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Table of contents for Barter
A few months ago, I received an e-mail from someone who had read my post Connecting – Part III: Trade Exchanges. He asked several questions that I thought others might find interesting. In this post, I’ll discuss what barter/trade exchanges are, then in subsequent posts, I’ll answer the questions. Just about everyone has heard about the ancient practice of bartering. The farmer would pay the doctor with a chicken or the carpenter would repair the lawyer’s house in exchange for legal work. However, it’s not often that two businesses need each other’s goods or services in the same amount. Trade exchanges, also known as barter clubs, make bartering possible for almost everyone. The trade exchange acts both as a matchmaker and a banker—finding goods and services for members and maintaining records of the “trade dollars” or “barter units” members spend and receive. The exchange charges a transaction fee (in cash) for providing the service; most exchanges charge a one-time, annual, or monthly membership fee as well. Often businesspeople find bartering attractive because they think they don’t have to pay taxes on trade income. Unfortunately, that is a misconception. Trade income is taxable exactly the same way cash income is. However, if you spend trade dollars for business expenses, the expenses are deductible just as if you had paid cash. In the next installment, we’ll talk about the value of being a member of a trade exchange. Helen Ginger at Straight from Hel tagged me for a meme that’s just for fun, a good way to start the week on a light note. 1. Your real name: Lillie 2. Your Gangsta name:(first 3 letters of real name plus izzle) Lilizzle 3. Your Detective name:(fave color and fave animal) Yellow Cat [That doesn't sound like any detective I know ... actually I don't know any detectives, but it doesn't sound like any detectives I've heard of.] 4. Your Soap Opera name:(your middle name and street you live on) Ann Mauze [Pronounced Maw-zay—sounds exotic, doesn't it?] 5. Your Star Wars name:(the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name) Ammli 6. Your Superhero name:(your 2ND favorite color, and favorite drink) Green Tea [Hey, that's healthy.] 7. Your Iraqi name:(2ND letter of your first name, 3rd letter of your last name, 1st letter of your middle name, 2ND letter of your moms maiden name, 3rd letter of your dads middle name, 1st letter of a siblings first name, and last letter of your moms middle name) Imaaana [Can't get away from As, Ms, and Ns—like my last name: Ammann] 8. Your Witness Protection name:(parents middle names) Laura Franklin [Too pretty a name for the witness protection program] 9. Your Goth name:(black, and the name of one of your pets) Black Kitty I’m tagging bloggers I think might play along, but if you prefer not to, I won’t be offended. And if I don’t tag you and you’d like to join the fun, consider yourself tagged. Cath Lawson at Cath Lawson Monika Mundell at The Writer’s Manifesto Jeanne Dininni at Writer’s Notes Laura Spencer at Writing Thoughts
When I wrote a guest post at Poewar: Writer’s Resource Center, John Hewitt promised to reciprocate. John’s site is a great place for writers of all kinds—I’ve been a subscriber and a fan for a long time, and I’m delighted to host John’s guest post. I hope you like the post as much as I do and that you will show John your appreciation in comments. I’m here to tell you it is easier than you think. The truth is that your competition stinks. They’re terrible. They’re awful. They don’t know how to apply for a position. They don’t know how to write a decent e-mail query. Many of them can’t write their way out of a wet paper sack. Just reading their e-mails is painful. Ninety percent of the people applying for these freelance positions can be eliminated within a sentence or two — a paragraph at the most. That is because their writing is terrible and it shows. The first 90% can be eliminated immediately because they have made one (or more) of six mistakes: • They use informal language These very basic mistakes take that 400 person applicant pool down to a manageable 40 people. That is still more competition than you would like, but even at this point, many of the applicants aren’t serious competition. They have their own series of mistakes that they make. These mistakes are less obvious and less deadly, but they still keep most of these candidates from moving forward. • They fail to cite relevant experience Once you eliminate the people who make those mistakes, you would be surprised how dramatically the pool of applicants shrinks. In the end, out of 400 applicants, there are perhaps 10 that can withstand even this level of scrutiny. That doesn’t mean there are 10 great applicants, just that there are ten who didn’t already blow their chances because of an easily correctable mistake. Competing against 400 people is daunting, but competing against 10 is a reasonable challenge, especially if you think you are the right person for the job. Just follow these eight simple steps and you will get yourself into the top ten most of the time: • Write in a professional style That’s it. Those eight things will rocket you to the top of the pile. There are plenty of ways to improve your chances even further, but these eight will keep you from being lumped in with the idiots. Good luck. With the Olympics dominating TV, “proud sponsor …” and “official sponsor …” ads abound. Every time I hear those words, I’m reminded of my own experience as a “proud sponsor of the Olympic Festival.” I have a framed photo and a framed poster hanging on my office wall as souvenirs. If you’ve read this blog for even a short while, you probably know I’m not a sports fan. You’re likely surprised that I would have any Olympic experience and may not even know what Olympic Festival was. I had never heard of Olympic Festival until one day in 1991 when a representative of the Olympic Festival ‘93 called on me to ask my interior landscape company to be a sponsor. For several