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SNM156: The Secret to Bartering Your Business

August 07, 2017 • Jonathan Green : Bestselling Author, Tropical Island Entrepreneur, 7-Figure Blogger

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You don't need to spend a ton of money to get started with your business. Often you can simply exchange your time helping someone for access to the course, training, and software that you would struggle to afford right now.

The post SNM156: The Secret to Bartering Your Business appeared first on Serve No Master.

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the secret to bartering your business on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by fresh books. Accounting and bookkeeping mistakes destroyed thousands of small businesses every single day. Bookkeeping doesn't have to be hard turned to the number one invoicing software for small businesses. Start for free today at serve no master dot com Backslash Fresh Books Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. I've been going through a lot of negotiations recently and shifting several of my projects. When you're growing your business there, too, he elements that control your net profit. How much you making what you spend? We've been a lot of time in previous episodes, and it's on my books talking about your primary skills, what you have to offer and everyone has something areas of expertise, things you understand or know about more knowledge about. He talked a great deal about selling those skills, but what about trading them? Are bartering them? And recently I went through several critical negotiations that gave me a great deal of freedom. Once you begin to have a value, a fixed number for what you charge for different things, for example, I have a pretty solid set of numbers for what I charge for writing a book, ghost writing, project, writing a product, create a product for someone, or even for writing a sales letter. Whether it's long for more video self script, it becomes much easier to barter something when you have a feeling for what it's worth. When we think of bartering, most of us think you're trading like a fish for a loaf of bread, but it's hard to know their relative value on Lee. When you're living in that culture for a long time, do you know how easy it is for you to catch a fish versus how difficult it is for you to make a little breath? Sometimes people have products, and service is that you want access to But you can't afford to cash outlay. You're still growing your business. You can't afford to take the money out. One of the things that you could do is approach the business owners. Hey, I'm really interested in this course. Is there something I could do in exchange for access? And when you're first starting out, sometimes you'll offer reviews or analysis, and that's very valuable. It's a great way to start out, give a lot of early access to books or courses in exchange for helping those components. It really makes a difference for me, too. Have that covered in advance to get someone to go through a course for me and check from stakes. Recently, someone went through the entire early version of Kendall Sniper for me, watching all the videos, looking for glitches and in about 60% of the videos, one word or two words. I got cut off for some reason. In the compression, many of the video's got damaged. When I went through it caught about 1/3 of the damaged videos, but turns I missed a bunch, so just having someone go through looking for those specific things, and he set me with each video of the exact moment something was wrong. That's really valuable to me because it would take me a huge men. Time to watch the videos with your foot of content. I know because it's my voice. This is a very basic way you could barter your way into getting access. Two courses. If you want to go to conferences, you want to meet the people conferences. You can contact someone running a conference and say, Is there a way I could intern or volunteer at this conference? And oftentimes you could volunteer and become the personal assistant from one of the speakers will become one of the primary helpers just by offering to help out in certain ways, you could get to attend an entire conference for free and get access to the more elite people. This is another way toe barter or skill share as you're working your way up. Maybe there's a service you want to hire. In my case, I'm working with a very expensive company. That's Facebook ads, and they're looking to build on the part of the business. And they said, would you be interested in mate writings and books for us? Rather than paying the monthly fee. And I said, of course, and we came up to a number that, actually, the ratio of books two months, I get free. Tch book I create is almost exactly the same as I would charge if I was doing a flat cash. So it's a really good value for both of us, both of what we're getting and in the cash. And we're actually sitting at multiple deals, and this is really gonna help me grow my business. And what happens is I could take that money that I would have spent paying them, and it said, Use it for runway Use it for ads budget, which is really where you want to spend your money when you're running ad campaigns. This means I could spend three times as much money as my ad campaigns as I was before. It's wonderful you might find that you can turn your out's your expenses close to zero simply by offering service's or things already. Expert at that are difficult for you now to accomplish the exact same thing. I could easily go out and find a new client. I could find Maur ghost writing clients write a book for them. Get paid, then use that money to pay this person. We're simply simplified the process, and it's making life a lot easier chasing that clients and seeing clients all the time. It's not a dream come true for me. Yes, I do some ghost riding. I choose projects that I really love had rather ghost right for people or work on projects for people that have a good relationship with that. There's a long term benefit to I look for other