Construction Company Names, Get Yours Right the First Time

1. Define Who You Are

The first half of the phrase “brand name” is “brand”. Before you go on to making up a new firm name, you need to define and connect with what your brand is. You absolutely have to brand your company.

Think of how many construction companies are on the market, and the types of names they choose. If you really sit down and think about it, you’ll realize that the successful companies’ names make sense on a primal level because their names describe their brand.

When it comes to naming your construction company, set aside some time to think about who you are. Work through these 4 branding exercises, we call them the foundation of your brand. If you do this first, it will make naming your business a lot easier. Your name will be instilled with meaning instead of simply being a catchy construction company name with no substance.

Mission Statement

A mission statement quickly tells the customer who you are, what you pride yourself in, and the core values of your company. For your building company, you might speak to the importance of trust, craftsmanship, and a happy customer.

Vision

Have you ever seen a top athlete come in first place with their eyes closed and their head down? No, the people who succeed are looking way ahead of them. This applies to your company as well. You want to look for many years and even decades into the future and decide where you want your company to be.

Do you want to be the go-to-guys for commercial building? When people say “commercial builders”, you want their first thought to be your firm name. What does it take to get there, and what can you do today to start that journey?

If you don't have formalized brand vision statement, read our brand vision article and download the worksheet to get it done now.

Brand Values

This is partially lumped into your mission statement; you need to make sure you understand and communicate the strengths of your company. If your main goal is to have the best technology and do the work as accurately as possible, your customers need to understand that. Brand values will not only help you stick to your vision and keep your mission statement true; it will also help you attract the right group of employees and customers.

The Positioning of Your Brand

Your brand positioning will build off of your brand values and helps people understand if you are right for them. This will describe the value you bring to the table, and why customers should pick you over your competitors.

When you brand your company, your logo designs, unique name, and advertisement should all follow suit. If you do these exercises first, I promise it is worth it and you will feel great about your business afterwards. For more information, read our article about branding with examples.

2. Time to Brainstorm

Sitting down with your mission statement, vision, brand values, and brand positioning in mind, it’s time to start brainstorming. It’s always a good first step to take a look at successful or interesting companies and use their construction company names as inspiration. You might also use a business name generator (1) just to draw inspiration from randomness.

Names for Construction Companies

Here are some construction name ideas (some are fictional building business names). Read them over, and if any catch your eye, be sure to take note of it:

• AE Smith
• Aqueous Industries
• Dewson Construction
• Full Circle Development
• Homeserve
• Hydrozilla
• Clayco Co.
• Complete Commerical Builders
• Lion Heart Contractor Company
• CORE Construction
• Lighthouse Building Services
• Custom Construction
• Safework Industries
• Everlast Builders
• Laing O’Rourke Builders
• Power Home Contractors
• Connor Construction Co
• SSE Construction Firm
• Pier Pressure Construction
• Beck Group
• Design Build Ready
• Magic Hammer
• Morgan Sindall
• Verus Constructors
• Timbersmith
• Nest Haus

Pick your top 3 or 4 names from the company names ideas list above and start to really examine them. See if there are any shared characteristics between the names.

• Do the names invoke a certain feeling or thought?
• Can you easily imagine what the company stands for?
• Is the name easy to say? Easy to remember?

These questions will help you to understand what you value in a company’s name and therefore help you name your business. You can repeat this exercise with construction companies in your area. Catchy business names seem to have some type of gravitational pull about them.

What’s in a Name?

There’s a lot of understood characteristics when it comes to company names—you probably know them and might not even realize it. This begs the questions, what are good names for a construction company? How do I pick one? What goes into brand naming? While you're in the process to generate business name ideas, it's worth understanding what's happening in the background.

Short and Sweet

The perfect name will be remembered by the customer. Your company’s name should be short, easily pronounced, and easily read. You want to make sure your name is understood on paper as well as verbally. The first step to getting a customer to trust you is getting them to remember you.

Think of Apple, Tesla, Sprint, Dell, CORE Construction. Very easy to read, understand, and remember. It's perfect for construction company names. Have you heard of the company called International Business Machines Corporation? Probably not. Have you heard of IBM? That’s IBM’s full name—people refer to it by an acronym because it’s shorter and easier to remember.

Reflects Your Brand Values

Remember when you wrote down your brand values? This is where they come in handy. Try to condense your value descriptors into single-word synopses: Trustworthy, innovative, efficient, quick (e.g. Innoverus—a combination of innovative and the Latin word for trust). When you compile a brainstormed list of company names, you want these same words to describe the name. Companies that have effective names are all over the place.

