Give it a good name
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Welcome to Issue 7 of A Good Reputation, a newsletter about a good brand move that helped grow a small business. (Did someone send you? Subscribe here.) Hello Reader, Until last week, I hadn’t met anyone who hasn’t struggled—even just a little bit—with naming their business. That’s because naming your business is a big f’ing deal. Naming anything is a big deal. Names carry weight. They can give meaning and context or create confusion and negative associations. For instance, I almost named this newsletter “The M Word” because marketing has become a dirty word, and small businesses think they hate it (even though they know they need it). I thought it was funny. But my partner, a private school teacher who’s gone through so much diversity, equity, and inclusion training, cringed when I pitched it. He thought it was offensive. As you can see, I dropped it. I’ve had to name lots of things throughout my life and work, and I’ve struggled with them all. Two kids, two food blogs, an online magazine, a community, a newsletter, and now a freelance business. My biggest fear is outgrowing my name. Or having something that’s not clear or not clever or too boring. As a freelancer, I've struggled with a frequently asked question: Should I use my name? Or should I pick a good brand name? People are working with me and only me, after all. But not Erika Steinberg. A fractional chief marketing officer for law firms, Erika picked a name before launching and stuck with it. In 6 years, she grew her solo business from $45,000 to $575,000 a year with a full book of clients. That name, along with a focused clientele and generous approach, has made Erika the obvious option for part-time marketing help in her space. And that, my friends, is the ultimate goal. Here's what I learned from her. A Good Story Erika is kind of a big deal in the legal industry. For 11 years, she was the director of marketing operations for Sidley Austin, one of the world’s largest law firms. But shortly after moving from Manhattan to the suburbs of Westchester County in upstate New York, Erika could no longer handle the three-hour-long roundtrip commute on top of her 10-hour workdays. That, and she had two school-aged kids with kid-sized needs. Erika didn’t want to stop working, she just needed a more flexible work arrangement. So four months into her break from her in-house role, she started thinking about fractional marketing. She took her former boss, Barry, out to dinner one night to aerate the idea. He thought it was brilliant—as long as she exclusively worked with law firms. (More on that later.) She asked him what she should name it. Steinberg Consulting? ES Marking Services? But something about using her name wasn’t feeling right. She pulled a pen from her purse, found a scrap piece of paper, and scribbled down “CMO2Go.” Just like that. She loved it. The deed was done. A Good Approach Thanks to referrals from her former company, as well as friends and family, Erika had clients right away. (Side note: That’s the benefit of having many, many years of experience before launching your own thing.) As Erika puts it, she was batting a thousand in her first year in business. If she got the call, she landed the gig. Her business name made her offer crystal clear—a CMO service when you need someone on the fly to fill in the gaps. Everything was going great until it was too great. As so often happens with fractional business models, too many clients and too little time eventually turned her business back into the 10-hour-a-day slog she set out to escape. She quickly realized that she had built herself another job—not a business—and course-corrected. She hired contractors who could help execute the work, including designers and copywriters, so she could focus on higher-level project management and strategy. She was three years in and more grateful than ever that she had chosen a brand name that allowed her service—not herself—to be the selling point. Erika says this formality also makes her think and operate more like the CEO of a business rather than a freelancer. It allows her to consider doing things like sending her clients end-of-year gifts and thank-you notes—something you don’t hear many freelancers do. These gifts come in the form of contributions to organizations and causes that Erika's family and clients care about. I love this because it's a feel-good customer retention and referral move, as well as a heart-led business practice. (This is something I could work on.) Anyway. That, Erika says, is the first thing she did right. The second was staying in her lane. Following Barry’s advice, Erika turned down leads from clients that were not law firms. She admits this was one of the hardest things to do in the beginning, but honing in on her area of true expertise helped her build a reputation as the legal industry’s go-to marketing hire. For instance, one of her clients came from a former colleague who was on an elevator with a partner at another firm. The partner asked: “Hey, do you know anyone in marketing for my law firm?” The referral said: “I’ve got just the people for you.” That’s exactly what you want. Become known for a thing—one thing—and you’ll make it exceptionally easy for people to talk about you when you’re not in the elevator. To grow beyond referrals, Erika recently started writing long-form articles on her company blog that she distributes on LinkedIn as part of her own marketing strategy. The move has helped her build her credibility and share her expertise to land new clients down the road. A Good Lesson Erika admits she left a lot of money on the table in her early days from not figuring out her pricing strategy. For instance, a project she billed 30 hours for once actually took her close to 50 hours to complete. Now 6 years in, she has a decent gauge on her hourly rate and how long things will take. But her most critical mindset shift was around value-based pricing. The way she now calculates her pricing takes into consideration how much lawyers bill as part of their hourly rates. Every hour they don’t have to think about marketing, she argues, is an hour they can bill their clients. That’s worth a lot—and so is she. A Good Takeaway Erika’s approach to building her freelance business isn’t necessarily novel, but her way of running it is—and it did clarify some things for me. First, let’s tackle the freelancer question of whether or not you should give your business a proper name or name it after yourself. If you’re set on naming a business after yourself, the upsides include:
The downside is that if your business fails or you do a bad job, your personal reputation could go down with it. And if you eventually decide to expand and hire, you'll need to untangle your name from your business. If you’re serious about turning your freelance side hustle into a real grownup business, naming it gives you three advantages:
For me, the choice is clear: Give your business a name and build a personal brand to drive leads to that business. Now, if you have a business, product, or project you want to name, there’s only one framework you need to follow. It comes from naming expert Alexandra Watkins, and it’s perfect. I interviewed Alexandra when I was a reporter for the San Francisco Business Times. She was growing her business and named own company "Eat My Words" using this framework. It’s called the Smile & Scratch test, and if your name doesn’t pass it, you should pass on the name. Here's how it works. First, your name needs to make people “smile”. That means it needs to be:
If your name makes people “scratch” their heads, scrap it. That includes any of these flaws:
I fed ChatGPT this test. I then gave it my name ideas for this newsletter. A Good Reputation passed with flying colors. A Few Good Resources
That's all for today. Now excuse me while I go work on naming my freelance content marketing business. Hope you have a good one, |