Get Your Business Funded: Creative Methods for Getting the Money You Need

Barter Benefits

For the small business, there are significant reasons to use barter instead of cash to augment normal business. With barter, you can:

Save money. What would it have cost me to hire Norman to add a deck, build a porch, and redo a bathroom? That barter exchange benefited me financially in two ways. First, I was able to save the money I would have spent to have those things done, and second, I was able to use some of the money I saved for other, more pressing expenditures. Bartering your unused time or unsold inventory rather than money saves you money.

Move excess inventory or unused time. Barter allows you to make good use of products or time that may be otherwise wasted. Stores have extra inventory, accountants have unused time, restaurants have empty tables, and so on. Bartering these valuable, albeit unused, assets allows you to get valuable assets in return.

Create new customers. Bartering, when done the right way, exposes new people to your business and helps grow it in a few ways:

1. If you join a barter exchange, members of the exchange become exposed to your business. Bonus: It costs you nothing to gain the exposure.

2. In addition, the people who barter for your goods or services just may become regular, paying clients.

3. Finally: Since word-of-mouth advertising is one of the best marketing tools there is, satisfied barter customers can also send cash-paying customers your way.

Increase your cash reserves. As indicated, and significantly, by bartering ...