You see, while naming something endows it with certain qualities (think about your own name or the process of naming a child), it’s just the start.  Having a strong name, an interesting name, or a plain name doesn’t in fact make you strong, interesting, or plain.  The name is only the context in which it lives.  What you do with that name is what matters.

So, while Blueberry might have a catchy name with a good story behind it, it’s what we aim to do that we think sets us apart.  Back when we founded our company, someone said to me, “The mortgage banking business needs a new LOS provider like I need a hole in my head.”  Given his analysis of the marketplace, I had to agree.

Just another company wouldn’t do.  But something different?  Yes, that’s the vision that inspires us!

At its core, Blueberry is about helping others become wildly successful.  We know that if we do that and measure our success against that of our customers, we will do something special.

Why helping others?  It’s pretty simple.  Because most companies are out for themselves at the expense of others, they suffer from a Win/Lose mentality.  We think helping others creates a Win/Win.  Steven Covey was a master in shaping my thinking on this subject.  He argues rightly that Win/Win is collaborative and encompasses the “and” versus the “or”.  The opposite leads to a zero sum game.

Why wildly successful?  Because too often people settle for mediocrity.   We want to go above and beyond.  In the best-selling business parable, Raving Fans, the author Ken Blanchard describes it as Decide, Discover, and Deliver.  Decide what you want by creating a perfect vision of the customer experience; discover what the customer wants in correlation to this; and Deliver that plus 1%.

We set out to answer the question, “What would the perfect Loan Origination System look like?”  Since our founding, we’ve designed and developed our solutions with modern software architecture and advanced technologies.  It’s provided our customers real solutions to their business problems and helped them seize new opportunities.  It helps enable them to be wildly successful.

Purpose matters.  It’s foundational.  Purpose gives you direction so that you know where you’re aiming… where you’re going.  Otherwise, you’re just another company.

Well, the story goes back many, many years.  My Dad, the chairman of Blueberry Systems, grew up in radio in the early 1950s.  At the ripe old age of 11, he actually got a job as a Saturday afternoon disc jockey at a radio station in Fremont, Nebraska.  Somehow or another, he talked both his dad and the station’s general manager into letting him spin records.  I guess it was easier back then for a kid to get a real job like this.  His passion for it ultimately led him to a long-career in the radio business

And it was at some point in his early career, he heard Fats Domino’s song “Blueberry Hill.”

Fast-forward some 55 years later.  If you’ve ever started a business or dreamed of doing so, you know how hard it can be to actually come up with a name for your venture.  A name says so much… and often attempts to describe your business and aspirations all the while endeavoring to be memorable.

It was a round a conference table that my father and I were having a conversation about what we’d call our newest business.  We wanted to change an industry, reshape the landscape, and create the perfect enterprise system for our customers.   But what would we call our new company?

We thought about the usual questions one asks when naming a business:  who are my customers, should the name be descriptive, what associations would the name evoke, can I trademark the name?   After an interesting discussion (and some quick “No ways… that will never work.”), my Dad shared a thought with me.

Seems as though he always thought it would be fun to have a company where the On-Hold music was something memorable that tied to the name of the business.  He remembered “Blueberry Hill.”

It didn’t take us long to get to “Blueberry Systems” after that.

It’s memorable.  It stands out in an industry full of acronyms and TLA’s that sound an awful lot alike after a while.  Of course, it has personal meaning for us too.  One thing for sure, we have a lot of fun at Blueberry Systems as we work to shape and change our corner of the world for the better.

The post-script might be that we do everything with a Blueberry twist around here:  lots of “blue” branding, Blueberry muffins, Blueberry ice cream, and even Boo Berry at Halloween.

Or not…

A hallmark of Blueberry Systems is our use of considerable mortgage experience (we call it our mortgage DNA) in solving the real world, day-to-day business problems that every mortgage lender is facing.  Out of habit and out of intent, we view everything from the lender’s perspective.

We view our customers as partners and our goal is to make each of them wildly successful.  As our masthead says, that includes their bottom line but goes even further, to include their quality of life as well…

Otherwise, I don’t intend for this blog to be exclusively about business.  From time to time, I expect to share – some random and some not – other facets of life that interest me as well.

Thanks for stopping by.  Talk to you again, soon!

-Wil