In my previous three articles, I covered each of the 4 main tasks you must complete to create your business’s foundation, which are as follows:
- Picking a Company Name
- Getting a Domain & Setting Up Professional Company Email (you can stop using your yahoo account!)
- Getting a Company Phone Number & Address
- Getting a Logo
This is step 4 – Getting your logo! I have heard people say before that “my business is too small to need a logo” but I firmly disagree. A professional company has a professional image associated with it, no matter what the size. You want people to associate their positive feelings about your business with a visual representation and a logo does just that. Set the bar high for your small business – your venture is a reflection of your entrepreneurial efforts – don’t ever just say that what you have is “good enough”.
The process of creating a logo for your real estate investing or small business can be broken down into two areas of work:
- Creative work – Coming up with the concepts and thoughts for your logo. Figuring out how you want to visually communicate with prospective & current customers about your business.
- Mechanical work – How you are going to actually get this image made and “on paper”(graphic design work, etc).
Creative Work
Similar to coming up with a company name, getting a logo for your business requires a bit of creativity. Not only is a little creativity required to come up with the right memorable image but it is more than likely that your first, second and even third options might not come out looking as good on paper as you anticipated in your mind (been there done that!). Or as you learned in step 1 of picking a company name, the images might already be taken by another business.
For this idea generation part of getting a logo for your business, consider these points:
What is the nature of your business? For example, as a real estate investor, if you wholesale residential properties, you need to think of images that are associated with the words “wholesale,” “residential,” and “properties”.
- Wholesale – bargain, large scale, pricetags, bulk orders
- Residential – a house is an obvious (but good!) image for a logo (as opposed to a logo with a sky scraper in it for example which may imply a focus on commercial properties).
- Properties – multiple houses, perhaps people in front of the house.
What is the actual name of your business? If your real estate investing business is called “Wholesale Property Shop” for example, then you can get logo ideas from the actual name. Perhaps for “Wholesale Property Shop” you associate the image of “shopping” with a cart or a brown paper grocery bag; as for “wholesale property” you want to imply bargain homes in large quantities so your logo image could be hands pushing a shopping cart with a bunch of homes in the cart. To imply a “bargain price”, show the homes tied together in the cart with a single dollar sign on the front for example.
If your business has the name “Solutions” in it for another example, think of images showing accomplishment, results, resolution such as hands doing a high-five or a magnifying glass (to imply finding an answer)
- Think about your customers – what is the tone of your business – do you deal with people in distress or are other businesses your customers? This is a huge consideration of what kind of feeling you want your logo to portray for your business – a more casual feeling for consumers or perhaps a more formal representation. When starting out, you may have more room to think of how you want your business to be portrayed.
Take the image of a house again as part of your logo you’re your customers are individuals/families, the house in your logo can be made with softer lines or colors to feel warmer. If the house image is used in a more formal business’ logo, it may want to be drawn with thin sharper lines with text inside for example. But you can leave a lot of these creative details for the experts that do the mechanical work, which takes us to the next part…
Mechanical Work
What I mean by “mechanical” is simply the actual art/graphic design work to get an image on paper. Some people may think about designing a logo themselves, but I feel this is not a good use of your skill set unless you have artistic experience or are trained on a sophisticated graphics program.
I recommend that you outsource the work to a graphic designer to make the best use of your time, effort and resources.
From my personal experience, I know that hiring a graphic designer for a project can be expensive. The first time I worked with a graphic designer, I was paying for a job by the hour and it went about 4 times over the budget I had set aside for this design work. It was not the designer’s fault; the main reason the project cost me a fortune was because I did not know what I had in mind.
When you go into a project without any anticipated outcome, you are bound to make multiple changes since you don’t know what you are trying to get to. The time it took the one graphic designer to create just 3 options for me and to make edits was very costly and ultimately, I was only 90% happy with the end product.
You can use sites like DesignCrowd, CrowdSpring, 99Designs, or UpWork to outsource and make the most out of your budget.
You should now have everything you need to get a great company logo! Be sure to put the logo to work on all of your direct mail pieces, in your email signature, on your website and on administrative documents such as proposals, contracts and invoices. It is a great plan to have a consistent logo allowing people to repeatedly recognize your business and gain credibility as a professional organization.
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