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7 | How to Name your Herbal or Nutrition Practice
It's time to get your practice up and running.
One of the first steps is to name your practice. For some people, this can be a real stumbling block. It feels like a huge decision. Don't let this hold you up! I've included a few things to consider below, with more in the podcast episode. It's also helpful to know that it's pretty easy (from a business/legal perspective) to change your name later. For example, if you file as an LLC you can pay a small, one-time fee and add a "Doing Business As" name to your registration.
Tips for picking a practice name- Consider including the name of your city, state, region if you'll be primarily working locally
- Don't use hard-to-spell words if you can avoid it
- Pick something relatively short (3-4 words or so)
- Google the name to see if it's already being used
- Do an "entity search" in your state to see if the name has already been registered.
- Check with the patents & trademarks office to make sure the name isn't trademarked
- See if any urls associated with your name are in use. Your url doesn't need to match your business name, but if someone is already using a similar url it may cause confusion for your clients
- Avoid using your own name in the practice name, in case you want to grow your practice or sell it/pass it along to another practitioner down the road.
If you're looking for a guided process as you work through getting your practice up and running, come join me in the 10-week Roots: Foundations of Clinical Practice online course. Each week you'll have a few simple tasks to complete, and by the end of the course you'll be ready to open your doors. Start anytime 💚
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Transcript
(00:06)
Hi there, welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman. I'm a licensed nutritionist and registered herbalist.
(00:12)
And today's episode is for all of you out there who are getting ready to start a brand new practice.
(00:18)
I find that the fall, September in particular, it's a really common time for people to embark on new opportunities. And many of you out there are just getting geared up to open your doors or perhaps to open them for real this time.
(00:32)
And one of the questions that comes up early in the process is what should I name my practice? So I'd like to share a few thoughts for you to consider as you are starting at the very, very beginning. All right.
(00:45)
So there's a few things you really want to be clear on before you come up with a name for your business. One of them is who you work with specifically.
(00:53)
You want to get really, really detailed about the type of people that you are hoping to bring into your practice. Of course, you want to be clear about what you do and also how you do it. So I encourage people to think about the adjectives that describe your practice. So, for example, there can be a lot of different herbalists that work with reproductive health, fertility, pregnancy, that sort of thing. So what you would want to do if you are one of those practitioners is to think, well, what what makes me different than some of these other folks?
(01:21)
Like how would somebody choose whether to come to see me or somebody who does essentially what I do? And a lot of times it comes down to the way in which you do it.
(01:29)
So maybe you have a less formal approach or maybe you have a more academic approach, maybe you have a functional approach, or maybe you combine energy healing and herbalism.
(01:40)
So think about the things that really set you apart, not in a way that puts down other people, but just in a way that would help somebody make a decision about which practitioner to go see. So make sure you feel really clear about that and then start brainstorming. So you want to just keep a big document or a piece of paper or a page in your journal open and start writing down things that resonate with you.
(02:04)
So some ideas that you may want to consider are if you will be working in a specific local area, for example, in a specific city, in a county or even in a state. And you're planning to do mostly on the ground in person work.
(02:18)
Once the pandemic is over, then you may want to incorporate that in your business name. So, for example, I live in Staunton, Virginia, so I might if I were naming my practice and I wanted to only work with people or primarily work with people in Staunton, maybe I would call it Staunton Herbal Clinic or something like that.
(02:38)
So that's one thing to consider. You may want to see if you can work into the name of your practice, something about your approach.
(02:44)
So, again, if you are a functional herbalist, if you are a traditional herbalist, if you are a pregnancy and nutrition nutritionist or I'm sorry, a pregnancy and lactation nutritionist, see if you can kind of work that into your title without having it be too long.
(03:01)
You really want to stick to maybe three or possibly four words, something in that range, but not a full sentence as the name of your business. All right.
