About Us

In 2017, I started a small business in Northern Virginia and went looking for a referral group to help it grow. The spot I needed was already taken everywhere I looked. So while I waited for an opening, a local chamber of commerce took a chance on me and two other wait-listed business owners — a financial advisor and an insurance agent — and let us start our own. We called it BRG, the Business Referral Group.

Someone had to keep track of who was referring what to whom, and that someone ended up being me. I did what everyone does: I built a spreadsheet. It worked fine for a while. But after about six months, it was buckling under its own weight, and I couldn't turn the data into anything the group — or the chamber's leadership — could actually use.

I figured there had to be a better way, so I built a rough prototype and started using it on my own group. Then I offered it, free, to a few nearby networking groups. They liked it. That was the start of ChamberForge, in early 2018.

Today, ChamberForge runs referral tracking for more than 800 business networking groups around the world, and it still means something to me every time I hear it's actually helping. Like a lot of you, referrals are how ChamberForge grows too — so if you know someone who runs a networking group and could use this, I'd love an introduction. You can send one from my profile page.