Short answer: pick a name somebody can hear once, spell without asking, and find on Google. Check it against Companies House, the trade mark register and the domain before you fall in love with it. Then leave the logo alone for six months, because a logo is a decoration on a business and you do not have a business yet.
Naming is where new owners lose the most time to the least consequential decision, and logos are where they lose the most money. Both are worth doing properly and neither is worth doing first.
What makes a good business name?
Four tests. Run each one out loud, because that is how names actually get used.
1. The phone test. Say it to somebody who has never heard it. Can they write it down without you spelling it? Names that fail this test cost you customers permanently and silently, because a person who cannot find you again does not ring back to tell you. Clever spellings, dropped vowels, numbers instead of words and puns that only work written down all fail here.
2. The search test. Type it into Google. If page one is already full of an established business with a similar name, a band, or a common phrase, you will be fighting for your own name forever. A slightly odd name that nothing else owns beats a natural-sounding one that everything else owns.
3. The room-to-grow test. Does the name box you in? “Leeds Kitchen Fitters” is excellent for search and awkward when you start doing bathrooms, or move. Your own name has the opposite trade-off: infinitely flexible, harder to sell later, and permanently attached to you. How narrow to go depends on who the business is for, which is worth settling before the name rather than after.
4. The five-year test. Will you still say it without wincing? Names that lean hard on a current trend, a joke, or a piece of slang age faster than anything else on this list.
There is a real tension between tests two and three. Descriptive names with a place and a service in them are genuinely good for local search, which is why so many trades use them. Distinctive names are better for building something that outlives one service in one town. Neither is wrong. Choose knowing which you have chosen, rather than discovering it later.
What checks do you have to do?
Four, and skipping them is expensive rather than merely embarrassing.
Companies House, if you are forming a limited company. You cannot register a name that is the “same as” an existing name on the index, or so similar that the two could be confused. There is also a list of sensitive words and expressions, set out in the Company, Limited Liability Partnership and Business Names (Sensitive Words and Expressions) Regulations 2014, which need approval before you can use them. Using one without approval is a criminal offence. Check the current rules and the name availability checker on GOV.UK rather than relying on a summary, including this one, since the lists change.
The trade mark register. Separate from Companies House, and this catches people out constantly. Registering a company name does not give you the right to use it as a brand, and it does not stop somebody with a registered trade mark objecting. Search the UK trade mark database before you print anything.
The domain and the handles. Check them at the same time, not afterwards. You do not need a perfect .com, and a .co.uk is entirely normal for a UK business, but you do need something you can say aloud without a paragraph of explanation.
The local check. Search the name plus your town. Discovering an identically named business three streets away after the van is signwritten is a bad afternoon.
If you are trading as a sole trader rather than forming a company you have more freedom, but the trade mark point still applies, and so does everything about being findable. Which of the two you should be, and what else genuinely has to be in place before your first customer, is covered here: what you actually need to start a business.
Why does the logo come last?
Because a logo is the smallest part of what people mean by a brand, and the easiest to redo once you know what you are.
Consider the order most people work in. They name the business, spend a few hundred pounds on a logo, order signage and cards, and then start trying to find customers. Six months later the offer has shifted, the customer is not who they expected, and the logo describes a business that no longer exists. The money is gone and the logo is now a constraint.
Now consider what a customer actually decides on. Whether you turn up. Whether the work is good. Whether the price made sense. Whether somebody they trust mentioned you. A logo has never once been the reason a person chose a plumber.
That is not an argument for looking scruffy. It is an argument about sequence. Looking consistent matters early. Looking designed matters later. The businesses that look convincing in year one are almost never the ones with the best logo, they are the ones where every photo, post and reply looks like it came from the same place. That is a much cheaper problem to solve, and it is largely about doing the same thing repeatedly: making your posts look professional without a designer.
What should you do instead, for now?
