What will it be, the company or me

A question I often ask myself is how I should present myself as a web worker. 2 years ago I founded 4za, a design company that exists out of me, myself and I (with the welcome help of some people around me, sometimes). However, clients do not refer to me as ’4za’, nor as a company: they refer to me as Roy.

All too often I see a companies website (which I know is a one man gig) talking about ‘what we can do for you’ and ‘how to reach us’. And, to be honest, the first year I too had loads of this corporate talk on my website. Even worse, in the beginning it wasn’t even clear who the person behind my own company was, almost as if I was ashamed to be working ‘alone’ and not being a ginormous corporation.

After realizing this, I decided to stop ‘faking’ and just be clear about who I was, what I could and couldn’t do, and started being honest about still studying. Still as ’4za is Roy’ though, not as ‘Roy’. I thought this would lead to questions and maybe less work, but it didn’t.

However, sometimes I still feel like I’m hiding behind an arbitrary company name instead of just presenting myself as myself. This has it’s advantages, such as being able to make invoices and communication look professional and pay-worthy, but often makes me feel uncomfortable.

Of course communicating with my real name has it’s advantages: it would reduce communication complexity and would give clients an even better idea of what to expect. There are some disadvantages too however: the aforementioned professionalism will seem lower, and it becomes impossible to easily start working with somebody else.

The last point seems to become important in the near future, as my brother seems to start designing too. He has already done some website designs, and continues to progress. It would be nice to be able to help customers together, dividing some work and being able to do a bit less in periods with a lot of school work (where, of course, the other person has to do a little more that week). If I were him I wouldn’t agree starting a company together that is named after the other person too.

Whether or not to use your real name as outward company name or not is a question which is, I think, important to a lot of single-employee business-owners like myself. For now, I’ll stick with the hybrid personal-name/business-name combination, but I really think that within now and the next few months my personal name will become more prominent, of course at the expense of 4za. Time will tell, that’s the one thing I am sure of…