Should You Name a Business After Yourself?

The pros and cons of naming a business after yourself

The usual list is long, contradictory, and mostly beside the point, because almost all of it collapses into one question: is the person the product, or is the product the product? Every argument below follows from the answer.

If the person is the product, a personal name does real work. It tells a prospective client who is accountable, and it makes your track record transferable to the company.

If the product is the product, the same name is a quiet tax. It competes for attention with the thing you want remembered, it ties the company to one person’s availability, and it makes hiring, delegating, raising, and selling each marginally harder. None is fatal alone. They accumulate.

A useful shorthand: if you can imagine the company thriving five years after you stop answering emails, your name probably should not be on it.

When using your own name for a business is the right call

Four situations where a personal name is the strongest option rather than the path of least resistance.

• You are the productIn expertise businesses (law, design, architecture, consulting, coaching), the client is hiring a person and the invoice happens to arrive from a company. A personal name is honest signage there: it says who is accountable when the work is late. That is why McKinsey is still called McKinsey.
• Your surname is already a coined wordA rare, sayable, spellable surname is the thing naming budgets exist to buy, and you got it for free. Bosch and Dell read as invented brands to most of the world, because outside their founders’ own circles they were effectively new words.
• You are building a one-person brand on purposeAuthors, speakers, artists, solo consultants: the person and the business are one asset and are meant to stay that way. There is no succession plan to protect and no acquirer to satisfy, so the usual objections do not apply.
• Provenance is part of what you sellFor makers, growers, and family firms, a family name works as a maker’s mark: it signals continuity and someone whose reputation is attached to each item. That is a product attribute rather than a vanity, and hard to manufacture with an invented name.

When it is the wrong call

The conditions founders most often regret, in roughly the order the regret arrives.

• The business is meant to outgrow youA product company wants customers buying the product, not the founder. Sooner or later you need to be replaceable in the sales conversation and eventually on the letterhead, and a name pointing at one human makes both harder.
• Your surname is commonA common surname behaves like a generic word: results go to the thousand other people who share it, and “which one are you” becomes a permanent tax on every introduction. That is a findability problem rather than a taste problem, and it is testable in about ten minutes.
• You expect to raise or sellInvestors and acquirers buy the brand along with everything else, and if the brand is your name then your name is part of the deal. Survivable when it is priced into the terms, painful when it surfaces at the closing table.
• The name is hard to say or spell where you sellSurnames obey the same phonetics and cross-language rules as any other candidate, and founders are the worst judges of their own. A name customers cannot spell cannot be typed into a search bar, and one they cannot say does not get recommended aloud.

The common-surname case deserves five minutes on its own, because it is the one founders dismiss fastest. The problem is not that the name sounds plain: people who want to reach you cannot, and recommendations land on somebody else. The four diagnostics in is your brand name too generic work as well on a surname as on a dictionary word.

What a personal name costs you later

The decision is cheap on day one and gets dearer every year, because the costs land at the moments you are trying to grow rather than at the moment you are choosing.

1. HiringSenior people want to build something partly theirs. A name on the door answers the ownership question before the interview starts, and the answer is “not yours”. Firms do hire brilliantly under a founder’s name, by being unusually explicit about equity and credit.
2. DelegationClients ask for the name on the invoice. When the firm is called Moreau & Co, the client expects Moreau, and every handoff to a colleague reads as a small demotion in service. You become the bottleneck by design, and the fixes are structural: named leads, visible seniority, patience.
3. Succession and reputationEither the name retires when you do, taking the goodwill with it, or it does not, and strangers trade under your name for decades. Reputation runs both ways too: what the company does attaches to you personally, and what you do personally attaches to the company.
4. The saleWhen the company changes hands the brand normally goes with it, and if the brand is your name then the rights in your name are part of what you sold. It gets its own section below, because it has produced years of litigation for people who assumed their name was theirs forever.

None of this says founder-named firms cannot grow, hire well, or change hands profitably. Many do. It says they manage these four things deliberately, while companies with a separate brand name get them for free.

What happens to the business name if you sell

In the ordinary case the brand is one of the assets being bought. If the brand is your name, the trademark rights in your name are part of what changes hands, and the buyer has every commercial reason to want them exclusively. The surprise is how far those rights can reach back into ordinary use of your own name afterwards.

The best-documented example is the menswear designer Joseph Abboud. In 2000 he sold the exclusive rights to his name and marks to JA Apparel for a reported $65.5 million. When he later prepared a new line and wanted to promote it as the work of designer Joseph Abboud, the company sued. A federal court in New York first read the agreement as having transferred commercial use of his name outright, and enjoined him from using it. The Second Circuit vacated that in 2009, holding that the word “names” in the contract was ambiguous. On remand in 2010 the court found he had not sold his personal name beyond the trademarks, and still permanently limited how he could use it in advertising. The lesson is not who won. It is that he spent most of a decade in court over whether he could say his own name about his own work.

