CSQD logo transitioning to the Embark Logo

For seventeen years my business was called Csquared Design.

I don’t hate the name. It did its job for a long time, and there’s a version of me that’s still a bit sentimental about it. But by the end it was quietly costing me, and I could feel it in three specific ways.

Nobody could spell it (or say it). Csquared. C Squared. C2. CSquared, CSQD. Every phone call had a small spelling conversation buried in it. Every referral had a chance of going nowhere because someone typed it wrong.

The word Design had become the smallest part of what we actually did. We’d moved into strategy years earlier. The name was still describing the studio I started, not the business I was running.

And it meant something to me, not to the market. Csquared made complete sense from the inside. It said nothing at all to the founder sitting across the table wondering whether we could help.

But none of those were the real reason I changed it.

The real reason was that I wanted to play a bigger game, and the name wouldn’t come with me. I’d already been through the hard part a few years earlier, losing my purpose and having to rebuild the whole thing from the ground up. By the time I came out the other side I knew exactly who I wanted to work with and what I wanted to be known for. The name was the last thing still pointing backwards.

So it became Embark. Which cost me a lot more than a new logo and took a lot longer than I expected.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably in one of two spots. You’re naming something new and you want to get it right the first time. Or you’ve got a name you’ve quietly outgrown and you’re not sure whether that’s a real problem or just you being restless about it.

This guide covers both. The five types of business names, the naming mistakes I see most often (including the ones I made), how to tell whether you’ve actually outgrown yours, and the practical checks to run before you commit to anything.

Contents

Why your business name matters more than you think

Your business name is the single piece of your brand that appears everywhere, forever, and is the hardest thing to change later. It’s said out loud in rooms you’re not in, typed into search bars, read aloud by whichever assistant someone is asking for a recommendation, printed on invoices, and scanned on a tender document before anyone has seen a scrap of your work.

That’s the part people underestimate. The name usually arrives before you do.

It’s doing work in the gap between someone hearing about you and meeting you. In that gap, it’s setting an expectation about your size, your price point and your seriousness. If the expectation it sets is lower than the reality, you spend the first ten minutes of every conversation climbing back up.

The good news is a name doesn’t have to be clever to work. It has to be right, and it has to be usable. Those are very different things to clever.

The five types of business names

Nearly every business name falls into one of five categories. Knowing which one you’re in tells you what job the rest of your brand has to do.

Descriptive

Says what you do. Australian Roof Repairs. Gold Coast Dental.

Instantly clear, requires almost no explanation, and works hard for local search. It’s also the most limiting, because it locks you to a service and a place. The day you add a second service or a second city, the name starts arguing with the business.

Suggestive

Hints at a benefit or a feeling without spelling it out. Afterpay. Airtasker. Zip.

This is the sweet spot for a lot of established businesses. Enough meaning to feel relevant, enough room to grow. It gives your designer something to work with and gives you somewhere to go later.

Invented or abstract

A made-up or borrowed word with no built-in meaning. Canva. Xero. Aesop.

These are empty vessels, and that’s the point. They own nothing at the start and can own anything eventually, because you fill them. They’re the most protectable and the most expensive, because every gram of meaning has to be earned through marketing.

Founder or eponymous

Your surname. Bunnings. R.M. Williams. Jim’s Mowing, which is one of several Aussie brands that broke every branding rule and won.

Personal, credible, and impossible for a competitor to copy. The trade-offs are real though. It ties the business to you, complicates a future sale, and can make a twelve-person operation sound like a sole trader.

Acronym or initialism

Initials. IBM. BP. KFC.

Almost always a mistake for a business your size, and I’ll explain exactly why below.

Business name types compared

Name type Clarity upfront Room to grow Ease of protecting it Marketing effort needed Best for
Descriptive Very high Very low Very difficult Low Local, single-service businesses
Suggestive Medium to high High Moderate Medium Established businesses expanding
Invented or abstract None Very high Strongest High Businesses building long-term equity
Founder or eponymous Low Medium Moderate Medium Expert-led and trade businesses
Acronym None High Difficult Very high Businesses already widely known

Business naming mistakes that quietly cost you

These are the ones I run into most. None of them look like mistakes at the time.

Naming yourself after a feeling

Platinum. Premium. Prestige. Elite. Luxury.

I get why it’s tempting. You want the market to understand the tier you operate in, and the fastest way to say it seems to be to say it.

It doesn’t work, because premium isn’t a claim. It’s a conclusion. Your market arrives at it based on your pricing, your restraint, your materials, your service and the standard of everything you put your name near. Announcing it in the name is like telling someone at a party that you’re humble.

