Lee Anne Busman connects businesses that want to buy and sell — sans cash.
Barter Consultants International can facilitate a transaction between a plastic surgeon who wants a new bathroom and a contractor who wants a nose job. BCI can connect an art gallery owner who needs a hotel room in New York and a hotelier who is looking for fine art. Busman even uses barter to run her own business: The accountants and telemarketers who supplement her eight-person staff get paid in barter dollars.
Busman studied psychology, which she has used more in business than in clinical settings. After careers in retail, real estate and sales — including as a broker for another bartering firm — Busman started BCI in 1999. It has grown every year since. In addition to its corporate office in Buckhead, BCI has satellite licensees operating in DeKalb and Gwinnett counties, near Hilton Head, S.C., and in Jamestown, N.Y.
Busman says BCI does more than $1 million a month in trade volume. The company just started an online marketplace that Busman expects will help boost business by as much as 20 percent this year.
Q: How does your business work?
A: What a company is doing when they become a customer of Barter Consultants International is they are opening a bank account. Rather than a cash bank account, they are opening a barter bank account, and the currency is BCI currency. ... Each company is assigned a trade broker who helps them not only earn barter dollars but also helps them to spend barter dollars to save cash.
Q: Who uses barter?
A: Barter is meant for businesses that have surplus inventory, obsolete inventory or downtime. A good example to illustrate this is a hotel. If a hotel has 70 percent occupancy rate, then 30 percent of its rooms are empty — earning no income. So the hotel owner decides to barter those rooms to turn them into currency with BCI. Our clients use those hotel rooms, and then the hotel owner can buy billboard space, buy vacuum cleaners, get the carpets and upholstery cleaned, buy office furniture, buy exercise equipment. He’s able to save cash by using the barter dollars that he earned using empty hotel rooms.
Q: Your customers are all businesses, not individuals, is that right?
A: Well, there are a lot of cottage businesses — people who work out of their homes. ... It only has to be someone who has something to trade.
Q: So, these businesspeople might use bartering for personal use?
A: Oh, yes, ... and a lot of companies are now using barter to incentivize their employees or even to offer perks to other companies to get them to do business with them.
Q: How does your company make money off these bartering arrangements?
A: We charge fees every time customers make sales and every time they make purchases, and we charge a very low maintenance fee per month.
Q: Is the fee on bartering transactions a set percentage?
A: Yes, we charge 6 percent, in and out, in cash. ... I do have some clients who trade exclusively with my company and guarantee a level of barter trade per year who get a better rate.
Q: When the economy first began to slide, was it good for your business?
A: Yes, from 2009 to 2010 we grew about 25 percent [the company’s largest-ever annual increase].
Q: How is the economy affecting your business these days?
A: People don’t pay their bills. Even though we have an automated payment system, at the end of the month some customers’ credit cards don’t work, their checking accounts don’t work. Right now, I have the highest accounts receivable that I have ever had in the history of my business.
Q: Is there any one industry that is best positioned for barter?
A: There are four cornerstones to a good barter exchange. No. 1 is media. A lot of companies out there do not have the cash budget to pay for media. Restaurants are very, very important. People love to eat out on barter. ... The supply of restaurants very rarely meets the demand. So, that’s No. 2. No. 3 is printing. Printing is huge for us because everyone needs printing. The last one is travel — hotels, vacations.
Q: What percentage of your business consists of these four “cornerstones”?
A: Those four probably represent 40 percent of our business. We do a huge business with doctors and dentists, too. ... And we do a huge amount of business with contractors.
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