Right now a beach vacation sounds great, but might feel unaffordable. And, uh-oh, the car odometer just rolled over to 60,000 and is due for one of those major expensive checkups, so that will wipe out a large part of your vacation fund.
Here’s how I took care of both of those obstacles by signing new clients who had services and products I wanted.
The owner/manager of some lovely beach homes in an area where we love to vacation offers shared ownership of some of his beach front properties and rents them when the share owners can’t use them. We’d been invited guests of friends who own one of these timeshares and imagined how nice it would be to own one ourselves. My husband and I just couldn’t swing the cost of fractional ownership and the rental prices are staggering, too.
We visited this resort area once or twice a year, always staying in not-so-nice digs, and for just a couple of nights’ stay. After one of these visits, I decided to contact the owner of the luxury properties and see if he needed any web support (I’d visited his site and knew it remained largely unchanged for long periods). It was one of those happy serendipitous connections: he’d been looking for someone to take over the site’s maintenance for awhile and I called at the right time. We went forward from there and now I barter with him periodically for a week at one of his lovely properties.
My auto mechanic of twenty years had never made the leap to the Web. Living in a small town means we’ve become well-acquainted over the years and when I come in for service we chat about kids, baseball, our town. Enough years have passed that father had passed ownership to son, who seemed poised to take the business in some new hip directions. During an oil change I the son if he had considered building a website. He responded that he knew they needed to do it but were too busy to figure out where to begin. We chatted about it and the seed was planted. A couple months later, he called and asked if I could come in and discuss building a site. We agreed to barter and I ended up with almost a year of auto service in exchange for the project.
On a smaller scale, I have worked out trades for advertising on one of my sites with my massage therapist, the owner of a local yarn shop, my hair stylist, and a cycling shop.
The approach to this strategy is simple.
- List the businesses you already frequent, and scope out their operations for a place where your services might be a fit. Since you already know what they have to offer, there is barter potential if you land them as a client.
- Pay them a visit at a time when they aren’t swamped, and mention what you can do for them. If you’re a regular face and they are already familiar with you on one level, it we be much easier.
- After you have a contract and have developed a good working relationship with this new client, broach the barter idea.
If you haven’t bartered before, you’ll need to become familiar with the IRS rules for barter transactions and be sure to issue invoices and keep accounting records which will satisfy the government. You also need to consider that barter income reduces cash income, so you’ll need to make certain you don’t arrange for more bartering relationships than you can afford.
In the current economy, hand picking the clients you want from the businesses you already know and trust is a low risk approach. Just look around. These may be in your community just waiting for you to tap them. Or, if you prefer not to work with local clients, think about the businesses you frequent when traveling, visiting family, or on vacation. You probably have many relationships with businesses in which you could convert your role from customer to service provider. And if you can add a bartering arrangement to the deal, you both win.
Written by Katie Baird
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Katie is the owner Loose Ends , a Mac-driven virtual assistance practice established in 1996. Katie specializes in web development and support and she loves to blog about her virtual assistant life at Loosely Speaking. Find her on Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn as "ktcosmos," and (since she's also a knitting fanatic) on Ravelry as "LooseKnit."
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