Enough to look deliberate, and no more. All of this is free or nearly free, and all of it survives a later rebrand.
- Your name, set in one decent typeface, used consistently. A wordmark is a legitimate logo. Plenty of large companies have never had anything else.
- Two colours, and only two. Pick them once, write down the hex codes, and use them everywhere. Consistency reads as professional far more reliably than cleverness does.
- One good photograph of you or the work, used as your profile picture across everything.
- The same one-line description everywhere, which should be the difference you identified when you worked out what makes your business different.
Four things, an afternoon, no invoice. That is a visual identity good enough for the first year, and it is more than most of your competitors manage.
When does the logo actually matter?
There is a point where it earns its keep, and it arrives later than people expect.
- When you go physical at scale. Vehicle livery, signage, uniforms, packaging. Getting this wrong is expensive to reverse, so it is worth paying for once you are committing to it.
- When you sell a product on a shelf next to competitors, where the identity is doing work at a distance before anybody reads anything.
- When you have something worth protecting. A recognisable business benefits from a mark people recognise.
- When you actually know who you are for. Which is the real gate. A designer can only do good work from a clear brief, and the brief is everything in this series: who it is for, what makes you different, what you charge. Commission a logo before you can answer those and you are paying somebody to guess.
The honest version: if you are wondering whether it is time, it is not. When it is time you will know, because something concrete will be waiting on it.
Does the name matter as much as people think?
Less than the agonising suggests, and more than the dismissive answer allows.
A bad name that fails the phone test costs you customers every week, invisibly. That is real. But among the names that pass the four tests, the difference between the good ones is small, and it shrinks every month you trade. Names acquire meaning from what the business does, not the other way round. Almost every company name you respect sounded like nothing before the business made it mean something.
So the practical advice is: do not settle for one that fails a test, and do not spend three weeks choosing between two that pass. Pick, check it properly, and go and get customers. The name will grow into whatever you make it.
Frequently asked questions
Should I name my business after myself? It works well for trades, consultants and anything where the person is the service, and it is instantly available and hard to conflict with. The trade-offs are that it is harder to sell the business later, harder to hand over, and permanently linked to your personal reputation. Neither choice is wrong, but know which trade you are making.
Do I need to register my business name? If you form a limited company, the name is registered as part of incorporation and must pass the Companies House rules. If you are a sole trader you can trade under a business name without registering it, though there are restrictions on what it can contain. Registering a company name is not the same as protecting it, which is what a trade mark does. Check the current requirements on GOV.UK.
Can I use a name if the .com is taken? Yes, and most UK small businesses do. A .co.uk is completely normal here and carries no disadvantage locally. What matters is that people can find you, so the more important check is whether the name is already dominating search results, not whether one domain extension is free.
How much should I pay for a logo? In year one, ideally nothing. Set your name in a good typeface and be consistent. When you do commission one, the price varies enormously and the quality of your brief matters more than the fee. A designer working without a clear sense of who you serve will produce something decorative rather than useful.
Should I use an online logo generator? As a placeholder it is fine, and better than inconsistency. Two cautions: the results are frequently near-identical to other businesses using the same tool, and you should check what rights you actually get, since some tools do not give you ownership sufficient to register a trade mark later.
What if I want to change my name later? It is doable and it costs more than the change itself, because you are also replacing signage, print, profiles and search presence, and asking existing customers to relearn you. Rebrands are common and survivable. They are simply an argument for running the four tests properly now.
Can SocialPostxr keep everything looking consistent while I work this out? Yes, and that is the part that matters more than a logo early on. SocialPostxr pulls your brand from your website and keeps posts looking and sounding like the same business each time, so you look deliberate before you look designed. Nothing publishes until you approve it. See how it works or compare the plans.
SocialPostxr turns your business into finished posts, captions and visuals included, then schedules and publishes them for you. The free Starter plan is £0 with no card required, and includes unlimited scheduling plus 5 starter posts. Start free.
