Choosing a Business Name.
By Malcolm Hornsby
September 2003
What's in a name, as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. A name can be
emotive, evocative and subliminal in nature. Would a person of the Jewish faith
go to a driving school call Adolph's Driving School or would you go to Mad Mal's
Motoring Maniacs I think not. If you look through the yellow pages under driving
schools you will find hundreds of driving school names, some that don't smell so
sweet. It's a good idea to look through these names to see some of the mistakes
that proprietors make when choosing a name for their business. Choosing a name that
incorporates your personal name for instance like Joe's Driving School maybe ok
if your name is Joe and your comfortable portraying a business name that tends to
indicate to the customers that the school is a small insignificant operation, even
when the school has fifty instructors operating.
Selecting a business name that ties you to a suburb like Preston Motor School may
also be problematic as a customer may dismiss your business as one that only services
the suburb in question. Names that incorporate the words National - Australian -
State could also be a problem as they indicate your business covers a vast zone.
These names are a poor excuse for a good business name. Take a look at some successful
businesses, most have only a one word name. Take a good look at what driving school
names already exist as the Department of Fair Trading will not register existing
names so you will have to come up with something unique.
The Yellow Pages can also index driving schools in alphabetical order and it's no
surprise to find that the highest number of driving school names start with "A"
this is because many people still use the Yellow Pages paper directory to find services
and those business names beginning with the letter "A" will be at the front of the
index. Choosing a business name that starts with "A" is all very well for the paper
based directory but these days were seeing the emergence of many electronic directories
and these directories are powered by a database of some type and if they are set
alphabetically the first entries listed are numbers. In other words if you decided
to call your driving school 123 you could probably find your business name at the
top of the list. If your looking to save the hassle and cost of registering your
school then you don't have to register your own name so you could simply operate
your business using only your own name, though I would advise against this.