By Bob Meyer

Nora Christensen wanted to start a cooking school, but her $2,500 in seed money wasn’t enough to lease the space and buy the equipment she needed.

So the 37-year-old teacher-turned-entrepreneur came up with a work-space recipe: She struck a barter agreement with a company that gave her the use of a commercial kitchen in exchange for her meal-preparation skills.

The arrangement developed when Christensen responded to a newspaper ad. Bodine Electric, a motor manufacturer in Chicago, was looking for a vendor to operate its employee cafeteria. She arranged with Bodine to use the company’s kitchen facilities to make lunches and dinners for its 500 employees.

With the help of a cook and a dishwasher she hired, Christensen provided Bodine’s employees with gourmet meals at a guaranteed price per entree that was about the same as the cost of a fast-food meal.

In return, she got exclusive use of the kitchen when she was ready to open her cooking school. After a year, she was able to open the school.

Her advice to other companies with bartering arrangements is to maintain constant communication with your barter partners, and to speak frequently to the direct beneficiaries of their services.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurs & Small Business, Marketing, Purchasing & Financing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.