joyce freelance and agency side Dev Basu / Powered by Search

We specialize in this

Overwhelmed by the amazing response from the great StartupNorth community! Thanks ever so much. I've got a dozen things to review and appreciate the Word of mouth recommendations!

Check us out at Venuiti.com :)

Joanne Gore Communications is a virtual B2B Agency and I'd love the chance to help you. Here is how we've helped others:

I have experience. Our firm has deep leasing expertise too

PM;d

Would love to get some advice as well! Thank you!

I have connections to a good private lender, pm for details

I can support as well through connections.

Talk to Kola Ifambuyi - will DM you his email.

Russel Inspektor can definitely help!!

Stefan Paul Palios

Oliver Cordes

I was in the same boat. I was finally able to get a mortgage through desjardins private services. You can shoot me a DM and I can connect you with my mortgage advisor there

We use wiza and LinkedConnect. Has been working really well for us! Happy to answer any questions if you have them

I have participated in US crowdfunding ventures before when they first started a few years back. I am currently interested in this: invest.virtuix.com/