Back to the evolution of Servinity. After settling on a name and logo, the next task at hand was a slogan. 

(Quick side note - the primary “task at hand” was always the development of the site itself but I will save those stories for later posts.  Some stories, like the debate over which font to use for employee profiles, are better left unwritten.) 

So we needed a slogan.  The first thing we did was take a look at the slogans of companies in relevant industries:  job finding, social networks, and the service industry. Here are some of the ones we found:

• Monster – Today’s The Day
• Jobster – Meet Your Future
• LinkedIn – Relationships Matter
• MySpace – A Place For Friends
• Facebook – none
• eBarJobs – Hospitality Portal
• Market 10 - Matching Your Strengths & Desires to the Right Job
• HCareers - The most hospitality, foodservice, and restaurant jobs & job seekers anywhere!
• Yum Yum Jobs – Where the Service Industry Connects

(Note: The two social networks for the service industry had not yet launched when we undertook this process.).

As I mentioned in a previous post, the name Servinity was derived from the words “service,” “serenity” and “divinity.”  We wanted the name to reflect our goal of bringing order to the chaos of staffing in this industry.  The slogan, we thought, should follow suit.  But we have a very complicated product - four products in one, really. There was concern that we needed to compliment the “soft” sell of Servinity (remember, we decided against ”telling what we do” when we decided to ditch the name Pickupashift.com) by having a stronger slogan which describes the product. 

Here were the top 20 choices:

1. Social Networking with a Purpose.  Exclusively for the Service Industry.
2. A Social Networking Career Site. Exclusively for the Service Industry.
3. A Social Networking Employment Site. Exclusively for the Service Industry.
4. The Social Networking Employment Site. Exclusively for the Service Industry.
5. The Service Industry’s Social Network.
6. The Service Industry’s Employment Site.
7. The Service Industry’s Employment Social Network.
8. How the Service Industry Finds Jobs.
9. Find a Job Through the Service Industry’s Social Network.
10.  Job Search.  Social Network.  Communicate.
11.  Create a Network.  Find a Job.  Exclusively for the Service Industry.
12.  The Official Job Finding Social Network of the Service Industry.
13.  Social Network?  Job site?  Both.  Exclusively for the Service Industry.   
14.  The Service Industry’s Employment Tool
15.  Serve Up a Job
16.  Let Us Serve You a Job
17.  Serving Those Who Serve
18.  An Employment Service Exclusively for Those Who Serve
19.  Serving Servers
20.  Served Right

Pretty bad, huh?

After staring at this list for a few hours, we had a realization:  almost all of Servinity’s functionality has value because, at a high level, Servinity is an online community for the service industry.  The inherent inefficiencies of the industry which had plagued Jeff at El Bar, and which we had set out to remedy, were almost all products of fragmentation and isolation.  And Servinity was built to solve these problems by bringing people together.  It was as simple as that.  “Uniting the Service Industry” was immediately installed as our slogan.  

Fast forward eight months. To today.

I think we’re changing the slogan.  The above story took place a long time ago.  The product and brand have progressed significantly since then.  For one, the scheduling and managerial tools weren’t even a part of the site when we created the above list (a quick glance will show no mention of those features.)  But it will take a few more posts to catch you up to this point in the timeline; so this, too, is a story for another day.  In the meantime, pay attention to our branded materials – you may just see a change before I announce it here.

We are very pleased to introduce you to the newest member of our Advisory Board, Rick Sherman.

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Rick previously served as group executive vice president of Imasco USA, parent company of Hardees Food Systems, Inc., president and chief executive officer of Church’s Fried Chicken Inc., chairman and chief executive officer of Rally’s Inc; and chairman of PJ United Inc., the largest franchisee of Papa John’s.  Rick also previously served on the boards of Qdoba Restaurants Inc., Papa John’s International, Inc., Taco Cabana, Inc. (Lead Director), and JimmyJohns Franchise Corp.  He is currently a franchisee of Papa John’s, Qdoba, and on the board of Reed’s Jewelers Inc.

Rick’s bio speaks for itself.  We are obviously thrilled to have someone of his expertise and stature on our Board.  We look forward to learning from him and turning his years of experience into years of success for Servinity.

Welcome, Rick!

