I have a passion for small business and entrepreneurship. My passion stems from many sources. Entrepreneurs and small business owners are usually at the epicenter of  job creation, creativity, risk taking, the chance to do something amazing…etc. Consistent with my passion, I recently co-founded a Collaboration and Coworking space in Uptown Westerville Ohio. (I live in Westerville).

The name I had originally chosen for this space was the WestervilleCoCo. CoCo was short for Collaboration and Coworking. Everyone love it! People were buzzing talking about the “CoCo”. I thought I had really struck oil. I moved forward with logo development and we hit on a really cool design.

Then – just before we printed a huge sign -the oil well ran dry. Our attorneys called and said “we have a problem… CoCo is already trademarked for coworking”

Dead in the water.

We tried desperately to salvage the name and the design. We came up with SoCo (social coworking) and SuCo (successful coworking). But those really suck. I knew it. My business partner knew it. After much discussion we decided to go back to the drawing board – throw everything out, the logo, the work that was done – all those were sunk costs anyway. We cleaned the slate and went back to the drawing board – strategically.

We thought long and hard about what we were offering. We were not renting office space – we were simply offering a workspace where you could get things done. It wasn’t stuffy like a corporate setting – it was casual. We were also offering to take away the headaches and stress that come with an office such as bringing in furniture, connecting WiFi, setting up printers, coffee machines…etc. We wanted people to enter our building, put their laptop on a desk and be up and running in seconds.

I wanted to be able to tell people “Hey, just Grab a Desk and we’ll take care of the rest“. The result was a name that is far superior to the original (non-strategic) name. We pushed through another round of design and landed on a brand that is just awesome.

Here is a quick recap of why the name Grab A Desk is far superior to the original CoCo name.

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