Long Post ahead:
My business name reflects the city I’m in & I have an original logo.
The logo doesn’t have that much to do with pressure washing. It doesn’t have a picture of a house or a wand. It’s character based. It has to do with the city I live in and there’s a splash so there’s water in it. When I spoke to the designer about it they’re first reaction on the logo was “what does that have to do with pressure washing?”. But I insisted on it. And I’m very happy with it. The designer did a great job.
Anyway this question is not about the logo itself as I’ve found it doesn’t really matter, it’s just something to copyright your pictures with. It’s more about the name.
My name is very searchable as it reflects the location and the basic service: Pressure Cleaning. The problem I’m having is that when you use the name of the city, people expect it to be a huge company. They expect you to be all encompassing including commercial etc. They think you have several trucks and employees and maybe you do high rises. Or at the very least you have a 100,000 dollar rig with a few employees. But that is not the case.
So currently I’m thinking of putting the name itself on the back burner and using my first name or initials in either creating a new name or a secondary name as a DBA. In that case if I do a ton of commercial down the road I can still use the other name which has the city in it.
But for residential I’ve noticed that people are more interested in connecting with you as a person and as someone they can trust etc. Whereas the broader name such as Minnesota Pressure Cleaning (example) w/a Viking on it (example) isn’t something people are going to connect with.
So the question is should I change the name altogether or use a DBA for residential clients???
If you plan on being a one man show then you could change it to Bob’s Pressure Washing or something, if not then keep the name you have now.
Same for me, when I was making my logo for my window cleaning biz the designer insisted on having a blueish grayish type logo. She said “when I think of window cleaning I think of blue skies and light” lol. I wanted a more black red white theme.
It doesn’t matter what people expect. If you like the name then keep it. I too have this happen to me but I don’t care. If you don’t care they won’t care.
Name based on what you want to be, or you will pigeonhole yourself.
Are you sure? I’m finding that on the community advertisements, like social media platforms, people are ghosting my profile.
Yes that is what I did. I want to take over. But until it gets to that point I was thinking about using a DBA for the smaller social platforms.
I doubt that has anything to do with your name…social media is a tough nut to crack in most cases. A logo change is one thing, a name change at any point is starting over in most cases. The only exception I’ve seen is we changed the name of a secondary business to match our bigger primary business a few years back, that became a positive thing.
Maybe so…But the name I use may be too broad and too common as it is. Maybe I could open up another company as separate and then do a merge later on.
Careful with your company name. I used to be WC and screen repair, I had to change to ‘exterior cleaning’ to fold in the PW side. Ever since then my WC has dropped dramatically so I’m now having to reconsider my name again.
I was thinking about SEO and commercial cleaning when I registered my biz name. Now I’m thinking about connecting more w/local local customers.
Yeah, I have pressure washing & window cleaning in our name. It helps a lot with SEO……at least in our area.
what matters is that it’s consistent…you don’t want to have people needing to relearn who you are, or assuming you’re now someone new. Plus, if done well, you’re looking at new website(s), vehicle wrap(s), etc.
I suppose so. But I guess it might depend on how established you were in the first place.
I would poresume after year 1, you have some level of establishment, that will only be increasing YOY. Don’t rename unless you want to start reputation building over from close to zero
