Tips for Naming Your Small Business + Listener Questions – Small Business Show 133

The Small business show episode 133 for Wednesday, August 23, 2017. Greetings folks, and welcome to the Small Business Show. The show, as you know, by, for and about small business owners here in Durham, New Hampshire, running my small businesses, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in San Francisco Bay Area, I'm Shannon Jean. Trying to keep my head on and run my businesses as well. Yeah, it's crazy, crazy times, but always exciting stuff. And like we both talk about it. It energizes you often when you have to, have to hustle.

Oh, hustle, man. It's. That has been the story of my week. It's like, yep, the hustle has made me more energized. It's good, it's good. Yeah, yeah, it is, it is, it's.

It's. And a lot of the stuff I always tell myself, well, this will make a great story.

Oh yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm living a great story right now and I will share it as, as it, as it winds up. But, but yeah, it's one of those things where, you know, you find yourself in a scenario and, and the like, you get excited about hustle and it's great.

Yeah, yeah, good. Changes, changes the dynamic of what you do in your normal day to day, you know, routine and stuff. Right.

It breaks up the routine. Yeah, that's it. That's it.

Because I think that, you know, getting stuck in that routine is really the enemy of, you know, running your small business and working on your business, being creative.

Totally.

And whatever it takes to break yourself out of that, you know, and, and like, in my case, this, this past month I've been shifting, you know, out of one warehouse and everything and.

Right.

You know, it has just been like constant. You know, I've driven my forklift more in the last month than I have probably in the last 10.

But it's not your forklift anymore.

Well, that's correct. We just sold it. Yeah, but you know, I'm not the forklift driver, but I have been the last month and it's been like, oh, this is kind of cool, you know, so.

Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. I always, I always appreciate it. I mean, I. This is the wrong. It is the right word, but it sounds wrong when I'm down a staff member for whatever reason. And, and it's a scenario where I have to step in and, and do a job that either I've never done before or that I used to do but haven't done in a while. Totally fresh perspective on Things and really always winds up being a good thing. So. Yeah, that.

That brings up a good. Let me ask you this question.

Yeah.

To be successful as a small business owner, should you be able to do each job that your employees do?

Well? Yeah. I mean, you should be. So I'm going to answer a different question first.

Okay.

You should be willing to troch and do each job.

That's a totally different question.

Absolutely it is. But as we learn running our small businesses, there are very few things. Like, if you happened to need to hire a surgeon that worked at your small business, maybe. Right. I mean, that's like something where you don't even have. Or. I. And I don't think you either. But I don't have close to enough training to even, like, be remotely successful at operating on another human being or really anything. But, you know, short of that, I think you should be able to do each job. You might not be the best person for it.

Well, yeah, certainly.

Yes. Almost by definition. Yeah.

Well, it's an interesting transition because I think in the beginning you have to do it. Yeah. Most people would say, oh, I can do that. I mean, I can remember years ago walking by repair technicians going, you know, I can do that in half that time, you know, messing with that. Hey, I can. I can do that. And da, da, da. And then. But eventually was like, well, I can't do any of that. You know, and you kind of the superhero part of, you know, small business ownership, it makes you maybe feel at a disadvantage. But I would argue that it's. It's a much better scenario not to be able to do those jobs because you have to then give them more autonomy.

Right, right, right.

And, and, and we talked about that recently. I don't. Might even been last week about giving them the power, your employees, you know, getting out of their way, and perhaps that's one way that you're forced to do it.

It totally, you know, it totally is. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the longer I'm in any one business, the more I learn. And I. And if I have to manage people doing a certain job or whatever, I. I wind up learning enough about that job that I start to feel like I could do it. Now, whether or not I would be as good as them, if, Especially if it's a job I've really, truly never done before, that's, you know, that remains to be seen.

Yeah. Well, we're guys that create our own reality. Right.

So we tell our thing.

I get to that.