Consider the water bottle brand Camelbak. They promote hydration and portable water. The name makes the customer think of a camel’s back. The customer might imagine a desert, a reservoir of water that the camel always has with them, how hot it is, and they might naturally get thirsty. You want your name to invoke the same type of reaction.

Use History or Mythology

A quirky way to think of a new name for your company is to consider old history or mythology when you’re brainstorming. Incorporating well- or little-known stories will give a fun backstory to tell how you name your business.

Arm & Hammer is a reference to a roman god of metalworking, Nike is the Greek goddess of victory, and Olympus refers to the home of the gods.

Get Punny

If you are looking to keep a fun and friendly tone in your business, you might want to pick a witty or humorous name. Be careful that you aren’t too raunchy or else you’ll lose potential customers who think you’re being unprofessional with your name. Using a middle-of-the-road sense of humor will result in some creative names for your construction co.

The LoJack stolen-vehicle recovery system is a play on the word “hijack”, Yahoo! was named such because their founders jokingly called themselves yahoos, STX is a company that used to make lacrosse sticks so they called themselves a slant of Sticks, and TCBY (the yogurt company) originally had their acronym mean “This Can’t be Yogurt!”.

Common name suggestions from brand experts will undoubtedly use puns. Humor is a very effective tool when it comes to creative names.

Use Your Region

Another common naming technique for a business is to incorporate their local region. You can use your neighborhood, city, state, or section of the country. By using this method, you build commonplace with your customers since you’re sharing a region with them. You just have to be careful you don’t get too generic and create a name that sounds bland.

Construction names might look like New England Construction, Chicago Bridge & Iron Company, Golden State Builders, Newark Contractors, or Silverlake Builders. Construction company name ideas are very typically drawn from their local region. A possible challenge with using cities, states, and other geographic names is that it may be difficult to expand into new areas without changing your name.

Back to Your Roots, Use Your Name

If you’re struggling and lost and you’ve been trying to come up with the name for a while, maybe you should think about keeping it simple. Using your first or last name and including “construction”, “builders”, “constructors”, or “contractors” is a tried and true method. The customer will feel a personal relationship with your brand—almost as if you’ve just introduced yourself. Remember, the second half of "brand naming" has to do with your name, so don't be afraid to use it!

Think of Denny’s, McDonald’s, Turner Construction, Johnson and Johnson. You feel a certain familiarity encountering a company with a name you might have heard in the real world before. A downfall of using your name is that it could make the business harder to sell in the future.

Combine Like Terms

Finally, you could think of creating a new witty name by combining two terms used in the industry. It’s a clever way of connecting your firm name to your industry.

Examples for combination names are Pintrest, Snapchat, Poshmark, LinkedIn, or PayPal.

To get more ideas for names, check out this list of companies and how they got their names (2) on Wikipedia.

3. Evaluate the Names You Came Up With

At this point, you should have at least a handful of names you came up with. The fun part—coming up with brand naming ideas—is done, now it’s time to do the research to see how viable the options are. You probably aren’t familiar with this process but don’t worry, just follow along.

Can You Trademark the Name?

The first thing you want to do is check to see if the name is already claimed by another company. You can go to the US Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) database (3) to see what is currently filed. Do you know the difference between a patent, copyright, domain name, business name, and trademark? If you don’t, there are a top of great videos (4) and articles on eh USPTO’s site that help explain things.

• How do I register my construction business name?
• Should I get a trademark for my construction business name?

By looking at the database, you will be able to find out which name you can legally claim for your company. If you cannot legally have the name, you cannot use the name to do business—this is incredibly important.

This is also the first step because it will eliminate the most potential options on your list. If a name cannot be legally owned by you, take it off the list and keep going. If every name on your list is scratched out from this step, time to go back to the drawing board. Otherwise, let’s check out what domains are available!

Finding a .com Domain Name for Your Construction Company

Most people don't think of checking to see if the domain name is available before they decide on a construction company name. It is as important as making your list of creative names, here's why.

It's very common for people to search for you online by entering your company name into Google. If your domain name doesn't match your business name it may not show up in the results. If it does and the domain name doesn't match, people will get confused.

Getting this right leads to more customers, converts more sales, and grows your notoriety. Your site should be posted on your business cards and you might say things like “visit us on the web at www dot …”. If your company name is Timbersmith, your domain name should be www.timbersmith.com, it will be easier for people to remember because it's what they expect.

