Have you ever tried to name a business? I’m curious, because although the opportunity to name a business is an awesome privilege, there’s so much that goes into choosing a name.
I will preface this blog by saying that I’m not a branding expert. I have no formal training or experience in branding. That said, I thought it might be interesting to share my experience in naming my business and my thought process for developing the name Collective Results.
I had so much that I wanted to convey through the name of my business. I wanted a name that reflected the values and goals that I had for the company. So, I started by sitting down and jotting down bullet points about everything I wanted the name to convey about the business and then tried to attach key words to them.
I wanted a name that would:
Reflect the importance of focusing on outcomes (or results) and our commitment to delivering useful, tangible benefits to the clients we work with.
Reflect our expertise in being able to help clients show outcomes by choosing key performance indicators, building systems for data collection, and helping them analyse their data to show their results.
Show that we care equally about the process we use to get to those outcomes. For us, relationships, collaboration, learning, and support are how we most effectively achieve meaningful outcomes for our clients and the communities they serve.
Show that we are a collaborative team that works together, makes decisions collaboratively, and makes the best use of each other’s talents, skills, and strengths, to achieve the best outcomes. To honour this, it was important to me that the business name not have my name in it or be linked to me personally.
Be sustainable over time.
I thought the terms Collective and Results would capture these ideas and I merged them together into one name. After testing it with a few trusted family members, friends, and people in the industry, and after making sure it wasn’t already used elsewhere in Ontario, I registered it.
Now, when I consider the name Collective Results as a whole, I hope that it conveys the idea that success is important, but it is not achieved alone. Success is achieved through the collective efforts of the organizations that we serve, our team, community members, community partners, and service users working together to build the best possible outcomes. It’s been wonderful to watch our team define and live into our values as a company over the last two years, and I think our name aligns nicely with our values of relationships, learning, happiness, and equity.
Our team has organically started using the saying “…and that’s Collective Results” when we catch ourselves living into our name. I’ve heard this saying this when we build a strong plan collaboratively with a client, identify unique perspectives that should be involved in a project, help a client identify quick wins to address problems, successfully engage people with lived experience in influencing project outcomes, or co-design dashboards that help agencies see the impact they’re making, and many more instances.
What do you think of when you hear the name Collective Results? What was your experience naming a business? Leave your comments below!
