Would you change the name of your company if you could?

A friend of mine was asking me what he should call his business. He works in the kitchens and he was wanting to know whether he should call his business around the geography, plus what is that he does, i.e. Watford Kitchens. Or whether he should name it after himself and the fact that he does kitchen’s, establishing himself as a little bit of a personality.

I said well it’s very much what you want to do with your business whether you want your business to be a saleable asset or all you want the business to stand alone as its own individual brand. Now I’m talking for most of us normal sized business owners here, whereby the fundamental thing that we want people to be able to do is to find our business and find out what we do. For example, if I had a kitchen company in Surrey, for example, I’m having Guildford kitchens on the front of it. If I type Guildford Kitchen’s into the google strip then the likelihood is that Guildford Kitchen’s it exactly what would come up.

There are areas where course that would be limiting because I may want to do Cranley Kitchen’s or Haslemere Kitchen’s or Surrey Kitchens or London Kitchen’s or it might make me look a little bit parochial – a little bit to kind of local. But what it would do would be drive business to the website because people would be effectively searching that. Is it glamorous in terms of a trade name? – not necessarily – that is a business with those smaller limited ambitions.

Now if you’ve got all the money in the world then you can establish a brand like Apple, or Virgin or indeed something like Uber. There’s a lot to be said about having those very cool one named massive brand symbols that you can then add all sorts of different businesses to. But I guess it’s just a matter of whether you’re establishing a brand or if you’re establishing something that will lead to leads effectively being generated by your kind of website.

In terms of personalizing your brand, I think it’s extremely naff and very Americanised. There is quite a lot of people that have such and such a name and their business kind of title. But once upon a time people deemed it to be personalized, I think now it’s potentially looks a little bit kind of parochial. Or a little bit of an ego trip in terms of the people that are involved in that. In that, they want to be the personification of their business and it doesn’t necessarily stand alone without them.

So again if you wanted to make a saleable asset that wasn’t tied up into something that you were doing, then you have to create a business that is detached from your own. So in summary and if you’ve got loads of money then great create a brand with the one named fancy thing and drive people to look for that brand. If you’re looking to generate leads with your business then where you are and what you do is a really good place to start.

Hope that helps in terms of the naming of your new companies.

Take care