Not only should your domain name match your company name, but it’s incredibly useful to have a .com domain. Did you know there are over 280 different domain extensions you can choose? Still, a vast majority of people would have a hard time naming 10. Of course, .com (short for commerce) is the most recognizable. For the most part, people will type .com when typing in your site because that’s what people default to.

Check Google for your Potential Name

While you’re working through the steps of testing the viability of your construction company name, it’s always a good idea to do a quick Google search. Search for the prospective names on your list and see what kinds of results you get.

Remember that these are the same results that other potential customers are going to see. If your name gets buried under hundreds of page results on Google, there’s a very low chance people will find you this way.

Also, check out the companies that show up on this list.

• Do they offer similar competing products and services?
• Might someone pick the wrong website on accident when they’re looking for you?
• How popular is the other company’s site?

Is the Name Scalable?

This is often an overlooked part of coming up with a name. So often we see companies that start out with a very specific niche service they provide, and a name that reinforces this. Later the company grows and expands, and the name stops making sense. Think of the construction names you came up with, and imagine them being used 5 years in the future.

Examples are companies like Weight Watchers who changed their name to WW after they shifted emphasis away from weight and onto wellness. RH was formerly called Restoration Hardware until they opened their offerings up and hardware was just a small part of it.

• Is the name very specific to one part of your company?
• Will the name make sense as you expand?
• Will you still like the name after you make a million dollars in revenue?

You want to avoid painting yourself into a corner and becoming a deterrent to your own growth. A name that incorporates your geographical area makes less sense as you expand.

Ditch the Dashes

If you’re starting to settle on a name and a .com domain—there’s something very important to keep in mind. Your website might be verbally spoken to potential customers. Not only does your domain have to read well on paper, but it also needs to be easily discerned when spoken.

If you have a lot of dashes in your names it will be hard for the customer to remember. Ditch the dashes. Additionally, try to avoid using homophones otherwise you’ll have to verbally explain if your domain has “too”, “two”, or “to”.

You should also steer clear of numbers for the same reason. Numbers just add more confusion—are they written out or just the number? This extra step of clarification will just lead to more headaches.

Besides the fact that using dashes and numbers is hard to verbally articulate, Google also dislikes them. It’s well known that Google prefers simple domain and company names, and it tends to stray away from dashes and numbers.

Get Inspiration, Don’t Copy

This is the final and biggest point. It’s great to look at a list of names like we did at the beginning of this exercise. But it’s not okay to spin a competitor’s name and copy their brand—especially in the construction world. This is a market that is deeply connected and not only will competitors take offense to this, customers will also find it very unoriginal.

Competition is a positive influence on construction companies, but copying other people’s brands is not as positive. Additionally, it could lead to legal problems depending on the severity of the copy.

4. Get Feedback from Everyone

You know the classic saying “everyone has an opinion”. Well, in this case, that’s a great thing. Start reaching out to people and getting their opinions on the name you’re deciding on. Tell them your construction company name ideas and your website and see how they react. They might have naming ideas you never considered.

Though it’s easier to do online, you’ll get better results if you also try verbally telling people your company name and site. You can tell them your company’s name and then ask them to write it down or spell it and see how difficult it is. You want honest feedback from people.

See if people can draw any connections from the name to your company. Test how memorable it is by following up with the people a day or a few days later and asking them what the name of your company is.

These don't have to be brand experts, just pitch your building construction company names and see what the average person thinks. It might even help to get naming suggestions from people you know at other construction businesses.

Choosing a name is the first step but, luckily for you, it can be an iterative process before you finally pull the trigger. This means you can keep workshopping, brainstorming, and tweaking the name before you finally roll out the new name. Take your time and slowly keep working at your company’s name until it’s perfect.

Closing Thoughts

There’s a lot going on while you start building your construction brand, and a name is a big part. It has to be simple, creative, and it needs to get your values across. Start by looking at your company’s mission statement and values. Keep those in mind as you move on to brainstorming. Look at the names of companies in the space and draw inspiration from them without copying them. Think about what names you like and why. Use those core values as you build your own name.

After that, take a look into the legal availability of your shortlist of names, and see what domains are available. Finally, get feedback from everyone around you and take their notes to heart.

It can be frustrating when your ideas are mostly taken. If you keep working at it and don't give up, you will find the perfect name for your business. Depending on your budget and your needs, you may want to hire professional help.

Your name is the first step to building your brand. You’ll get more customers with the right brand, and people will remember you and reach out to you again in the future for their building and construction needs. You want your name to stick when people think of a building business name.