In the early days, I was an employee of Golder Associates, but had started a printing business located beside my desk. Establishing the name for my company was the collision of two unrelated items:
The first: In the early 90’s, a great new technology appeared on office phone systems. That was the ability to have a name on the phone’s display so that when you made an internal call, the recipient could see who was calling. Golder got such a system and had the receptionist punch in everybody’s name against their local numbers. The receptionist was good at a lot of things, but typing wasn’t one of them. Instead of “RICK”, my name was entered as “ROCK”. And because this was humorous to her, she decided to leave it that way.
photo of Little Rock Logos through the years
The second: Golder was a geotechnical Engineering company. They had very large infrastructure projects around the world, and for austerity, they would pluck an important chunk of rock from a site and deposit it on the front lawn of one of their office locations. These were affectionately referred to as the Golder Boulder.
Collision: As I was running to the registry office to register a trade name for our company and still without a clue as to what the name should be, it suddenly occurred to me that I was not the big Golder Boulder, I was just the Little Rock. That was twenty-five years ago. The name stuck, and Golder is still an important client today.
