Why I needed six weeks to choose a business name

Deciding on a business name might not sound like a challenging task for an entrepreneur, but for Paula Maidens it was a long and arduous process.

Maidens is the founder of Recruitment Coach, a Queensland-based business set up in 2010, which now has a team of five.

It was created to provide SMEs with access to professional recruitment and retention advice, support and strategies, which typically fall outside of the small business budget.

“Our business model makes it possible to help any business to solve their HR issues – no matter what their budget is or where their priorities are,” Maidens says.

“Equally as important is our vision to offer our employees and franchisees a fantastic working environment that offers them autonomy and flexibility.”

“This aspect of our vision means that our business model is scalable and can operate from any location.”

“As our intellectual property and internal systems are based in the cloud, Recruitment Coach can easily expand to other locations, both in Australia and overseas.”

The business turned over almost $300,000 in the 2010/11 financial year, and has grown 100% year-on-year since then.

Maidens says she saw a gap in the market after working as the director of a global recruitment firm.

“I saw firsthand how many businesses struggled to recruit the right people,” she says.

“I found that most businesses experienced recruitment difficulties simply because they lacked the internal knowledge to confidently hire someone or to manage their own human resources.”

“I soon realised that there was a gap in the market: to provide cost-effective recruitment and human resources support to small to medium businesses without an in-house HR function.”

“After finding our niche, Recruitment Coach was then created to empower businesses to manage their own human resources.”

According to Maidens, the most challenging part of starting the business was choosing a name.

“We knew what we wanted to offer, but we didn’t know what to call it,” Maidens says.

“We knew that what we were offering was HR but… we understood that businesses don’t usually think they need a HR function until they become large in their own minds.”

“Finally, we realised that every business needs to recruit to grow from one to two people, and most businesses feel recruitment pain in finding the right people.”

“We then decided to focus our brand name on recruitment and eventually came up with the name of Recruitment Coach.”

According to Maidens, it took about six weeks of being “locked in a room with a thesaurus, the internet and a lot of words on a whiteboard” before a name was chosen.

But as Maidens explains, it proved to be an invaluable experience.

“You don’t know what you don’t know and it quickly became critical to learn all the business things and fundamentals extremely quickly,” she says.

“The fundamentals that I had to pick up quickly were choosing a name, building a website and online portal, and working out how to market the name and idea.”

“The marketing side was so important as without that sorted, no one knows who you are or what you are offering.”

“From the difficult experience of choosing a name, I found that putting yourself in the shoes of your clients and your market, understanding their biggest challenge, and working back from there was a great place to start.”

“We now apply that ‘in their shoes’ methodology to every new product or service that we come up with, and especially during our sales process.”