A name change might be in the works......
A little trip down memory lane
Back in 2003 my business partner and I decided it would be really cool to start our own business. When we were originally developing a business plan we felt there were glaring issues in the staffing and direct placement market. Based on some of those issues we thought building a direct placement/ headhunter company of our own might be a worthy venture. We thought the perfect name would be B&C Consulting LLC, the B and C representing the first letter of our last names. Although the name was conceived of pragmatism, it really didn’t convey anything to companies or candidates in what we actually did.
2004....the start of our foray into entrepreneurship
We jumped right in getting our tax id number and forming our limited liability company. The next thing to do was to build a website. At this point, the internet was here to stay and everyone was clamoring to get a website online. As the first iteration of our website came about, we were starting to realize some of the challenges with our name. It seemed like in every aspect of our business our name reflected ambiguity, “what do you do again” was the question we heard daily. Although every company must convey their core competencies to customers and in our case candidates, it just made things much harder, especially with phone messages. You’re so limited on time when leaving a message and to succinctly explain what you do and why you are calling became a challenge. Not to mention most people have limited tolerances for long drawn out messages so the quicker you get to the point the better!
2008.........the crash
Our business was growing well and at this point, in spite of our name and we had several established customers. In 2004-2005 we decided to focus on pretty much just engineering and do some biotech recruiting too. We felt specializing in one or two complementary industries would be good for branding as well as understanding of what our customers and candidates are looking for. Unfortunately the economy collapsed in 2008 and so did our business and everyone else’s. The next two years wiped out at least half of our competitors and many of our clients. We were doing everything just to keep the lights on.
Branding and our name change
So after rebuilding for several years after the crash we came to realize some things along the way. One of those realities was that our name wasn’t a great conveyor of what we do, headhunting. Another sobering aspect of building a business is branding. A great article that lays this out in simple fashion is “How Much Does Branding Cost?“. To the point, branding on the cheap by their estimation is a $55,000 dollar investment. For a small business, when you are looking at every aspect’s ROI (return on investment) that dollar amount brings a lot of anxiety. So I remember from business school at Mizzou (University of Missouri-Columbia, go tigers) that a cheaper way to identify/clarify what you do is in the name.
After thinking about it, recruiting was clearly a big factor in what we did, so having that in our name made sense. Since we do only engineering recruiting, I wanted something engineering related and lean is a big part of engineering. 6 sigma or DMAIC seemed like a perfect fit. The other aspect of 6 sigma is methodical improvement, something I think evolved naturally within our company. The 2008 crash made everyone improve their game to stay in business and it was during that time that we refined a lot of our processes within our small business to stay afloat. With all that said our new name came to be by convergence of 6 sigma (process improvement which kept us in business) and of recruiting (what we do). At the end of the day, its just a name. If you don’t have the service to back it up, it really doesn’t matter.