(03:10)
So keep a running list, and I recommend that you do this over, say, a weekend so you don't want to spend months and months and months trying to come up with the perfect name. But you do want to sleep on it at least once or twice and let things percolate. So make a list, come back to it periodically over the course of a few days and see what resonates with you. The one thing that can be very helpful is if you know your client and you know what kinds of things they might be searching for, that is also helpful to incorporate in your name.
(03:40)
So the way that your client describes what you do and what you describe what you do might be a little bit different. And so that's another consideration. Now, after you've slept on this for a few nights and you've come up with a few ideas, hopefully what I want you to do is do a little bit of an investigative process.
(03:58)
So the first thing you're going to do is just Google that name and see if anybody else is using it in a way that overlaps with yours.
(04:05)
If there's an ice cream shop or something that's using it, that's probably not an issue.
(04:08)
But if there's another health care practitioner that's using a similar name, especially if they're in your local area, then that might be something to consider. And certainly it might be something that's confusing for your clients. If they wind up at somebody else's site who lives in a totally different state or does something overlapping, you don't want to wind up losing some of your people to another practitioner.
(04:30)
All right.
(04:30)
So certainly Google, the other thing you want to do is go to your state. The business office of your state probably has a Web site where you can do what they call an entity search. And this is going to let you see if there's anyone in your state who has registered that name already.
(04:49)
And that's a really important thing to do, because if there is, then that name is not available for you to choose as one for your business. So just Google entity, search and whatever your state is, and the link to search for that should come up pretty easily.
(05:05)
The last thing you want to do is look at what you are urls are available because you are going to want a website.
(05:10)
Now, your website doesn't necessarily need to be the same as your business name, for example. My business name is Blooming Grove Nutrition LLC, and my website is camillefreeman.com
(05:22)
So it's fine to have a slightly different url than your business name, but it is worth checking again because if somebody is already using essentially your business name as you are, and it could possibly be confused with your practice or your business, then that is going to be really confusing for your clients. So don't use it as a, you know, say, oh, well, somebody's already using that. You are I can't possibly use it, but use some common sense and make sure that you're familiar with what the options are.
(05:50)
Now, the next thing to think about is that people are going to be Googling your business or searching in some way for you. They might search your name, but if they know your business name, they might search for that as well.
(06:01)
So it's also better if you avoid things that are hard to spell. This makes it easier for you when you're just giving people your business information, but it also makes it less likely that you're going to lose people in that whole search process.
(06:16)
So if you have something that's hard to spell in your business name, think about if there's an easier way.
(06:24)
You can if you can kind of change the words out a little bit. Another consideration is that if you have a word like four in there, that can be confusing because it could be spelled for, four, or it could be the numeral four.
(06:38)
So think about whether that's something you want to incorporate in your business name or not and make your decision from there.
(06:46)
Now, once you've done that and you feel pretty clear about your name, you are ready to go ahead and set up your practice as a formal business if that's what you've chosen to do.
(06:59)
And we can talk more about how you do that at a different time.
(07:02)
The last thing I want to tell you is that it is actually pretty easy to change your name, your business name, later.
(07:10)
So don't feel like you have to get perfect right now. If you change your name later on down the road, you can usually file what's called a DBA or "doing business as" something else.
(07:23)
And there's a minimal cost, maybe like twenty dollars or fifty dollars, something like that.
(07:27)
And that way you can keep your original name, all your paperwork. You don't necessarily have to change it, but you will also be considered to be doing business as a different name. So don't panic. It's not worth getting too, too stressed about. If you're not totally sure what your business or practice should be called just yet.
(07:46)
And then one last final piece of advice, and this is maybe not relevant to everybody, but a lot of people think about just using their own name as their formal practice or business name.
(07:58)
So if in my case, that would be Camille Freeman LLC, and that is usually not advised, because if in the future you want to add more people to your practice or instead of it just being you, you want to open up a whole store or a whole center or something like that, it's a little bit more challenging to incorporate that.