I’ve been asked a few times, “How did you find your partners for Servinity?”  Well, the following is a list of my partners, their Servinity roles, and how I came to work with them, listed in the chronological order of my startup life.  

Adam Wolf, Strategic Advisor:   Adam and I went to college together and was my founding partner in our previous startup, Tech Experts.  Although Tech Experts wasn’t a huge success, the experience taught me a lot, including the fact that Adam’s high-level strategic vision is a perfect compliment to my in-the-trenches entreprenuerial drive.  It was clear from the beginning that Adam and I would go into business together again.

Chris Morris, CTO:  Chris was one of our first hires at Tech Experts.  He quickly proved to be technically superior to our other employees, but also possessed an excellent understanding of the business issues relevant to his job.  I’m sure it comes as no surprise for me to say that high quality business acumen is rare in a tech guy.  We soon made Chris a partner at Tech Experts and I made a mental note that when I needed a CTO in the future, Chris would be my guy.

Joe White, Legal Counsel:  Joe and I went to college together and were later housemates while I was in graduate school.  Joe was aware that I had a previous startup and we would often discuss business ideas.  Our conversations inspired me to form an informal startup ideation group which we dubbed the “Meeting of the Minds.”  The group consisted of Adam, Chris, Joe, myself, and one other friend.  We would throw around business ideas, research plausible ones, and deconstruct the many possibilities.

Jeff Gewirtz, Sales/Industry Expert:  As mentioned in our first post, Jeff is the owner of El Bar, a small bar in the Poncey-Highlands section of Atlanta.  The staffing issues he faced while running El Bar were the impetus for Servinity.   Jeff and Joe had been friends for a while at this point, and upon Jeff’s conception of the idea, the two began researching the possibility of turning it into a real business.  At the same time, Joe was involved with Meeting of the Minds and myself.  Joe raised the idea to me one day just to get some feedback.  That ultimately lead to the following conversation between Jeff and I: 

Josh:  “I’ve got a strategic advisor, a CTO, startup experience, and the drive to make this thing work.” 

Jeff:  “I’ve got legal counsel, industry experience, and a great idea.”

And the rest, as they say, is history. 

I thought I’d take a quick break from the Servinity story to let y’all know about an exciting event that we will be participating in.   It’s called Startup Riot, and it’s a startup focused pitch event where the invited audience will be:  1) Job seekers; 2) Technology professionals in large companies and non-profits; and 3) Investors - angels and VC’s. 

You can read more about Startup Riot on the Bilgistic blog, but if you are a startup or any of the above parties, you can sign up here.  The date hasn’t been set yet, but they are trying to gauge interest, so please sign up if you are interested.  We’d love to have you at the event - if for no other reason than to hear me try to explain the complexity of Servinity in only three minutes.

On a not entirely unrelated note, Bilgistic, which is a blog focused on entrepreneurship, startups, and technology in Atlanta and the East Coast, has apparently been following our blog.  It seems that someone finds my random musings on mundane startup life interesting.  In fact, they had a nice post about us the other day.  Pretty good PR for a company which hasn’t launched anything yet.  (Yet!) 

Thanks to Sanjay from Bilgistic for taking an interest in our blog, and more importantly for organizing Startup Riot.  Hope to see you all there.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Klaas Baks has joined our Advisory Board. 

Klaas is a Professor of Finance at The Goizueta Business School at Emory University and the research director of the Emory Center for Private Equity and Hedge Funds.  His research and teaching focuses on issues in venture capital, private equity, entrepreneurial finance and investment management, and he has published papers in a number of academic and business journals.  Klaas serves on the board of Triton Value Partners, an Atlanta based private equity firm, and on the board of two other start-ups.

On a personal note, I met Klaas for the first time several years ago when I was an MBA student and participating in a venture capital case competition.  Immediately following my team’s final presentation (and announcement of our victory), Klaas rushed up to me and said, “You absolutely must take my class.”  Well, I was never able to take the class, but Klaas and I kept in touch, and he became an informal advisor.  Over the past few years his assistance with regard to the conception, development, and initial funding of our Company has taught me more than I could have ever hoped to learn in a formal setting - although he still thinks I should have taken his class.  

We are excited to have Klaas, his expertise and contacts, to guide us through early stage fundraising, general business development and beyond. 

