What’s up, y’all. Welcome to The Shontavia Show, where my goal is to help you start a business based on your life’s vision. This ain’t gonna be your daddy’s business advice. I’m laser focused on entrepreneurship in the 21st century, vision and breaking the traditional mold. If you can get with that, you can get with me, be sure to visit shontavia.com for more episodes, blog posts, and other content. Thank you for listening. The show starts now.

What’s up y’all? Welcome to The Shontavia Show where I want to help you start a business based on the vision you have for your life. So the goal of today’s episode is to talk to you a little bit about choosing a name for your business.

This is something people agonize over. And trust me when I say it is not just you. For example, did you know that Nike actually used to be named Blue Ribbon Sports? Or that Google started out as BackRub?

So can you imagine if we were, like, going around saying, Hey, let me BackRub that? That would be really pretty weird, right?

So these iconic companies started out just like a lot of us do with a great idea and a bunch of brainstorming about names. So if you’re thinking about what to name your company, there’s a lot of stuff to think about.

But let me give you four things you absolutely have to do when you’re thinking about what to name your company.

(1) Number one, you have to Google the name. I think everybody knows to do that now. Google the name, but the challenge is most people stop there. They Google the name. If they don’t see anybody with it, they continue down the path of choosing a name. Or if they do see somebody with it, they you know, maybe changed their minds and decided to go with something else. You actually don’t have to do either of those things, but you should Google the name for some reasons I’ll talk about in this episode.

(2) Number two, you should check for trademarks.

(3) Number three, you should check for domain names and social media.

(4) Number four, you should check your secretary of state’s business registry.

So first let’s talk about Googling the name, which everybody knows to do. Once you’ve figured out a name that you like, you should Google it to see what other uses are out there. Now, this is almost an impossible task because it is impossible for you probably to be the first person on a planet of seven and a half billion people who want to use certain words for your business. Unless you’ve completely made a word up, and even if you’ve made a word up, somebody else’s probably made up a very similar word.

It’s hard to find something that hasn’t been used anywhere.

As my mother tells me all the time, ain’t nothing new under the sun. So what you have to figure out is with the names that you’ve chosen, what Google results should stop you in your tracks and what Google results don’t necessarily mean you have to choose a new name for your business? Because you probably will find something and that is actually okay. Just because another person is using the name doesn’t mean you can’t use it. The real questions are whether naming your company, whatever it is you want to name your company, is ethical. Because you know, folks on social media are vicious y’all. And then is it legal? If there are too many instances of the same name out there, you may not be able to set yourself apart in the marketplace. So if you do a search, you see lots and lots of names out there, it may be hard for you to create the reputation you want to create.

And if your name and brand are too close to somebody else’s, even if it’s legal, you may end up with a lot of headaches, because you don’t want anybody to think you’ve stolen their name. You may never hear the end of it on social media, you’ll have all kinds of challenges. You just don’t want to have. The court of public opinion can sometimes be harder than the court of law. And so you don’t want to– there’s a lot of stuff there.

So first when you Google the name, keep mental notes, write some things down about what’s out there. But don’t let any of that stuff stop you yet. Though, keep in mind, and we’ll talk about trademarks in a little bit — you don’t want to fall, you don’t want to fall outside of like what is permissible by trademark law. And what trademark law allows is for companies and people to protect names and phrases where they want to do business.

And so if we delve into trademark law a little bit, trademarks are words, phrases, things called designations — that can include colors, pictures, sounds, all kinds of things — that you use in a business to sell products in the marketplace and distinguish yourself from others.

There’s a lot to unpack with what trademarks actually mean, but just do know if someone’s using a name, a phrase, a group of phrases, and frankly just about anything to identify their business and distinguish what they’re doing in a particular marketplace, there may be a trademark.

One of your next steps should be to look for whether or not that trademark has actually registered in a couple of different places. So the first place you can look, and the smartest place to start is the United States Patent and Trademark Office website. It’s USPTO.gov. You can search for names and phrases there.