Yeah. That's the frustrating part, though. You learn Enough. And you're like, screw that guy. I could do that better. And it turns out, you know what? Maybe not, actually.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, one of the things I've been doing lately, you know, I've got a couple of new businesses, one really new that we're, you know, working on names and picking out, you know, how we're going to identify this new company that we're launching. And so I thought, you know, we'd spend a little time today on the show talking about, you know, ideas or. And thoughts on naming your business.

Yeah.

Come up with there. Yeah. And one of the things I found that was pretty cool. It came across my desk, very timely. You know, entrepreneur.com does a great job, you know, lots of great articles and stuff. And they posted an infographic and I thought we'd chat about, see if we agree or not with some of these things. I think we've both been involved with naming, you know, dozens and dozens of companies over the years or services maybe within those companies.

Yep, for sure.

So I'm sure we have an opinion on this stuff. And one of the things I found interesting is one of the first things on this infographic that we'll post up to Business show co is they say, you know, pick a name that's simple and short and.

Okay.

I really like it. I don't know if it's the most important thing, but I'm not a big fan of long. I think the longer your name is, it kind of means the more you're. You're having to explain.

Yes.

What it is you're doing.

Yes. True. Yeah. Yeah.

And I like short names, but I also like taglines that you can place with the name when needed. That does explain what you do.

Right. Yeah. You should be able to explain. And I think the tagline is actually more important than the name. I. I've certainly spent a ton of time naming businesses and like you said, products and projects and everything, but in the end, I actually don't think it matters. Right.

I mean, you don't think the name matters?

I mean, I don't think it's as important. As important as we wind up, we assign the name so much value and I just don't know that it matters as much as we think it does when we're naming our companies. And maybe I'm totally wrong about this, but I feel like there's so many other things that are going to be the actual factors in your success or failure.

That is true. I think it aligns with your often stated Concept about ideas, Right?

Yeah, it's very similar to that. Yeah.

And the name is kind of along that same lines. And I would also put out there that your logo is. Often a huge amount of effort is put into developing the name and logo, and perhaps those are not the most critical things. They are important.

I think it's important that you come up with a name and logo that you can live with. Yeah. Because you can't. Once you've got a foothold in the market or whatever it is you're doing, changing your name will cost you dearly.

Yeah, I wouldn't. Yeah, yeah.

Right. So really, it just has to be a name that you like so that you can get behind it. And if it's Fuzzy Wigs or whatever you like, okay, great. I love that name. I mean, I don't. But if you did, then there's nothing wrong with that. Then you're like, oh, yeah, Fuzzy Wigs, man, we sell the best podcast ads on the Internet, and, like, there's nothing that can stop us. And if you can get excited about that and call yourself Fuzzy Wigs and have, like, a logo that's like a little bug with hair on it, you know what, man? That's cool. And then you're done.

Yeah. And I also think it's important to restate this. That logo or your company name and your logo are equally, and especially in the beginning, perhaps more important to you and your team, your employees, whoever needs to get passionate about it. You know that. That's a. You know, you want them to be behind it and stand and go, look, I love that. You know, I love this colors and this logo and the name, and I can tell people that that's a really important part of developing the name of your business.

Yeah. You know, I think that's. That's the. To me, that's the most important part. You got to be able to show up and not be apologetic or embarrassed of your name and. Or logo. And as long as that. To me, as long as it's over that hump, man, just, like, get to work. Let's go.

Yeah. And.

I realize I just sort of trumped our entire segment that we had planned here, but I want to go through it because all of these things are important to serve that one purpose. Like, are you going to be happy with it? Because we all make emotional decisions, but if we can feed and inform our emotions based on facts, even if they're BS facts, well, that's fine. That's great.

Yeah. And I think that that emotion is an important Thing, you know, and one of the tips in this infographic is, you know, what's the story behind your name? You know, when I, the first company that, that I created that really took off and grew really big was Mac Rescue. And my concept was, okay, well, we gotta, we need to rescue these people.

Right, right.

