One thing we’ve learnt in the past year is how to – and maybe even more importantly, how not to – undertake the critical task of finding a new name for a company.

This post tells our story, how we went in search of a new company name through an agency – working from the outside in and ended up with options that just weren’t right for us. Unable, at the time, to see where we had failed, we were talked into giving it another try. Only this time, we started from the inside and worked our way out. And instead of making this decision at the top, we partook in this journey as a company – where the entire team had a say in where we were headed.

Let us start from the beginning…

A few years back, we found ourselves operating under quite a few brand names and as we grew – it became clear to us that we needed to unite under one name.

So we did what we thought was the best way to do it, we hired an agency and got to work. After telling them a little bit about us, they sat us down and pitched a bunch of names to us. We tried them on, one after the other, hoping that one would stick and make it as the ONE name to unite all our brands. But regardless of how we tried, we fell short. The names weren’t necessarily bad, they just weren’t right for us.

In the end, we settled for a name. We weren’t happy about the situation but at the time, we didn’t see we had any choices left. We needed a new name and we needed it NOW.

So, we decided that we needed to dress up our new name with a vision and a mission statement. Maybe that would make it easier to digest, we told ourselves.

So, we did! We engaged the entire company in finding our inner why; what made us get up in the mornings and want to go to work. How we wanted to be perceived by our customers. How we developed our services to simplify the everyday life of talented people who, in many ways, create customer experiences for all of us – everyday.

Uniting in this work was magic. Seeing as everyone had experiences to share, this work became the backbone of everything that followed.

We found our why. We found our vision. We found our mission statement.

But we still had a name that just didn’t match what we had just created.

So once again, we convinced each other of maybe just giving this another try. There might be a name out there that would be worthy of all the hard work we had put in. We worked together with the same agency that had guided us in creating our vision.

And this time, we succeeded. We found a name that embodied how we all felt about our  platform, our services and something we could all be proud of.

Symplify.

It’s simple. It’s true. It’s a source of pride for all of us.

Lessons learnt? Plenty. The most important one being – include your team. This can never be a one man show, or even a board decision. This is pure beauty because we found our name as a team. We worked from the inside out realising that we need to do this together in order for everyone to believe in it and live by it.

Robert Kimber, CEO
#WorldOfSymplify #SymplifyWorks