Goal for growth
From BarterPlan Ebook
7. Set your goal for growth
After developing your Wish-List, decide on a definite amount of barter you plan to do each month. Choose a goal for the amount of net income from barter, as well as an amount of net business expenses to be covered via trading. Represent these amounts as an actual percent of monthly income and expenses, or as a specific dollar amount.
When determining a goal for barter revenue, take into account your business expenses. Especially the production costs, or the minimum amount of cash you need to produce your product. Most people will be insulted if you try to recoup this as cash during a barter transaction, so remember that your counterpart also has cash costs and that you both are 'recouping' by receiving choice product of fair market value at essentially wholesale cost. Back to point, the reason it's important to remember cash costs while designing a goal for barter revenue is because if you do all your business in trade you will have a hard time coming up with the cash required to stay in business! So think of it this way.. If your cash costs per unit are 50%, then you need to sell at least half of your units for cash, and the rest could be safely bartered without breaking the bank. This is a simple example but hopefully it get's the point across. If you are selling digital products, and you estimate cash costs to be less than five percent per unit, you could conceivably barter with 95% of your customers. It's easy to get carried away with trade so give yourself some safety margins at first, then periodically go over your accounting and decide if you have room to market more through barter and trade exchanges.
