TES 027 - Getting Your Business Name Right

Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Hey there. I'm Mel Abraham, the author of the number one national best selling book the Entrepreneur's Solution and the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy where we teach you how to design a business and create a life, a life of financial freedom and peace of mind. And welcome back to this episode of the Entrepreneur Solution Show. This one's going to be kind of a cool episode because I get to answer a question that seems to come up a fair amount and that is, is the name of your business really that important? And you know what the short answer to that is? Absolutely yes. And when we come back from this brief introduction, we're going to talk about the keys to a good name, the things to look for, how to evaluate it, and my four step process of coming up with your business name. And just like every other episode, this one has a guide to it. This actually has a tool to it that helps you evaluate your names and figure out which one is the best name for you. And you can get that by going to the download page, going to melabraham.com session027. That's melabraham.com session027. And if you happen to not be at your computer, maybe you're at the gym listening to this or you're driving and you can't be at your computer, go ahead and just text, but do it safely. Text to 38470 mylegacy one word mylegacy, no spaces 38470. We'll text you back a link, a download link so you can get access to the tool for this episode. And we'll see you right back here. Talk about your business name right after this introduction. See you soon. Bye.

Welcome to the Entrepreneur Solution, where highly successful entrepreneur Mel Abraham becomes your entrepreneurial mentor. Here, Mel reveals his business building strategies and even gets a chance to answer your questions. Mel Abraham, a CPA by education, but an entrepreneur by exhilaration and a true believer in the entrepreneurial way of life. It's through entrepreneurship that we create community, support society, and live our dreams.

It's where possibility meets reality again, and you can have the life and lifestyle you want, one of freedom and peace of mind. Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur Solution, where it's time for you to be bold, dream big, and live life your way.

Hey there. Welcome back. This is Mel Abraham of the Entrepreneur Solutions Show. And as I said in this episode, we're going to talk about something that comes up often. And I had a person ask me this question, you know, is it really that important.

What you name your business? And the short answer is yes. And what we need to do is really understand what's in a name, what are the dynamics of the name and what can it represent and present? Now, by and large, there may be you have flexibility into how you name your business, but there might be some legal limitations. For instance, me as a cpa, I can only use certain types of names for. For my CPA firm or attorneys or doctors. So barring any legal limitations that might exist in your state or in your country, your name is really important because it presents to the world the first piece of branding that you're going to do. It's the first message the world sees. It's the first thing that the world knows about you. And that's your company name, if you look at it that way. So let's just look at what I call the. The five stages or the five things that come about from your name. And this will try to bring full circle the keys and why this is so important to think about. And the first one I call precept. And this is about creating a legal identity. This is about creating an identity in a marketplace. This is about, you know, driving that stake in the ground and saying, here's who I am. This is truly about.

Who the company is and.

Making sure that you have your position laid out. The second thing that comes from a name is this concept of position. Position in your industry, position in your market, position. So what I mean, when you think about the name, for instance, Four Seasons or Ritz, the name of that has just kind of creates a visual, creates an impression, creates a feeling in the person because it's been built as a brand. And so one of the things that we need to think about when we're thinking about our name is what position are we trying to take in an industry? Are we looking at luxury brands? Are we looking at commodity types of positioning? What position can your name portray? Now, it may not portray anything as far as that goes, but understand that how you name your business can portray your positioning in an industry or marketplace. It also can present personality. You know, you can have a fun name and people say this is going to be a fun organization to work with, or it can be more stodgy and I hate to say it, dull and everything, but it can portray personality traits. Now, granted, Southwest Airlines, Southwest itself, the name itself doesn't.

