Fairly early on in my “barter experience” I ran in to a couple different people who found me through a barter exchange, but wanted to arrange a deal outside of that exchange.  This comes down to a basic ethics issue.  Barter exchanges send business to me.  That’s really their primary job as far as I’m concerned.  They are my “outside sales” force.  So with that in mind, I think it’s a VERY bad idea to cut them out of a deal.  My goal is to establish a reputation among brokers that it is a positive, easy, and PROFITABLE experience to send folks to me for a  deal.  Beyond the obvious that Test you are cutting your own throat when you fail to pay your sales team, it is also unethical to do so.

That being said, things are rarely black and white.  The world is full of shades of grey so you need to look at situations individually.  Here are a couple situations where I would consider doing business outside an exchange with contacts who are in my exchange network:

• Business started outside the exchange
  If you are doing business with someone in your barter network, where the original contact did not come wholesale jerseys from your exchange, I see no problem working with post them directly for cash or barter or even cash & barter.  If the sale did not originate with a lead from the exchange all bets are off.  For example, I have a long time client that we did cash business for years, then later on we realized that we are both in the same barter exchange.  I see no problem continuing to deal with them directly or even on doing a part cash part barter deal with ?bn them (that might be normally prohibited by my exchange).
• Long term vs. short term
  I have a vendor that I found through my barter exchange and it turned out that he wants some of my services directly.  He wanted to work directly and totally Publications cut out the exchange to save the commission fees.  After much conversation, I agreed that if our first job was run through the barter exchange, I would be willing to do some work on direct trade after that.  My goal is for this to be a long term vendor and I fully cheap nba jerseys expect that after a relatively small amount of direct trade we’ll be back to 100% through cheap jerseys the exchange.  My reasoning in making this deal was two-fold.  Firstly, much like an outside sales person, I don’t think it’s reasonable to always expect that a commission will be earned from every sale that is ever made with a client that a on salesperson brings in.  Often sales people earn their commission Coffee is on that first sale only.  In this case, the exchange will be earning for the first sale and (most probably) many wholesale mlb jerseys more down the road after the direct deal is done.  Secondly, I had to look at the “greater good” here.  It seemed quite likely that the whole deal would fall apart if I didn’t make some kind of a concession to this vendor.  The exchange would have earned nothing if I hadn’t agreed to do some trade outside of the exchange.

As usual, please feel free to post back about your experiences with this issue.