So if you see that folks have registered a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, then that could be a stop sign for you in terms of choosing that name for your business. But again, it doesn’t necessarily have to because trademark law has a lot of nuances to it.

The question will be whether that name itself has been registered for the purpose you want to use it for. So if I want to call my microphone company Pink Flamingo, and there’s no other company using microphone — or selling microphones using the phrase pink Flamingo — I should be able to do that. Even if there’s a Pink Flamingo ice cream shop with a federally registered trademark. Those two things do not compete with each other. So just cause something, some things you find on Google or some things you find in the USPTO’s database, that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t use it for your business. So that’s one place you can search.

The other place you can search sometimes is your secretary of state’s website for trademarks in particular. So the secretary of state’s office has a number of different responsibilities. Oftentimes in most states, so this is a state by state kind of thing, it depends on where you live, but, the secretary of state’s website or or responsibilities include registering companies, keeping state related trademarks on file, and then any number of other things. But for our purposes, those are the two that are the most important. Your state may have a database that you can search for words and phrases. If they do, you should definitely do that. If they don’t, you can go do that kind of by hand, face to face, or you can hire companies to do that for you.

At any rate, I mean, I’m a trademark lawyer myself…this stuff gets really, really complicated. I don’t know that you necessarily need a lawyer at this stage. Maybe you do if you’re finding lots of things and you’re not clear, you know, if you can get in wherever you fit in.

But, in terms of looking for names of a business, searching the USPTO’s website, searching the secretary of state’s website in the state where you live or planning to do business, can help you further whittle down the list of names and choose the list of names for your business.

The next place you should check, and this is where a lot of people end up with issues in their business, because they do this too late or maybe sometimes they do it too early. Go to godaddy.com or domainnamescheap.com or some domain names registry/website and see if the domain names are available. So the worst thing is in the world is for you to choose a name, register the business with the secretary of state, get a trademark, do all these things.

And then you can’t own the domain name because somebody else does. Or somebody wants to buy a domain name from you. So like me, I own about, I don’t know, 60 or 70 domain names right now, and there are a couple that and I plan to use and plan to use. And you know, they’ve been kind of sitting there and you know, those are things that I own right now.

So if somebody wants to buy them, they have to buy them from me. I actually had somebody buy a domain name from me a month and a half ago for $2,000 and that’s a domain name I paid $12 for. But they needed it for their business and they had already selected all this stuff for their business and did not own the domain name and couldn’t get it without coming through me. So check for the domain names that are available.

And also the social media handles. So if you’re planning on being on social media, on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook, on Pinterest or wherever, go ahead and get the domain names too. Buy them. Well, you don’t have to buy a social media handles, but go ahead and get those really, really quickly. Because if you’re planning on using them for your business, then it is great to have those in your wheelhouse, in your portfolio. Even if you change the name later. I mean, you can always cancel the account and let that name go.

But it can be really tough once you’ve already spent a ton of money on marketing, materials and business materials and all that, if you don’t own the social media handles. Also, doing this, checking the domain names and the social media handles, will show you if there are other people out there using the domain name, the social media handle, the business names that you want to use.

So it is best to be consistent and to have a consistent brand from the outset. Searching through all this stuff will help you get there. You want to snatch all this stuff up as soon as you possibly can, because you don’t want to end up losing out on it because it just took you too long.

In my own company, so the name of my company is “leverage,” LVRG. And when I went to search for LVRG.com, it is available, but right now it costs like $25,000 and I wasn’t gonna pay $25,000 for LVRG.com.

So you know, you have to kind of work through lots of different things and figuring out what plan you’ll take with respect to owning the domain names for your company. I ended up buying LVRG.co, LVRG dot a bunch of other things. And LVRG.com may still be there when I do have $25,000 to spend on a domain name, but today ain’t the today.