And, and our tagline was at the time was we help you beat the system. And the system was like the Mac os.

Right.

And as well, when we, when we shifted into really being a deal driven company and selling all kinds of, you know, refurbished and trailing edge technology, we flipped it a bit and say, well, the way we help you beat the system is we don't sell new product that's so expensive, you know, shift things around. So, you know, there was this whole concept of, you know, saving you and being hero. You know, I've said it on the show here before. I mean, the heroic small business owners, you know, I love that concept. Right or wrong, I really still feel strongly about it. And it was the same when we launched Tech Restore. You know, I'm like, well, I'm going to do this name, but we're going to, we're going to create the logo, create the logo around a heroic image of a technician that is saving you. And our tagline, you know, I mean, it's, we've done lots of things, you know, overnight repair, tech, urgent care, dah, dah, dah. But the best one I liked was, you know, we was saving your. And we had a picture of a donkey one device at a time. And we did that on the back of our shirts at trade shows and this kind of thing, we got a ton of coverage on it. So getting that emotion or humor, something that you can connect to people that like, oh, that's clever, that's funny. I think that's a great thing if you have the opportunity to do it with your name.

Right? Yeah. Can't.

Quality, Wade.

No, no, no.

You know, but you want to make a, you know, you don't want a name that gives the wrong first impression when somebody hears it. You know, you don't want to be like, right, that's, that's weird.

That's weird. Well, I, and one piece of advice in here that I would highly recommend people consider is don't include place names unless your business will always be location specific. And I can come up with a perfect complimentary example for this New York Sports Club or Planet Fitness, which one's a better name to franchise out?

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's great.

Yeah, I See New York sports clubs all over the place. Yeah, you know, I know what it is. It's. Right. But it's just weird to see that, you know, in Chicago.

Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, another one they talk about getting, you know, focusing on keywords, search words, SEO keywords. And I would agree they're talking about, don't get too obsessed with that. Things change really quickly in the search space. So some word that's trending really good right now. If it doesn't describe your business, but it searches really well, I wouldn't hang your hat on how good it comes up that day or at this particular moment.

No, because SEO will be served by people talking about your company. Right. So, I mean, you might get that initial bump of, you know, like you used to get if you put an A in front of your company name so it appear at the top of the yellow Pages. But you know that, that goes away as soon as people start linking to you and mentioning you and then you.

Start building your online profile. You need to spread yourself out. You need to be getting all those good reviews on Yelp. You need to get the Google reviews. You need to be have a LinkedIn page for your. You need to, I mean, just keep kind of morphing across the interwebs. Right. And, and, and the more you, you know, your name is out there, the higher, you know, you're going to go. And all those keywords and, you know, good content that you've got on your website as well. Of course.

Oh, yeah, totally, totally. I like one piece of advice. Practice saying the name out loud. Don't just read it, but do that too, but say it aloud. Make sure it's something that you can pronounce and hopefully other people can pronounce too, but that it rolls off the tongue. You like the way it sounds. It's, you know, that is an important sort of litmus test to run it through.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. And, and then, you know, what it looks like printed, what it looks like on the, on the web, you know, and, and, you know, it's just like we, we're looking at companies. We started this business called Slingshot Trading. And I was like, okay, we can't get that domain this, but we can do this. And I love, I love Slingshot deals. And the reason I love it is when I type it, the last part of it says hot deals. And you know, that may be. So, you know, that's just me, but I was like, well, subconsciously somebody's going to see that you know, and kind of comes together with it. And you could play with it in the logo or the name, you know, that kind of thing as well. Yep. And again, don't, you know, one of the last tips on this infographic graphic is don't choose something you don't like. If everybody else likes it or it describes what you're doing, but you can't get behind it. You know, you got to trust your gut. Oh, yeah. And if you're the one that's going to be the champion of this thing, it's okay to throw away everybody else's advice, which is, you know, may not be the best anyway, and go with your gut, you know, into what you think. So, you know, I think naming is important, but I also really like your, your, your point about not getting too wrapped up in it so that you don't, you know, it can slow down everything else that you need to do to get your business off.

