Do you ever do the thing where you put off something because it seems administrative and merely time consuming, and thus can wait until a few seconds before the deadline, but turns out to require some thought and knowledge? Hopefully I’m the only one.
When I was registering a business name for the first time, I hadn’t given much thought to the name of the business. This turns out to be important because besides obvious things like branding and marketing, in state legal statutes the business name can’t be confusable with any other existing business name in the state.
Actually I had thought about it a little – I was just going to use my name. But when I thought about it, my name being a business entity felt a little strange. I didn’t even really have a business, I just wanted to be prepared and start thinking more about the idea of having one. I don’t identify as a business entity, you know? Sometimes businesses say what they do pretty straightforwardly, like General Motors, but other times, the name has nothing to do with what the actual business is. “Google” doesn’t mean “advertising” or “search,” it’s just a name, though the name is synonymous with the latter.
I realized I didn’t know what one calls a business that is only in the idea stage, and even the general thinking around why businesses are named different ways was so strange that virtually any name I typed to search for naming conflicts felt weird to look at. Being a cyclocross fan, I happened to have checked out the latest world rankings to see if Mathieu Van Der Poel and Sanne Cant were still crushing it since I last followed racing closely in 2015, and looking at the lists of names, I remembered the unsettling feeling of my business name.
Because if you don’t race cross, or you don’t live in central Europe, the names of Sanne Cant, Zdenek Stybar, Corne Van Kessel, and many others of the very best ‘cross racers in the world will just be a bunch of consonants and vowels that don’t have any kind of logic to them. Or anyway that’s how I felt when I started watching the pros years ago. Most European languages seem to use accented characters, so seeing things written in them they’re tuned out as Obviously Not English to American English speakers.
Maybe I’m biased having had a Polish grandmother from near Łódź. Dutch and Flemish though use enough plain old Roman characters that my American Brain tries to do something with them, but I end up the same as when I bump into a pile of LLCs, LPs, S Corps, which is having no idea what to do with them.
After just a couple of races though, the names become a little familiar and the fear of not being able to know subsides. You would never confuse Wout Van Aert with Toon Aert, just as Rocky and A$AP Rocky obviously race in different categories.
But you don’t start out knowing that! And once you do, the names are just names, plain old words like any others.