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Crafting the Perfect Name for Your Residential Cleaning Venture

Before my son was born, I can remember being stressed about his name. Late one night, I found myself online digging through the social security administration’s popular baby names registry for the 20s – the 1920s. None of the top 500 popular ones would work. On to 500 names from the 1930s! I had to step away. Breathe. Naming a new business is no different. Nothing sets a house cleaning business up for success like a fantastic name.

For naming your cleaning compnay – once you know what kind of service you’ll provide (commercial, residential), the battle is half over. Next you’ll need to identify your “ideal target market.”

With these two pieces of information in hand, you’ll be one step closer to generating a name that will work for your cleaning business.

Ask yourself a few questions about your ideal market:

  • What type of advertising will your ideal customers respond to?
  • What types of businesses have the same target market as you?
  • How do those businesses advertise?

It’s well worth the time to do the research.

For instance, if you offer the cheapest service in your city and want people to know this, look for examples of advertising based on price. There are plenty of examples available, such as fast food restaurants, budget movie theaters, pest control services, and plumbing services.

But how do you know if their advertising is working for them? Well, that’s easy! If you see ads that are running for a long time, you can bet their ads are generating new customers and the money it takes to run them.

It’s important to know that you shouldn’t copy someone’s advertising. They’ve probably had lots of experimentation to get where they are — and the nuances matter in a big way. And yet, you can use it as inspiration for your own.

Imagine a business that will advertise based on price. Think of appropriate business names that will identify your specific niche at a glance. Use a thesaurus to find different base words that convey a similar meaning.

This would include words such as cheap, cheaper, cheapest or bargain or budget or competitive.

A search for the word Cheap on Thesaurus.com yields lots of great results

From these ideas, make a list of sample business names – don’t worry about them making sense at this point, just keep writing.

If you’re more tech-minded, you can give ChatGPT, from OpenAI a whirl. ChatGPT is like a personal assistant. It excels in tasks like generating name ideas for businesses. The free account gives you access to Model 3.5, but for something as important as a name, I would recommend that you spend the $20 for a one-month subscription and get access to GPT-4 – you’ll find that the results are much better. You’re going to have to live with this name for a bit, so you might as well put a few resources behind it.

I asked ChatGPT to help me name my cleaning business - here's the list it generated

 

If you like the GPT-approach, we’ve got a longer article that goes into more detail on how to name a cleaning service.

Once you have all your ideas in one place, it’s time to see if any are appropriate for your business. This name will be used in all your advertising. It will represent you and the service you provide.

As you look at your list, consider the business names of your main competitors:

  • What comes to mind when you see their business name?
  • How does it relate to what you know about the business?
  • What do you intuit about the business from the name?
  • Does their business name make you want to call?
  • Imagine you are researching services to clean your own home – what names would attract your attention?

With tools like Thesaurus.com and Chat-GPT, generating lots of great names isn’t so tough. The hard thing is to do the research, understand your market, and remove your own feelings from the decision you’re making. What name can you stand behind that will also resonate with your target market?

Get it right, and there’s lots more work to do 😅

Spend the time to a great name. But don’t let it stop you from accomplishing all the other things you’ll need to do (like licensing) to get your business started.

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