Thoughts on Naming a Painting Company

While there are a lot of options when it comes to naming your painting company, there are a few basic rules you should follow. While this list is hardly exhaustive, it should give you a good start.

Avoid names that imply low prices, such as Discount Painting or El Cheapo Pintura (for our Hispanic readers). If your name says that you are competing on price, don’t complain to me when you can’t make any money. Customers will expect cheap prices.

Don’t use names that might imply a less than desirable character, such as Drunk Painting Company, Watered Down Paint Company, or Blow and Go Painting. I think the reasons are obvious for avoiding such names. But in case they aren’t: you don’t want the public to think that you will be drinking their booze, using WalMart’s worst paint, or leaving a mess that even Mary Poppins couldn’t clean up.

I personally don’t like the idea of naming the company after the owner. To me, it sounds too “mom and pop”. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with mom and pop, but it’s not the image I really want to project. I think a name other than “Bob’s Painting” projects a larger, more professional company. Plus, it can create intrigue and interest as customer’s try to figure out where the hell you got your name.

For example, my company is named Philpaint. Several times a week someone calls asking to speak to Phil. (Less frequently, someone will call asking to speak to Frank—I don’t know why, but I find it humorous.) But I digress.

We have no Phil in our company. Never have, and as a matter of principle, never will. (This is another aside, but if we had someone named Phil everyone would think he owned the business, and that wouldn’t be good for my oh so fragile ego.) The “Phil” in Philpaint comes from my last name. Pretty clever huh?

When we were thinking about renaming the business from Phillips Painting Services, someone mentioned that he liked the sound of Microsoft. He thought the way they took parts of two words—microcomputer and software—to make a new word had a nice ring to it. So I figured that if it was good enough for Bill Gates it was good enough for me. Besides, if I have .001% of his success I’ll be able to retire a very wealthy man.

I realize that these last few paragraphs probably won’t prove very helpful to you, but sometimes I just enjoy telling a story. And since this is my blog, I can do that.

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