Worse, it usually signals the opposite. When a business calls itself Platinum Something, the read is a business that wants to be perceived as premium, not one that already is. Buyers pick that up instantly, even if they couldn’t tell you why.

Look at how premium brands actually behave. Restraint everywhere. The name does very little and the execution does everything.

Reaching for an acronym too early

IBM, BP and KFC all earned the right to be initials. They spent decades as International Business Machines, British Petroleum and Kentucky Fried Chicken first. The shorthand followed the recognition. It didn’t replace it.

When a business with no market awareness shortens itself to three letters, it doesn’t gain sophistication. It throws away the only free piece of communication it had. “HRT Group” tells a stranger nothing at all. Whatever it stood for told them something.

Rule of thumb. If people aren’t already shortening your name for you, don’t do it for them.

Describing the business you have today

The problem with a purely descriptive name is that it’s a photograph of one moment.

I’ve watched this play out more times than I can count, and I lived a version of it myself. A plumbing business adds gas fitting. Then commercial. Then a maintenance division. The name still says residential plumbing, so every conversation starts with a correction. That’s a tax you pay forever, and you set the rate the day you registered it.

If you’re already in this spot and adding new services, this is a brand architecture question before it’s a naming one. How the parts relate to each other decides what you’re allowed to call them.

Picking something nobody can spell or say

Say it out loud to someone who’s never heard it. Then ask them to spell it.

If they hesitate, you’ve got a problem, and it’s not a small one. It affects referrals, search, email addresses and every phone call your team makes. Clever spellings that look sharp in a logo become a chore in real life, and a name that’s a chore doesn’t get passed on.

Take it from someone who spent seventeen years spelling his own business name down the phone.

Picking a name that fights your positioning

The name and the strategy have to pull in the same direction, or no designer can rescue it.

A warm, human, relationship-driven business that names itself something cold and corporate has created a contradiction that shows up in every piece of collateral it ever produces. This is precisely why naming sits inside brand strategy rather than inside design. It’s a strategic decision with a visual consequence, not a visual decision.

What actually makes a business name work

Strip away the mysticism and a good business name does five things.

It’s easy to say, spell and remember. Non-negotiable. Everything else is downstream of this.

It leaves you room. It should still fit the business in ten years, after the services you haven’t thought of yet.

It’s ownable. Available, protectable, and not one of six near-identical names in your category.

It fits the personality. It should feel like the experience of working with you. When the name and the reality don’t match, people trust you less and can’t explain why.

It doesn’t overclaim. Let the work say the big things. The name just has to open the door.

Notice what isn’t on that list. Meaningful. Clever. Deep. A name doesn’t need a story behind it. It needs to be a good container for the story you build. Same principle as your logo, which is why I’d rather you read the seven types of logos explained with examples than ask a name to do a logo’s job or the other way around.

Signs you’ve outgrown your business name

Two or three of these is normal. Five or more and it’s worth a proper conversation.

  • You explain or apologise for the name in meetings
  • It describes a service that’s now a small part of what you do
  • It ties you to a suburb or city you’ve grown beyond
  • People consistently assume you’re smaller or cheaper than you are
  • You’ve stopped saying the full name and started using a shortened version
  • Your team can’t say it clearly on the phone
  • It sounds like the business you started, not the one you run
  • New staff or clients get the spelling wrong regularly
  • You hesitate before saying it in a room full of people you want to impress

That last one is the tell. Hesitation is information. It means some part of you has already decided the name doesn’t represent you anymore.

If several of these landed, it’s worth reading the broader signs you need a rebrand, because the name is often the symptom rather than the cause.

Why businesses change their name: a quick reference guide

There’s a difference between the feeling that your name is wrong and an actual strategic reason to change it. This is the table I wish someone had put in front of me.

The trigger What’s really going on Is renaming the answer?
You’ve moved into a new market The name works locally but reads small or regional to the market you’re now chasing Often yes, if the name is tied to a place or a founder’s postcode
Your ideal customer has changed You’re pitching to bigger, more sophisticated buyers than the name was built for Sometimes. Positioning and identity usually do more of the lifting than the name
You’ve expanded past your original service A descriptive name is now describing a fraction of what you do Usually yes, or at minimum an architecture decision about how the parts relate
The business has matured You built it as a one-person operation and it isn’t one anymore Rarely on its own. This is more often an identity and messaging problem
A merger, buyout or partner exit The name references people or entities that have changed Almost always yes. Names carrying dead relationships create constant awkwardness
Legal, trade mark or domain conflict Someone bigger is in your space, or you can’t protect what you’ve got Yes, and the sooner the better. This one only gets more expensive
The name is a barrier in daily use Constant spelling, mispronunciation, confusion on the phone Yes. This is friction on every single interaction, forever
You want to play a bigger game Your ambition has outgrown the container you built for it Usually yes, and this is the one people talk themselves out of

That last row is mine. It’s also the one I’d take most seriously, because it’s the hardest to justify on a spreadsheet and the most costly to ignore.