years ending in 1995, the Olympic Festival was held between Olympics, a sort of mini-Olympics for US athletes competing to be on the US Olympic team. We were asked to provide plants to decorate the festival venues. Business was good, I liked to support the community, and we had two years to prepare. So I said “yes” and became an “Official Sponsor of the Olympic Festival”—based on the value of our contribution, LIllie’s Plantscapes was a “Key Supplier.” By 1993, circumstances had changed. I still wanted to support the community, but business had suffered from my absence while recovering from a stroke. We were short on preparation time since planning for this event had dropped to the bottom of the priority list when my staff focused on business survival during my absence. I was still in a wheelchair and easily fatigued, making it more difficult to manage large projects. Then we discovered that not only did the Festival organizers want green plants (which we could use later) for decorations, they wanted hundreds of blooming plants (which would have to be discarded after the event), increasing our out-of-pocket costs tremendously. Nevertheless, we had made a commitment and were determined to honor it. The Olympic Festival treated it sponsors very well. We were given a great deal of publicity, invited to breakfasts and other events where we were given gifts (such a leather-bound diary/calendar featuring all the Festival events), and given private tours of the venues. That VIP treatment made participating in the Festival fun and exciting, but it didn’t alleviate the financial and labor strains we incurred. Fortunately, I had a wonderful workforce. Often we had to break down one venue at midnight, move the plants to another location across town, and set up by 6:00 AM. We were given several VIP passes—identification as a Key Supplier that hung from a chain and allowed us anywhere in the venues. Workers could deliver the plants to a venue, wander around behind the scenes and see the athletes preparing to compete, watch the event, then go back to work. We created a schedule that covered all the indoor events—the outdoor events used nature rather than our plants for decoration—and asked staff to volunteer for specific venues so they would have a chance to see their favorite sports. We even allowed office personnel to work as laborers so they could participate in the Festival as well. Although some events were more popular than others, we managed to schedule all the workers for events they wanted to see and cover all the events. Sometimes we had crews setting up plants in a number of venues around town at the same time … and we were still taking care of hundreds of clients’ plants on a regular schedule. Everyone in the company spent an intense, stressful ten days ensuring that plants were in place to decorate the venues on time—even when events ran late and caused a rush to get the plants to the next venue. Every staff member was proud of the company and thrilled to participate in the Olympic Festival, which was a huge event for San Antonio. The thousands of dollars and hundreds of manhours of labor it cost us were well-spent. Even though I’m not a sports fan, I couldn’t miss this opportunity to see performances by athletes who might become Olympic champions so I attended some of the gymnastics events. I found this video on YouTube of some of these events. Shannon Miller, performing here, went on to win a number of gold medals in the next Olympics and is the most decorated American gymnast in history. You can even see some of our plants in the background early in the video! I saw a link on Robin Lee Hatcher’s Write Thinking to this test to determine whether you use your left brain or your right brain most. The right brain relates to creativity, the left brain to logic and organization. Writing requires right brain usage; editing requires left brain usage. I enjoyed taking the test and found the results interesting. You may want to check it out for yourself. Here is the summary of my results: Lillie, you are somewhat left-hemisphere dominant with a balanced preference for auditory and visual inputs. Because of your “centrist” tendencies, the distinctions between various types of brain usage are somewhat blurred. Your tendency to be organized and logical and attend to details is reasonably well-established which should afford you success regardless of your chosen field of endeavor, unless it requires total spontaneity and ability to improvise, your weaker traits. However, you are far from rigid or overcontrolled. You possess a degree of individuality, perceptiveness, and trust in your intuition to function at much more sophisticated levels than most. Having given sufficient attention to detail, you can readily perceive the larger aspects and implications of a situation or of learning. You are functional and practical, but can blend abstraction and theory into your framework readily. The equivalence of your auditory and visual learning orientation gives you two equally effective sensory input systems, each with distinctive features. You can process both unidimensionally and multidimen- sionally with equal facility. When needed, you sequence material while at other times you “intake it all” and store it for processing later. Your natural ability to use your senses is also synthesized in your way of learning. You can be reflective in your approach, absorbing material in a non-aggressive manner, and at other times voracious in seeking out stimulation and experience. Overall you tend to be somewhat more critical of yourself than is necessary and avoid enjoying life too much because of a sense of duty. You feel somewhat constrained and tend to sometimes restrict your expressiveness. In any given situation, you will opt for the rational, and learning of almost any type should be easy for you. You might need certain ideas explained to you in order to fit them into your scheme of things, but you’re at least open to that! This pretty well describes me. Let us know in comments if your results describe you well.
