From the beginning in 2010 we were simply called “Lolle & Nielsen”, but last year we decided to add our dream to the name: “Inventions”. And the reason has to do with both the external and internal perception of the company.
Be warned: This post is admittedly a bit navel-gazing, but it actually took us years to add “Inventions” to our name. Here’s why.
For years our company was simply called “Lolle & Nielsen” – a pretty generic named which meant people had a hard time figuring out what we actually do.
Last year – 6 years into our venture – we finally added “Inventions” to the company name. This might seem like an obvious move we should have made way earlier, but external perception isn’t everything: We didn’t change it earlier because of our own internal view.
You see, we’ve always dreamed of establishing an inventing company. But every time we started explaining people that we were inventors, we most often got a “can you make a living that way?”-reaction. So for years we didn’t dare say it out loud.
Prove the dream
As a bunch of humble engineers and designers from Denmark, it was hard for us to admit we were dreaming big and hoping to establish a sustainable business doing inventions.
From getting a project funded to see the licensing work – inventions is more often than not a really long-term investment, and what if it didn’t work out in the end?
For that reason we made a substantial amount of external projects and consulting in the beginning to keep the business afloat. But slowly it actually started to happen; The revenue from internal projects and royalties was beginning to be the biggest part of the business – our thesis of making a inventions business was working.
Combined with the continuous questioning – what are we good at and what makes the company special? – we finally made the decision last year, and renamed ourselves: Lolle & Nielsen Inventions.
Longterm dreaming
Today only 20 percent of our time is spend on external projects, and somewhere between 15-20 percent of the revenue comes from the licensing business. It took us 7 years to get this far, but if it keeps growing at the current rate, it wont take us 7 more to reach the next 15-20 percent.
We actually start feeling like we’ve earned the right to have “Inventions” in our name – and we feel very fortunate to have established our own dream jobs. But this doesn’t mean we’ve reached the end goal. It doesn’t come down to growth and scaling the business to and international conglomerate, but we have to keep moving if we want to keep inventing, keep contributing with solutions that makes a difference in peoples lives.
Success with one inventions gives us the possibility to start new ventures – currently we’re looking to expand with new competencies in software and IoT – and the more successful our licensing business gets, the more we can do what we love: Bring cool inventions into the world.
