Why Tuna Öztürk became Tyler Blackford.

My name was Tuna Öztürk. It has been Tyler Blackford since 2024. People ask about this more than they ask about anything else, usually carefully, as though the answer might be painful. It is not. Most of the reasons are logistical and slightly dull. One of them is not.

The dull reasons

In English, Tuna is a fish. It is a good joke and I have heard every version of it. It is also a bad thing to be called in a first meeting with someone deciding whether to hand you their product, because the first thing that happens in the room is not the work, it is the joke, and then you spend a minute climbing back to where you were.

Öztürk carries most of the Turkish alphabet. Ö is not on an American keyboard and neither is ü, and a surname that cannot be typed is a surname that arrives misspelled in the contract, the invoice, the calendar invitation and the introduction email. Each one is a small friction, and not one of them is the client's problem to fix.

Between the two, almost nobody I was selling to could say either name out loud. That sounds like vanity until you watch it happen. Someone unsure how to pronounce your name will avoid saying it, and someone avoiding your name does not repeat it to anybody else. For the first several years this company grew on almost nothing but being repeated: one client told a friend, that friend told another, and referral was the entire sales function. A name that quietly stops the referral is not a cosmetic problem. It is a growth problem.

Why 2024 and not sooner

We opened the New York operation that year. Until then the work was Turkish and so were the rooms, and none of the above had cost me anything at all. The moment the buyer was American, all three reasons arrived at once. This was not a strategy I had been sitting on. It was the thing the expansion made obvious.

The part that is actually hard

Here is what nobody mentions. Changing your name for business is not a branding exercise. You are asking every person who has known you your whole life to call you something else. Some of them will not, and that is their right. You explain it to your family. You watch people who love you work out whether this is ambition or something worse. And you carry two names for a while, one used by the people who know you and one by the people who pay you, answering to both and being fully neither.

I would not describe any of that as free, and I would not recommend it lightly. The gain was real and I would make the same decision again. It is still not a decision anyone should make for a marginal improvement in a conversion rate.

What it actually takes

So the honest answer to why somebody would do this is that you have to want the work to win more than you want your own name on it. I am not claiming that as a virtue. It is a preference, and it is the one that decides whether a thing like this is worth it to you. If you would not trade your name for the work, do not trade it, because you will resent it. If you would, the paperwork is the easy part.

Both names are still mine. Tuna Öztürk built the first years of this company and Tyler Blackford has been building it since, and it is the same person doing the same work in the same office. What changed was the spelling, and how easily somebody else could pass it on.