At the risk of starting out like a scripted wedding speech, “For those of you who don’t know me…” my name is Lauren Brimhall and I’m a West Chester based realtor licensed throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey! I am also the President and founder of the West Chester Referral Network (WCRN), which humbly began with a simple community post seeking a small, informal group of five-to-six professionals to refer each others’ services back and forth. Yes, I actually said “five-to-six…”

This post completely blew up, immediately generating well over 60 responses expressing interest, including many individuals from duplicate professions, which was a problem because the group I had envisioned would have only one of each. Instead of being overwhelmed by this scenario, I embraced it wholeheartedly and immediately came up with a “trial by fire” system of accepting the first member to apply from each profession that gave everyone a fair chance regardless of popularity, years of experience, or what would have been in-most-cases my unqualified opinion of their portfolios. This method also avoided any questions about gender or race favoritism, although we did by total accident end up with what my husband calls a bit of a “hen party,” of almost entirely females. As strange as this acceptance method was, having gotten to know this group over the last several months, we very much lucked out with some truly amazing members! Only a very small percentage of members had to be removed early on, and the remaining group you see on the WCRN website now is tested, tried and true by our other members and their referrals!