Tom McDowell’s Barter Blog

Other than restaurants, do you set any geographic limitations on the numbers of businesses in any one category that you’ll allow membership to?
We do watch the geographic areas of our clients to some extent. For instance, you don’t want a service station on each corner. Otherwise, you’ve taken these people who already compete with each [...]

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Those who quit with a positive balance are rare. Mostly, the exchange is owed money when this situation arises. Our contract carries a provision so that anyone who does quit with a positive balance must agree to spend his or her dollars within a pre-determined timeframe. At this point those dollars would become income to [...]

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Anyone can start a business by simply printing up business cards and hanging out a shingle. However, there is a big difference between being in business and knowing how to operate a business. Why reinvent the wheel when you can study my success story - AND save tens of thousands of dollars in startup and [...]

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What we use as a guideline, more than anything else, is to have $3,000 per active account, as we can safely turn over that kind of business without creating an inflationary spiral. The key to a successful exchange is to remember and adhere to the law of supply and demand — when your supply of [...]

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