So look through the um, USPTO’s website. Look for the domain names, look at the secretary of state’s website in the trademark registry, search Google.

And then also with the secretary of state’s website, search for the business names. If you’re ready to make your business official in a state. In every state in the U S there’s some process for doing that — for registering a company. And in most, if not all States, there are rules that two businesses in the state cannot have the same exact identical name. And so a good place to check when you’re looking for what to name your company is the secretary of state office’s official website with the registry of all the businesses.

Because, then again, you’ll see who else is operating in this state with that name. Now, the name of your business will have to be different. You may be able to use the same name through some other mechanisms.

But to start with, choosing the name of your business requires all of these different considerations.

And I’d like to step back a little bit too — when you think about choosing a name for your business, there are really kind of two categories that business names can fall into.

Sometimes business name categories fall into just like the name of the person or the name of the people. So like the name of my company is LVRG right now. It has been through several iterations. It used to be Shontavia Johnson international Incorporated. Now it’s something different.

So some people will choose, like, the name of themselves or their last names or the last names of all the people in the business. Law firms do this a lot as the name of the business and that’s fine.

Others will choose everything else. So Apple, Google, Nike, Canon, you can choose names that are just about anything.

They can be made up words or not. There’s some trademark implications with that, which I’ll cover in other episodes, but choosing the name of the company really can fall into one of those two categories.

Now it can be tough to figure out which category you fall into.

And a lot of people ask, you know, like, should the name of my company, just be my name incorporated or my name LLC, or whatever kind of business entity structure you choose. And I guess my thoughts there fall into a couple of different buckets.

So if the brand is you, you plan on being like the face of the company, the company revolves around your area of expertise and that kind of thing, then yeah, it makes sense for the business to have your name. You can think of companies like Estee Lauder, that was a person’s name. Donna Karan New York, that is Donna Karan’s name. Madam CJ Walker’s Miracle Health Company.

So there are companies that have the name of a person there. But even if you do that and you decide you want to sell or you don’t want to be the face of the company anymore, that’s fine too.

So there are many instances. So Kate Spade is one of those. So Kate spade actually sold her interest in her company to another private organization, private company and you know, she got her pay out and she was no longer connected to the Kate Spade brand.

So that isn’t necessarily like a one for one exchange, but that is a general kind of consideration.

On the other hand, to choose some other kind of name that is not, you know, you your name in particular, if you’re thinking ever about selling the company, if you’re thinking about having a brand that describes ,and the company name that describes more of what you do, and less of the people who are doing those things, then choosing a name that is not a personal name makes sense.

But again, I think a lot of it goes back to your vision for your life.

I talk a ton about vision on this show. I’m a strong believer in the power of vision and in creating things that support your vision. It really goes back to your vision and what you want and what your plans are for your business.

So with this episode, I hope what you’ve taken away from it is searching Google is a really first good step, but there are other things you need to do with respect to naming your business.

So first, is the business going to be your name or something else? Searching Google, searching the United States Patent and Trademark office website, searching the secretary of state office’s website, and then also really, really important getting domain names, buying domain names. They’re probably $10 or $15. And then also looking for social media handles and making sure you can get those things consistently.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Shontavia Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, subscribe and leave a comment wherever you’re listening. You can find me on social media everywhere, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wherever else @ShontaviaJEsq. You can also visit me at shontavia.com to find a transcript of this episode along with other show notes. While you’re there, please be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter.

The information shared in this podcast and through my other platforms is designed to educate you about business and entrepreneurship and I love to do this work. While I am a lawyer, though, the information I provide is not legal advice and does not create or constitute an attorney client relationship.

The Shontavia Show is a LVRG Incorporated original. The show is recorded on site in South Carolina and produced at Sit N Spin Studio in Greenville, South Carolina. Original music and sound design is by Matt Morgan and Daniel Gregory. Mixing and mastering is by Daniel Gregory and the video is by GVL Media.