Business Naming Details

[Brian Cooper]

New user here, currently attending school and hope to be up and running by April. I already have a business name in mind, but I wanted some opinions on whether to call it Home Inspection, Inspection Services or Property Inspection. The main reason I am asking is because of the potential to add commercial inspection to the business at some point. I am leaning towards Home Inspection because that is going to be the majority of the work but I wasn't sure how marketable that is for commercial inspections. I wanted some thoughts and possible scenarios that you may have encountered. Thanks in advance.

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[Jerry Peck]

... Home Inspection, Inspection Services or Property Inspection.

Inspection Services (add your name, location, whatever in front if you want/as necessary to separate you from other "inspection services" companies).

Leave off the "Home" or "Property" tags - "Inspection Services" let's everyone know what you do in whatever field you do it, yet does not diminish or create a limiting effect based on the businesses name.

[ROBERT YOUNG]

May I ask why are you choosing 2 name business title?
SEO is everything. Read this and tell me what you think.

[Dom D'Agostino]

Leave off the "Home" or "Property" tags - "Inspection Services" let's everyone know what you do in whatever field you do it, yet does not diminish or create a limiting effect based on the businesses name.

Agree with Jerry, and I wish I had done that myself years ago...

Dom.

[Brian Cooper]

Thank you guys, the business name will have more than 2 words, I just haven't finalized the actual name yet. Jerry and Dom-That's exactly what I've been going back and forth about, I don't want to have to set up a separate DBA with other domains and the complications that would come along with it in the future.

[Jerry Peck]

My inspection company, before I retired (be twelve years ago soon) was Inspection Services Associates, Inc (too much IRS paperwork comes with a Inc, and not that much more protection than an LLC ... and an LLC has very little IRS paperwork for it).

The domain name you use has nothing to do with your company name, albeit that the domain name is good to be tied to the company name in some manner, and helps make you more unique in marketing (i.e., 'home-inspections.com', if it was available, would likely not generate as many actual calls as 'BCInspectionServices.com' likely would generate).

Decide on a likely business name and get your domain name first, to see how close you can get to what you want your business name to be, wait too long and what you wanted for a domain name could be gone.

You can do a domain name availability search here: https://www.networksolutions.com/who...36e395854f.108

[ROBERT YOUNG]

Back in 2009 and 2010, Montreal Home Inspection Services was getting 1,200 hits on Google yearly.
I took the company and domain name and pushed forward.
No one was using home inspection services in my neck of the woods.
Too few knew about SEO and I was sharping my pencil quickly to get ahead of the curve.

To make a long story short. Inspection, services or inspection services are top ranking keywords/word phrases. Best to have a SEO catchy name or pay in lost clicks if you do not.

Jerry, I can imagine your company ran efficiently on word of mouth 2 decades ago. Times have changed.

Brian, 2 out of 10 home inspectors become a viable home inspection business.
Out of the 14 home inspectors I have somewhat mentored, not one is a business.

Work hard. Do much for free. Shadow, Carry tools. Do not talk badly about others, Be honest. Be respectful. Be humble. Learn to defend your position. Even if it means some saying to you, 'Trying to get a straight answer from you is like trying to nail jello to a tree.' Right Jerry.

Expect to spend $10,000 to get up and running.
Do what you can to get your market share.
Good luck.

[Jerry Peck]

Jerry, I can imagine your company ran efficiently on word of mouth 2 decades ago. Times have changed.

Almost 3 decades ago now - and I kept up with the changes, leading the way much of the time - I started doing inspections on a notebook computer in the field in 1994 (I think it was 1994, may have been 1993) using an inspection program I wrote (it was based on WordPerfect and used WordPerfect as the word processor, few use WordPerfect today, including me, even though WordPerfect could do so much more, and do it so much more easily, than could be done in Word, than can even be done in Word today). I revised and expanded the inspection program to include what I looked at as I learned to look at more and more things, and to address things better, such as putting photos into reports when digital cameras came out (was a lot better than developing 35 mm film or using Polaroids and pasting the photos onto a printed page).

Been there, done that, no longer my time to do that. I have another project I am working on and I will post a link to it when I get further along with the project - this project is for fun (well, inspections were also 'for fun' at the time too ).