The Game Of The Name
A look at some of the unlikely ways Inc. 500 CEOs came up with the names for their companies.
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Investigations
Q: What do you call a company that makes the Inc. 500?
A: Not anything you want
Naming an italian restaurant Marty Bloom's wouldn't exactly give it credibility," concedes CEO Marty Bloom. "I wanted something straightforward, like Tony's, Sal's, or Carmine's, but I just couldn't find the right damn name. Then one night I was in bed watching My Cousin Vinny on HBO, and all of a sudden this light went on and I shouted, 'Perfect!' My wife says, 'What's with you?' And I tell her I'm going to call this thing Vinny's."
That's how it happens. That's what makes the difference between a modest success and the kind of company that can't do anything but skyrocket its way onto the Inc. 500 list in its first year of eligibility. Today, Vinny Testa's Restaurant Group proudly occupies the 259th slot on the list, purely because its founder had the wisdom not to burden it with his own name.
Which brings us to a simple truth: deciding what to name your company is more important to your success than anything else you're going to do, except, of course, deciding whatever it is that you actually intend to sell (not that the two need be related). In fact, our exhaustive analysis of this year's ranking suggests that if you want to land your company on the Inc. 500 list, there are some rather simple approaches you can take. Mind you, don't confuse simple with easy. Marty Bloom may have looked as if he was lounging abed watching Marisa Tomei do an Oscar-winning comedic turn, but in truth, his epiphany represented the culmination of months of rumination, scrutiny, and obsession. Not to mention his willingness to shell out extra dough for a premium cable channel.
But Testa's (née Bloom's) technique will sound eerily familiar to many of his fellow Inc. 500 CEOs. Study their naming styles and it becomes apparent that all founders of fast-growing companies rely on at least one of the five techniques revealed herein for the first (and, by popular demand, last) time:
Technique #1: Screw up your name--or somebody else's. Time was, when the companies that dominated the Inc. 500 list were straightforwardly named after their founders, a strategy no doubt responsible for propelling weight-loss giant Jenny Craig Inc. into the #6 slot on our 1988 ranking. This being the era of partnerships, however, the task has turned infinitely more complex.
Witness, if you will, Wheb Systems (#154), a forms-processing company that derives its name from combining the initials of the last names of cofounders Jim Woodruff, Tim Harvey, and Barry Brueseke. The e stands for "especially," serving as a much-needed vowel for sounding out the name. "We thought for a long time and finally came up with those initials," says Brueseke. "Harvey didn't stay with us very long, so we bought him out, and now the h is silent"-- proof that Inc. 500 CEOs are not only smart but also abundantly clever.
Similarly, Aztec Systems (#471), a designer and installer of corporate computing networks, has nothing to do with the ancient Mexican nation; its name is derived from a combination of the names of founders Andrew Levi and Steve Sigler. "It's no real whiz-bang thing," says Levi, feigning modesty. "We started with ASTech and turned it into Aztec so we could leverage the Aztec Indians and the sundial in our corporate identity." Apparently, leveraging the brand-name recognition of historic empires is not beyond the ken of CEOs of fast-growing companies.
If your own name doesn't work for your business--well then, you know what to do. The aforementioned Marty Bloom knew that Vinny's by itself wouldn't be enough for his new restaurant. After all, he had previously started an eatery named Starbucks, causing the Seattle-based java megajoint to come after him. He worried that down the road he might run into the same problem with a name as generic as Vinny's. So he splurged on a book of popular Italian surnames, found Testa, and came up with Vinny Testa's Bar Ristorante, whereupon he filed a trademark application. "To my total amazement, it was approved," says Bloom, who has kept his own name.
Technique #2: Drop names frequently. If you're not on this year's list, or if you're not pleased with your placement on this year's list, there's hope--if you'll just consider renaming your company. Sometimes it takes a few cracks before you get the name right.
Savvy CEOs know when to drop one name and pick up a new one. And not just Inc. 500 CEOs, either. In its semi-annual survey, identity consultant Anspach Grossman Enterprise discovered that in the first half of this year, companies made a record number of name changes (955, if you must know). Of those, 421 were made by corporations that had adopted names that would better define the companies to their audiences. Case in point: F.W. Woolworth, which closed its five-and-dime stores last year, changed its name to the Venator Group. Now you're clear on what it does, aren't you?
But Inc. 500 CEOs know better than to change a company name from one that has incredible brand identity to one that brings to mind, well, dinosaurs in a Spielberg flick.
Take Gary Erickson, cofounder of Clif Bar. When he started his company, in 1986, he named it after his grandmother Kali, who died three years later. Until 1997 the name remained Kali's SportNaturals, in spite of the fact that more and more people began to refer to the company by its main product, the Clif Bar, a sports energy bar named for Erickson's father. "We were very attached to the Kali name," says Erickson. "People would call up and we'd answer, 'Kali's SportNaturals,' and they'd say, 'I'm looking for Clif Bar. Is this Clif Bar?" Last year, as Kali's SportNaturals, Erickson's company was #253 on the list. As Clif Bar, it's #152, up an almost-implausible 101 spots. Coincidence? Right.
