How Spotwork successfully scaled stateside

Expanding into the United States presented more of a challenge than the founders of Spotwork had anticipated. But by establishing a clear framework to manage teams, the startup is making huge strides south of the border.

Darren Perlman and Daniel Copeland want to break down barriers to employment for underserved groups. That’s why, in 2019, they co-founded Spotwork, an AI-driven staffing platform that connects companies with flexible and long-term workers. Because job seekers are matched with companies through an app, the playing field is levelled, effectively eliminating both unconscious and conscious bias in the hiring process. “We want to help everybody,” says Perlman.

When COVID derailed plans to launch the company in April 2020, the co-founders honed their concept and secured $10,000 through a YSpace accelerator program later that year, which they used as seed funding. Spotwork went live in November 2020, when companies were scrambling to manage staffing challenges during the pandemic.

While Spotwork was bootstrapping its business in Canada, the founders were also trying to find footing in the U.S. “We kept a very small, tight team while we were balancing the two markets,” says Perlman, who emphasizes that this lean structure meant that regional innovation centres such as MaRS played a key role in the company’s development from the outset. But by 2023, the company was eager to expand its American market presence.

Building a solid foundation

After an initial expansion attempt in 2023 netted less-than-ideal results (“We peaked at about three customers,” says Perlman), the founders reassessed. In 2024, they decided to “build the engine a little bit better,” as Perlman puts it. With support from the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program, they leveraged business intelligence to determine how to build the best foundation for a repeatable sales model. Although the Canadian team was strong, Perlman says it became clear that to secure larger clients in the U.S., the company needed sales people on the ground in local markets. Spotwork had just hired its first American employee when MaRS brought Margaret Stuart on board.

Establishing clear expectations

Stuart, who has decades of global sales and leadership experience, recognized that establishing a concrete management structure could benefit Spotwork’s growth strategy. She began by helping the co-founders define their vision and their core values (“What are the non-negotiables?”), which could provide touchstones as they developed a plan to guide the sales team. It quickly became clear that a framework for accountability and results in the U.S. was essential. Where Spotwork had typically relied on a reactive approach, Stuart encouraged the co-founders to be proactive in managing team members. “We’d wait to check in after a few weeks and then take it from there,” says Perlman. “She said, ‘If you have KPIs from the outset, it makes it easier to assess success.’”

Stuart helped the founders develop overarching success metrics and spurred them to implement quarterly business reviews. “We brought in a common vocabulary on how we were going to measure success,” explains Stuart, who recommended using the V2MOM management approach. By setting out a company’s vision, values, methods, obstacles and measures, the framework helps clarify expectations and facilitates employee alignment and accountability. Over six sessions, the group put together a living operating model for the U.S. sales team that included quotas for in-person visits, phone calls and weekly demos and plans for weekly reviews.

Setting the stage for expansion

The strategy is paying off. Spotwork’s four U.S. sales associates (in St. Louis, Phoenix, Atlanta and Salt Lake City) are all performing well. A year ago, the company had just 200 corporate partners in Canada — it now has about 500 across all of North America.

What’s next

The company’s goal is to double sales in each of four regions by the first quarter of 2026, then scale to six or more regions by the end of the second quarter. “If we can scale to eight profitable regions within the U.S., then double that again in 2027,” Perlman says, “we can be a unicorn success story of Canadians expanding to the United States.”

Spotwork

• Founded: 2019
• Program: MaRS Momentum
• Services: Executive support

MaRS programming is funded in part by the Government of Canada through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario and by the Province of Ontario’s Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade.