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Are you thinking about starting your own barter exchange, or have you just started one and want to learn how to increase your membership base? These “best practice” tips and suggestions will surely enhance your success…
To build momentum and trade velocity, you need a few things:
- 10+ new members per month
- Members that need to buy or sell immediately
- Members that have excess capacity and need business
- Members that are looking to buy something, but are strapped for cash.
With the current state of the economy you should initially target:
- Restaurants
- Contractors & construction companies, HVAC service companies
- Businesses with perishable inventories that can’t sell today’s unsold inventory or capacity tomorrow.
These include:
- Hotels
- parking lots
- lawyers
- doctors
- hair salons
- auto repair
- magazines
- radio stations
- billboard companies
- lawn maintenance
- trades people (electrician, plumber, etc)
Prospecting & Sales Calls
Visit with new potential clients face to face when possible… Ask a prospective member what they need. Ask them if you get it for them on trade, will they agree to join, and then go and get a member that provides what they need. You get two new members, two new account set-up fees and a trade that generates immediate cash fees from the buyer and the seller. Total cash in your pocket – $500 to $1000 or more. Do this twice a week and the cash crunch is reduced for lots of people (both members, you and your families) and the world will be a better place.
Did you know that in 3-4 hours per day, you can visit with three business owners and sign up at least one of them (if you ask for the sale). I know this to be a fact, because I did it! That’s four new members per week (doing sales 4 days a week), which gets you 200 members in one year. That will generate about $2,400/month cash to start, ramping up to about $5,000/month in six months, $10,000/month in one year and $15,000/month in 18 to 24 months.
So what are you waiting for? Go sign up a new member!
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Can you explain how you came up with these figures and what fees you were charging?
These figures are based on $50 average cash fees per member per month, which is slightly higher than the national average, as you never want to just aim for average. As a point of reference, my barter exchange in NYC billed approximately $71 average per member per month at $15 cash/month, $15 trade/month, 5% cash on purchases and 5% cash on sales.
Starting out, you can charge $195 for an account setup fee, assuming you provide new account consulting services that teach a business owner how to increase sales, get new customers and conserve cash by spending trade instead of cash. If you charge a set-up fee 80% of the time, that will bring in about $2400/month cash to start while you are waiting for monthly and transaction fees to ramp up.