I think that all you have to do is call yourself a "Handyman Service" instead of calling yourself a plumber, electrician, carpenter or whatever to avoid all the licensing requirements. Anyone can be a handyman, but you need the papers and licenses to call yourself a "plumber" or "electrician" or other tradesperson.
Creating a company is easy. I registered both a corporation (5126967 Manitoba Ltd.) and a sole proprietorship here in Winnipeg (5126968 Manitoba), and I am not a licenced anything. I graduated as a mechanical engineer, and now I make a full time job as a landlord of a small apartment block.
In both cases, you simply go down to your local state or city hall "Companies Office" and pay the necessary fees, sign the necessary documents, and your company is registered. Here in Manitoba, you can start a corporation for about $400, while a sole proprietorship will cost about $60. You can do it yourself without a lawyer. You simply state on the forms that your company's principle commercial activity would be providing handyman services to the general public.
The most important thing to do right now is to decide exactly what kind of "company" you want to start; a corporation is completely different legal animal than a sole proprietorship.
A corporation is a separate legal entity. If you start a corporation, then even though you own all the shares of that corporation, as the director and sole shareholder, you are still considered an employee of that corporation. The advantage of having a corporation is that it offers legal protection. If anyone ever sues the company and wins, then the corporation loses it's assets, but your own personal assets aren't in danger of being seized. So, for example, if someone sues the corporation for $50,000 because the swimming pool it installed turned out not to be in compliance with some city by-laws, and it cost the customer $50,000 to have the swimming pool changed so that it was in compliance with those by-laws, then the worst that could happen would the the corporation could go bankrupt and loose it's assets (such as the tools and equipment purchased by the company). You, however, would not be at risk of losing your home or your personal assets even if the corporations assets was not enough to satisfy the judgement against it. The only way the courts would ever "lift the corporate veil" to deal directly with the owner of the corporation is if the corporation was a scam set up to defraud people, such as a company that takes deposits in advance to do work, but then skips town and never does any work.
When you see the letters "Inc." or "Ltd." behind a company's name, it means they are a corporation. In fact, the "Ltd." is short for "Limited" and it notifies everyone doing business with the company that in any lawsuit, the company's liability will be limited to the assets of the company. That means that the personal assets of the company managers, directors and/or share holders would not be in danger of being seized.
A sole proprietorship is considered to be "owned" by the person who created it, and is not a separate legal entity, and doesn't provide that same legal protection to it's owner. Consequently, if the sole proprietorship gets sued, and the assets of the sole proprietorship are not enough to satisfy the judgement, then the assets of the person who owns the sole proprietorship can be seized to satisfy the judgement.
From an income tax perspective, there's not much difference unless your company becomes very wealthy. Corporations that create jobs get tax incentives from the various levels of government to lower the corporation's income tax payable, and the company can then pay out dividends to it's shareholders that are taxed at a lower rate than salaries. However, your company has to be making a lot of money before that strategy will save you much money. What most people who own small corporations do is simply pay themselves the net profit of the corporation every year as a "management bonus". Since salaries and employee bonuses are tax deductable to the corporation, then net income of the corporation gets reduced to zero every year, and the sole shareholder of the corporation pays income tax on the company's net income on his personal tax return.
If you have a sole proprietorship, then typically you simply report your business earnings on a separate sheet on your tax return, and the amount of income and tax paid on it would be the same as if it had come in the form of a management bonus from a corporation.
What you might want to do is open both a corporation and a sole proprietorship. That way, if the corporation signs any contracts to do work for people, it may want to subcontract out various parts of that work to your sole proprietorship. That way, it's the corporation that's responsible for the work being done, but any tools or equipment purchased to do the work are purchased by the sole proprietorship that's doing the work (and are therefore always your own personal property, not the corporation's).
(That's how I have my business set up. I own all of the shares of a corporation that owns an apartment block. If anyone ever slips and falls and breaks their back on my property, the worst that could happen is that my corporation could be sued into bankruptcy, but my personal assets would be protected. No one could touch my personal assets even if the corporation's assets weren't enough to satisfy the judgement against it. However, if the corporation needs to have the carpeting in the apartment block hallways cleaned (for example), I hire my own sole proprietorship to do that work. That sole proprietorship would then buy a carpet shampoo'er with which to do that work, and so that equipment would be MINE, not the property of the corporation that owns the apartment block. And , the taxation is exactly the same. In this case, the carpet shampoo'er would be tax deductible to the sole proprietorship and would be capitalized over a period of years just as it would had it been purchased by the corporation. But, it would always be MY property, not the corporations.
