Blaine E. Grimes Summer Grant Recipient

Maxim Rasmakhin
Marketing Intern
International Monetary Systems (IMS), Columbus, Ohio, USA

This summer, I interned with International Monetary Systems (IMS) at their Columbus, Ohio, office. IMS operates in the barter industry and is headquartered in New Berlin, Wisconsin. It is a publicly traded company with more than 23,000 member businesses and more than 30 years of experience facilitating business-to-business trade. It is currently in 50 markets and works with more than 1,200 restaurants, 500 hotels and resorts, and 600 advertising venues nationwide. IMS’s members are professionals, business owners, artisans, and skilled trade people who buy and sell goods and services on a trade basis. Last year IMS transacted $114 million in trade.

Each IMS account is administered by a dedicated Trade Broker who works with the individual member to deliver new business and to maximize buying power by allowing businesses to purchase at their cost of goods. The average IMS member enjoys a 5-15 percent increase in business the first year. Coupled with the ability to conserve cash, IMS membership offers a unique option to those businesses seeking to expand their customer base.

Bartering is a growing industry in the US and many other countries. More than 20 billion dollars are transacted annually through trade in the U.S., and this number is growing approximately five percent each year. In the last three decades, the barter industry changed dramatically, and there are several large companies that form trade exchanges.

The difference between a direct barter and a trade exchange is in the own currency that trade exchanges use. It allows receiving goods and services that a business needs by providing the goods and services that it specializes in. For example, if a hotel business needs landscaping services and a construction business needs a hotel room for its owner, these two businesses can still trade. A construction company will pay a hotel business in trade dollars for using a hotel room, and the hotel business will pay the landscaping company with these earned trade dollars for the landscaping services that they need. Thus, the trade is facilitated much more conveniently through the trade exchanges.

The internship experience was valuable to me because I worked with minimum supervision, demonstrating my leadership skills and ability to work on my own. Part of my job was to search for small- to medium-sized businesses that could benefit from trade. For example, if it was an advertising company, I needed to identify the types of products and services that they can offer on trade, the goods and services they can acquire on trade, and how an advertising business can earn extra profits and save cash by working with other members of our trade exchange. As a result, I gained good understanding of different businesses, their needs, issues, and expenses.

In addition, I had to contact business owners to ask them questions about their businesses to understand whether IMS itself would benefit from this company. If I thought that a company qualified and fit well, I discussed benefits of trade exchange with them and tried to convince them to become a member of our network. If both companies would benefit from working together, I processed applications and put the businesses in touch with a broker.

As a result, I learned about different markets and industries. I learned the fundamentals of the barter business, the way it operates, and how it makes profits. Also, I improved my communication skills by communicating with CEOs, presidents, or general managers of the companies we worked with. I learned how to communicate with clients and how to help them find solutions to some of their issues. Furthermore, I improved my research skills by searching different companies using Chamber of Commerce records, local newspapers, directories, referrals, classified ads, and Google.