If you build it…?

“If you build it – they will come” and they did – according to the movie ‘Field of Dreams’.

Sadly, being in business is no longer akin to the miracles of a Hollywood fantasy. Today, building a business is recognised as a tough assignment and we are constantly being told “it begins at the first stages of preparation”.

To many, the old echo of, ” Get yourself a good accountant” vibrates through the halls of commerce and in many ways it’s still good advice. But they’re not the only experts you’ll need in this new millennium. You’ll also need a great marketer, someone in PR who understands media, a top class IT person who can save you money, a good solicitor as well as a sound but creative bean counter.

In business terms, it’s first of all handy to know if the stuff your offering has a market. It’s OK to build it and let them come, but if your stuff doesn’t have a consumer need you’ve got yourself an ‘orphan solution’ and with it a major heartache, because they ain’t coming. Once you’ve establish they are going to come, you’ll need a name and here’s where the real challenges begin. Don’t look to your accountant for that because bean counters are superb ‘left brainers’ and you’ll need a ‘so far right‘ brainer for that job.

Let’s begin with finding the right word, easy enough you would think? Not so, you see your name is as much about positioning yourself as anything else and nine times out of ten the first appropriate name you think of will already have been taken.

Take an example. Here’s a catchy little number that could be a fashion label, let’s call it ‘ditto’. Simple enough, easy to remember. Here’s your new company ‘Ditto Fashions’. First port of call is your local Department of Consumer Protection to register your new name as a business… “Sorry, no go”, the names been taken. Ditto is a telephone company.

Unperturbed you move forward believing it could become your intellectual property if you registered it as a trade mark – so off you trot to a site called ATMOSS IP Australia, only to find that there are already 12 ‘ditto’s’ registered in 17 classes. Now that’s a bummer.

While all this has been going on your IT person has been checking out domains for you. The result comes in – the computer says, NO! No ‘.com’, no .’com.au’, in fact no ‘dot anything’, all eight possibilities are already taken and just to make sure it’s a full count, we also discover that if you apply for an ABN you’ll get knocked back because it’s already registered.

An exaggeration perhaps? Not really, this is a real live one, I’ve just completed the searches. That’s a round one knock out.

It’s a massive problem and for business today it’s a dilemma too far away. In researching the problem we’ve identified a new market and responded with a unique ‘name your business’ package
It’s a service where we do all the hard work. We develop an appropriate, creative name which is consumer friendly and positions your business correctly. Then we run the necessary checks with the appropriate agencies until we are confident it can get through every process. Only when that is completed do we present the results to you and with your approval we implement it on your behalf. It saves time, money and a huge amount of frustration.

Just for the record, if you decide to take this on yourself be prepared for a couple of weeks work and remember that using geographic titles in the name will automatically prejudice your ability to register it as a trade mark, which, by the way is the only legitimate proof of ownership.

Building it so they will come, entails a lot more than dreaming – but that’s the name of the game.