elements as well, when I'm taking up projects and especially after the financial costs of all the medical stuff for my family over the last two months, take care of my wife and all the things that happened in the hospital for an email issue. No, I'm talking about that stuff was very expensive and really get into my buffer. And so now I said, Hey, is there a way we could do some type of barter so I can have some breathing room to focus on growing and rebuilding my buffer and just like some of the stress on me in the short term and it's really helping, we're both excited about it because there's benefits to both sides and that you know you have a big party so as your looking for ways to move forward. Once you have that list of skills, the things you have to offer, you can then find people that are interested in that trade. For example, if you're very good at writing still letting someone very good at reading products, one path is partnerships. But out of the path is bartering. You write a sales letter, they make a product. You had a second cell phone to make a product on one's yours and ones. There's They have two side by side businesses that a friendly relationship as part of the growth of my business. I've taken on more employees. I know four people that worked for me, which is a lot, and they're all working on things that I physically can't do anymore. Because of the problems with my eyes, I have to spend less and less time on the computer, and I spent more more time managing a team. And that means every week the first money goes to staff salary. The first money that comes and has to go to pay. This is one way of growing your business, and another way is doing skill shares. And sometimes you can do this with an internship program where your training labor for knowledge. That's another former bartering. And sometimes when you're starting out, you could only be the intern. You can't be the mentor, so you really need people to do work for you on things that you stink at. Some people message me all the time. There's a guy in one of my Skype groups for some software that I used, always posting. Oh, I'm not good at anything technical. Does someone want to be my new business partner? Business partner left me. I don't have to do this. What do I do? And eventually message me directly. Once, since I know you helped me set up something and I quote, I said, Look, you'll be happy. It's gonna cost money and do stuff for free. That's what it would cost. And of course, suddenly there wasn't such an emergency. But if this person was a lot more savvy than he talks about, like he has a huge business, what he could say is I have a really big e commerce store and I know how to do these things. I know how to find customers. I know how to find amazing proxy, how to get things designed. What I don't know. Howto d'oh is set up the shopping cart. Technical stuff. Is there someone who can bridge the gap? Do that? We could do a skill share. I'll help you get more traffic if you'll help me design this little technical stuff. That's a win win for two people. You can be creative. I was just speaking to someone yesterday about negotiating is a much better negotiator than me and tell me all these different things he's gotten for free and replacements and how things that they say they'll never do for free. He gets them for free all the time when things break or when it's friends have something that break death came to call support to get it taken care of because he's so good at. And one of the core philosophy that have about negotiating is you have not because you asked. Not when I am asked to promote someone's product. I say. Can you give me a higher commission that other people when I introduced to people I say can you give me a little taste of the deal for setting it up? All of these little things? I only get because I asked if you were just two people and don't say anything. You might get that commission and it's standard to get a taste for setting up a deal on my marketing business. It's normal. It has a name. It's called Tier two or Javy Brokering. If it was a normal, if it did happen all the time, it wouldn't have a name. When you buy something, if you don't ask, you get no extra. When I buy a surfboard or something from across the country, I would say, Hey, can you just throw in shipping sometimes? And is there anything I byline? Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't end up saving me 50 or $100. Sometimes that's nice and save a bit of money just by asking. And many people were so afraid of confrontation or seeming like a cheapskate. In fact, one of my neighbors recently called me a cheapskate Charlie, and it said, I don't think that's a real term in English, but I guess it's a term in his native language and I said, It's not that I'm cheap. It's that I don't pay extra high. Only buy video games when they're on sale, and they have to be on sale more than 50%. So I'm always waiting for that right moment. I'm not in a rush. I just saw a new video game this morning. All I love to play that, but it's brand new. I say I'll wait a year for to be out sailed fine. I'll enjoy it as much in a year playing it as I was right now, except for a year, it's gonna cost me 20% or 10% cost. That's just my approach to business one. The way that I received money. I'm always trying to be cautious with how I spend things I don't want to over pay. My wife has a small stand up paddleboard. It's good enough for her, but she can't ride it with the kids on or the dog certain it can't handle that additional weight. I can't write it because it's too small for me. I can surf on it, but I can't stand up paddling have served on That's actually pretty fun, Sir phone. Recently, the guy who made those is making a new batch, and they cost half the price of international one and these they're actually pretty good. They're the best domestic boards have used on. So we've set up a deal where we ordered one because it saves money. Experience will be 99% the same, but the cost us just 50% the cost being efficient. And I got the better price. You by asking. I said, Hey, this