The United Kingdom has a colder version. Karen Millen co-founded the label that carries her name and sold her majority stake in 2004 for a reported £95 million. In 2016 the High Court held that she could not use her name, or a confusingly similar variation of it, on clothing or homeware, because the restrictions she had agreed to in the sale reached into the adjacent categories a customer would expect the brand to enter.

Neither case is an argument against selling. Both are an argument for treating your name as a priced asset in the deal rather than a detail in the schedules: read what the agreement means by “names”, and put it in front of a lawyer before signing. Worth repeating here: Namoly does not check trademarks, so nothing on this site tells you whether a personal name is clear to use. The spectrum itself is in trademark basics for startup naming.

The middle paths

The choice is rarely “my full legal name” versus “an invented word a consultancy sold me”. Four options sit in between, and the first is the one most founders never consider.

• Compress it into a coinageThe most elegant option is to make a new word out of your own name, which is what Adi Dassler did when his nickname and surname became adidas. You keep the personal origin, and you gain a distinctive string nobody else can claim to be merely describing their product with.
• First name, or initials plus a wordA first name is shorter and usually far less crowded than a surname, which is why it survives the search test more often than founders expect. Initials plus a real word is the other variant, though bare initials are a weak start: they are what famous companies shorten to, not what unknown ones launch as.
• Surname plus a category wordThe default compromise (“Moreau Analytics”) is fine when the surname is distinctive and actively unhelpful when it is not, because you have paired an undistinctive name with an undistinctive noun and called it a brand. Test the pair, not the surname alone.
• Keep the person and the company separateNothing forces one decision. You can build a personal reputation under your own name, publishing and speaking as yourself, while the company carries a name that can be sold, staffed, and outgrown without touching you. It is the cleanest exit from the whole dilemma.

The compression route has the best track record, and the full story of the most famous example is in why it is called adidas. Keeping the person and the company separate is a brand-architecture decision rather than a naming one, and the trade-offs are in naming a product vs. naming a company. If you already trade under your own name and wonder whether to move, the criteria are in when to rename your startup.

Test a surname like any other candidate

Founders grade their own surnames on a curve, which is understandable and expensive. The name has been pronounced correctly around you since childhood, so you cannot hear what a stranger hears. Treat it as a candidate rather than as your name, and run the same four checks as anything else.

Domain availability is usually worse for surnames than founders expect, because the competition is other people rather than other companies, and a namesake sitting on the domain for fifteen years is not running a sale. Memorability splits sharply: a distinctive surname scores like a coined word, a common one like a dictionary word, and the gap between those outcomes is the whole decision. Phonetics catches the spelling and stress problems you stopped noticing. And cross-language behaviour matters more than people assume, because a surname is a real word somewhere, carrying meanings in languages that never heard of your family. A report says “no flags in N languages” rather than “safe”.

Run both variants you are weighing, the full name and the shorter one, and compare them side by side rather than judging either alone. The wider pre-launch battery, including the tests no software can run for you, is in how to test a brand name.

Frequently asked questions

Should I name my business after myself?

Yes if you are the product and your name is distinctive: an expertise business trades on a person, and a rare surname behaves like a coined word you got for free. No if the business is meant to outgrow you, if the surname is common enough that nobody can find you among the people who share it, or if you expect to raise or sell, because the name goes with the company when it changes hands.

Is naming a business after yourself unprofessional?

No, and in several fields it reads as the opposite. Law firms, design studios, and consultancies have used founders’ names for a very long time precisely because it signals accountability: a person’s reputation is attached to the work. The real objections are practical (findability, hiring, succession, exit) rather than a matter of professionalism.

What happens to the business name if I sell the business?

In the normal case the brand is one of the assets being sold, so if the brand is your name then the trademark rights in your name are part of what changes hands. Designers who sold eponymous labels have later ended up in court over whether they could trade under their own names again. What you keep depends on the wording of the agreement and on the jurisdiction, so put it to a lawyer before you sign.

Can I trademark my own name?

Often, but not automatically. In several jurisdictions a mark that is primarily just a surname cannot be registered on the strength of the surname alone: it generally needs acquired distinctiveness, meaning evidence that buyers have come to read it as pointing at one business rather than at a family name. The requirements differ by country, so treat it as a lawyer’s question. Namoly does not check trademarks.