Bartercard Comes To Businesses Cash Flow Rescue

Barter is a practice that has evolved since its ancestral days, and as managing director of trading platform Bartercard UK, Mark Williams explains, “gone are the days when you swapped a sheep for a goat”. New technology has changed the face of barter forever, giving it the potential to grow so much faster. Rather than businesses swapping products on ad hoc basis, companies can barter across various sectors internationally and receive immediate value back in return.

Let’s say you’re in the furniture business and experiencing difficulties getting rid of some stock. As a member of a barter scheme with Bartercard, your stock will be sold at retail price for ‘trade ponds’ which in turn can be used to purchase new items as it holds the same value as sterling. This straightforward transaction frees up your company’s cash flow, outing the peaks and troughs of demand whilst obtaining more value from goods or services that would otherwise be difficult to sell. Bartercard UK’s franchise has been a part of this rapidly growing sector for 25 years now.

The business started in Australia and has since gone global with 2,000 members and an expected 20,000 members by 2022. The owner of IOH Branding, a multi-sensory branding firm, Rob Marsden says as a member of Bartrcard he has traded approximately £1.5m worth of goods in the past 17 years and has found customers through the scheme. Marsden adds: “They guarantee that they will get you leads, and so it’s business we wouldn’t have found elsewhere,” Marsden says. “People say ‘we’d rather have cash’ ... but most businesses have some surplus, and using this system you always sell at retail to maintain the margins.” Anything can be bartered from a business standpoint and it is a system that allows governments and multinationals to do business effectively. In a bygone era, swapping a goat for a sheep entailed nothing more than a handshake, today there are costs involved in the transaction.

Bartercard has helped media company Astus UK secure media space by negotiating access and bartering for goods and services by broadcasters. Astus UK managing director, David Jones, explains: “A broadcaster might give us a million pounds worth of airtime, and get back a million pounds worth of outdoor [advertising] space.” Jones adds, “It gives a significant cashflow benefit.”

Cash will always be the commodity of choice; however, the use of spare stock or capacity offers helps businesses keep their balances in the black, freeing cash flow for your business’s further expansion and growth.