When I thought about starting a business, I knew that there would be a lot to it. You can't simply read a book on how to start a business and expect to know it all – there is just too much. There is incorporating, hiring competent people, coming up with a business plan, getting investors, getting retail space – you get the idea. One thing that I didn't consider, however, was finding the right business name.
It took me months of fruitless business name search before I really had any idea what I was doing. I got business name suggestions from everyone I met, but none of them were really good. Hiring a company to get business name suggestions seemed like a silly idea to me at first, but then one of my friends and partners told me to think about it in a different way. To him, the business name suggestion is just part of the broader business branding and marketing strategy. Your business is not just the products you sell, the people who work for you, or even the physical location where it is held. The business is about how people see it. Getting the right suggested business names is the first step to projecting the right corporate image.
The key to business name suggestions is to not think of them in isolation. It is true that every once in a while, a brilliant business name suggestion comes along. If this happens to you, you can use it as a starting point. You can cater the branding strategy, the slogans, the corporate logos – everything to that particular business name. In general, however, business name suggestions should be part of a more integrated approach. The business makes suggestions that you choose should not exist in isolation, but as part of an overall strategy. Naming a business is not only where you start as the business's founder, but also where the consumer starts. The wrong name and you will get no business.
In the end, sometimes good business name suggestions come from the most unlikely people. Our foray with the marketing and advertising agency was fruitless, and in the end we had just managed to waste several thousand dollars on nothing. In desperation, I turned to some very unlikely people to give me business name suggestions. Since we would be a toy distributor, I turned to my younger son and his friends. They came up with the perfect name.
