We’ve been working hard over the last five months to create a new brand. It is another exciting and unexpected part of our journey as a start-up. Here we explain what we have been up to and why.
The story behind our new company name
As a company we are on a mission to transform the way public services use their data and information to learn, drive change and improve. We are excited by the value our current clients are gaining from our software OutNav and their work with us. We are now moving to make our approach available to any organisation that can benefit.
An important step on this journey is creating a strong and protected brand. This ensures that anyone reading our content, attending our training or using our software is clear and can be confident that it has been produced by us. It also helps people who use or share our resources be clear about where the information comes from, which is an important part of working in an evidence-informed way.
We have built a strong client base over our first 18 months as a company, and have learned a lot from our clients, and wider enterprise support. We have enjoyed trading as Outcome Focus, but we found out through an Intellectual Property Audit that, as the term is already in use, it would be hard to protect as a company name. As the last thing we would want to do is place any limitations on great outcome focused work, it became clear we needed a new and distinctive name.
Why Matter of Focus?
It turns out that choosing a new trading name for a company is harder than you might first think.
We needed to find a name that we liked, that expresses who we are and our mission, and that is not being used by other companies, domains and social media accounts.
Working with a vibrant new design agency, More Yum we worked through an intense but enjoyable process to understand what we wanted to convey with our brand name, then generate and refine ideas and options. Alongside this we took long walks, read blogs and articles and generally sought inspiration wherever we could find it.
We finally settled on the name ‘Matter of Focus’ for our company. It feels distinctive, it still keeps some continuity by using the word focus, and it reflects the day-to-day work we and our clients do driving change to improve public services for the people who use them.
The team’s thoughts on Matter of Focus
I love the multiple meanings of ‘matter’ – we spend a lot of time asking the organisations we work with to think about what matters to them and the people they care about. But also matter makes me think of earth and soil which represents how grounded our approach is in the everyday messiness of practice. Sarah
I really liked the play on words with matter of fact because in the complex, relational world we work with you can’t always have facts, but you can always have focus. Charlie
…matter means substance too – and I always really enjoy how substantial our approach is. Amy
For me, making a complex problem simple is all about focus. Break the problem into pieces, focus on them one at a time, and the next thing you know, you’ve solved the whole problem without it having been anywhere near as tricky as it looked as a whole. Steve
I really wanted to keep the word focus in the name, as for me bringing focus and helping organisations maintain focus in the complexity of their work is where so much of our value lies. Ailsa
And, so here we are. New name, new look: same focus on what matters…
