By Bob Meyer

Gerald Benjamin, is the President and Senior Managing Partner of International Capital Resources, San Francisco. He’s the author of the book, Finding Your Wings, which shows how to locate private investors to fund business ventures.

Benjamin says the “barter investor” is one of nine angel investors in the marketplace today. The barter investor:

• Provides products or services—what you would have used the capital for—rather than capital, in exchange for equity.
• Is participative—not passive.
• Has early-stage preference.
• Offers capital in the form of products and services plus infrastructure.
• Considers management a most important criterion.
• Demands that your venture has capability to grow to $10 million in three to five years.
• Is willing to invest up to $250,000.

A typical example of a barter investor might be a company that now has an active business—and it would dovetail with what you want to do.

In other words they could have an infrastructure in place, wherein they’re already billing, invoicing and collecting. They could provide the processing and shipping of orders. They might have warehouse space, as well as other needed services.

These would be added to your business. Often private investors don’t necessarily need money per se, what they need are the services that the money would buy.

If an investor can find a “barter investor” that provides a good fit, some exciting synergism—to quickly expand the investor’s business venture—could well be amazingly productive!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 11:31 am and is filed under Entrepreneurs & Small Business, Best & Brightest Barter, 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.