In a world ruled by marketing, the image a company conveys is essential. In this sense, there is nothing as important as the name. The name of the company and its marketed products is similar to the first impression one makes when meeting somebody for the first time. That is, it is the company’s visiting card and therefore key to its success or failure.

A good name must be flexible, differentiating, credible, consistent, outstanding, evocative, legible, easy to pronounce, simple and finally, easy to remember, especially when dealing with products rather than companies. Marketing’s discipline in charge of giving commercial names to products is called naming. Nevertheless, this discipline can also be applied to the naming of the company itself.

To name a product or company is no simple task and requires a great amount of wit, creativity and abstraction capacity. Many companies turn to naming consultancy services to launch new products or to create affiliates. International companies such as  Lekicon, NameLab, Nomen and Idiom are the ones in charge of “giving birth”  to the names of products that will be used worldwide. The problem is that their services are far from cheap: they go from 4,500 to 25,000 euros, amounts that not everybody can afford, especially entrepreneurs.

If such is the case, the alternative is to use one’s imagination to devise the name of the company or the product. Obviously, a professional would do a better job, just like an accountant would also do a better job with our accounts, but it is not always possible to have one. There are some peculiar Internet tools designed to put terms together –generally 2.0 or related with technology- in order to find more or less funny, and generally not so adequate, names. Nevertheless, they can be a good start to get some ideas. Some of these sites are SugestName, Namimg2 2.0 or Domator

Entrepreneur.com offers some advice to find the best name following the steps in theory taken by experts. In this sense, the first thing to do is to define what do we want to communicate.  At the end of the day, the company’s name has to define or bring to mind the business the company is in charge of or at least the vibes it wants to transmit. This is the key, since the rest of the process starts at this point.

From this point, factors such as the sector we are targeting (for example, in retail the market is very segmented, therefore the name must straight away bring to mind what the client is looking for) and the expansion strategy –if we want to be international we can not use elements that geographically limit the name-. In general terms, the name must be evocative, which moreover saves ulterior explanations.

Dictionaries, tools as those previously mentioned, books, magazines… these are excellent sources to look for ideas. Help from relatives and friends, who can give their own personal perspective, is always useful –not to say essential- in this process.  The main idea is to make a reasonable amount of proposals (between 20 and 30) that meet our communication objectives. We will then start working on them and ruling them out.

As soon as we have short-listed the number of alternatives down to more or less five proposals which should be easy to read and express the business nature, we have to start our search in the brand’s register. We need to make sure that our names do not belong to another company already, and if we consider it appropriate, register the brand.

The name of the company is important because it is the company’s first image, the first impression for the client. Nevertheless, if the business is built on solid foundations it will progress. There are thousands of examples of companies with dreadful names that are currently market leaders.

The entrepreneur’s road is hard and full of obstacles, nevertheless, since hundreds of people start for this road every year, there must be some advantages to be found. Leaving aside the personal development aspect, that is the satisfaction of being your own boss or the –relative- freedom of establishing your own working hours, truth is that self-employment has other advantages, for example training, to begin with.

We are not discovering anything new if we say that training is essential for any project’s development and especially growth. Nevertheless, the training area is one of the most neglected ones by most companies, specially the smallest ones. Most multinationals do have career development programs for their employees who can thus improve their CV and add knowledge “at zero cost”. The percentage of people working on this area decreases proportionately to the company’s size. The reversion of this trend is in the hands of the businessman himself and the worker.

At the end of the day, an entrepreneur can choose the time and resources he wishes to allocate to training and just because he or she is self-employed, he or she has access to a training offer that is not available for everybody. In this sense, the various self-employed workers associations periodically publish the courses this type of workers can access to. Moreover, those who have chosen to create a company and appear as workers of such, can also be trained at almost zero cost, or at least partly subsidized. In order to achieve this, the only thing they have to do is use the amounts included in every employee’s payroll as continuing training and which the company and/or employee can make use of afterwards if they wish so.