Here’s the honest part though. Changing your name is the single most expensive move in branding, and it’s rarely the first thing I’d recommend. A lot of the founders who tell me they hate their name don’t have a name problem at all. They’ve got a business that grew and a brand that stayed put. The name is fine. The positioning is eight years behind the business.

That’s a much cheaper fix, and it’s worth ruling out first. If you’re weighing it up, rebranding is a conversation worth having before you commit to anything permanent.

The checks to run before you commit

Do all of these before you fall in love with anything.

Say it out loud, repeatedly. In a sentence. On a voicemail. To someone who hasn’t heard it. Names die in the mouth, not on the page.

Search it. Google it, search it on socials, and see who’s already there. If page one is crowded with a bigger business in a similar space, walk away now rather than in two years.

Check the ASIC business names register. Registration tells you if the name is taken. Important caveat that trips people up constantly: registering a business name with ASIC does not give you ownership or exclusive rights to it. It’s a listing, not a shield.

Search IP Australia for existing trade marks. This is the one that actually protects you, and it works within specific classes of goods and services. A free search will surface the obvious conflicts. For anything you’re serious about, get a trade mark attorney to look properly. I’m a strategist, not a lawyer, and this is the point where you want a real one.

Check the domain and the handles. You don’t need an exact match .com anymore, and .com.au carries real weight locally. But if every sensible variation is gone, that’s a signal.

Run the accent test. Say it to someone with a different accent to yours. Then have them say it back.

Sit with it for a week. Every new name feels strange at first. That’s not a fault. But the ones that still feel wrong after seven days usually are.

FAQs

How do I name a business?

Start with your brand strategy, not with a list of words. Work out who you’re for, what you stand for and where the business is heading in ten years, then generate names that fit that direction. Once you have a shortlist, test each one out loud, search it, check the ASIC register and IP Australia, and confirm the digital assets are workable before you commit.

Should my business name describe what I do?

Only if you’re confident your business will still be doing exactly that in a decade. Descriptive names are clear and useful for local search, but they lock you into a service and often a location. Suggestive names give you clarity without the ceiling, which suits most established businesses better.

Can I use my own name for my business?

Yes, and it works well for expert-led and trade businesses where personal reputation is the asset. The trade-offs are that it ties the business to you personally, can make a larger team sound like a sole operator, and complicates things if you ever sell. Consider whether the business needs to outlive your involvement.

Does registering a business name protect it?

No. Registering a business name with ASIC lists it and allows you to trade under it, but it does not give you ownership or exclusive rights. Protection comes from registering a trade mark through IP Australia within the relevant classes. These are two separate processes and people regularly assume the first covers the second.

When should I change my business name?

Change it when the name actively works against the business you’ve become, not simply when it feels familiar to you. Clear signals include explaining or apologising for it, being consistently underestimated, or being tied to a service or location you’ve moved past. Renaming is expensive and slow, so rule out positioning and identity fixes first.

How much does naming a business cost?

It varies enormously, from free if you do it yourself to several thousand dollars as part of a broader brand strategy engagement. The larger cost is rarely the naming itself. It’s the trade mark work, the rollout across signage, vehicles, uniforms, packaging and digital, and the equity you rebuild after a change.

My takeaways

A business name isn’t a label. It’s a constraint you either choose deliberately or inherit by accident.

Don’t name yourself after a feeling. Earn the feeling and let people arrive at it themselves. Don’t reach for initials you haven’t earned. Don’t describe the business you have today unless you’re certain it’s the business you’ll have in 2036.

And don’t confuse a name problem with a positioning problem. Most of the founders who tell me they hate their name have actually outgrown their positioning, and the name is the only part they can see.

I sat with Csquared for a good while before I moved. Longer than I should have, if I’m honest, because the cost of changing it was easy to calculate and the cost of keeping it wasn’t.

That’s the trap. The wrong name doesn’t send you an invoice. It just quietly makes everything else harder.