That's the thing. Right. If you had infinite time. I mean, there's so many things to be different. I can't even. I'm not even gonna go there.

Yeah, well, it's another one. One. You know, I'm all about eliminating excuses to start your business.

Right.

You know, you need to start it today. You can't put, you know, things in front of you like, well, we have to wait till we can make this much money or we have to wait till we can be perfect or wait, you know, it's like you just gotta start and, you know, get, get a name you can get behind and, and, you know, start making progress.

That's it. You gotta start rolling. Yeah.

Yeah, that's good. I enjoy it. So we'll post that up there. We'll post it up to the small business group up at businessshow Co Facebook. If you have any comments on it, if you think it's crazy, you know, let us know. Or tips that are not on this infographic, let us know. We'd love to hear, get your feedback.

Yeah. Feedbackusinessshow co. That's good.

Hey, do we have time for a couple of OR one or so listener subscriber question?

Yes, we do. Yeah, let's go. Let's start with Sherry. Sherry says, I've enjoyed the recent discussions about selling your business. I think I need to find a buyer for my company since I'm reaching the point of being completely burnt out. My concern is that if I don't. Sorry. My concern is that I don't know if I have the energy needed to be the representative for Selling my business. Any suggestions?

Well, that's gotta be pretty common that often small business owners wind up selling just for the fact that they're getting burnout.

Right.

And I can attest to that when you're really trying to grind it out and you just kind of often hit a wall. But I also believe there's no one is going to represent or champion your business and the concept of your business and your whole model and what you've achieved. Better than you.

Yeah. I mean, if your concern is that you're not the right person because you're burnt out, that's different than you're not the right person because you can't negotiate. Right. I mean, that's two different things. And you can probably bring someone else in to help you with the negotiation process. I mean, if you can go and find a potential buyer, you know, then you use your attorney maybe to. To be that. That intermediary for. For the, you know, the actual nitty gritty details. Although as you just, you know, when we talked about this about a month ago, you know, it's great if you can be involved because attorneys kill deals.

Yeah. I would say that I would probably rather maybe get in touch with a business broker.

And they're not cheap.

They are not cheap. But if I think you can find. There's certainly different levels, you know, of business brokers and maybe you need to hire one just as a consultant.

Yeah.

Versus one that, you know is going to completely take things all the way to the end. But you're certainly going to have to have some help, you know, your attorney, your accountant. And I would suggest that if you're. When you're feeling it this way, Sherry, is that you. You really be transparent with your team of advisors, which should include your accountant and your attorney, and say, look, guys, I want to sell the company, but I know maybe I'm not going to come across right now because I'm so wiped out. Maybe you just need to step away from it for, you know, some amount of time to kind of re. Energize yourself or just.

Yeah. Picture what life is like without having this business. Like what does it look like after the business is sold? And maybe use that as your motivation to just like muster up. I mean, if you started the company, chances are you are able to find that motivation somewhere within you and you just need a little bit of a carrot. So paint yourself that picture, maybe even describe it. Like write a letter to yourself. Right. About the things that you'll be able to do or whatever it is. Just to get you in the right frame of mind to. Yeah, okay. All right. This is the right thing to do. Let's go. Yeah, yeah.

