Why I am against exchanging services
Unfortunately, most of us who offer professional services have had a prospective client offer us their products or services in exchange for ours—an exchange commonly known as barter. I am completely against this practice. Not merely against it: it is a policy at my company and a personal principle.
A person who proposes an exchange prefers to give their product or service instead of money. At the end of the day, one might think that one asset is as good as another and that accepting this kind of deal is valid. However, barter presents several problems:
1. It is impossible to establish an exchange rate
The reason money exists is to provide a vehicle for value that makes transactions possible. Although money itself has no value, it represents the value of something; as Douglas Adams put it, it is “a fiction we all agree upon.” Put simply, you could say that what I make is websites. So if I go to a store and want to buy 500gr of meat, it will be difficult to determine what fraction of a website those 500gr represent. It will be even more difficult to get the store to accept a fraction of a website in exchange for the meat. By using money as the medium of exchange, however, I can buy the meat with the money I earned from making a website.
A law firm recently offered me its services in exchange for a website. How many legal consultations is a website worth? We would have to try to find a common denominator to establish an exchange rate, such as hours of work. I price my services in hours of work, but they do not, so how can an exchange rate be established? Through money.
2. Lack of interest in or need for the product or service received
Another problem is that I am most likely not interested in receiving the product or service the other party is offering, which is why I was not the one who proposed the exchange. The product or service offered cannot pay the rent on an office, cannot pay employees' salaries, and cannot even represent a profit. It cannot be reported for tax purposes; we would be committing tax evasion.
Returning to the law firm example, I do not need or require its services, and the promise of accessing them in the future has no value to me. Moreover, I have my own lawyers to handle legal matters, people I have worked with before and trust. By agreeing to an exchange of services, I would be forcing myself to use the services of a firm I did not choose.
3. Undervaluing the work
If you offer me services in exchange instead of money, it means that money has greater value to you; therefore, you consider my work to be worth less than I do. I am not interested in working with someone who believes that my work is not worth the price quoted. What is even more revealing is that you consider your own work to be worth less than the money I want to charge. In other words, your opinion of your own work is lower than my opinion of mine, and I would lose out in such a deal.
This absurd practice of exchanging services persists because of people who believe their work has no value and who, in their desperation to sell something bad, will accept any deal. For me, it has become a rule that anyone who proposes an exchange of services is not a professional and does not expect a professional service either. These kinds of clients are not for me.