Who are you?

Question: When you were thinking what to call your business, did it come easily? Was it obvious?

When you have to create a name, it can become a distracting adventure of imagination, and a lot of rabbit holes and wrong turns.

Usually, if it’s not obvious, just say ‘what it says on the lid’.

I know businesses that have spent time, effort and money to come back to the most obvious name. 

When I was involved in setting up a charity to support self-employment, we had great fun playing with all sorts of names, eventually to be reminded by a service user to just say what it does.

Hence ‘IWORK4ME’.

I have worked for companies whose names I couldn’t stand.

They had outgrown its original relevance but were stuck with it. Change would have been expensive and risky. The lesson there is to try and avoid something that will go out of date.

Acronyms are fun sometimes (and there are too many). But again, the business can evolve and its relevance and meaning are lost. 

If you are lucky, the acronym almost becomes a word in itself, and what the letters stood for is lost in time.  

My business naming decisions have been different, but each has been the right decision.

• Personally, I am hugely grateful to Sharon at Caddie + Co. She convinced me to use ‘ask richard’. I didn’t love it at first, but it works and was it definitely the right decision.

• When we decided on ‘The Autism Network’, it was an obvious evolution of a previous name/business.

• And as for ‘ricart’, that was in my head for at least a decade and I couldn’t not have used that.

Anyone struggling with a name for a new business?

I have some unused ideas! 

What do you think? Let me know here.