Contractor Business Tips: How to Name Your Contracting Business

All right. Hey, you pulled the trigger. You're ready to go out on your own. You're ready to rock this business thing. But before you do that, I want you to ask yourself this question. How much time have you given to naming your business? So here's the thing. I want to share a few insights or tips that I have on naming your contracting business. And these are things that I've either done right or wrong, or I've seen others do right or wrong. And so I want to just hit these real quick for you today. If you're in the position where maybe you're starting out in business, you're just about to pull the trigger on a name and have everything printed up, and logos, and websites, and business cards. And I want to make sure that before you get started, you take the time to make sure that you are picking the right name for your business that's going to communicate what you want communicated. So here's a few tips. The first is this. Clarity, work first. You have to do the clarity work first. And what I mean by that is you have to sit down and take the time to understand what it is that you want to stand for in a business. If you want to stand for high quality, I remember meeting somebody at a home show. They were like, yeah, we're really high quality, and we don't want to be expensive. But they had the word affordable in their business name. There's a disconnect there. Doesn't work. So do the clarity work first. Take some time and really understand who you are, what you want to be. And many times that will lead, that exercise will lead you to the name of what your business should be. In fact, my recent rebranding of my business to the contractor fight came from a session, a clarity session that I did with one of my coaches and mentors. And we spent two days holed up in a little Airbnb in Breckenridge, Colorado to get clarity on what I wanted to build in my life, in my business. And that's how the contractor fight came about. So many times, you're going to get the name right if you do that clarity work first. All right, one thing you don't want to do is use initials. Initials are boring. You're not IBM. IBM is IBM, and they've been around for God knows how long, and they do billions of dollars. So avoid initials. They're confusing. There's nothing memorable about them. There's nothing unique about them. The next thing that you want to make sure that you're doing when you name your business is you want to choose a name that's relevant. I love the name. Tim Ferriss has the book The 4-Hour Workweek. Kind of says it all. There's actually a painting franchise called Wow One Day Painting. It says it all. It's relevant to what they do. All right, the next thing that you want to consider when naming your business is you want to make sure that it's simple to say, and it's easy to spell. Don't play any cute little spelling games and things like that with your name, like if you're going to use the number four in place of the word F-O-R. That's cute and all this other crap, but don't do it for your business name. All right, make sure you roll it off the tongue a few times. You have a few people say it. Practice answering the phone. Is it easy to say? Does it roll off your lips really simple, or else you're going to have problems later on? And the other thing is make sure it's easy to spell for people, because when they're typing it into Google and stuff like that, you want to make sure that it's simple and easy for them to find you. All right, the next thing is you want it to be memorable. Years ago, my painting company that I was a partner in in the Chicago area was called Jalapeno Paintworks, and it was memorable. We had this pepper guy who was all happy, and he was fun. And what we wanted to stand for was a great experience that was fun and unique and things like that. And we would drive down the road in our trucks, and people would call the office. And they'd go, man, I see your trucks all over the place. It's so unique. We want you to come paint our house. So by being memorable, it's what marketers will call being sticky, or what Seth Godin calls being a purple cow. In your industry, look at what everyone's naming their companies. We saw Bob's Painting and Quality Decorating and Fine Cut Painting, or whatever it is. And we were like, man, that's a bunch of crap. We don't want to be like that. We want to stand out. We want to be memorable. All right, the other thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you go to USPTO.gov and make sure that the name that you're choosing is not already trademarked by somebody else. The last thing you want to do is invest a lot of time and money and all that other stuff into a name that you can't trademark. All right, and the last thing about naming a company is once you have the name, hire a pro to help you with your identity, your logo, your images, things like that, the colors that you should use. Invest in a pro who will help you communicate what it is that you want to stand for. Listen, you go out, you blow $1,200 on a sprayer, you blow $35,000 on a dingo, or whatever you're buying for your business, and then you half-ass it when it comes to creating your identity, and your website, and all that social media stuff. So don't half-ass it. Make sure you hire a pro to do it, and get out of their way, and let them do what they do best, just like you do what you do best. Hey, you want to connect with like-minded contractors who are winning the contractor fight? Head to thecontractorfight.com and join the movement that will help you take back your dignity, earn what you're worth, and build a business that serves you, thecontractorfight.com.