About 6 months after retiring from DoD’s Senior Executive Service, I decided to form a small consulting firm. I soon found out the hardest part was not building a business plan, but deciding on a name. I no longer had expert staff around me – it was just me and Dan, my husband, at the kitchen table, tossing ideas around. When we’d finally land on a name we thought we could live with, it would turn out to be already registered in the state of Virginia. This went on for days. It consumed us.

Then one morning I was out with the dog, Maxwell, on our morning walk, and it hit me: Maxwell is a perfectly sophisticated name. Far too sophisticated, as it turned out, for this goofy dog. But a completely respectable name for a consulting firm. I was excited. We went straight home and bee-lined it to the kitchen table. Dan looked it up. Maxwell Associates was free and clear. We registered that instant and my company was born.

Fast forward 6 years and I decided it was time to refresh the brand. The original logo I had crowd-sourced was generic, very similar to that used by a certain bank, and very forgettable. I hired a professional designer and marketing expert to help. He interviewed us. Asked about the company, where we live, our philosophy on business, our hobbies. It was almost like a first date. Two weeks later he presented dozens of logos and we narrowed it down to a few themes. One of these was a set of stylized line drawings of Maxwell, the dog. It’s the one I liked best. It’s the one Dan liked best. But friends, family and associates were concerned the industry would not take us seriously with an animal logo. In the end I thought, “What the heck, Merrill Lynch has a bull with a ring in it’s nose, nobody thinks they are a rodeo.”

The decision was made and the new logo was completed.