I sat in front of my computer ,cruising through at least 50 sites before I got up the nerve to go to www.hostingdude.com to look for a domain name for my company. (I am not affiliated with them, I just like them as they are easy to use.) A lot of thoughts went through my head – conflicting ones. You can’t run a company. Which is funny, because I ran someone else’s successful company for 15 years. Then I thought, you don’t have time. Which was kind of true because I have a 3 year old and a 1 year old. I looked at our bills and thought to myself, "I need to find a way."
For the past year, since I left my job in Corporate America, I had been working as a professional business coach. I liked my clients – most of them found me from my prior position, but I was frustrated each week. I would give my clients great ideas of what they needed to do to build their business, but they didn’t have the staff to do the email blasts and the database building. For a while, I tried to do it all myself. That was a disaster.
I was up after my kids went to sleep and up before they woke up and I was a wreck. I thought about other moms like me who had time to work at home. There had to be some out there. So I put a free ad on Craig’s list and got 81 responses that first day. I was amazed. Women like me who were home for a variety of reasons: some wanted to be with their children, some cared for children with special needs, some cared for their parents and their children, some were military wives who moved every few years, some were disabled, some had disabled husbands -- the list was endless.
As I struggled with the name of my company, and I knew it had to be something catchy – something that would convey to the clients what we do – and something marketable, something I could sell later. So I didn’t want to use my name. All I could think of was "moms." We are moms... we are mothers... we are mothers who work... we are mothers who work for corporations... we are motherhood incorporated!
I liked the name because it was specific enough, yet vague enough for me to grow. I quickly bought the domain name www.motherhoodincorporated.com. I wondered if I should buy up all the offereings -- .net, .tv, .biz., .us -- here seemed to be a hundred of them. Truth is, I didn’t have a lot of money to start up this company so I just bought one. I reasoned that is someone wanted to copy me, they could go ahead, there are enough moms and enough business for all of us.
Now that I had my domain name, I knew that I needed a DBA. I learned this because I went to the bank and asked to open a business account. They said I needed a DBA. I was to embarrassed to ask this snotty bank woman, so I went home and looked it up on the internet.
A DBA (Doing Business As) is a legal document of an individual or other business entity stating that they intend to conduct their business under the name they have chosen. I only know about California because that’s where I live and work; here, it is illegal to do business under any name which has not been registered with the county in which the business resides and published in a newspaper in the same county. Check to see what the laws are in your state.
Good luck with everything!
Lorena.