Let's Bork

This article is very different to what I usually write but I feel like this might be a good story.

For five years the name of my business has been Cinofilo. To understand the choice of this name, I need to explain a few things. Let’s start from the beginning.

Many of you don’t know that I’m Italian and that I moved here in UK in 2016.

When I first started my business I came across the problem of choosing a name for it. I wanted something that could include both dog training and dog walking as these were the services I would offer. I wanted to come up with something that would roughly mean “everything about dogs”. That’s because the business wasn’t restricted to just taking care of the dogs physical needs but it was also going to help parents solve their everyday behavioural problems with their pets.

As I was desperately searching for the right name, one word kept popping up in my mind. It was “Cinofilo”. In Italian it has two meanings. If used to describe a person, it means that that person loves and studies dogs. If used with anything else then it simply means “about dogs”. This was exactly the concept I was looking for but I couldn’t find an English word with the same meaning.

I kept thinking about different names for a while but I couldn’t come up with anything that felt special to me.

So I ended up seriously considering “Cinofilo”.

I told myself that if there are so many different businesses with a foreign name, than it might be okay to do the same. I thought that maybe a foreign name might be remembered easily because it’s something unique.
So after some consideration I went for it.

I happily registered the name and started the company.

During the first weeks, I learned online that a new pet business can takes years to grow. I heard that to grow I needed to make a good impression on my clients so they would refer me to other people. And I realized that Chelmsford is packed with pet related businesses so getting clients to even start, wouldn’t have been easy.
Nonetheless in a few weeks I started with my first client. And slowly, over time, I gained a new client every few months.

At this point, I was also working part time in a store and between the two jobs I didn’t have much free time So I created a facebook page and a blog to try and promote myself through social media.

At the time I had zero knowledge on how to make the most of internet. So naturally I didn’t have many followers. After a while I felt like it was a waste of time so I ended up using social media less and less.

To make things worse, I felt like there was no rush since I had a couple of regulars that kept me pretty busy. I told myself that the clients will come over time but I couldn’t have been more wrong because some time went by and I was left with only one regular and some occasional jobs.

At this point it became clear that I absolutely needed to promote my business in a more efficient way because my previous promoting ideas weren’t working with the time and energy I had. I needed to find new ways or I needed to make the most of what I already had. But before I could do anything, I needed to know more.

I went online and I did some research. I realised what I was doing wrong and I started making adjustments accordingly.

I picked up my facebook page again, I joined some groups and I started posting a few times a week. I created an instagram and twitter account and did the same. Some of my posts would be links to new articles from my blog and some would be edited videos.
I printed new business cards with all this new contact details and started bringing them with me everywhere I went. I forced myself to try and overcome my lack of confidence when it came to personally promote my business to the public. So I made a vow to give a business card to every dog parent I would chat with on my walks.

Over time, as I was chatting with friends about all the changes that I was trying, it became evident that “Cinofilo” wasn’t the right name. My friends, while talking about my business and how they were referring me to people they knew, kept getting the name wrong.

This made me realize that maybe this name was one of the reasons why I was having some trouble promoting my business. It was a hard name to remember. And if my friends, that heard the name frequently, couldn’t remember it, then not many people that only heard it once could. On top of that, people had a hard time finding me on google since there are a lot of businesses in Italy that contain the word “cinofilo” and that appear in the result before mine.

Now, if I was a client trying to look me up online I would quit after the first couple of failed attempts.

I needed to make finding me very simple. Cinofilo was also a word so common in Italy that my instagram pace had to be called “cinofilochelmsoford” because “cinofilo” was already in use by someone else.

This needed to be fixed very soon.

So a few months ago, four years after the beginning of Cinofilo, I was right where I started with names. But I needed to find something new.

I asked around for opinions while trying to come up with new ideas. I though it would be fun to include the internet dog language that I was using in my videos already. I love that language. It’s the best way to express dogs goofiness and their almost perpetual carefree happiness.

So in the end I came up with “let’s bork”. It felt right for the dog walking side of the business since it brings the idea of doing something exciting together (such as a walk). It also felt right for the training side since we consider barking a way for them to talk to us. And when we can understand what they are talking about than we can start helping them with their problems.

The next step was to ask around to see if everyone liked the new name as much as I did. The feedback came back all positive. Everyone thought that it was easier to remember. They also liked that I included the “Doggo language” that is becoming so popular all over the internet.

So now I have made up my mind and I’m delighted to announce that I “Let’s bork” will now be the official name of the business starting from the 5th April 2021. It will take me a while to change all the info on all the pages so I apologize if for a while it’s going to be confusing.

I hope you all will like the new name.

Let me know in the comment below what you think about it.