Before you fall in love with a business name

Naming is the fun part, so it's usually done first and checked last. That order is how businesses end up printing a name they later have to change, which is one of the more expensive mistakes available to a new company.

Here's the order we'd suggest instead. Come up with a short list, run every name through the checks below, and only then decide which one you love.

The practical checks

• Can you register it? Search your provincial and federal business registries, and the Canadian trademarks database, before anything else.
• Can you get the address? A .ca or .com you can live with, plus the handles you'll want. Being “thenamestudio” everywhere because “namestudio” was taken makes you harder to find for years.
• Can someone spell it after hearing it once? Say it down a phone line. If you have to follow it with “that's with a K,” every customer will too.
• Does it already mean something else? Search it. If page one belongs to a band, a US chain, or something unfortunate, you'll be competing with that forever.
• Does it still fit in five years? A name tied to one service or one town gets awkward the moment you add the second of either.

Descriptive, invented, or a person's name

A descriptive name (Coast Plumbing) tells people what you do immediately and is easy to find, but it's harder to protect and easy to blend into. An invented word is distinctive and protectable, but you pay to teach people what it means. Your own name carries trust and personality, and it makes the business harder to sell later. None of these is wrong. They just cost you in different places.

One thing we won't do

We'll do the searching, tell you plainly what we find, and help you choose. We won't tell you a name is legally clear, because that's a lawyer's call and it's worth paying for. On a name you're going to put on a van, a sign, and every invoice for a decade, a few hundred dollars of advice is cheap.