(08:23)
The other thing is that if you do at some point in the future, want to pass your practice along to another practitioner, that just makes it a little bit harder to do that as well.
(08:32)
So it's possible. It's not a huge deal, but it's something to think about that you may be limiting your possibilities a little bit if you only just use your own name as your formal business name.
(08:43)
So I hope that was some helpful ideas to consider.
(08:45)
If you have any questions about this, if you have any tips to pass along to newer practitioners about how to name their business or their practice, please feel free to post in the comments or message me and let me know. I would love to hear from you and I would love to hear how you came up with your business name or your practice name. It's always fun to me to hear the stories. All right. Take care, everybody. I'll talk to you next time.
Hi there, welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman. I'm a licensed nutritionist and registered herbalist.
(00:12)
And today's episode is for all of you out there who are getting ready to start a brand new practice.
(00:18)
I find that the fall, September in particular, it's a really common time for people to embark on new opportunities. And many of you out there are just getting geared up to open your doors or perhaps to open them for real this time.
(00:32)
And one of the questions that comes up early in the process is what should I name my practice? So I'd like to share a few thoughts for you to consider as you are starting at the very, very beginning. All right.
(00:45)
So there's a few things you really want to be clear on before you come up with a name for your business. One of them is who you work with specifically.
(00:53)
You want to get really, really detailed about the type of people that you are hoping to bring into your practice. Of course, you want to be clear about what you do and also how you do it. So I encourage people to think about the adjectives that describe your practice. So, for example, there can be a lot of different herbalists that work with reproductive health, fertility, pregnancy, that sort of thing. So what you would want to do if you are one of those practitioners is to think, well, what what makes me different than some of these other folks?
(01:21)
Like how would somebody choose whether to come to see me or somebody who does essentially what I do? And a lot of times it comes down to the way in which you do it.
(01:29)
So maybe you have a less formal approach or maybe you have a more academic approach, maybe you have a functional approach, or maybe you combine energy healing and herbalism.
(01:40)
So think about the things that really set you apart, not in a way that puts down other people, but just in a way that would help somebody make a decision about which practitioner to go see. So make sure you feel really clear about that and then start brainstorming. So you want to just keep a big document or a piece of paper or a page in your journal open and start writing down things that resonate with you.
(02:04)
So some ideas that you may want to consider are if you will be working in a specific local area, for example, in a specific city, in a county or even in a state. And you're planning to do mostly on the ground in person work.
(02:18)
Once the pandemic is over, then you may want to incorporate that in your business name. So, for example, I live in Staunton, Virginia, so I might if I were naming my practice and I wanted to only work with people or primarily work with people in Staunton, maybe I would call it Staunton Herbal Clinic or something like that.
(02:38)
So that's one thing to consider. You may want to see if you can work into the name of your practice, something about your approach.
(02:44)
So, again, if you are a functional herbalist, if you are a traditional herbalist, if you are a pregnancy and nutrition nutritionist or I'm sorry, a pregnancy and lactation nutritionist, see if you can kind of work that into your title without having it be too long.
(03:01)
You really want to stick to maybe three or possibly four words, something in that range, but not a full sentence as the name of your business. All right.
(03:10)
So keep a running list, and I recommend that you do this over, say, a weekend so you don't want to spend months and months and months trying to come up with the perfect name. But you do want to sleep on it at least once or twice and let things percolate. So make a list, come back to it periodically over the course of a few days and see what resonates with you. The one thing that can be very helpful is if you know your client and you know what kinds of things they might be searching for, that is also helpful to incorporate in your name.
(03:40)
So the way that your client describes what you do and what you describe what you do might be a little bit different. And so that's another consideration. Now, after you've slept on this for a few nights and you've come up with a few ideas, hopefully what I want you to do is do a little bit of an investigative process.
(03:58)
So the first thing you're going to do is just Google that name and see if anybody else is using it in a way that overlaps with yours.
