The less a business pays for goods and services the more profit that business generates. How does a small business with limited purchasing power get access to lower cost goods and services? The answer is simple. Pool the purchasing power of many small businesses to increase the purchasing power of each individual business. The implementation of forming a buying group can take lots of time, money and resources. Most small business owners have little of these buying group ingredients.

The concept of many small to mid-size businesses joining together to form buying groups has been around for a very long time. The implementation of the concept has only been available for a few years. Just about all of the national buying groups that have started operations in the past five years are no longer in business. I will tell you why many of these buying groups were not successful later in the article. Some of the few surviving buying groups have formed an alliance that offers their members access to greatly discounted pricing with a total of 37 national vendors. The Hospitality Buying Group was the first national buying group to offer a FREE lifetime membership to any business in any industry. This group recently started the Hospitality Buying Group Alliance which offers free lifetime memberships to all the national buying groups in the alliance. The only investment the business members make is the time to compare the prices of the alliance vendors against what they are currently paying.

By now you are thinking that all of this sounds too good to be true. If the Hospitality Buying Group Alliance gives away lifetime memberships then how do they make any money? If the members are not a revenue stream then the only other revenue source must be the vendors. The vendors pay the buying groups commissions on all purchases made by their members. There is no risk for the vendors because they only pay the commission after they have been paid by the buying group members. The commissions are very low so the maximum discounts can be offered to the business members.

Some credit card companies, like American Express, offers a small savings or a percent cash back reward to their customers for using vendors in their network. While saving 2