The Power of Bartering With Your Small Business Network

Networking has many benefits. You can get a free stream of customer, receive great advice, and help many others in the process. However, one thing that really stands out is the process of bartering. Now you are able to get some really expensive products and services free. Read on to find out how you can benefit from this.

With a standard, non-networked business, you are going to pay, pay, pay. Each time your business needs a product or service, from legal to accounting, from office supplies to party planning, you’re going to have to write a check. Well, those days are now over once you join a network.

With the bartering aspect of networking, you will trade your goods and services for the goods and services of others in direct proportion to the value of the work provided. If you are a web designer and you need some painting done, then you could create a website for the house painter in your network and perhaps he will paint a room in your house. If you agree to become his webmaster and constantly maintain his site, say for the next 5 years, perhaps he will paint your whole house.

There is another twist on this as well. There are also things called barter dollars, or barter credit. Where you will do something for a person, but you do not need their services in return, so they will issue something like a paper IOU as a form of barter credit. Now you can turn around and trade this barter credit for someone else’s services that you need and that person will use your coupon to turn in for the original service. The person that you helped originally will repay their debt, just to another person.

This is just one of the many ways that you can use bartering. There are whole groups of businesses around the country that create networks just for the sole purpose of doing this. Some people even pay cash for barter dollars for much less than face value and then turn them in for a high profit with of services that you want to have in return. For example, let’s say that you bought $500 worth of credit from a lawyer for $100. Now you can turn around and trade those barter dollars for something else, or you can cash in an get $400 worth of service for free in addition to the $100 that you paid for. This is where the big guys keep winning and the little guys keep paying. Join the winning side.