Happily situated in the comfortable office space right up from my home, courtesy of friend and Club E member, Dolf De Roos, the last thing I was contemplating was moving into a multi-thousand square foot facility in downtown Phoenix and re-starting our Club E office (CEO).
You see, I had a very bad taste in my mouth, not to mention my wallet, from the abrupt expulsion from our beautiful Tempe facility when our landlord had his facility foreclosed on and seized by his lender. As I ruefully learned, commercial tenants have absolutely no rights and with zero notice, we were forced to close our doors and move from the over 11,000 sqft CEO home in one hour. I had no intention of falling into that trap again...
The funny thing was, I had recently decided to discount any private commercial property home for a future CEO and make an an appeal for free space from many of the local cities through their economic development departments. I reasoned that the cities could contribute one of their empty properties, with furnishings and utilities provided and Club Entrepreneur would fill the facilities with Club E members, fostering new business start-ups which would create much needed sales tax revenue to that city that wanted to play ball with us. I had gone so far as to prepare an email and video and shoot it off to a dozen local economic development departments when I was approached with an alternative...
As many of you know, I am an ardent believer in the barter business as a viable financial tool and new business generation almost, for literally all enterprises. In conjunction with the Phoenix area's largest and most established trade firm, Tradesource, Club E Exchange was created to address the barter needs of our membership.
Tradesource founder, Sylvia Rosinski, plopped down a color brochure featuring four large commercial properties offering to trade their space on barter. I was intrigued and decided to check it out.
Local real estate magnates, Joan and Chuck Clancy had been assembling a portfolio of hundreds of thousands of square feet of commercial buildings and over 1800 rental apartments over the past 35 years. Like commercial property owners everywhere, their vacancies were soaring but unlike nearly every other developer and commercial property owner, the Clancys had not leveraged their holdings. Therefore, they were not in danger of losing their properties like virtually every other commercial property owner is in the Phoenix market.
What was even better was that Club E could establish a new CEO for barter...offering the same arrangement to its tenants, thus giving everyone a greater chance of succeeding through the conservation of capital. Barter could be generated through the sale of excess services or products and used to pay for what would have been a cash expense...in this case commercial property rent. I was thrilled to learn that our barter lease also included all utilities as well as janitorial services!
Best always,
Peter J. Burns, III
Founder
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Peter Burns
About Me
- Peter J. Burns III
- Beginning at age 19, I've started over 100 businesses. Educated at UVa. and Harvard Business School's OPM Program, I was raised back East (New Canaan, Nantucket, Sanibel) and am now in the "Wild West" of Phoenix, Arizona. My greatest venture to date is the establishing of this country's first College of Entrepreneurship. Along the way, I launched the University Entrepreneurs Venture Fund (available for student-inspired start-ups) and now what promises to be the world's largest entrepreneurial organization-Club Entrepreneur.