How Starfish got its name
Anyone who has had to name something (a baby, a game, a car or a company) will know that it is not an easy thing to do. Ideas that seem really good at the time they are raised, suddenly appear less inviting after a few minutes. And so it was with us.
John Lacey, Tadek Gawor and Ian Taylor spent over six months developing the model for our company that was lovingly referred to in the early days as “Acme Consulting” and part of that involved choosing a name.
A key element of the model we developed was our values, and it is interesting to note that our five values have not changed and remain totally valid for us today.
With respect to values, one of the things that concerned us in the way some consultancies operated was the practice of “cutting the cloth”. We have had personal experience with consultancies that had an operational model whereby when they had an issue with the effort/fees balance on any fixed-fee assignment, they would cut the output as much as possible and necessary to ensure the fee generated the required profit from the assignment. While this generated a financial benefit to the consultancy (at least in the short term), the result for the sponsor was one that invariably did not meet their expectations. This in turn meant the client organisation did not receive the expected benefits of the consultancy work.
We agreed that, in order to live our values, we would not take this approach. We coined the phrase “making heroes of our sponsor” and this remains in our vocabulary. As part of this discussion, the marketing that exists within us all emerged, and we thought of attaching a strap line to our “Acme Consulting” name. This strap line was to reflect our commitment to delivering high quality outputs to our clients – every time. We came up with the idea of “Acme Consulting: we start, we finish”. This seemed brilliant for a few minutes (see above!) but then the beauty of it faded. However the fusion of the strap line words gave us the basis for our company name. “Start” and “Finish” melded to become “Starfish”, and we agreed right then that this was the name we would adopt.
Therefore, “Starfish” represents our commitment to delivering high quality outputs to truly meet our clients’ needs.
From STARt to FIniSH, we're right beside you. This is what makes us STARFISH.