When I started my event business in 2004, I struggled with what to name it. It’s a problem we hear a lot at Event Planning Blueprint, “how to choose a name for your event planning business”.
Tyesse, a long time community member at Event Planning Blueprint and a recent grad of our business training program, experienced this when naming her event business.
Ultimately she chose a name that was close to her heart and had meaning for her – Marigold Rose Events, which was named after her two grandmothers. So sweet, right?!
But, it took going through this 8 point checklist before she decided on the right name for her.
How I Named My Event Business
It took me weeks to decide what to name my business because I couldn’t decide if I wanted something fun and catchy, something meaningful or if I should name the business after myself.
In the end I decided on C!AO Event Management. Ciao (pronounced chow) is an informal Italian greeting that is used to say hello or good-bye.
The name helps you brand your event business, decide what your website will look like, what logo to choose and what to put on your business cards.
Many event planners struggle to choose a name because of the pressure to pick the ‘right’ business name.
Choose A Name For Your Event Planning Business
Some experts believe names should be abstract and others believe they should be informative so it’s easy to understand what your business is about.
In today’s video, I share 8 steps that you can use to help make a decision.
Step One: Grab a pen and a piece of paper and write down every word that comes to mind. Don’t filter your thoughts or say no to anything – yet. (Use wordnik.com to expand your word list)
Step Two: While some synonyms have positive connotations others are neutral or negative. E.g. lazy vs. relaxed, difficult or challenging, studios vs. nerdy. Explore different word choices to enhance your business name. Ask yourself:
- Who is my target audience?
- How is my business better (or more unique) than the competition?
Step Three: Narrow your list to 2-3 options.
Step Four: Is the name easy to pronounce and spell? Ciao wasn’t an easy word for many people to say, but it was memorable and it meant something to me.
Step Five: Is it descriptive? C!AO had personal meaning for me because Italy is one of my favorite countries, and it also stood for Contemporary, Innovative and Original.
Add a Tagline
If your business name isn’t descriptive, add a tagline to describe your services.
Step Six: Confirm the URL is available. Use a web hosting site to secure your domain availability.
Step Seven: Test your business name by asking (at least) 25 people from your target audience for feedback.
Step Eight: Is the name legally available? Use your State/Government website to check availability and register your business name. Most Government sites allow you to do this online.
I’d love to hear from you.
In the comments below, let me know if you’re struggling to name your business and which tip helped you most.
Leave as much detail as you’d like, but remember, links to outside posts and videos are seen as SPAM and will be deleted.
Your comments help the entire community, so thanks for sharing!
Have an eventful week,
NAMING YOUR EVENT PLANING BUSINESS
Hi Event Planners, Melanie here from Event Planning Blueprint.
Welcome back to another episode of Event Planning Blueprint TV.
Today we are going to be talking about naming your event planning business and I know that a lot of you who are going to be clicking on this to watch are struggling with just that.
What the heck do I name my event business?
Today I want to share 8 steps with you and while we are doing that if you have any comments or you want to send some thumbs up emoji or hearts, please do that.
This is interactive, we are on Facebook Live, so feel free to do just that – interact with me.
Let’s get into it.
Step number one. When coming up with your event business name and I know the process can feel like “oh my God, what am I doing, what should I name it, what if it’s not the right name…” here is the great thing about all of this; if you decide on a name and then later you decide “you know what?
It just doesn’t fit or I don’t like it.” you can change it, it’s that easy to do. Of course, with a few other …depending on how far in the process you are of course Stew …so step number 1; this is a great way to get a whole bunch of words so just sit down with friends who are family and do some brain storming, grab a piece of paper, pen or kind of a word doc or google doc, whatever your preference is and write down or type in every word that you possibly can think of, don’t filter anything at this stage.
So, like I said, step number 1 is sit down and brain storm all of those words at the beginning.
Jot everything down that comes to mind, don’t filter anything.
This is a great exercise to do with friends or family because they know you best and they know what’s important to you.
Step number 2, you want to explore some different word options based on that first list so what are some of the synonyms or idioms that you can come up with that relates back to that initial list?
In step number 3; Narrow down your list. In this section, you can either …depending on how you’d like to do it but what I would suggest is that you create a ‘have list’ and a ‘do not have list’ or categories if you will.
Things like “oh I definitely don’t like these words, so they are out and I definitely do like these words so they are in” and then obviously just get rid of that second one.
In your 4th step, go through each of those words and say them out loud.
The process of actually saying something out loud will change how that word feels and how it rolls of your tongue and then you can decide whether or not if it is easy to pronounce, you want to make sure that you are coming up with words that people can easily pronounce especially for your target audience.
In Step number 5; decide, you know, is it a descriptive word? Or once you’ve put a few words together, are they descriptive?
Do people know what you are talking about? Do they know that you have an event planning business?
Now I’ve got a hell of a story for you, [03:12] who is in our business training program – Success Academy – she was going through this process and she decided in the end to name her business after her 2 grandmothers, so her business name is Marigold Rose Events.
I think it’s a beautiful name and especially because it has a story behind it and the nice thing about that as well is that she can weave that story about her grandmothers into the branding of her website and the rest of her business.
So, is it descriptive? The great thing about the Marigold Rose Events is that she added the word ‘events’ on the end so that you know she is in event planning business, that she is an event planner, so it is very descriptive.
If you have one which is less descriptive then you may want to come up with a tagline and I’ve got another blog post about taglines that you can go over to and figure out what your tagline is, we are not going to talk about that today here but just make sure that people understand what it is that you are doing, so that is step number 5; is it descriptive?
