HOTEL OWNERS

If you are a hotel (owner,) suppose you have 10 vacant rooms at $100 a night and you need a new brochure for $1000. Trade International Exchange (TIE) provides a way for you to buy your brochure, fill your rooms (at your cost on the rooms) and maintain your cash! Call us today to learn more (305) 261-8439 (TIEX)

TIE FACEBOOK PAGE

If you haven't stopped by our Facebook page, yet, click on the link below and join us!
Come and trade with us...it's addicting!

CLICK ON OUR LINK  BELOW:

https://www.facebook.com/TradeInternationalExchangetie

ARTICLE FROM FORBES - Social Entrepreneurship

More and more, entrepreneurs are not satisfied with creating a business that delivers a great product, generates a profit and creates value (read wealth), but instead want their enterprise to directly impact a social problem from poverty to global warming.

A New Capitalist Manifesto: Balancing Profits with Purpose David K. Williams Contributor

Winning A 5 Minute Pitch: How Candace Klein Won $1.7M in 25 Competitions (And Why She and SoMoLend Are Giving Money Away) Cheryl Conner Contributor

Publishing Is Broken, We're Drowning In Indie Books - And That's A Good Thing David Vinjamuri Contributor

Some social entrepreneurs are running for-profit businesses with a clear and specific social mission integrated into the business model while others are launching traditional not-for-profit businesses.
Blake Mycoskie, founder and “Chief Shoe Giver” at Toms epitomizes the movement, launching his “buy one, give one” shoe company in 2006 and quickly growing it to a $100 million annual run rate—and donating over 1 million pairs of shoes along the way.
In either case, planning for success mimics the requirements for success in any new venture: a plan, customer focus, and execution.
The Plan
The greatest fallacy in business planning is that there is a good template or software that will help you create a winning business plan.  The very opposite is true.  While there are some standard topics that must be covered in a business plan, borrowing language from a template or software is simply self-defeating.

The CICFO Orphanage in Cambodia - Devin Thorpe is in the back

The primary purpose for a business plan is not so that an entrepreneur can tell someone else about the plan to raise money, find customers or recruit talent it is so that the entrepreneur can figure out what the heck she’s doing.  The greatest insight I ever found in business plan writing is that if you can’t write down how you’ll do something you really don’t know how you’ll do it.  Therein lies the real value of the business plan: it is the exercise an entrepreneur completes with her team to help figure out exactly what to do.
A great business plan doesn’t have to be long; in fact, the shorter the better.  It just needs to be complete.  I’ve seen a one-page plan that was more complete than fifty-page plans.  The plan needs to articulate the problem the business proposes to solve, a vision for how that will be accomplished, and what uniquely qualifies the enterprise to do that.  The plan should also include an introduction to the management team, a marketing plan, a product development schedule, and financial forecasts, including cash requirements.   Good business plan outlines are plentiful on the web.
Customer Focus





Customer Focus

Mark Rippel is a volunteer of UBELONG in Cambodia. A true social entrepreneur.

For a traditional business, customer focus is relatively straightforward.  The customer is the person who trades her money for the product you sell.  For a social venture, there could easily be three customers: 1)  a donor or sponsor who derives little or no personal benefit from the exchange, motivated by altruism, 2) a traditional customer who buys a product or service from the business, and 3) a beneficiary of the organization’s mission.   All three customer types require focus and attention.

EXPLODING BUSINESS OF BARTER

 (excerpt from the Harvard Business Review)

Business bartering has been around for a while (Pepsi conquered the USSR by exchanging the soft drink for vodka in 1990), but the pace is rapidly increasing. In 2010, for example, the North Carolina Bar Association approved the participation of attorneys in organized barter exchanges allowing them, for example, to swap legal services for credits to "spend" on a vast range of services from computing to web design, auto repairs and advertising. Now, at barter exchanges across the world, professionals from doctors to electricians are trading their services for goods, services or "trade credits" which can then be used to pay for business expenses whether printing, advertising or travel. Meanwhile, corporate barter firms, the intermediaries in barter transactions, have flourished, helping companies to create value from assets which may no longer fit their strategy, may not be working at capacity or are no longer needed. Client firms swap what they don't want or need for something they do — frequently media services. In addition to swapping goods and services for media, companies can use the trade credits they receive from the bartering intermediary to exchange for freight, travel, waste management and equipment. Honda, Kia and Subaru have bartered cars for media trade credits. Haymarket Exhibitions made part payment for advertising using tickets to their exhibitions. Leading electronics firms have bartered discontinued stock, placing it in leading hotels in exchange for media and trade credits — gaining a potential new client in the hotel group in the process. Food manufacturers have bartered excess inventory in exchange for media credits or trade certificates allowing them to purchase other services such as hospitality and cleaning. Lufthansa has bartered real estate for media credits and aviation fuel.

