The name nobody picked

Somewhere between the paperwork and the first invoice, you settled for whatever nobody argued against.

In the fall of 2003, my dining room had no furniture in it. Just a sliding glass door covered floor to ceiling in small yellow Post-it notes, a folding table, and three guys with no jobs.

Michael, Martin, and I had worked together at Rhino Internet Solutions in Tempe. The dot-com crash hit the company twice. The first round cut the staff in half and somehow left the three of us standing. The second round, about eighteen months later, took Michael and Martin. I stayed on, the project manager they still needed, watching two of my closest friends walk out the door.

We had eaten lunch together almost every day for two years by then. After the layoffs, neither of them worked for six months. They spent that time asking me, over and over, to leave Rhino and start something with them. Three people who had collectively worked about one full year out of the last three, sitting down to name a company.

We didn’t just brainstorm. We ran an actual exercise, the same one I still use today, just in low fidelity. Small Post-its for names, large sheets for four categories: functional, invented, experiential, evocative. Write a name, stick it under the category you think it fits, argue about whether it’s in the right place, vote, take a break, vote again. We went through hundreds of names that afternoon.

The one that stuck wasn’t clever. It was obvious the second we saw it. We were, literally, a collective of professionals who met for lunch. Lunchbox Collective.

We had the name before we had anything else. That week I’d given blood for cash. What was left between the three of us covered a bus fare and the LLC filing fee, and nothing past that. We signed a lease on a small office with no furniture and no clients, on the strength of a name and not one dollar more. The company didn’t feel real yet. It became real the next day, when we landed our first paying client.

We’d already decided who we were before anyone paid us to be it. That name went on to do actual work for us for the next twenty years. When we finished a project, we didn’t just email a final invoice. We burned the files to a CD and a thumb drive, built a foam cutout to hold them, and shipped it inside a real lunchbox. Some of our original clients still have that lunchbox sitting on a shelf in their office today, more than twenty years later. Clients and friends started handing us lunchboxes too, just because it was ours now. We kept every one of them on a shelf in the office.

Most businesses skip that afternoon entirely. They pick a name the way we almost picked that office, whatever doesn’t require an argument. Somebody incorporates between two client calls and types whatever fits in the filing box. A partner throws something out at the end of a long meeting and everyone’s too tired to object.

I call it the Default Name. Nobody chose it. It’s just the one nobody objected to.

There’s a version that fails the opposite way. Naming circles have a term for it: the Happy Idiot. An agency invents a word that means nothing, hires someone with a linguistics degree to explain how it’s secretly built from Latin and Italian roots meaning “wonder” and “purpose,” and hands it to a client who feels smart for approving it. The client leaves happy. The name means nothing to a single person who will ever hear it. One name plays it safe. The other plays dress-up. Neither one was actually chosen.

A name is not a description of your services. It’s a promise about what changes for the person who hires you. Ours made that promise before we had a dollar to back it up, and it got tested the very next day.

I still run the same exercise today that put “Lunchbox Collective” on a folding table in my dining room in 2003, refined by twenty more years of doing it for clients. I’m not going to walk through the whole process here, because the process isn’t the point of this issue. The point is simpler: your name is either doing work for you right now, or it’s just the thing nobody objected to. Only one of those pays you back for the next twenty years.

If you’ve never actually run the exercise, that’s the first thing worth doing before you spend another dollar on a logo or a website. Ask yourself honestly which one you’re running on.

We had thirty days to get the company off the ground. It took one night. That first week in the new office, we prototyped, wrote the copy, and built the site ourselves by hand. It went live under "What's With the Name," reading exactly this: "The collective was formed through open and honest conversations about how we could remain true to ourselves and the medium in which we work...on our lunch break, of course." We weren't being clever after the fact. We said the quiet part out loud from day one.

Richard D. Stuart
The Weekly Prescription

P.S. If your business name has never actually been tested against what it’s supposed to do for you, that’s worth twenty minutes. Start with a free working call at yourwebguy.org/become-a-client. No pitch. Just an honest read on whether your name is working or just surviving.