And I would say, like, you know, last year we interviewed Bob Gruel from Seapoint Business Advisors, and he talked about, you know, selling a business, how to get it ready, all these kinds of things. And that's the type of person I think you could have, certainly you can have a conversation with to see if there's a fit there, and he can help you and, you know, how you frame things and, and you, so you may not, you may just need a little bit of help and to think about that, but you, I think you need to come up with a way to kind of push through that being burnout. And I like that visualization exercise of, boy, you know, here's where I can get to neck. You know, once this happens, I'm going to be at this point, it's going to be great. Or that kind of thing, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah. And it may be, you know, I know for me, selling tech restore, one of the things that really helped me because I had a hard time doing the deal. It's like, oh, wow, you know, I built this from nothing and somebody else going to take it over. But I really felt it was the right group, the right team that came together to buy it, that they were going to take it to an entirely new place that I had not. And that really got me excited about it. It's like, wow, that's something I never even really, I, I, I'm, I know nothing about this other area that they're going to push into. And I was like, well, this will be great, because now, look, I can watch this happen and advise them with what I know about, which is a current business, but not the new stuff. So, you know, however it is that you're or whatever it is you can reach for to help you get through it.

Yeah, you know, certainly good stuff. All right, we got time for at least one more, I think.

Got time. Great.

Yeah. Let's go to Jay. Jay says my business is profitable, but we always seem to be running out of cash.

Welcome to the park.

Yeah, man. Sounds like you're doing it right. I'm thinking of taking out a home equity line of credit in order to deposit a large chunk of cash in the business account at one time to help. Have either of you ever done something like this to fund your business? I've never done the HELOC to do it. Yeah, I've used a line of credit.

Yeah, yeah. I'VE done the HELOC when it was a better finance vehicle than just going to the bank and getting that. And the nice thing about the HELOC is oftentimes the interest can be tax deductible on your personal side of things.

Right. But you're also putting your house up as collateral. You are.

Yeah.

And that's by heloc, I mean home equity line of credit for anybody that doesn't know, by the way.

So if you're just getting started, a bank may not want to give you a line of credit if you don't have, you know, any history. Now, we've talked about on the show about, you know, using credit cards that way, and I'm, I'm a huge fan of that. As long as you can pay them off every month. The, the question I would ask you, Jay, is, you know, what is going to pay that money back?

That's always the question.

Yeah. Do you have business in the pipeline that is, you know, going to generate the cash flow, that you're going to be able to make regular payments to get that, that line of credit on your home paid off if you do? Okay. Well, I'm, I'm not completely against it.

Yeah. Right. I mean, there's obviously risk there, but it's not, it's not blind risk.

Correct. But if you're borrowing money, and I have done this exact same thing, so I speak from, unfortunately, from experience. If you're borrowing money to mask other weaknesses in your business, that's a problem.

That's bad.

And that. Yeah. And that can really lead to, you know, to a ton of issues, especially if you've, you know, you're, like you said, let's say you have to convince your spouse, hey, I want, I need to pull this money out. You know, we're going to do this. I'm going to put it in the business, and it's going to help do this and that. The other thing, I think you really need to be sure or confident, you know, there's no guarantees, but confident that you have that business coming down the pike. You just need this cash flow to help get you there. Yeah, that, that this new business or whatever's going to happen.

Ray Kroc did it with McDonald's, right? Yeah. Yeah.

It's got to be, I mean, a very common story.

Very common. Yeah.

Yeah. But I can say I have borrowed money before to dump in the business, thinking that, oh, if we just go a little further, we're going to be okay, but really not confident that where that new Business was. And what happened is, you know, I was just buying myself time.

Yeah, you're. All you're doing is buying time. You're not buying, you're not buying known opportunity. Right, Correct.

And then you're going to wind up in the same position. But then you've got, you know, this debt now that's tied to your home, which can impact your personal relationships in a dramatic fashion. And so, you know, that, that, that's just my advice if you've got to figure it out and go away. I'm. I have these contracts coming due or I have this, these customers that always do business in, you know, December or I'm rolling into the holiday period and I just need a chunk of cash to get through there. That's one thing. But if business is dropping for some reason and, you know, the extra money is just going to kind of COVID that up for a little bit or.

Delay the inevitable, kick the can down the road, don't do it.

You need to ask yourself and maybe ask somebody else. You know, what does your accountant think? What's your bookkeeper think? Maybe somebody that can be a little dispassionate.

Yeah, objective.

