Owner/CEO's Name & Business's Name
Yvonne Padgett, Refermyhomebiz.com
Year Established
Launched Jan 2010
Why is your business unique and what's your pitch?
People are leaving jobs in droves and many of them are starting home businesses. They are creative, passionate, driven and amazing with what they come up with. The challenge many of them have is marketing those businesses and getting the word out.
With Refermyhomebiz.com we are encouraging anyone who needs anything for their home, family, kids, business, lifestyle, etc to purchase those goods and services from a home business entrepreneur.
Our economy is changing and now more people than ever have home businesses and with that boom is the desire and need to ban together to spend those dollars in our own community
What led you to start the business?
I have had a home business for a number of years and went to networking events and loved meeting the people, but I quickly realized 2 things.
1) Most people are so busy "pitching" their business that they are not really thinking of who else in the room they could (and should) be doing business with and
2) I found that for days later I was on the phone doing business with them, or referring them to others because I really did LOVE the businesses they had created. I was a "referral maven" before I knew that term even existed! Had I had unlimited funds, I would have been everybody's #1 customer because I wanted them to succeed and I really did love what they were selling. In one room alone I could purchase clothes, cards, candles, cakes, jewelry, home cleaning supplies, toys, organizational services, bras, electricity and so much more!
At the end of 2008, I saw a contest that StartupNation was doing to promote the top 100 home based businesses. They had pages and pages of home business entrepreneurs and I had finally found a goldmine of shopping for myself! I loved it, but since that was a contest and closing shortly to new applicants I decided that we needed something like that for home businesses for the long-term to market their business in a low cost way while also giving them a lot of great resources and a community of support and that's when Refermyhomebiz.com was born.
It's the stories that people write about in their profiles as to why they are so passionate about their businesses that allow people to connect with them and want to do business with them. Advertising banners, buttons and links to a website cannot give you as much as a full profile on the owner and why they are passionate about their business. It's powerful and then when prospective customers go to the website, they fell like they already know a bit about the owner and they are not doing business with a nameless, faceless company. That's why "About" pages are so popular, people want to know a bit about who they are doing business with to give us more of a "connected" feeling in our lives. And when people know their dollars are directly supporting a family, all the better!
Lessons Learned
- I learned the lesson others did before me, coming up with the idea is the easy part, implementing it is hard!
- I thought it would only take me 3 months to get the website live and it took 6 months. It took countless conversations with web developers and 1 failed attempt before I found someone who could do it for my budget (most developers told me it would cost 3 to 10 times my budget).
- Even with my web developer times were not easy and I had to fire him at one point and scrap some of my initial requirements before I finally decided to take on more of the technical work myself & put a lot of sweat equity in it