A quick Google Search on naming a startup and you will find a lot of information on why you should and should not spend too much time on it (spoiler alert, most startups fail, why waste time on this). For the FlowPath founders, we fell into the latter category - we wanted to find something that worked but wasn’t too fussy. Something we could attach our unique story in a lightly meaningful way without unnecessary complexity. One that had applicability to the various industries and customers our product serves. So how did we land on FlowPath?
The Story
Well, first, FlowPath as a company is a platform designed for facility and infrastructure management. Our customers, Facility Managers, Operations Managers, and Trade Service Companies, use FlowPath to automate repetitive tasks and exponentially increase the volume of work they are able to perform while staying engaged, holding vendors accountable, and making smart business decisions. It’s the place where they log in every day to manage their department.
Professionals in the Facility Management space all-to-frequently deal with an enormous amount of complexity in their day-to-day operations. “Fighting (metaphorical) fires” as they arise and being the hero to the organization is the badge of honor worn by many a Facility Manager. This phrase is so pervasive within the industry, and so generally used by people to describe emergency work that pops up, that we wanted to acknowledge it and allude to the solution with the name of our company. FlowPath is, after all, the solution to fighting these daily fires and getting your facilities operation under control and ahead of the game.
Continuing the theme of fighting “fires” we started to dig into the names of processes and tools that put out fires. Naturally, this led us quickly down a rabbit hole of Firefighting terminology. After some quick review, we agreed that naming the company something like “Pick Axe” or “Fire Hose” just didn’t have the right ring to it. Tooling was also a little too literal. With a little more digging we found a very interesting article that introduced us to the firefighting concept of the Flow-path.
Definition of flow-path
The flow-path is the route that air/oxygen takes when it heads in to feed the fire and the route that fire, smoke or heat heads for, to leave the building. What determines the direction and force of this pathway is what the fire likes to do, what we like to do and also what the wind likes to do.
Control the Flow-path and you control the fire. Only then can it be managed and extinguished.
Boom. FlowPath was it. It fit perfectly and also paid homage to the past service of our founding team as well as to the trade professionals the product serves. FlowPath is a system that allows you to automate communication workflows and manage the team to get the work done. Set up FlowPath, control the Flow-path to your fires, and get your operations under control to get more done!
Want to learn more? Here is a great Youtube video of a live-fire training that talks about the Flow-path.
Runner-Up Name
Oddly enough, “Puffin” was in the running. I can’t get into, nor would you want to hear, why. Hopefully not, but every now and then you might bump into how we paid tribute to this mighty bird in our product as the mascot to our error page.
So, there it is. The FlowPath name origin story in all its glory. We hope you enjoyed this and all the other FlowPath blogs, podcasts, and resources!
About FlowPath
Founded in 2019, FlowPath is a facilities management software that automates work orders, maintenance, communication, notifications, projects, and reporting in a simple-to-use platform that can be leveraged across industries. FlowPath was named a Gartner top Facility Management Software for 2022. To learn more, visit https://www.getflowpath.com.
