What Your Business Name Says About You (An Unscientific Guide)

• Plumbing & Maintenance Services: "We don't have any imagination, understanding of branding, or time to spend worrying about acronyms..."
  
• Bob's Plumbing: "I'm either a friendly local owner-operator, or a multi-national franchise masquerading as one".
  
• Freedman, Loorie, Sing, D'Angalo, Longe & Wynded: "We should have thought of a better naming system before taking on new partners".
  
• A Cut Above Hair Salon: "We like puns, but we think the jury is still out on originality".
  
• Subiaco Plumbing: "If  our business grows, we're either going to limit ourselves or find ourselves increasingly inaccurately named".
  
• DynaForce Phantom Shield Excelsior Industries: "We've spent a lot more time thinking about our business name than our business model". 
  
• MPMC AmChinCo.: "We're such a massive profit-making conglomerate that it doesn't really matter what our name is anymore". 

Payment Options Calculator

So your bill arrives, and there are options of paying in 1, 2 or 4 instalments. Which one is better? The upfront option is cheaper, but since time is money you could be using that money for something else. Plus it's usually easier to budget when your money doesn't go out in big chunks. You can't just do a quick calculation because each instalment is saving you money over a different time period. Then the next day you have to renew your insurance and you have the option of yearly or monthly payments. What to do?

For a while now I've been using this handy little Excel sheet to work it out. I offer it free of charge to hopefully reduce the stress in your life just a little bit and make the world a better (and hopefully nerdier) place.

Download it here.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Cognitive Biases

After reading about cognitive biases, I have decided to coin some of my own:

• The Fremdenamen Effect: the tendency of things to carry greater credibility when given foreign names. 
• The Frost Effect: the tendency for concepts named after people to give a misleading first impression. Named after Dr. Frost. 
• The Grandiloquent Nomenclature Effect: the tendency of things to seem more legitimate when given lofty sounding names. 
• The Self-Demonstration Effect: the tendency for cognitive biases to be more easily remembered when their name is self-demonstrative.