Portray any kind of personality per se, but they've developed a reputation around it. And now the name itself, Southwest Airlines, you know, it denotes a fun airline. It denotes a personality trait that's fun, that's vibrant, that is energetic, that is flexible, that. That is a little more loose than some of the more formal types of airlines that are out there. So your name can also be help indicate and signify what kind of personality you bring to the table. Then it also could be a name that is around a product. You know, what do you offer, what are your offerings? And the thing that I'd be careful about here is you might call it Joe's Data Drives or Joe's Cleaning or Home Cleaning or something like that. And the challenge with that is it corrals you into that one single product. What happens, you know, if you think about it, we went from five and a quarter floppy disks. I know I'm dating myself here. And there's probably a whole lot of you going, what's a five and a quarter floppy inch disk, five and a quarter disks, to the three and a half inch disk, to CD ROMs, to DVDs, to thumb drives. And now we really don't use disk drives at all anymore. But if I name my business so and so's Disk Drive Service or so and so's Disk Drive Supply House, we then limited the ability for us to market other products to broaden our products and service offerings. And so as much as your name can denote a specific product, service or offering, you want to be careful and think broader in the context of how that might limit you down the road. If you want to expand your business, expand and grow your business, either vertically or horizontally. And then the last thing I think that, that it can also denote is this concept of preferences or your past or traditions or who you're going to serve. If you are specifically focusing on a specific market, the name itself could drive you to that market too. And so. And the only reason your name isn't going to necessarily deal with all five of these all at one time, but it could if you engineer it. I mean, the fact of the matter is that some of these companies Spell spend upwards of 80 or $100,000 with a naming consultant to work through a whole matrix of different things to figure out how do they come up with a name. For instance, the name like Compact, a name like acuvue, a name like Acura, a name like even Olive Garden. All of those names were done through a naming consultant firm and they spent a lot of money trying to make sure that they've got the right name that indicates the right identity, that indicates their position in the marketplace, what their personality is, what their product or offering or service or promise is and what their preferences are and what their past or tradition is. So, so you can get very, very complex and complicated and detailed in that naming process and be really, you know, really. It can be an expensive process, a time consuming process, but a meaningful process when you think about the name. For instance, acuvue accuview is contact lenses. And so accuf view, okay, just how they put it all together really, really starts to denote a certain personality, a certain product, a certain promise, a certain element to it. And so it is important to think about it. Now many times we don't, many times we just throw a name out there. But what I'm inviting you to do is to say what's my identity? What's the position I want to place, what's my personality that I want to portray, what's the offering from a broad scale perspective that I might want to.

Bring about and what are my preferences? And think about it in that way. In order to help you, let's just talk through what I the four steps, the four process steps that I think you can go through to build on your name, to come up with your name. And this will help you kind of bring this full circle, to bring this to life and say alright, so what do I need to do? I want to go into business.

I have an idea of what I want to offer, but how do I name it? How do I know what that name should be, what process to go through? And so let's just talk about the four steps and the first is what I call priming or the prime prime the pump if you will. This is about your preparation, this is about your pre work, this is about.

Collecting data and resources that you can use to help kind of in the next stage, which is called propagate, to propagate a list of possible names. This is the place where you start to set criteria of what you want the name to indicate, to signify, to denote, to represent in your market to your market's eyes. To your customers eyes, to your team's eyes, to yourself, all of those things, this is the time to do it. Many times you're going to find that the pre work is where all the heavy lifting is done for a lot of things in business. And this is one of the elements, is that we want to do all the pre work up front. We want to look at our competitors names, we want to look at other people in the space because we don't want to make sure. We want to make sure that we don't confuse people by doing something that's similar to another name in the space. Once we collect the data in this stage, in the prime stage of it, we collect the data, we do the research, we set our criteria of what we're looking for in the name, then it's about propagating, it's about populating, it's about getting that list together, it's about brainstorming with individuals, with customers, with team members, with outsiders to go through and say let's figure out a list. And when we talk about this, it's not about filtering the list at this point we're not saying good, bad or indifferent. We're just going to take everything and throw it up on the wall for now and we're just going to see what sticks right now. And many times the way we do this is just with a bunch of post IT notes, start writing a name on a post it note and have everyone in the room start writing names on post IT notes. And if they want on the back of the post it note, they'll write a justification for it or the reason that they think that it's appropriate. And we just stick them up on the wall. And we stick them up on the wall and we see if there's commonalities, common themes, we see if there's a discussion to be had, if something resonates with other people and we start moving them around. But this is what the propagate phase is. It's simply getting a population of literally a couple hundred possible names, if you want to go that far. And to say here's what's possible, here's what we've come up with based upon customer input, based on industry research, based on our research, based on brainstorming, based on talking to family, friends and foes or whatever you've talked to to really come up with a name. Then we move from propagate to this next stage, which is the process. So now we want to take that list and we want to whittle it down. We're going to use the criteria that we set in stage one, in the prime stage, and we're going to use that to start to whittle it down, to get down to maybe 5 to 10 maximum names to say, these are the ones that we're really going to hone in on, that we're really going to dial down and make a decision. And one of the things that we do here is I take the criteria, and this is the tool that you can download here with this episode. But you take the criteria and you list them out. And look, I'm a cpa, so I'm a math person. And you rank each name based on each criteria on a scale of 1 to 10. And the one with the highest score has got the highest satisfaction rate based upon the criteria that you set, if that makes sense. So if I say that uniqueness is one of them, relevancy to my market is another one, and.

