METRO TRADING ASSOCIATION HOSTS 37TH ANNUAL BARTER TRADE SHOW

Learn how barter transactions through Metro Trading Association can help your business cut cash expenses and gain new customers. MTA’s 37th Annual Trade Show features shopping and spending opportunities with hundreds of smart businesses that have elevated their bottom lines through savvy barter transactions. The MTA Trade Show also includes silent auctions, raffles, dinner and drinks.

Date: Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Time: 3:00 P.M. – 9:00 p.m.

Where: Oakland Yard Athletics

5382 Highland Road

Waterford, Michigan 48327

RSVP: 248-244-0000

Cost: Free to attend

About Metro Trading Association:

Founded in 1978, Metro Trading Association is the oldest trade organization in the Great Lakes Region. With offices in Troy, Michigan and Toledo, Ohio, MTA is a strong network of more than 2,000 businesses and some 5,000 participants. Additionally, through its affiliations, MTA has barter relationships with tens of thousands of businesses worldwide.

In the current economic climate, barter is essential to good business. It helps you to make every product, every sale, count. Metro Trading Association is dedicated to the advancement of barter. Barter, unlike cash, has a genius characteristic in that every purchase a business makes through barter seeds a future new sale. Overhead and personal expenses that drain a business can now be harnessed to advance its growth and help assure the success of one’s own business. Only with barter do purchases result in new sales and these new sales produce cash profits. The fact is that just a 5% increase in gross sales for a typical retailer will result in a 20% increase in cash profits after transaction fees.

Businessman, Michael Mercier founded Metro Trading Association. Mercier had been a partner in a successful stock brokerage firm in the mid-1970’s, when he ran across the concept of using barter as a profit-enhancing tool and was immediately struck by its potential for businesses. A strong believer in free enterprise, Mercier had always been disturbed by how many small businesses fail in their first few years of business. His idea was to give businesses the opportunity to lower costs, increase cash profits and obtain new clients through organized barter.

To implement this concept, Mercier determined that he needed at least 100 businesses in various categories to make the barter economy viable. He began by knocking on doors with an offer for business owners: they could become a member of his trading group, with a money-back guarantee if they were not satisfied with the quality of businesses joining. Mercier assembled 150 businesses and Metro Trading Association was born. Even to this day Metro Trading Association guarantees new profits. “We don’t sell anything to anyone,” Mercier says, “we just ask for an opportunity to perform.”

Mercier quickly hired a full-time staff to maintain his rapidly growing barter exchange. He also established trading relationships with trade exchanges across the country, giving his members the ability to trade outside southeastern Michigan. During that time, Mercier became highly respected nationally and is a past president of the National Association of Trade Exchanges. He has also served on the Global Board of International Reciprocal Trade Association where he was an officer and member of the executive committee.