is what we need. What can you make happen and getting 20% less than the initial number? So asking for deals asking for percentages off is the first step. It's the first step to negotiating. If you don't ask for more money, they'll never offer. No one will ever offer you a race that you don't ask for in the military that they have automatic promotions for certain times. In greater certain tests. You pass because otherwise they're soldiers who would stay E one or No. One for their entire career because they would never ask for a promotion. Now their system has a lot more things in place about getting promotions in earning them in different ways. But they know most people won't ask. Most people don't renegotiate when they go in for a job offer. They don't say anything. They say, What's the salary? And they go. Okay. Whatever you're offering, I accepted. That seat is a yes. No. This week we found Ah, house. That's for sale. It's a pretty good price, but I'm not 100% sure I want to buy this house, Understand? Sure. I wanna buy anything. You know, I'm not a huge buyer type person. Never thought about buying a house before, But the price actually pretty good. And when I said was there were more interested in, like, a rent to own situation. Like we'd want to rent it for a year to and then decide to buy it so we could set up a deal. Now, where we have a fixed system we rented for one or two years and then that money counts towards it If we decide to buy and we fix a price now that we thinks reasonable, this puts us in a strong position in It puts the owner in the safest you've been trying to sell for a year. No one made any offers in the last year. So we know there's not a lot of competition for this house. We're not really worried about it. The owner will then get the benefit of having the steady income from the house and we get the benefit of. If we decide to buy it, we can. This is a negotiation that we set up simply by asking like that. Actually, idea came from. My dad told me that I'd liketo rent it before I buy anything. Is why don't you set up a deal where that's the deal that said, That's genius And already through an intermediary, they contacted the person. The person is abroad and the person's interested. So we're moving forward slowly with negotiations. This way. We could live in the house for a year and if we decide we absolutely love it, yeah, we could move forward by it or we could keep renting it for a while. So we have different options. It allows us Thio get both of the things I wanted and this is negotiating which bartering is a negotiation right? We offer one thing for another and the next thing will enter is the rental price negotiation the person has moved away permanently, which means the renter is also kind of the caretaker. So when it comes time to Price negotiate, I'm sure the person's thinking of raising the price. But in our negotiations say, Well, my family's actually spent a lot of money and maintenance were actually already thinking about putting in a pool in the front yard. It's our first thought. We're gonna do a couple of things to improve the property whether we buy it or not. Surely you're not gonna ask us to pay full price when we're gonna make the product. But the house better. My mother, as she went through her career of being a mom, was notorious for improving houses my parents rented and people always thought that was insane. She was paying. It shows I'm gonna live here for two years. I want to look nice. And she would paint the houses that we read. It should put up Wallpaper place tonight, sir, and eventually she worked her way up. And that's part of the reason my family lived in nice houses when we switched from renting to buying. Stewardship is reward. You don't have to feel limited by money. It's not your only currency. I set up barter deals all the time. Now they don't always come through. Sometimes someone approaches me and they're saying, Oh, what this business model of this and that and we start Thomas skill share, and that's usually where someone is very good. I recently was talking with a very expensive copywriter who has been writing copy for much longer than me and how much more firm history and career, and he was about to go to market it. Like I said, Why don't you go through? My system will teach you how to do Amazon. How to build. That is a business you can focus on, the stuff you love doing and start building a business instead of going into markets you don't want to do just because you feel like you know how they gave him access to some stuff and then it's been a week, and I haven't heard from that. That doesn't mean the deal is gonna fail. It most likely means that he watched a couple of videos and decided he wasn't interested in it or you got distracted by work. The least likely possibilities is gonna go through the entire program and never speak to me again. And if he does okay, sometimes you do a negotiation. He's only getting access to some limited stuff, really. The coaching, the one on one time in the communication was meets big value. But not every barter. Every deal comes up the way you hoped. This is why you set up lots of deals and lots of Barbara things and offer things to people all the time. I love skill shares. I'm not a big fan of partnering on things that they used to be. I tried parting. I first started this business. It ended in disaster for me, my partner on a lot of projects. But my most successful businesses have always been solo. I'm putting out more and more things, serve no master brand and working on some really cool things. And a lot of the stuff gets there because of bartering and skill chairs, because they say that someone teach you how to do this, and I'll teach you how to do that. I would love to say that the cards have been working on which I can't wait to release, and in fact, I'm probably gonna announce them before this podcast episode goes up the damn recording this three days earlier, they sent the first demo deck of cards, and I'm sure it's very exciting process. It was an idea from someone who I was skill sharing with, and he said, Here's