Yeah, yeah, objective about the business and come up with that. Other than that, I don't have any problem with it. But you just got to get it paid off quick. I'm not a fan of debt at all. Only using it to flip and make more money and get it paid back as quick as you can.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Treat it like, you know, margin.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah, right away. Yep, yep.

Turn it in, turn it off. And whether you're doing it with your credit cards, I mean, you know, you can build up your credit card line of credit quickly. I mean, you know, you get yourself a really good amex like the Starwood, the SPG MX that we always recommend on the show. You need to be calling them every three to six months to ask for a credit line increase. You'll need to give them some financials. They want to see your bank statements and see your flow and that kind of thing. But, you know, you can run that line of credit up to 3, 4, $500,000 rather quickly as long as you can, you know, you have the paperwork to back it up.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Because they want the business.

Oh, they love it.

They love.

Yeah. Especially when you can show that you can pay it off. So if you've got, I mean, you know, even if you have just a $5,000 card and use it, you know, just Pay it off, dump it in the next week, you know, and set that money aside, pay that card off and just keep building that up. Because it's, in my opinion, if you need short term, you know, access to capital, the credit card is fantastic. As you know, if you've listened to any more than one episode of the show. I'm not a fan of banks. I love bankers because those guys are pret cool when you deal with them individually. But the hidden bureaucracy and the committees behind the scene that often make the true decisions, I don't like those people that much because I can't impact them at all. They don't know who I am. The bank relationship person is great.

Yeah.

But. So I would much rather lean on American Express that you built a relationship with over time and, and use that.

Yeah, totally, totally.

So I hope we answered your question, Jay, you know, and let us know, come back and let us know how things turn out for you.

Crazy, man. It's always if you're, if you're, if you're worried about cash flow, that means you're a small business owner, I think. Yeah.

There is no, I mean, doing it right.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, you've always going to be hitting payroll, you're always going to be planning for those things. It just comes with the territory and, but you know, you just got to manage it tight and being aware of it means you're doing something right.

Yeah. You're aware of it. When. Early, early on, I remember somebody said to me, and I have lived this, and I'm sure I have shared this advice many times too, and what he said was, profits are great, but don't worry about profits. Manage to cash flow first. Then once you've got that under control, then you can tweak things and make the profits happen.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah.

Because you can, I mean, you can be very profitable and put yourself, you know, out of business if you're burning your cash.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I, my first job really in the Mac business, I was still in college and I worked for a great guy, but he had a, a little quirk where every, just about every payroll, towards the end of my career with them, while I was still going to school, this guy would get sick. And I, I think it was, now that I've been through it, you know, 20 plus years later, I think it physically made him sick. You know, he just was like, oh my gosh. And I couldn't understand it because I was young and, you know, not that bright about how things work or just didn't have the experience, but I was selling all kinds of stuff. And I just like, you gotta be. You gotta have tons of cash. But actually, you know, I didn't understand the other backside of it. You know, he's buying product for me to sell and doing this and managing in and out and people weren't paying him on time and this kind of thing. So this guy would physically get sick and we, we. We would always be delayed in getting paid. And you cannot, cannot do that. We're going to do a show about payroll in the. In the future and talk about the repercussions of not making payroll.

Not making it. Yeah, yeah.

It's kind of this, you know, really critical, critical part of your business and the confidence of your team behind you, and you just have to. You got to do it.

You got to find a way to make it happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's great. Well, I enjoy talking about this stuff today. And we have a great interview coming up. We have a couple of guys coming on next week from Tangle Free, which is a outdoor products company that they've grown this place like crazy in the last decade, and they happen to be local to me and some great guys. So we're having on. Yeah, it's gonna be cool.

Oh, that should be good. All right, folks, well, you know where to find us. Businessshow Co. Of course, if you want to join our small business support group, businessshow Co. Facebook. I knew I would get it.

Got it.

And feedback at businessshow Co. We'll see you next week.

Take it easy.

Keep living that charmed life.