About

Yvonne Padgett, a home based business entrepreneur from Texas, with an extensive career in Corporate America conceived the idea for ReferMyHomeBiz.com in September 2008 after she received an email from the founder of a fabulous women’s networking group asking for people to vote for her business as part of a contest to choose the top 100 Home Based Businesses sponsored by StartupNation.  She immediately went to the site and found the most amazing group of home based business entrepreneurs all in one spot!!!

She was on the site for many hours checking out the businesses and their amazing stories. Their passions came through loud and clear when reading their mini profiles along with their web links. In some cases, it was only because of their mini-profiles and their compelling stories that she checked out their websites and racked her brain to figure out who she could refer them to (if she herself was not their target customer).

When people take a minute to tell you why they are passionate about their business or how they got started in it, you can actually learn a lot about them and you can find things in common with them that will naturally draw you to them. You'll want to know more. You'll want to help them with their mission and their passion and you'll naturally want to help them succeed in business.

She went back to the website the next day, the day after and many thereafter.  She did business with people she found there, she voted for lots of home businesses, she referred businesses left and right to friends/family/teachers and wrote down on post-it notes the web sites for businesses she wanted to buy Christmas gifts from. That was all wonderful until two months later... when she couldn’t find her post-its!

She went back to the website and couldn’t find the businesses she was looking for, so she had to dig through emails (the ones she had sent out) to finally come up with the website names. If she would have been able to search by a category (ie. childrens clothes) or thought to bookmark the website, it would have helped but you know how you always think you'll remember a favorite site and then when you need it, you can't remember it! Aargh...

Meanwhile, she kept thinking these are exactly the home based businesses that we need access to everyday! Since this was a contest and ending soon for new businesses to upload their information, she decided what was needed was a website that would be available over the long term to home based businesses and targeted specifically to that community.

Yvonne has had her own home based business for several years with the international wellness company Melaleuca, in addition to her full time job in Information Technology and/or sales and she’s been involved in some wonderful networking opportunities in her local community. She's long been a natural referral maven of sorts.

At the local networking meetings, she enjoys meeting the other home business owners and hearing them passionately pitch their businesses and then she returns home loaded down with their business cards where she happily spends the next couple of days calling friends and reporting to them about the amazing businesses that she’s heard about and sending out referral emails to others she thinks might be interested.

That works for those first few days, but weeks and months later when she’s ready to refer others; it’s often hard to find the right business card again. Since word-of-mouth referrals can be so important to a business, she gets frustrated when she cannot match up the right people at the right time.

She talked with other women who attend those meetings, even in other states, and the frustration they all report is tracking those very important word-of-mouth referrals to know who's out there helping you build your business. You want to know so you can thank them and if possible, to return the favor by either doing business with them yourself, or referring them to others!  Some groups have tried different methods to track the referrals that their group attendees give to each other, but there’s no method they’ve come up with that works.

Therefore, it’s time that the problem was resolved in a way that will help better support home based business entrepreneurs.

With ReferMyHomeBiz.com home based business entrepreneurs can now have a place where they can advertise their business, at the same time, they can search for other home based entrepreneurs locally as well as nationwide to learn from, partner with, do business with or swap referrals with. People are looking to build relationships with other like-minded individuals and with ReferMyHomeBiz.com finally there is a place that can help facilitate that by using the Profile Book and Connections feature of this website.

That’s why this website idea combined with Yvonne’s overall love of being a referral maven to other home based business entrepreneurs, put her on the right track to create a new home business to help her favorite community of people; home based business entrepreneurs!

There are a number of websites that cater to women or moms only, but Yvonne was interested in creating one that was available to everyone with a wide variety of home based businesses.

New home businesses are created each day and what better way to support each other than to do business with and refer each others websites! says Yvonne.

So, selfishly having all her networking friends add their profiles to ReferMyHomeBiz.com will help her when she’s ready to do business with them and/or to refer them and she’s betting this website will do the same for you! Not to mention, we'll no longer have to search for missing business cards!!

The day she came up with this web site idea her fortune cookie said: Cooperate with those who have both know how and integrity.  That’s her plan!

To see Yvonne’s member profiles:

If you are a woman or a mom, this one's for you! Click HERE.

If you are a man, this one is for you! Click HERE.