How Bartering Can Help

the Home Based Agent

By Peter Coloyan

Barter, the act of trading goods or services for other goods or services, has been around since the beginning of recorded time. In fact, if you think about it, it is actually barter that should be called “the world’s oldest profession.”
Bartering can give you an advantage over your competition. You can learn to utilize the leverage it can bring to a transaction to acquire goods or services you may have thought were out of your reach. You can, in many instances, replace cash expenditures with barter.
I made my first travel barter transaction in 1978, when I traded a Disney World package as a giveaway for our local weekly newspaper in exchange for an entire year of advertising. The package cost me about $600 net. The advertising value I got was about $5,000! At that time, I couldn’t afford to pay cash for that advertising, but I sure couldn’t afford not to trade for it at a cost to me of 12 cents on the dollar!
That “barter leverage” allowed me to get our agency’s name in front of the readers of that paper for an entire year, and our business doubled from 1978 to 1979. I have been a firm believer in smart barter ever since.
Barter leverage is the reason that there are over 40,000 businesses of all types and sizes in the U.S. that utilize one or more of the barter exchanges that exist in virtually every area of the country.
Trading through an exchange gives you immediate access to hundreds of businesses, and creates an account to keep track of your barter transactions, through which you will make barter deposits (sales) and write barter checks for purchases.
Important note: Barter business should always be new, incremental business. You NEVER want to replace existing cash business with barter!
As a home based travel agent, you can utilize barter to help expand your business as I did — effectively trading your expertise and skills for advertising, printing, promotional items, computer hardware and software, electronics, the services of professionals such as lawyers and accountants and much more! You can also replace many of your current personal cash expenses with barter.
The most important thing to know is the true hard cost of your “barter dollar,” which may change from time to time but will ultimately help you determine if each barter transaction is in your best interest.
You may generate barter dollars through consulting services, or by taking your commission in barter, which will minimize your costs. Or, you may do what I did way back when and find the right deal that you can justify paying a small cash outlay for, which will return many times that cost in barter dollars.
According to the IRS, barter dollar sales are taxable as income and eligible expenses paid by barter dollars are deductible.
So even if you may not be able to afford to write a check for $5,000 for advertising for the year (which will generate more cash business for you), I bet you can find a way to earn that advertising through the power of barter leverage and the incremental business it brings.
If you would like more information on bartering, who to contact and how it can benefit you as a home based agent, please feel free to E-mail me at: petercoloyan@hotmail.com.

Peter Coloyan has been in the travel industry for over 20 years. He embraced the Internet at its beginning and has flourished with it. He currently writes on, as well as edits, over 100 travel-related Web sites.