Why UPTIME Consultant?
What's in a name... and why UPTIME?
Something I often talk to prospects about on first meeting
One of the things you get to decide when you finally start your own business is what you’re going to call it… for me it was easy, because I already had this word bouncing around my head for years!
My last 20 years of working ‘for the man’ was as a Mechanical Production Engineer for part of the PepsiCo business here in the UK, my main focus was productivity and maintenance. The last nine years between 2006-15 I was tasked by the Engineering Manager to invent and then deliver the Condition Monitoring and Lubrication strategy for what was (and believe still is) the largest Snack Food plant in Europe.
We embarked on this maintenance strategy rethink in 2006, monthly engineering team meetings held off site were always about the amount of ‘downtime’ as this was one of the measures we were often challenged with, on occasions it was embarrassingly high, hence the step change in 2006. This word ‘Downtime’ always grated on me and made me wonder if we weren’t looking at the issue upside down, kind of glass half empty instead of half full, even when this figure was cut in half (that took years and months!) we were still battered by this word!
I hated the word so started challenging it in meetings by asking if we could focus on the ‘UPTIME’ instead, some of the managers didn’t get it, I think they thought I was having a go at them but I wasn’t, I had thought about it and decided the negativity of hammering us with ‘downtime’ each month when improvement was being made turned off a lot of the engineers. It was palpable, you could see it in their demeanour and body language, they were becoming indifferent to it and that’s not a good sign!
That is when I decided any company I started would have “UPTIME” big and bold on it!
Did it make a difference? I think it did but probably only as another measure, the unplanned downtime still stood but the engineering manager could see my point and as the Condition Monitoring engineer onsite I always accentuated UPTIME in my quarterly reports back to the business.
I was already planning to start my own company when a redundancy round started, that gave me a whole year to come up with a plan and execute it after leaving. It made it easier to come up with a name, I did my research on companies house then wrestled with the idea of ‘Consultant’ I mean… who likes consultants!
Problem was that I had few choices, I couldn’t say ‘Services’ as I didn’t plan to deliver any ‘services’ and I didn’t want to pigeonhole myself with ‘Engineering’ so in the end it had to be ‘Consultant’ and to be fair most of what I have done for the past eight years is consult with clients.
The other thing I like about ‘UPTIME Consultant’ is that it’s non industry specific. I’m not tied to a certain channel which I would hate, I prefer working across a wide range of industries where I can demonstrate that everything I do is fully transferrable.
So as an introductory post now you know why our business is called UPTIME Consultant Ltd, if you ever start your own company this is one of the things you get to chose, it can involve some soul searching and lots of forward planning, if you get it wrong you can have massive problems with domain names and stepping on other people’s toes.
What would your ideal company name be and why?
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