(04:05)
If there's an ice cream shop or something that's using it, that's probably not an issue.
(04:08)
But if there's another health care practitioner that's using a similar name, especially if they're in your local area, then that might be something to consider. And certainly it might be something that's confusing for your clients. If they wind up at somebody else's site who lives in a totally different state or does something overlapping, you don't want to wind up losing some of your people to another practitioner.
(04:30)
All right.
(04:30)
So certainly Google, the other thing you want to do is go to your state. The business office of your state probably has a Web site where you can do what they call an entity search. And this is going to let you see if there's anyone in your state who has registered that name already.
(04:49)
And that's a really important thing to do, because if there is, then that name is not available for you to choose as one for your business. So just Google entity, search and whatever your state is, and the link to search for that should come up pretty easily.
(05:05)
The last thing you want to do is look at what you are urls are available because you are going to want a website.
(05:10)
Now, your website doesn't necessarily need to be the same as your business name, for example. My business name is Blooming Grove Nutrition LLC, and my website is camillefreeman.com
(05:22)
So it's fine to have a slightly different url than your business name, but it is worth checking again because if somebody is already using essentially your business name as you are, and it could possibly be confused with your practice or your business, then that is going to be really confusing for your clients. So don't use it as a, you know, say, oh, well, somebody's already using that. You are I can't possibly use it, but use some common sense and make sure that you're familiar with what the options are.
(05:50)
Now, the next thing to think about is that people are going to be Googling your business or searching in some way for you. They might search your name, but if they know your business name, they might search for that as well.
(06:01)
So it's also better if you avoid things that are hard to spell. This makes it easier for you when you're just giving people your business information, but it also makes it less likely that you're going to lose people in that whole search process.
(06:16)
So if you have something that's hard to spell in your business name, think about if there's an easier way.
(06:24)
You can if you can kind of change the words out a little bit. Another consideration is that if you have a word like four in there, that can be confusing because it could be spelled for, four, or it could be the numeral four.
(06:38)
So think about whether that's something you want to incorporate in your business name or not and make your decision from there.
(06:46)
Now, once you've done that and you feel pretty clear about your name, you are ready to go ahead and set up your practice as a formal business if that's what you've chosen to do.
(06:59)
And we can talk more about how you do that at a different time.
(07:02)
The last thing I want to tell you is that it is actually pretty easy to change your name, your business name, later.
(07:10)
So don't feel like you have to get perfect right now. If you change your name later on down the road, you can usually file what's called a DBA or "doing business as" something else.
(07:23)
And there's a minimal cost, maybe like twenty dollars or fifty dollars, something like that.
(07:27)
And that way you can keep your original name, all your paperwork. You don't necessarily have to change it, but you will also be considered to be doing business as a different name. So don't panic. It's not worth getting too, too stressed about. If you're not totally sure what your business or practice should be called just yet.
(07:46)
And then one last final piece of advice, and this is maybe not relevant to everybody, but a lot of people think about just using their own name as their formal practice or business name.
(07:58)
So if in my case, that would be Camille Freeman LLC, and that is usually not advised, because if in the future you want to add more people to your practice or instead of it just being you, you want to open up a whole store or a whole center or something like that, it's a little bit more challenging to incorporate that.
(08:23)
The other thing is that if you do at some point in the future, want to pass your practice along to another practitioner, that just makes it a little bit harder to do that as well.
(08:32)
So it's possible. It's not a huge deal, but it's something to think about that you may be limiting your possibilities a little bit if you only just use your own name as your formal business name.
(08:43)
So I hope that was some helpful ideas to consider.
(08:45)
If you have any questions about this, if you have any tips to pass along to newer practitioners about how to name their business or their practice, please feel free to post in the comments or message me and let me know. I would love to hear from you and I would love to hear how you came up with your business name or your practice name. It's always fun to me to hear the stories. All right. Take care, everybody. I'll talk to you next time.
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