Let's Make A Deal
Small businesses find benefits to making barter transactions without any cash.

By Chris Barncard
 
KENOSHA, WISCONSIN — Like the bitter cold that has slowed activity in Kenosha this month, a chilly economy is freezing up the usual business conduits.

Like many business owners, Bill Bohlman of B&B Bedrooms Plus, 5535 22nd Ave., figures making transactions without cash is one way to break the ice.

“Right now, everybody has extra time and extra inventory,” Bohlman said. “They would turn over both those things more often if they would use bartering.”

Bohlman takes care of many of B&B’s needs through trades, tapping a bartering network run by International Monetary Systems of New Berlin. IMS handles cashless transactions between businesses, facilitating deals conducted in trade dollars kept in IMS accounts.

“I don’t ever have to think that it’s going to cost me $400 cash to get a new price list printed,” Bohlman said. “The bottled water in the warehouse isn’t a big thing, either. But it’s another thing I don’t need to use cash for.”

The transactions bear little resemblance to the kind of traditional bartering that may come to mind — say, trading a new roof for a paved driveway — between small businesses.

“If I trade a futon to the dentist to clean my teeth, we have to work it out between our own books,” Bohlman said. “This way, IMS does that work." And the bartering doesn’t have to go on directly between two businesses. It gets spread across their network.

Bohlman uses the barter system (which charges a 6 percent fee to each trade’s buyer and seller) for printing, travel, hotels, packaging supplies, marketing and anything else he can find that replaces the need for cash on hand. Sometimes it’s a straightforward business expense, like the warehouse pallet racks he secured from a barter network member. Sometimes it’s more personal. When he was trying to sell his house in Illinois and putting in long days at his business, it was hard to find a place to settle in for the night.

“I lived at the Holiday Inn downtown about three days a week almost completely on trade dollars,” Bohlman said.

The hotel, now the Best Western Harborside Inn, 5125 Sixth Ave., is also the site of B&B’s annual trade show. Bohlman pays for exhibit space and rooms for visiting buyers with IMS trade dollars. He also pays for food from DeRango’s Restaurant, 2135 31st St., which does close to $1,000 worth of barter business each month, according to IMS.

DeRango’s owner Joe Passarelli said he does find business uses for the incoming trade dollars — his jukebox and video game supplier takes his barter scrip — but the boost for his cash business is considerable, too.


Joe Passarelli of DeRango's Restaurant, has been a member of a bartering network
for years, trading services (like pizza-making) for juke box rental and printing costs,
and developing new customers.

“The main part, the benefit to me, is networking,” Passarelli said. “I have a couple of different painters that come here on a regular basis. I’ve built up relationships with businesses like RJ’s Floors — now he’s a good customer and a friend."

“I don’t think they would have come here to start with if they hadn’t had the trade dollars, but now they come here whether or not they have the trade dollars.”

A barter network member since 1998, Passarelli has good and bad experiences with trade. “I’ve tried to get things for family parties, like a clown or something, and they won’t come up here on the Illinois trade dollars,” he said. “A lot of them from Illinois won’t come to Wisconsin. As soon as I say I’m from Wisconsin they hang up the phone on me.”

Bohlman said he is constantly hounding IMS account reps to add more Kenosha-area businesses. “When they first approached me, I said, ‘If you can find me a printer in town, I’ll join your network.’ The next week he came back and said, ‘I found your printer.’ I said, ‘How close is it?’ He said, ‘Look out your back door,’” Bohlman said. “That was Creative Graphic Designs (6218 23rd Ave.), and that’s where all my printing business goes now.”

Bohlman manages multiple accounts for his business, with his retail side paying his wholesale side in trade dollars. “Treat this as if it was a checking account that money is coming into and going out of,” Bolhman said, “look at it as a section of your business and you can be very successful with barter.”