Yuck! A little baking soda, then? Blech! How about a raw egg? Ick! A spoonful of cooking oil? Nasty! Maybe a little sugar? A nip of vanilla? A bit of chocolate? Yeah, those sound good … but all by themselves? The individual ingredients aren’t very appetizing, yet when they are mixed together and cooked in a hot oven, they come together to form a beautiful and mouth-watering cake. Ahh … taste that sweet, rich flavor. The creamy smooth frosting, the moist goodness of the cake. The individual ingredients of life often aren’t very appetizing, either. The yucky flour might be failure, the icky egg pain, the nasty cooking oil loss and grief. The sweetness of love, the tastiness of success, the flavor of joy are wonderful … but all by themselves? Yet mixed together throughout a lifetime and cooked through heat and pressure, the failure, pain, and loss combine with the love, success, and joy to form a rich and lovely life. Each of our lives is a piece of cake, and together are lives are a beautiful and mouth-watering cake. This post is an entry What I Learned From … Metaphors for Life, this month’s group writing project and Middle Zone Musings.
I recognize that Do Follow is one reason for the numbers of comments I get, especially from people who aren’t writers. The variety in where commenters come from and what they do/blog about amazes me. I appreciate the quality of comments and the conversation that is generated from these diverse readers. A note about my comment policy: In determining whether a comment is legitimate or not, I tend to give commenters the benefit of the doubt. However, I usually delete generic comments such as “thanks” or ”great blog.” I approve comments from people who leave keywords instead of names … but I really prefer to address people by name. Thanks to these July commenters: Top Contributor (15 comments) Jeanne Dininni Writer’s Notes Major Contributors (8 comments)
Outstanding Contributors (5-7 comments) Renae Brumbaugh Morning Coffee Significant Contributors (2-4 comments) Alina Popescu Words of a Broken Mirror Bouncer Bouncer Land Alina Padilla Precise Edit Business Networking Schmoozi Diane Her SCA Blog Joe My ABC Space Mobile Blog VaroLogic Blog Forrest Fine Art Photography Blog Hamurabi Hamurabi’s Weblog Karen Putz A Deaf Mom Shares Her World Kathryn Knittsings Lionel Acid 42 Monavie Black Diamond University Polina Skin MD Natural Important Contributors Alcohol Rehabilitation The Unloading Zone Alex Cell Mad alojamiento rural turispain Amy Derby Write from Home Anna Op Art Design Ben ARSVENDO blepharoplasty New York City Blepharoplasty Blogging Tips Blog About Your Blog Brad Shorr Word Sell, Inc Britt Phillips DVD Training Videos Buy Hand Dyed Yarns Leelee’s Unique Buttons & Yarn Chan Sui InnTell child internet habits All Spy Data Entry Services Data Plus+ Dave Titanium Golf Irons David W. Discount DSLRs drug rehab in California Recovery Can Eric Peterson Leadership and Other Ramblings Final Expense Insurance EFES Fiona Argentur-Vergin Frederick Alopezie Freelance Jobs Contentfully frikass Jacken4You frika The Natural Gems Shop Gary Capone Palladian International LLC GBG Business Live Free with GBG gerda Traumhafte Handtaschen Gina Paraguay 2 You Haley Geizkragen Handmade Buttons Leelee’s Unique Buttons & Yarn hank My Investing Blog hank freid Real Estate Iguana Infos über Natursteine isabella mori change therapy Jacob JobMob Jackie Cameron Consult Cameron James Chartrand Men with Pens Jenna Stars Dancewear Jes Montagehiefer Joanna Young Confident Writing Joey Mobile Container John Hewitt Poewar: Writer’s Resource Center John M Unlimited Complimentary Ringtones Justin Finish Writing Karen Alaniz Write Now Karen Swim Words for Hire Katie Info4Repair Kelly She-Power Laura Spencer Writing Thoughts Life Coach Life Coach Buzz Lip Sense Beautiful Lips Marianne Writer Mommy Marrie US Citizenship Forms Marrie Funny Car Videos Medical Tourism Bangkok Bangkok-Hospitals Info Mercy CSN Conference Mike Goad Exit 78 Monavie MP-4 Player Cocos Promotions NBA Tickets The Ticket Lodge New Age New Age Internet Marketing Academy Niall Devitt Beyond the Boardroom nice guy A Nice Chat Olivier Getting Rich the Certain Way Online Calculator Online Calculator Panthers Carolina Panthers Blog penny stock trading Trading Penny Stocks Online Quotes Compare Auto Insurance Quotes Riana Wedding Belle Robert Hruzek Middle Zone Musings Secra einklang-reisen Sharon Hurley Hall Get Paid to Write Online Shina auto-pflegetipps Simon Pingable Steve Gadgets4Nowt Susan New WordPress Themes Tiara Rhinestone Jewelry Tom Dermal.de tom kaulitz Abdul Samet Uzun Violin Popular Songs in Violin Vivian We Show yavuz Kaliteliteli Film Yvonne Russell Grow Your Writing Business Zak Nicola If I’ve overlooked someone who commented in July or made a mistake in names or links, please let me know. Thanks again to each commenter and to each of you who read and never let us know you’re here. |
