Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, a podcast where we dive deep into the world of information governance.
Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries. We talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company.
Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just curious about information governance challenges like email management, retention management, or asset data management, this podcast is for you.
This is Lee. And in this episode, Moura and I will talk about building your brand and the essential steps of creating a compelling logo and registering your business name.
This is exciting, Maura. This is the cool piece, right? Where you get to develop things, you get to create your logo and pick a name and so forth.
So do you have any additional comments right away?
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Well, I think it is exciting.
It's the first time that you start to put.
Put your vision into words or pictures, and, you know, how are we going to present ourselves to the world in our new business?
And I think that was a very creative thing. That is a very creative thing. And it was a creative process when we went through it.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Absolutely. So it's. It's more than just grabbing a catchy name or a logo. It's about creating a lasting impression.
And I think we did that with ours. Right? And if you want to tell that story at all, that would be great.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: I. I would love to tell that story. And I also think we did a. I think we did a good job. But when we first started thinking about. Well, not when we first started thinking about opening a business, because longtime listeners may have heard that you started bugging me about that, like, 20 years ago. But.
But when we.
For seriously. When we seriously started looking at starting the business first, we were thinking, you know, boring name. We came from the world of consultants. Everybody's just your last name. So is it the Dunn Cares consulting company?
That was really boring. It put us both to sleep, and so we couldn't go forward with that. So then we tried to be kind of nerdy, creative, thinking about the initials, our initials, but also our.
Our initial kind of founding employees who were our team that had been together a long time. Could we make anything out of that?
We couldn't. But you were.
That was.
That was a suggestion that you had that came from your life.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: It was. It was one that my mother gave me a long time ago when we tried to name the first boat we ever got, like, as a family, right? And I was grouped in with the grandchildren because I was youngest, youngest son.
And we created Lazy J with two E's. Because we had nieces who had e's in their beginning of their name and so forth. So yes, it was, it was very creative. It worked really well for that. But not for us.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Not for us. Because your mother was lucky. She had grandchildren with vowels in their names. We did not have any among all of us, both of us and our, all of our founding employees, not one person with an initial. So that was either first or last name. That was a vowel.
So it was really hard to come up with a word.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: All right. So then we were. We were sitting in some meeting and I cannot remember what meeting it was, but I feel like we were bored. We were physically together in this meeting. It was a big group of people and we were bored.
And I started thinking about names. We were both talking about names, I guess at lunch or in the break or something, we'd been talking about names.
And one thing that our listeners may not know about us, that's kind of a little quirky is that between you and me, we have owned at least three, if not four, Chevy Trailblazers over the years. And at the time when we were starting this company, I think we still each owned one.
And so I've always thought that was a cool thing that we had the same car.
It's a cool car. We liked it, the old ones. And.
And it's a good word, right? So it's a good word about we're setting a new path, we're blazing a new trail.
And I have always felt very, very much at the forerunner of things in terms of information management.
Not because I am, as you know, with my favorite story, the world of records management goes back to R a long, long time ago. The king of Ur, the kingdom of R.
But I always felt like we were on the cutting edge of it. We were, you know, working hard to make records management and now information governance, a practical thing and not just a nice, nice to have add on to an IT project, but something that brought value of itself. And, and so that was a new trail that we were blazing. So that was my contribution to our name. But I think you liked it right away and it triggered some creativity for you in the logo.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Well, it did. But when you get a name, you know, there's some, some tasks that you have to do that are important. And so registering your name with the Secretary of State in different states, even to make sure that you can use that particular name is always a good, a good idea. And then looking up at the, the Patent and Trademark Office to make sure that name is not Patented and used somewhere else. That's always smart as well, because you won't be able to use that name. So those are some of the.
Some of the regular mechanics. Thank you. I couldn't think of the word there, but the mechanics that you have to do. But then after that, it was like you said, all the brainstorming, and that led to, oh, my gosh, Trailblazer. What does that mean? You're blazing a trail. Let's think about it some more. And that came. The pathway and. And then the mountains came. And I don't know if you can see it in the background there where Maura has it. And I keep eyeballing it right away, but you get the mountain picture.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: Here we go. Visual aids for today.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: And then the gray path that goes up the mountain. You're blazing your trail. So that was our idea, but this was. This was really fun to come up with different ideas and. And try to draw them out and so forth. I probably still have some of those sketches in my notebooks.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: Yes, you. Because you drew it right then in the notebook, in the boring meeting, you started drawing the original logo.