In step number 6. Now these next few steps you may want to do them in a different order but I’ll just give them to you in 6,7 and 8 and you can choose in which other to do them.
So in step number 6, you want to figure out if the URL is available, so can you just go in …if you are not sure where to look that up or where to register your URL, go into our resource page on our site at www.eventplanningblueprint.com under resources and you’ll find host gator there on the list and you can register your website and your URL through host gator.
So, one other tip that I want to just mention here about registering your URL is; make sure if you possibly can, don’t hyphenate the name and I might see something …let’s just use Marigold Rose Events, so instead of having marigold-rose-event.com you want to make sure that you get something that says marigoldroseevents.com for example.
You may not be able to get a dot com (.com) and that doesn’t necessarily matter; there is a whole world of different thoughts around (.com) and other endings to your URL but don’t worry about that.
Just try not to do anything that is hyphenated. So that’s what you are going to do in step number 6 – decide or figure out whether or not your URL is available, if it’s not, you may want to come up with another name, you may not, that’s up to you but go through and see what other options are available.
In step number 7, now this is one that you may want to do before you check out your URL, again you can choose to do this last 3 steps in different order if you want to but test that name out, test your business name out on at least 25 different people and I would suggest that you do not test it out on your friends and family only because they are not really your target market and they are going to tell you all the nice fluffy rainbow things that you want to hear which is great because they are supportive but at the same time it’s really not going to really help you come up with a name that appeals to your audience or your target market.
And the other good thing about testing this on your target market is that it allows you to actually say it out loud more than once.
So, when you are saying it out loud you might realize “oh I love this name, I absolutely love it” or alternatively, conversely you may realize “oh you know what? This name just isn’t what I wanted and you might want to tweak it or change it all together.”
Finally, in step number 8, last but not least, you need to figure out if you can legally register your business name and the way you do this is you can typically do it online, depending on where you are, you can go online and search for “Register business name” and then just put in your state or your province and you can do it right there, it takes maybe about 5 minutes to do typically and the price will range, it isn’t usually more than $100 to register your business but again that’s going to completely depend on where you are and where you live.
So those are the 8 tips to starting your event business name. I would love to hear your thoughts so in the comments give us a thumb’s up, give us a heart, we love hearts here in event planning blue print TV and also in the comments, let me know which of these tips helped you most and why.
I’d love to hear what you guys have to say about not only the tips but also about naming your event business, did you struggle with it?
And if you want to join us for any of our future Facebook Lives and you want to make sure that you are getting the notifications right away, simply go onto our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/eventplanningblueprint and make sure you like the page first and then when you go into notifications, just hit on “receive notifications” and then once we are live which we are going to be doing weekly here then you will get those instant notifications so that you can join us and then we can have a conversation directly in front of Facebook Live.
So that’s it for today, I hope you have a fantastic day, thanks so much for joining me and we’ll see you again soon.
Bye everyone.
Thanks
Anytime 🙂
very helpful!!! Thanks!!!!
you’re welcome!
Melanie, I swear, I really do believe you have been peeking in my windows or you’ve bugged my house! Choosing a name hasn’t stopped me from starting my business, but the bug has really been biting me over the last 3 weeks or so to find a new name. I’ve asked everyone close to me, and I’m even speaking with an SBDC counselor tomorrow at my local Entrepreneur SBDC center about this!
You’re amazing!
Or scary. I’m not sure which yet.
I like it, though.
I think. 😀
lol we promise we haven’t bugged your house 😉
Also, happy to hear that naming your business hasn’t stopped you.
Good luck!
Forgot to say I did already check godaddy and do a business name search on my state website. Looking good so far for the name I want to change to! 🙂
that’s great, happy to hear it.
I name my business after my daughters surnames
that’s sweet and meaningful!
I have been racking my brain over the last three weeks. It’s also very annoying when you finally come up with something and it’s not available. My event business will deliver fundraising events however, I don’t want a name which will bracket me incase I choose to expand in the future.
Totally get it, coming up with a name is stressful! Try out a few names, say them out loud, say them to other people and see what sticks. You can always change it if you don’t like it!
This is something that I struggled with for a while. My business partner and I ended up changing our company’s name twice before we chose the perfect one. We encountered the issue of choosing names that were already trademarked and ones that just were simply not captivating enough. The best advice I can give would be to not let this stop you from working on your business. Continue to be productive and the name will come to you. Also, before creating any social media pages, logos, or any other stationary make sure to check the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) website to make sure that your company name has not already been trademarked. Trust me, it’ll save you a lot of headaches. Be blessed!
Genee, that is great advice, thank you for sharing. It’s also good to point out that you can choose a name and then change it, and that nothing is set in stone, and that it shouldn’t stop you from moving forward.
I am still struggling to think of a name because I am looking to do all types of events – from parties to corporate to weddings – and just don’t know how to pick the right name to suit them all. Your story was really helpful though, hopefully it will come to me soon.
Thanks Jade. Your best option for success and for choosing a business name is not to be all things to all people. Choose a niche. This makes picking a name easier, marketing is easier and sales are easier.
Hi Melanie, I am really struggling to get my business going, but I am finally ready and the name I want to use is AArons event and decor. I want to name it after my late son. What do you think?
Hi Sandra, thrilled you decided to join our course to get started. Re: your business name – I love it. It’s a beautiful story that you can weave into your marketing and use to honor your son. What a beautiful tribute.