In Spain the Fundación Tripartita explains the steps a company has to follow to apply for these training subsidies, together with the subsidized courses that normally refer to official degrees in the case of masters. In fact the Foundation even has a special section for SME’s support that can be very useful for entrepreneurs.

Even though most entrepreneurs already have a busy agenda, to devote at least a couple of hours to study the subsidized training alternative is worth it, since we must not only focus on short-term work. Sometimes, important things, or in the case of training, strategy, should go before urgent issues.

Image – edans

As we have advertised in previous posts, we are preparing the participation in the Salón Miempresa event so that 10 of the projects submitted to BBVA Open Talent second edition can be presented in this congress that will be held on March 9 and 10 in Madrid’s Palacio de Congresos. More specifically, presentations will take place on March 10 from 17.45 to 19.00 and the 11th to the 20th most voted projects will have the chance to participate. BBVA Open Talent’s organization has already got in touch with these projects to prepare the presentations.

Salón Miempresa is the first relevant annual event thought for allowing entrepreneurs, businessmen and freelances to find solutions to all their worries on varied issues such as starting up, funding, development, management, and also SMEs transfer and acquisition if appropriate.

In line with our strategy to support entrepreneur movement both in Spain and internationally, at BBVA Open Talent we have decided to back the event Mini Seedcamp Barcelona which will be held on March 23 and hosted by IESE Business School.

We encourage all entrepreneurs who have participated in both BBVA Open Talent editions to submit your projects to Mini Seedcamp, Barcelona. We believe that achieving optimum visibility in the sector both at a national and international levels is essential for startups growth, and this type of events can be of great help in this sense.

Seedcamp is an organization whose aim is to reactivate the entrepreneur’s community in Europe, giving the next generation of developers and businessmen the direction of a network of company builders, including seed capital investors, serial businessmen, product experts, human resources and marketing specialists, lawyers, recruiters, journalists and risk capital.

A brief note to communicate that the deadline to submit projects to Retos BBVA Open Talent is over in three days. Until Sunday 28th you can send us your Facebook and iPhone or Android mobile phones applications. You can use the forms appearing under each challenge to submit the documentation and once the deadline is over, we will need some time to assess all received projects. We’ll keep you posted from here.

After the voting stage for BBVA Open Talent’s second edition which lasted a month and a half, we are pleased to announce the 20 finalists of this stage.  We are very satisfied with the participation in this stage: we received more than 125,00 votes and more than 2,100 comments on the 320 projects that participated in this stage. The 20 finalists are:

All Rankings
Avizpate
busuu.com
Cheque Digital Blindado
City Analytics
ConfirmSign
Double Music
Enviado.es
Erasmoos
Feisyap
Frogtek
Glasscubes
Grow VC
Grupo de Profesionales
Needish.com
Ideas4All
PeerTransfer
ShareUsers
Solución Saas para la gestión de la documentación de las Pymes
Traetelo.com

We remind you that the 20 selected participants will be entitle to a prize and the projects ranking between positions 11^th and 20^th can be presented in an event that will be hosted within the Salón Miempresa on March 10^th, Madrid.

BBVA Open Talent’s organization is already getting in touch with the 20 finalists and the 10 projects that will be presented in the Salón Miempresa. Moreover, we want to take this opportunity to thank you for your participation, both presenting your projects and voting for your favourite projects.  We inform you that we are preparing new initiatives to support entrepreneurs and that you can now participate in Retos BBVA Open Talent for the development of applications for Facebook, iPhone and Android.

Tomorrow February 15^th at midnight (Spanish time), the voting stage for BBVA Open Talent’s (support to entrepreneurs program) second edition will come to an end. After the closing of the voting stage by the organization, we will go through the votes in order to avoid mistakes. In short notice we will announce which are the most voted projects.  Those who are interested in checking the evolution of the voting can visit the general ranking and the ranking by themes.

