In a little over two decades Jack Schacht, who started his trade exchange on a part-time basis from his kitchen table, leveraged his drive, focus, ambition, and intelligence into a cash payoff of $4,600,000 when Illinois Trade Association was purchased by International Monetary Systems, Ltd. September 29, 2006.

Known in the industry for his out-of-the box thinking and unorthodox actions, he demonstrated—over and over—that such activity was indeed valid, as his company’s membership and trading activity soared year after year.

He was a strong industry supporter and the President of the National Association of Trade Exchanges, as well as serving in many other board capacities. Additionally, he was a man who thought for himself, as evidenced when he came out for support of industry unification at a NATE Convention.

A Shakespearean actor in his earlier days, he was a dynamic speaker at industry functions, and often took the lead in many passionate discussions. And in the ensuing weeks we will be publishing Schacht’s thoughts with you.

We invite you to feel free to provide your comments at the end of each posting.

BarterNews: When working part time off the kitchen table, did you put together a written plan of what you wanted?

“One of the few regrets I have in building the business is that I really didn’t have a strong business plan. The problem, however, was that there was a shortage of solid data with which to draw up a good plan. The data I did get was usually completely wrong.

“I was told by one of the early people in the business, for example, that I should expect that my clients would spend an average of one thousand dollars a month so I set a goal of 1000 members in three years and promised my brokers and sales people that they should expect to be making some good bonus income by the time we reach our goal of 1000 members.

“I discovered after we had about 800 members signed up that my friend’s projections had no basis in reality since we were only doing about $200,000 a month by that time.

“So my business plan evolved over the first three years. One great thing about the business, however, was that it was always full of surprises and new opportunities so the business plan was always a work in progress.”


BarterNews: Did you ever have aspirations to open offices in different locations, or were you more of a “purist” by design?

“I never had any desire to open multiple offices. It was always obvious to me, in looking at other people who were doing it, that it was way too much work for the return on investment. Besides, Chicago was a great market for barter. And to make money in the business—real money—you need a large aggressive business culture.

”We did once sign up about 300 members in Milwaukee only because it is not far from Chicago. We were so frustrated by the conservative business culture that we ended up giving all the members to Don Mardek. That was almost 20 years ago and we never again ventured out of our market.”

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Jack Schacht. 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.