You list, I would say 8 to 10 criteria, maybe even more uniqueness, relevancy to my marketplace, and.

Oh, gosh, that it's memorable. And so if I can rank Those on those three criteria, I might have one that has an 8, a 10 and a 7. Well, that's 25. I may have another one that has a 7, a 7 and a 7. That's 21. Well, the 25 is ranking higher on the set of criteria than the number the 21. And what it does is it allows you to filter and prioritize them. Doesn't mean that that's the one you're going to select, because you're going to need to do one other. A couple of other things, too, once you get down to this short, short list of maybe three names when we get done with it. But this process stage is where you start to whittle things down based upon your criteria, based on ratings and rankings and scoring, to the point where you've got three names that you're looking at. Then we move to this last stage, which is to protect the name. So here's where what you need to do is you need to do an additional search. You need to see if there's anything else that's named similar to yours that can cause confusion. You need to see if that word or those words that are out there have been used before and are already trademarked. And the way to do that is, at least in the US you're going to go to the US Trademark, Patent and Trademark Office, you're going to do a search, and in most countries you'll have the ability to do something like this and do it on the Internet. But you want to search and make sure that your name is available, that the words that.

You'Ve chosen for your name are available. Because if you start down that process and you start to build a brand, the last thing you want to ever have happen is someone come back and say, wait a second, that's the word, or that's the name, or that's my identity that I put out there and it's trademarked. And now they can sue you, they can force you to change it. They can do all kinds of things that you don't want to get involved with. So let's do the work upfront. So we're going to search out and make sure that the words that you're using and the name that you're using isn't already trademarked. And second, I want to make sure that I have availability on the web, that you can get the proper URLs to make sure that you've got the ability to have that identity and digitally also, as well as legally in the marketplace. Now, let me clarify something about the legal aspect of it, because I've had this happen a number of times where they say, well, I created my corporation with my name, so I should be safe. And the answer is no, you may not be safe. Just because you created a business entity based upon your name doesn't mean that that name is protected in any way. You still will need to trademark it, make sure that you've legally protected the name, even though you might have an entity that has the same name. Hopefully that helps. That makes sense to you. So we're going to verify that you got the URLs. You're going to verify that you're not infringing on someone else's trademark or someone else's name. And then you're going to register it with the trademark office so other people can't infringe on your brand and on your name. So that's the process. Prime, propagate, process, and protect. That's the process that you typically go through that'll help you work through it. Download the tool to help you with that. And let me give you, just before I leave this episode, let me give you a couple of do's and don'ts. And I'm going to start with the don'ts first, because you want to be clear. You don't. You want to make sure that you have clarity. So one of the first things and the don'ts is you want to make sure that the business Name you choose has relevancy that it's not irrelevant and it's not meaningless. It's not just some flippant term out there that has no relevancy to the marketplace, the product offering, the customers, or what you do. I'd avoid strings of numbers and letters, things that are meaningless. 1, 2, 3, I don't know, cards, 1, 2, 3, gardening.

They're meaningless numbers and letters strung together that really don't necessarily have any meaning. So I would avoid those. I mean, you can always do it, in my opinion. I avoid it. I'd be careful about geographically limiting yourself. So you might say, for instance, down, say, I'm in San Diego. And I say, you know, San Diego Vacuum Cleaner sales. Well, or San Diego Psychology.