society, I have to make it work And he bought a course on it, that it's a missing pieces And he said, If you figure out this whole thing, will you teach me? And so I'm actually sending him the first deck of cards to look at and take pictures for me. I live so far away. I don't want them to send him internationally and may not even arrive would take extra weeks. That's cuts down on my cycle. So he's going Thio, take the pictures for me with his knights camera. Do all of those things that really helped me when I'm ready to sell the product. I'm really excited about that. We're bartering. He also was getting ah, free version of the very first version, the product. Another thing I'm working on, It's adult coloring books. I actually designed five or six adult color book several years ago, and I never released them for a myriad of reasons. I have a lot of content. When I was really first going crazy about Amazon two or three years ago, I had a bunch of stuff gross written for me, and I didn't release a lot of it, mostly because I got so distracted by lots of other projects. I found a product two days ago that I half made. I made all the slides to put all the content together. All I hadn't done was at the images to the slides for the blogging for dollars course blocking course. The cells pages half written the product images in the members area, and I completely forgot that it progressed on the product that far. So sometimes I'm working on so many projects and get something really far, and then something else happens. But I found it the other day, and now I'm gonna try and finish it and release it very quickly. But the problem with the coloring books is that I want to see one in my hands before I sell it before I release it. And I said to someone else who I've been doing some idea exchanges with. Can you let me send you these coloring books and then you'll take some pictures and really give me a lot of feedback before I start selling. I'm 99% sure they're fine. My only question is about the formatting, its content. It's about how they look on the page, and I want to see to make sure that I have a deep understanding of what the customer's gonna receive. So once I complete this process, I will start selling these books, and I'm deciding whether or not to play some totally under my other brand, which is called part of coloring book, or also my name on them because they're adult college books. Maybe some people follow me would think they're cool, too. Haven't fully decided that something. I'm thinking about how many off the names to put on stuff, but having someone else received them is an exchange. Some people will charge you to send them a product for free and take pictures for you because it's a business thing. Fair enough. But in this case she gets calling books for kids for free, and all she has to do is give me feedback shoes. You have to take pictures because that's not how I'm gonna sell them. Probably this is very valuable to me. This is a very valuable experience, very viable for her. She had something for free, and I get someone to give me a really valuable feedback. And when you're getting a demo of a product when you're getting a first printing sent before print on demand, it costs under $10. Sometimes it's like $3 the shipping CZ three or $4 when I was five and five, but it ends up being a little in the 10. Usually, I haven't been able to release these products for a long time because I have been a situation where I could get a bunch sent to me to check out. This is bartering. This is skill sharing. This is why I'm such a believer and networking. I'm limited in many ways in business because they live on this amazing tropic isle, and I'm watching a beautiful sunrise. I'm sure you can hear all the birds. I know that they are so loud they cut through the mic. But there's a price for paradise, and part of the price is that there are certain things I can't get access to our certain things that I can't do very easily. Yes, I could try to send Colleen books and cards to me, but the shipping would be significantly more. And here, when you mail something, have been arriving or 50 50. So we'll have to pay for a way more shipping and probably have to do it twice for everything I want to get sent here. And usually when something comes in the mail and actually the man man shows up with his hand out, you have to pay a bribe. They call it an import tax. But even if you send yourself something, you have to deal with this having people that I can send demo products to, who will look at them, take pictures of them. Tell me the real experience is very, very, very valuable to me. It allows me to do things that I couldn't do by living here. It expands my operations ability. Now, for a while, I've been sending stuff to my business address, have appeal Box goes to my bookkeeper, but her job is not taking pictures of things. It's not inside of her skill. Set it outside of her skill set. And so it's not a great use of our time. And she took pictures. The first set of cards, which doesn't have a really fancy camera. It doesn't need one. She's a bookkeeping on a picture taker, has a good cell phone camera. But when you doing product shots you want, like a really nice picture really is high quality you get. And so it's outside her wheelhouse and have to pay her for the time of going to peel box. Have to pay her for driving back from the P o box after payer for taking the pictures. So all of these things and it certainly helps me. But it's even better to have someone just passion about the particular thing and who I consent. Loads of stuff to really helps me out have people that are really get my vision. And so I've moved from having her do a lot of stuff because sometimes I feel like I'm putting around. I don't want to make her drive to the P O box, which is far away from where she lives now, all the time. She moved from near where she set up the P O Box two somewhere else, so it's kind of convenient for her. So I like having things that I consent to other people. They really give me their whole experience. It's a lot of value to me, and it means that