We remind you that the 10 most voted projects will be part of the 20 program finalists who can win different prizes and we also announce that projects ranking between the 11th and 20th most voted projects positions can be presented during the event Salón Miempresa, that will be held in Madrid on March 9^th and 10^th.  BBVA Open Talent’s organization will contact the projects managers to organize the presentation that will be drafted in Elevator Pitch format.

BBVA Open Talent will participate in a special manner in this new business, corporate and entrepreneurs event whose objective is to become a referent in Spain.

During the last event Café & Finanzas (a networking event held at Madrid) of the year, Marc Vidal, Cink general director, and Julen Basagoiti, BZMK NEXA chairman, talked about management skills in Internet companies. They also described some of the qualities any entrepreneur should have.

During his intervention, Marc Vidal told three stories which had had an influence on his management and entrepreneur work. One of the stories was about a friend of his who had undertaken the titanic struggle of changing life in a favela, and how a few of this man’s friends (him among them) had warned him about the unlikeliness of achieving his goal and had asked him to focus on more productive tasks. The man’s answer was clear: someone has to be the first one.

The ‘moral’ of the story is very simple: we can not wait for someone to undertake for us. When someone has a business idea, s/he has to try to implement it instead of looking for excuses to postpone its launching. Even if our idea looks overestimated, if we don’t start working on it we will never know what would have happened. The results might not always be what we wished for, but empirical knowledge based on experience and trial and error also works in the business world.

People who submitted their project to this BBVA Open Talent second edition have also been through the process of hesitating over their idea and its launching. However, they have also proved that all entrepreneurs have initiative. Having an idea is obviously not enough, to perform previous checks is always necessary (what is basically known as a business plan). However, sometimes we must be audacious and jump into the void (within certain limits).

Anybody who has worked in a Sales Department knows that a product is not everything: there are less tangible elements which can be determining when closing an operation. Maybe the most important one is credibility, since it is impossible to convince the client without it. This certainty can also be applied to entrepreneurship. At the end of the day, when an entrepreneur looks for funding or tries to find new partners, he is selling his project.

As MIT Sloan points out, the problem is that too many entrepreneurs focus almost exclusively on developing their business plan and leave out other tasks which are also important for the project’s credibility. These could be for example to keep an updated and adequate web page, to answer work e-mails and to look after the company’s image. The prestigious American business school carried out a study in order to determine which persuasion recipes do entrepreneurs use. They have discovered that the most successful entrepreneurs are those who inspire greatest confidence.

Many little entrepreneurs still solve the confidence issue through their business plan financial and technical aspects using these to cover shortcomings (specially related with experience). However, the study shows that it is more useful to focus on little symbolic effects which reinforce the company’s image of stability and credibility. All in all, credibility is about implementing a few basic product marketing strategies and finding a good packaging for the company.
Some of the tips they propose are widely used, such as holding meetings in places which suggest economic strength, using satisfied clients statements and dressing appropriately (even if it sounds basic). The study identifies four key areas in order to achieve investors’ confidence: personal credibility, company’s professionalism, experience (at least entrepreneurs’ experience) and recommendations and contacts network.

Naturally, it is easier to make progress on the two first key areas because it is on these areas where most of the entrepreneur’s main mistakes are made. The key is to approach this issue from a marketing point of view: the company and the entrepreneur himself are just products which need to be sold.

Image - Andrew Feinberg

The voting stage of BBVA Open Talent’s second edition started on January 1st. We invite you all to participate voting for your favourite projects among the following categories:

Cloud Computing
SMEs management tools
Financial services in social networks
Internet/mobile financial applications
Digital business

320 projects out of the 415 projects received before December 15th were selected for this second stage. The voting stage will last until February 15th and later the internal selection process will be opened. This process will end with the announcement of the 20 finalists: 10 most voted projects and 10 projects selected by BBVA’s jury.