The Wittij Consulting Name

A common question people ask me is how I came up with the name “Wittij Consulting.” Probably second only to “how do you pronounce it?” I assume most are familiar with “Consulting,” ergo “Wittij” must be the curveball.

Wittij Consulting: The Name

To fully understand the name and its origin, I’ll need to go back a bit further than the birth of Wittij Consulting. I started my first company in the late ’90s, doing general IT consulting for small businesses and developing custom software. “Xavier” was my only child’s middle name, so I named the company “Xavier Engineering.”

Wittij Consulting Naming Team (and Mr. X) Pictured Above

Fast forward to 2008, a decade and two girls later, and it was time to move from a “dba” to a more formal corporate entity. However, at this point, I had two opinionated young ladies in the house who were not too pleased that I named the previous company after their brother. (In my defense, I had done my best to appease, but apparently, the WiFi password was insufficient recompense.)

To avoid additional domestic dissent, I opted to rebrand and give the girls their due. We had given both of my daughters my wife’s maiden name as their middle names (Witt). I used that as a base, and then prefixed it with Izzy and Jilly’s first initials and… Wittij! I then added “Consulting” to help consumers have a clue what the company does while remaining vague enough to retain a slight air of mystery. Boom. Wittij Consulting was born!

Wittij Consulting: The Pronunciation

People also sometimes struggle pronouncing it if never having heard it before – and some even afterward. To boost brand?consistency, I looked up rhyming words and researched that esoteric?dictionary pronunciation notation. I then constructed a dictionary-style pronunciation guide for “Wittij Consulting,” which ends up not being extremely helpful:

“Wittij Consulting” is pronounced “wit-ij kuh n-suhl-ting.”

It makes it seem like the pronunciation issue isn’t really with the name, but with the speaker, doesn’t it? That aside, perhaps it would help to know that the “ij” part rhymes with “forage” said with a Northeast accent. In fact when I say it, “Wittij” rhymes with “quidditch,” which could be because I don’t know how to pronounce “quidditch,” but I’m not going to look up the pronunciation because I recently learned that’s useless.

Finally, if you wanted proof that the internet contains at least one of everything:?howtopronounce.com/wittij: “click, hear, and learn!” The one with the strong female voice is how I pronounce it, except using my voice.

The Good News

The good news is we are a technology strategy consulting firm (still mysterious) and not a marketing firm. We are significantly better at IT strategy and architecture than we are at naming companies. Drop us a line at?[email protected], call (401) 340-1400, or click the “contact us” button below to learn more. Like the tagline says, our reputation is our success. If we can do great things for you, we will. If we can’t, we’ll say so.

I hope this helped clear up a lot of confusion. To summarize: Wittij Consulting (wit-ij kuh n-suhl-ting), the name you’ll have trouble remembering, spelling, and pronouncing.

Thanks, girls.

This article was cross posted from https://www.wittij.com/the-wittij-consulting-name/