Monday, September 15, 2008


What will be the Company name?



This is again a very important question to answer. I will provide some tips, the choice should always be yours:

1) Use a name that can be easily pronounced by people of different nationalities (if you are planning to build a global enterprise). For example: Google, Infosys and Apple are all very simple. Company names like Technoelectroics are tough to pronounce and remember.
2) Keep it as short as possible, this helps easy brand recall
3) Make sure you can obtain a domain name. You might name a company 'XYZ Business Consulting Pvt. Ltd'; ideally you should be able to find a domain name which is http://www.xyz.com and not http://www.xyzbusinessconsulting.com/. It is too long to type and
remember. If you can't find a good domain name, I would recommend you find a name with a domain name.
4) I would strongly recommend that the name of the company have a basis for its selection. When a prospective client or a prospective employee asks you about why such a name was selected, you should have a story to say. A story that is ideally better than "It is based on my name."
5) Try and stay away from naming your company on your last name or first name. In today's world, it can scare away employees, investors and clients.
6) Make sure that another company does not have the same name, or sounds the same phonetically.
7) At the end always ask yourself, "If I have to introduce my company, will I feel proud introducing my company with its name?"

It took us about 3 weeks to finalize the name of the company. Part of the delay was due to us finalizing the name, and part of the delay was due to some issues raised by Registrar of Companies.

Some learnings while dealing with the Registrar of Companies (RoC), India:

1) Do not use a name that sound phonetically similar to another company, especially Trademarked companies. For example: 'INDDUS' sound very similar to 'INDUS'
2) If you want to use words like 'Industries' or 'Business', the RoC will ask you to increase the Authorized Capital to at least Rs. 10 Lakhs

Ok, so what's the name of the company? I am not going to answer this completely as I am waiting for a final confirmation from the RoC; I will sure do once I have the formal confirmation in my hand. But here are some clues:

1) The name of the company is going to be 6 letters long
2) The complete name will be "<CompanyName> Business Consulting Pvt. Ltd."
3) The name of the company is based on the company 'Values' defined previously
4) The company will be branded using the 6 letter word '<CompanyName>'
5) The website of the company will be the 6 letter word and '.com'. The website is already registered and we have also registered domain names with similar names to avoid confusion for our visitors.

Look forward to communicating the company name soon.

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