We were lucky to catch up with Kevin Frei recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kevin, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

I had a harder time naming my SaaS business than I did naming my daughter.

My little girl may be one of a kind, but her name is not. A business on the other hand – particularly an internet business – needs a monopoly on its name.

There’s no point dreaming up the perfect brand name if the trademark or domain name are unavailable, so when brainstorming business names I had Godaddy open on one browser tab and the USPTO website open in another.

My core product is a client portal, but I had ambitions for the software to expand its functionality. I decided that “suite” is a sufficiently broad category.

So I wanted a name that is memorable, unique, available as a dot com domain name, and incorporates the word “suite”.

I came up with Ahsuite, pronounced aw-sweet. It is not a perfect name, but given the constraints I had to work with, I think it’s pretty good!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I used to write musicals and license the performance rights to high schools. That was my first startup, but it wasn’t very successful financially.

Later I got a speeding ticket, took an online traffic school class, and decided to make a better one. That business did great and is now one of the largest online traffic school companies in Arizona.

While the traffic school was just getting started, I worked as a Google Ads specialist at a marketing firm in Phoenix. That experience would later be the impetus for my friends and I to start Ethical Digital.

I did the digital nomad thing in Europe for a while, then came home to Phoenix and married my sister’s roommate. We now have a baby girl that we are raising in the same house where I grew up.

About a year ago we decided to take the software we built for Ethical Digital and offer it as a SaaS for agencies and freelancers. That is how we started Ahsuite.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I wanted to be a writer since the fourth grade, and I pursued that path out of stubbornness for twenty years.

But whereas it’s romantic to be a struggling artist in your early twenties, it stops being cute as you approach thirty. I realized I actually had no interest in writing – in fact I would rather do almost anything else than write. All I really wanted was to be creative.

So I pivoted from struggling writer to struggling entrepreneur, and now my struggles are far more rewarding.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Small business owners are notorious for being harsh and mercurial managers. It is all too easy to lash out when frustrated when you have the weight of the business on your shoulders.

But the price for a short temper is a demoralized staff. That is why it’s important to be able to keep your cool and use positive reinforcement to get the most from your team.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ahsuite.com