Institute, something like that. What you're doing is you're narrowing the scope of your marketplace to a specific geographic area. So if you put San Diego in the name and someone's in Arizona, they say, well, they're in San Diego only I can't do business with them. And I think that what we can understand in many, many businesses, geographic lines are no longer hard and fast lines. The geographic lines are blurred. We can have global access, we can have statewide access, we can have national based upon technology today. So be careful that your name doesn't limit you geographically, at least from a perception standpoint to your marketplace. Also, and I mentioned this earlier, be careful about something that might limit your product or your service, at least how the offerings look in the context of that. So be careful about. If you're going to go out there and represent yourself as only a single product or service, then you have a little challenge with trying to broaden it later on. So I would be cautious about that. Long names or confusing names make it something that's easy to remember, easy to spell out. Listen, I met my wife. I met my wife in an airport. And many of you have heard the story. I met my wife in an airport. She works for a pharmaceutical company, and they took the family names that started this pharmaceutical company. And. And the name, I got to tell you is so long that I think one of the tests that she put me through was that if I could spell the name right in the email address, then she would at least talk to me and we might have a chance to go out on a date. But it was a very long, confusing spelling. I couldn't even spell it today. We've been married now four years. And the fact of the matter is that you want your name to be something that is memorable and easy and not Confusing. So watch out for long names. Watch out for puns or play on words, because you might get it, but the marketplace may not. So watch out for that. And then be really, really careful of borrowing from other brands, taking on a name that is similar to someone else in the market space, or not even in the market space, but someone that might say, wait a second, they're riding on our coat wings, they're riding on our coattails, and they're trying to pull our traffic or our customers, and they're confusing our customers. And you're putting yourself in a potential position for litigation, and you want to avoid that at all costs. So be careful about borrowing from other brands. So what should you do? Well, let's make sure that the name is relatable to your customers, to your marketplace, to your team. Make sure that it's concrete and descriptive and specific so it's not some broad concept that people go, huh? What's this about? Make sure that it's attractive to the customers that you want. And remember, I talk about preferences and positioning. So if it's for a specific niche, a specific customer group, and you can embed that in the name, it will strip away the customers that you don't want. Make sure that you're careful about new spellings or new words. Now, they get away with it in many cases. In fact, Compaq Computer is a great example of that. They spelled Compaq C, O, M, P, a Q versus compact. And it was for a very. For a portable computer back in the day. And Accuview is another one where they're coming up with new words. Acura another one. They're coming up with new words. So be careful about it. You can use it, but make sure that it's memorable. Make sure it's understandable. Make sure it's easy to spell. Keep it simple. Don't get all convoluted with too much there. Too much thought in there, too much detail. That is something that people can't comprehend or not because it's just too confusing. So you want to keep it simple. You want it to be web friendly. Remember, at some point they may have to type it into Google and everything. So you want to be able to make it web friendly. And a long name or a confusing name or misspellings of the name can be challenging. So keep it web friendly and then make sure it's protectable. In other words, do the search and make sure that you can trademark it. Do the search and make sure that you can protect it. Do the search because the Last thing you ever want to do is build yourself a brand that, that it starts going gangbusters and then you find out that you've infringed on someone else and they're going to enter the game and pull the rug right out from your under you on your success. So hopefully those do's and don'ts will help you a bit. And I've given you the process. Get the tool. I hope you found this of value. I mean this concept of what do I name my business? You can. Some people just go in and say I just throw a name out there. But I think that we can put more thought into it. I invite you to put more thought into it. I invite you to think about that. Your name can represent a lot of different things in the marketplace. So you want to get it right. It's something you're going to live with for a long, long time. And so I hope you found this of value again. If you want to get the downloadable tool for this, for this session, go to melabraham.com session027. Do me a favor, do me a favor and share this with a friend. Share this with someone that is in business, going into business or someone that you think that this is a value to. And if you haven't done so already, make sure you subscribe because I'm doing these on a regular basis. This is my way of being able to be in your back pocket as your entrepreneurial mentor to help you build your business, design your business, grow your business, create wealth, create success and build a life that you've always wanted. And if you have a question for me, business, success, wealth, entrepreneurial, whatever you have as a question, you can go to askmelnow.com leave the question there. We'll make sure we get it answered on one of the upcoming episodes. And so again, if you're not by your computer and you want to get the downloadable tool for this episode, make sure that you text to 38470 mylegacy no spaces 38470 and until we get a chance to see each other on the next episode, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant. See you soon. Cheers. Bye.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you subscribe so you get access to all of Mel's business and success tips. And if you like this episode, share it with a friend. If you have a specific business or success question, you can ask it at www.askmelnow.com. remember, it's all about being bold, dreaming big and living life. Your way because the world needs you. Until the next episode. May vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant.

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