Bartering in Laboratory Informatics

Bartering my services isn't something I've tried. In some of the business meetings I attend, there are businesses who barter their services and goods. A smaller group of businesses have even started working with bitCoin, which is a way to exchange currency worldwide.

For anyone interested in bitCoin, I'm not going to go into it in this blog post, but here is a web-site that will describe it in more detail:
https://bitcoin.org/en/

A Customer that Barters
As it happens, I have had one large customer who was very much into bartering. They would trade their overstock of products for other companies' overstock of products. Their company store was just incredible. Not only did they make a multitude of goods to purchase for cheap prices in their company store but supplemented that selection with unrelated products that were overstocks from other companies.

However, as impressive as this was, I would prefer to be paid in the traditional manner and never suggested that we consider switching to a barter model, much as I both loved their products and was able to use them.

A Thought
At one point, though, I'd thought about customers that are out of money and need just a little extra work done for them and wondered if there was some way to trade my time for their goods. In times when things are slow for me, I feel somewhat flexible about the type of payment I receive and started thinking more seriously about bartering my services for their goods. That way, I'm not just sitting around getting nothing back and they can get that little extra bit of work done despite the fact that they don't have any money for it.

The Problems
The first problem to consider is whether the barter will be taxed but since that varies based on where you're at, I'll just leave that issue alone.

Beyond that, the main problem is that the barter has to be useful for both sides. For example, when I have my webmaster do work for me, I pay him with actual money. I can't barter my own services for him because he's not involved with laboratories. Some companies do barter with a variety of other companies such that, even if they get something they don't need that they can ultimately barter that for something that they do need. But as small as my company is, I think that would complicate the barter.

Instead, let's consider that a customer actually does have something to barter that I need and/or want. It's still not a straightforward transaction. For one, goods aren't always sold as their "list" price so the first question is whether to price the good at its full "list" price for the purpose of bartering. The next issue is that there is only so much of a good that can be consumed by the other company. For example, I don't have any customers that make candy but let's suppose that I did and took that in barter. First of all, there's only so much candy that I can consume, despite what some of you have heard ;-)  and candy does tend to go bad. Taking 100 kilos of candy for my services would be a terrible trade unless I happened to be in the resale business, which I'm not.

On top of that, and this is something one customer and I did actually discuss, that candy would be pretty heavy. If you don't have money to purchase services, do you have the money in your budget to mail me 100 kilos of candy? Possibly not. And, considering that no-one is close to anyone in our industry, it wouldn't be close enough for me to come pick it up, either, plus my car wouldn't hold a big load of anything.

Curiosity
The opinion I've formed of bartering is that you either have to do this pretty regularly in order to be able to coordinate trades among several sources in order to make your overall trade work or you have to be able to resell the goods you receive, meaning that you have to have an established resale outlet.

Considering that the laboratory informatics industry services tend to be less used than something more general, such as web-site development, it make it yet that much more challenging to barter with. While I wouldn't say I'm opposed to doing it, and especially when business is slow for me, I don't know that I would necessarily seek it out, either.

If there's anyone in the industry who has made this work, it would be interesting to hear about the details, especially for those of us with flexible business models. If you want to share this, please share it in a comment to this blog as opposed to personally writing to me. If you read this post, are in an unrelated industry and still think your example interesting and worth sharing, I still might think it worth posting, here.

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/