BIGGEST TRADE

 Biggest Trade:  Pepsico to Swap Cola for Soviet Vodka and Ships



1990 - MOSCOW — Swapping soft-drink concentrate for vodka and merchant ships, Pepsico Inc. on Monday signed a $3-billion barter trade pact with the Soviets that it called the biggest, longest-running agreement ever concluded by the Kremlin with a U.S. firm. "President Bush and President Gorbachev should during their meetings have Pepsi and Stolichnaya on the table to remind them what good agreements are," said Pepsico Executive Committee Chairman Donald M. Kendall, whose experience in U.S.-Soviet trade goes back to the era of Nikita S. Khrushchev.

In 1974, Pepsico began shipping Pepsi concentrate in exchange for Stolichnaya Russian vodka to be sold on the U.S. market. That reciprocal trade pact has now been broadened and extended until the year 2000 to cover an estimated $3 billion in retail sales of Pepsi in the Soviet Union and Stolichnaya vodka in the United States in the coming decade.
Pepsico said the agreement would more than double its Soviet soft drink sales, now running more than 1 billion servings annually, and extend for another 10 years its exclusive rights to provide Russian vodka for the U.S. market. It now imports and sells 1 million cases of Russian vodka yearly through Monsieur Henri Wines Ltd. of White Plains, N.Y.

The accord's fine print shows the flexibility needed to do business in the \o7 perestroika\f7 -era Soviet Union. Kendall, who appeared at a news conference after the signing ceremony in the Kremlin, said Pepsi is now committed to buying at least 10 Soviet-built freighters and tankers of 25,000 to 65,000 tons, which will then be leased on the world market through a Norwegian partner.
"We think we will have the same success in marketing Soviet ships as we have in marketing Soviet vodka," Kendall said.
On news of the agreement, Pepsico closed up $1.50 at $66.50 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Swapping ships for cola concentrate is necessary because the Soviet currency, the ruble, is not freely convertible on the world market for dollars or other currencies, so profits from the Soviet Union cannot be exported in cash.

Kendall said he doubts that convertibility will come any time soon but that non-convertibility should be no barrier to superpower trade.
"If you wait for a convertible ruble, by the time we have a convertible ruble somebody else will have the market," he said.

Thanks to Kendall's promotional acumen, a cupful of Pepsi was given to Khrushchev at a U.S. exposition in Moscow in 1959, with Vice President Richard M. Nixon also getting a serving as news photographers snapped away. Since 1974, the Pepsi logo has become a well-known feature of the Soviet urban landscape.
In contrast, Coca-Cola, Pepsi's chief competitor, began doing business with the Soviets only in 1980 and is less well known.

Proceeds from leasing the ships will be used to buy equipment and supplies for two Pizza Hut restaurants now scheduled to open in Moscow this year. Pepsico had announced that its restaurant subsidiary would be the first Western fast-food outlet in Moscow, but it was beaten to the punch in January by McDonald's.
The number of Pepsi bottling plants will be increased from 24 to 50 in cities from Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East to Riga on the Baltic Sea. The agreement also calls for the development of plastic bottles and cans for the sale of soft drinks in the Soviet Union, where Pepsi is now available only in bottles.

BARTERING BUSINESS

EXAMPLE OF TRADE AT WORK WITH A DENTIST

HOW A DENTIST CAN USE TRADE:

Dentistry has a long history of bartering for their services. It’s a competitive, expensive business and we all need dental care at one point or another. The great thing about barter is that it enables dentists to save a lot of cash and wins new clients at the same time. And the patient, of course, can avoid some hefty cash payments when they need to spend sometime “in the chair.”

For instance, if an electrician needs a dentist for his kids, he can pay cash to his regular dentist—a big budget bite for a family with a sweet tooth. The dentist wants to add an exam room and may find someone to do the job on Craig’s List. Both are taking a bite out of their bank balances.

If the dentist had tried to trade with another electrician, it wouldn’t have gone over well (few people want to trade cash business for goods; who can blame them?)

But the electrician had a valuable service so TIE introduced him to a dentist who was happy to trade for services instead of cash. The electrician now has kids with healthy teeth, the dentist has his new exam room wired for all of the latest equipment and, even better, the electrician has sent the dentist three new referrals for new business!