They tell me blogs are supposed to be short; that my last post was too long.  Ok, here’s all you need to know for this one:  The following are Servinity logos we were considering before deciding on the final version you see at the top of this page:

The name PickUpAShift was always a mouthful and perhaps not easy to remember. The phrase did, however, resonate well with the  industry.   But when it became apparent that the name was creating confusion in the minds of potential customers, we knew that PickUpAShift was going the way of Lew Alcindor. 

As we continued to work on the Company then known as PickUpAShift, the product evolved.  Whereas, originally, shift trading and short-term staffing functions were paramount, we quickly realized that permant staffing  and scheduling would become the backbone of our business.  The name was no longer appropriate; it was too narrow.  Worse still, the people to whom we were speaking about our business were distracted by the name and assumed we only offered shift trading. They failed to grasp the comprehensive nature of the site. 

At the bottom of this post, in alphabetical order, is every name we considered (or at least every name we wrote down), before finally choosing Servinity.  The names in blue were some of the finalists.  The themes will probably be obvious: shift, service and network were the big ones. 

We tried acronyms (SIMEANT stands for Service Industry Management Employment and Networking Tool).  We tried abbreviations (SerColl stands for Service Industry Collective).  We tried foreign words (Lavoros means “jobs” in Italian).  We tried industry tools (ConnectedSpoons, DrinkGun).  We tried industry terms (Sidework).  We tried to play on existing sites (Waitser, TipSpace).  We tried nostalgic slang (Tron is an abbreviation for the unisex 80’s term “waitron,” which refers to either a waiter or waitress).  And we tried the completely random (DishTail, SoupFlower).

Ultimately, after a month of debate and a final eight hour session locked in a room with a whiteboard, the Company was re-christened Servinity.  Rather than using our name to tell what we do (jobs, scheduling, networking), or for whom we do it (the service industry), “Servinity” is how they will feel. 

Our goal has always been to bring order to the chaos of staffing in this industry, and by doing so, hopefully bring some peace of mind to the harried managers fighting this battle.  Servinity is a play on the words “service,” “serenity” and “divinity.”  After that final eight hour session, we needed some serenity.  And this is the name which provided it.  Plus, it sounds cool.

The final decision was made after someone suggested we could one day produce a commerical with Jerry Stiller reprising his role as Frank Costanza (George’s dad) from Seinfeld.  He would play a frantic restaurant manager, struggling to deal with the myriad staffing issues which had just befallen him.  Fans of the show know what comes next.  Stiller would look to the sky, throw his arms up in despair, and shout “Servinity Now!“ 

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This post was supposed to be about the name “Servinity” – how we came up with it, what the other options were, and what it means. But an interesting question came up after the last post: What would our business have looked like if we had kept the name “Pick Up A Shift”?

As it turns out, we actually spent a good deal of time and money creating identity materials for Pick Up A Shift, or PUAS as we called it for short. (The less-than-appealing nickname PUAS is yet another reason we changed to Servinity.) The process of creating a logo is another start-up “growing pain” notch we proudly wear on our belt.

Rather than trying to explain the inefficient and, at times, backwards steps we took during this process – setting a budget, finding a graphic designer, communicating our ideas, selecting a design – lets just say that we spent too much time, too much money, and were never even happy with the final choice. We worked with three different graphic designers and looked at over 30 different PUAS logos before finally deciding on one. Here are some of them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                      These were two the first logos we saw. The themes were very specific to the service industry, but ultimately we decided we needed a logo which would appeal to a broader audience.

Theme:  “In The Weeds”

Theme:  “Cocktail Napkin”

Each of the next three was considered a possible winner at one point or another:

This is the logo we eventually chose.  The colors for Servinty were based on this one: 

Finally, here is a promotional card we had designed:   

In the end, all of these materials became irrelevant, but we learned a lot from the process.  Because of the mistakes we made with PUAS, we did it better with Servinity.

How does a company choose a name? How does a website choose a name?

In researching this topic, I can across a web page titled “37 Ways to Name a Company” which lists, well, 37 ways to name a company. The first five on the list are:

1. Make a name for yourself (Macy’s)
2. List your partners (Sears, Roebuck and Co.)
3. Combine your name with your product (Hakim Optical)
4. Link your product with a rare virtue (Virgin Records)
5. Say what you do (Bonus Rent-a-Car)

The list goes on from there, but what it doesn’t address are the issues related to choosing a name for your company when your company is a website, such as the availability of the domain name, the choice of extension (.com, .org, .net, etc.) and the length of the name. As you might imagine, there aren’t too many short .com names available. You can choose just about any five letters, type them into GoDaddy, and odds are pretty good that someone already owns the .com extension. Just today I tried “frdin” and “sadif” and both are taken.