We did hire a graphic designer, too.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: And we say that.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: A lot of discussion about fonts and colors.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: And the standard colors that are in our logo on our website, they're in our logo on our letterhead and our business cards. We use them in all of our material where we want to present this is Trailblazer.
Same color, same fonts for continuity, for identity, and.
And we put a lot of time into it.
I thought it was funny. I started to laugh when you went on the tangent to how do you look it up at the Secretary of State? Which is very important.
But we did all the creative stuff first. And I think we would have been so disappointed if we'd gone to the Secretary of State and couldn't have it.
But fortunately we. Trailblazer Consulting LLC was not taken in any of the states where we wanted to register. So that's great.
If it had been, we might have had to come up with another name and have it as an. An alias and alternative. Officially a doing business as. So it's Trailblazer Consulting llc, doing business as some other name in a certain jurisdiction, but we didn't have to go that way.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: Yep. And so you don't. You don't need the professional to help you design the logo, but it does make it a little bit snappier. I mean, I've. I've seen the tools that are out there. Canva and some other items. And they could do a great job.
It's all your preference. It's your business. You could do what you want. But do take into consideration, as Maura was saying, some of the colors. Right. Because there's other colors that just cause some angst and some our energy and some are calming and so forth. And then there's the symbols. Right. You don't want to get too. Too carried away with symbols as well, so that it's politically correct. Not that that. Not that that's extremely important. But just make sure, depending on the.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: Type of business you want, that may not be what you're going for.
But even so, something that's simple, clean lines is easier for people to recognize. If you have something that's very complicated that somebody has to look closely at, that's harder to get that brand recognition. Yes.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: Something that speaks to your audience.
[00:09:07] Speaker B: Yes. Yes.
Although no one's ever asked us if we were like mountain climbing tour guides, so that's good.
We do get some confusion with other trailblazers.
There are other companies that have trailblazer in their name, and we will sometimes get requests for things that those other companies might do that we don't do.
But mostly we have been successful in maintaining our own brand, our own identity, starting from that boring meaning.
And it was a good illustration of the way that you and I have complementary skills, because I thought about the words and the image that they conveyed, and you came up with the image.
[00:09:58] Speaker A: It's so true. I think that lives today, too.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: Yes.
Yeah. We're still the same people that we were 15 years ago when we started this. Yep.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: So, well, that was good.
Do you have it? Do you have a closing?
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Yeah, we've. So one of the things that we have been arguing about in the last couple of years is what should our PowerPoint template look like?
And even though we have. Have this, the colors and the logo and the fonts, when you start to apply those to other things, and we did that on our own without our. The help of our graphic designer.
We had a little bit different visions and we had to. Had to reach a compromise on how to make that work.
So it's good to have the logo as the sort of grounding, the starting point. Every time when we go to do something new, we look back at where we started and, okay, how can this new thing modernize us, differentiate us a little bit? Like when we started this podcast, we called it what Counts by Tribalizer Consulting, or when we put out white papers or other things, how do we use our foundation, our logo, and our name and our fonts and our colors to keep the continuity but make it look new and fresh.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: That's, you know, that triggered something.
Remember the codes to your fonts and your colors because it comes up constantly.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: Yeah, write those down. Don't just remember.
[00:11:31] Speaker A: Well, yeah, write those down. Keep those.
Because you'll be asked if you go to professional or even if you go to just your marketing company and they want to put something out, they want to know what's the. The code for your colors.
So very important to keep.
[00:11:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Which is one of the things that we gained by having the. The professional because she gave us all those things as well as. Or she. We paid her for them but she provided them as well as like an. An EPS file which is camera ready, graphic quality logo. As opposed to one of us just whipping this up in PowerPoint or something, picking the closest color.
It's not the same. It's the investment to get the professional. Unless you are a graphic artist starting an art company of some kind or a design company of some kind and then you already have all that information.
But we believe in hiring people who know what they're doing for different aspects of it and that's not our skill.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: Very true. If you have any questions, please send us an email atinfo trailblazer us.com or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.
thank you for listening and please tune in to our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you the listeners. Special thanks goes to. Jason Blake created our music.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Thanks everyone. Talk to you soon.