I can grow specific areas of my business much faster when you're thinking about people to barter with the larger network is the easier it is, and you can even reach out to your network for key information. Say if you think of hiring someone, you can ask people who really know better than you. I'm thinking about getting someone help with Wet my website. Someone recently sent an email with a list of problems they found on my Web site that said, Just forward this to your Web designer. He should be doing a better job. You're full time Web developer and I don't have one of those. It's me. It's all me. But it would really help me to build pages faster and do some cooler things. Was talking to my friend, who I worked with on a project who's a full stack development. That means he's super amazing developments. He can build software. He built the Kindle sniper html keyword generator. The thing that helps you write really amazing Amazon descriptions. But his skill is too high for what I'm looking for. No, I initially said, I'm thinking Find a Web developer said the number I said, Well, here's the things I need him doing this, this, this and this and he goes out. That's not that's not the right name for what you're looking for. It's more of a like a WordPress person who can modify stuff that's not doing any actual HTML. And so the second price he gave me was significantly lower than the first price. Speaking to an expert and get that piece of information is going to save me a great deal of money when I'm ready to pull the trigger on hiring another staff person, not really in love with the idea of having a huge staff. I never thought I'd go up to four people. I had one person for a long time. That was more than enough. But because of the problems with my eyes and the promise with medical stuff in my family, I have to shift how I spend my time. I need to spend more time taking care of my family when something goes wrong and I need to be faster processes with writing a book before would take me on my own, maybe two months and now with my team, I only have to invest on my own time, a single work day. That's a huge return on investment for time, very valuable to me and the people I have. Working without my team was really wonderful thistles, gold but knowing how to grow your business knowing these things, sometimes that's the information you have to barter for. I want you to take a look at your business today in the areas where you feel like you're lacking when you feel your behind and see if there's a way you can accelerate them with barter. This is your assignment. This is a podcast with a bit of an excitement at the end. A little homework. If you're really good editor and you feel stuck with actual writing of a book, you can find an author to partner with in different ways, you could say, Hey, why don't you help me get better writing books? Talk me through the process of designing or riding your outlining Help me with my outlines. I'll help you with your editing. I was. Every actor in the world would accept that deal. That's a very valuable deal Yesterday. I can't tell you how long I spent trying to find someone to help me. Formatted coloring book. I finally found someone who offered to do it for a price. And as with everyone I ever find, those formatting, they said, tripled prices, triple in a coloring book and tell you right now there's a couple of key things. We'll talk about this in a later episode, but the easiest way to do print on the back calling book sister create space, which is on my Amazon, and that means the pages or thin there, just like a regular books pages. So last thing you wanna do for someone, it's put images on front back. So when you're sending in the design, you give coloring page are designed page than blank, and that means the front of the page will be designed. The back of the page we blink. So So what likes a drawing? They do. They cut it out and put on the fridge or something, and these people said, Well, we got a bill, You for those pages that we had a format them too. And I said, You're telling me I have to pay double for the blank pages And I got very annoyed and I research the research. And finally, after trying to find someone to barter with, I found a lesson on line, which told me exactly what I found this amazing YouTube video from a couple of years ago that explained how someone else did it. I made a few tweaks, but it completely solved my problem. I also discovered the reason I was having trouble uploading my file was a browser issuing a formatting issue. It's at me a lot of research, but having someone who already does calling books, you could have told me what to do, would have been super valuable for me, would have really helped me and saved me a great deal of time and an immense amount of frustration. You might be an expert at something that small, but what someone's looking for that particular thing. It's super valuable. It's very valuable in the moment. Look at your skill sets, look at ways where you can partner with people or things that you need to know and what you have to offer, and you can find that what you get is in your mind more valuable than what you're giving. That's how you know you have a good deal, and it's a great deal. When the other person feels the exact opposite, they feel like they're giving you something that's not worth nearly as much as what they're getting. And when you're both excited about happy afterwards. That's when you had a great barter exchange in a great trade. So today look for a least one and even better three areas of your business where you can use bartering To accelerate your growth, decrease your monthly, spend cut down on those expenses or make more money. Give yourself more free time. Look at those areas of how you grow your business and let me know in the comments below. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat rings head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller. Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listen to this episode of the serve. No master podcast. Follow me at facebook dot com Backslash serve no master.