So what do you name a website for bars and restaurants that helps them find and manage their employees? The answer, of course, is Servinity.com. But Servinity wasn’t an easy name to come up with. In fact, Servinity wasn’t always Servinity. For a long time, Servinity had a different name. And while the predecessor wasn’t as divine, the tale of its ancient moniker is an educational journey into the very principles upon which the site was built. Much like anthropologists study monkeys to learn about humans, so too shall you learn about PickUpAShift.com.

To explain, we hearken back to Jeff and the problem for which this site was created. Jeff’s bar, creatively named El Bar, is a small speakeasy located in the basement of a Mexican restaurant. It has no frontage and no sign. El Bar staffs lean - on any given night it runs with one bouncer, one DJ, one bartender and one manager (Jeff). If Jeff’s bartender doesn’t show, he’s got no one to make drinks. Too often in that situation, Jeff would jump behind the bar himself, having no choice but to neglect his managerial duties. What he desperately needed, he learned, was short term staffing help. He needed someone, as they say in the industry, to “pick up a shift.” Now if his bartender had called at noon to say she couldn’t make it, Jeff would have had plenty of time to find someone to pick up the shift. But when the bartender calls 20 minutes before the place opens, it’s pretty hard to find someone to cover.

This was a problem for Jeff and, as he learned, for many people in the industry. This was the problem which proved the impetus for our business. Although he likely hadn’t seen the list of 37 ways to name a company, Jeff instinctively chose number five, and named the company by describing what it does: it allows people to pick up a shift.

So why did we change the name? Where did Servinity come from? What does it mean? What were the other options?

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait until our next post for the answers to these questions. But to make sure that you don’t have to wait a second longer than necessary, here’s what you do: Click on the RSS link in the upper right hand corner of this page, or the “Subscribe by Email” link in the right hand menu, and subscribe to our blog. You’ll be the first one on your block to know the origin of the name Servinity, and you’ll never miss a post.

Until then, we shall continue to unite the service industry.

Servinity is up and running! Well, not the site, but the business. In the last week we completed our first round of financing, moved into a new office, and hired our first employee.

If you don’t yet know about Servinity, here’s the big picture: Servinity is an online community for the service industry. It’s an employment site; it’s a managerial site. It’s how waiters and bartenders find jobs and access their schedules. It’s how bars and restaurants find employees and manage those employees. And it’s all built on a social network platform to facilitate communication among the varied and distinct constituents of the service industy.

As this blog progresses we will take you along the journey from idea to launch, and beyond. In the process you will witness the trials and tribulations of a tech start-up trying its best to do things right. Today, we start at the beginning:

This coming weekend the entire Servinity team will be attending SoCon ’08, the social media “un-conference” in Atlanta, GA. The past year has seen a huge step forward, not only in the world of social media as a whole, but for us personally, as well. SoCon represents an interesting anniversary for the company - it was shortly before last year’s inaugural event that we made the final decision to forge what was then just an idea into a business. The idea was born just months before then….

Servinity began with a problem. Jeff, one of the Company’s founders, opened a small bar in Atlanta and was trying to manage it on his own. Jeff quickly found himself using a handful of websites and other devices to help him staff and manage his bar: he used Craigslist to find employees; MySpace to manage his employees and talk to his customers; and email, cell phone and text messaging to deal with everybody else. Jeff’s problem was time. He was spending too much of it checking messages and not enough of it doing the things he actually needed to do to run the bar. Servinity evolved from Jeff’s experience.

The result of that experience—Jeff’s frustration with existing technologies and his subsequent vision to solve an industry wide problem—is nearing fruition. When Servinity launches in the coming months, we will be proud to be one of the growing number of companies using social media to solve real business problems.

In the meantime, if Jeff’s problem sounds familiar to you, or you are similarly interested in uniting the service industry, let us know. We are always looking for quality people, ideas or partners to add to the Servinity team. Email us at josh@servinity.com.