Business gets off to rocky start with ‘wrong’ name choice

Sometimes when a startup business tries to get off the ground, it discovers it doesn’t quite have the right marketing in place to go far. Never underestimate, for instance, the value of a good name.

When Brett Hughes and Steve Caporale launched their real estate company, BoiseCribs.com, in December of 2010, there was some confusion over the name. The trouble stemmed from the fact “crib” is a slang term for “house” and, according to Hughes, the term BoiseCribs.com was meant to have “an urban, MTV feel to it.”

But it excluded a large percentage of the population not in on the jargon. “People didn’t respond well,” Hughes said. “We were pigeonholed in a certain price range and demographic. It was a decent idea that wasn’t there yet.”

According to Sean Rodman, a writer and strategist with SOVRN Creative, a Boise advertising and marketing services firm, the choice of a business name should be carefully made.

“The reason it’s important to name your business ‘correctly’ – which can cover a wide range of possibilities depending on your goals – is that the name is the first significant step in the creation of your brand, which will come to define everything your business stands for internally, but especially externally,” he said.

In April of 2011, BoiseCribs.com was rechristened and became Boise Premier Real Estate.

Alei Gothberg, a realtor who has been with the firm since the beginning, said she actually liked the original name. “I think that for their business model, they started out more hip but thought the new name would lead to a more classier approach.”

They now have 11 agents in all, each of them an independent contractor. The agents work from their homes and pay $50 a month to have desks at Boise Premier, as well as access to its conference room for client meetings, etc.

Caporale and Hughes self-funded their startup. Hughes, 32, explained during a recent interview that “real estate has always fascinated me.”

Even as a younger man he would peruse Forbes’ lists of wealthiest businesses and people and found, he said, “they always had something to do with real estate.”

While studying business management at Boise State, Hughes said he bought “fixer-upper” houses using his own savings, performed the necessary repairs, and then flipped them. He also bought investment property, and met Caporale when he sold some property to him.

Having been in the real estate business in some form since the age of 22, when the industry took a hit during the downturn, “that hurt,” he said. The real estate firms he had been working for began shutting down. He said at this point, he and Caporale got together and starting asking themselves, “What would a good real estate model look like?” They decided the commission model needed revamping.

The partners decided they would take a flat $500 transaction fee on each sale made by each of the independent contractors associated with a new firm they would open themselves.

They’re still using that model.

Hughes stated that while Boise Premier Real Estate doesn’t make as much off commissions as other brokerages, he and Caporale value the mindset of their agents over larger profits. “We want to have strong, independent people,” he said.

“The best agents are always independent thinking and very entrepreneurial minded,” said Caporale during a brief phone interview.

The men hoped that by attracting a certain kind of real estate agent, their company could better weather economic adversity, they said. Their second plan was to keep their work environment understated to limit the costs of doing business.

Hughes stated other firms have bigger overheads because they have offices in high-end buildings with atriums and other accouterments. The companies have to pay for those upscale buildings, he said, and ultimately it’s the agents, through their commissions, who fund the extravagance.

Conversely, Boise Premier has a 2,000-square-foot office in Meridian, where it primarily transacts business, and a 1,500-square-foot office in Eagle overseen by a single agent.