It’s a tired truism that a rising tide raises all ships.  And a rising market rewards both the creative and the rote practitioners.  In years past, it didn’t take a financial wizard to take out an HP12C, calculate a lease-rate factor, bundle up a package of leases and sell them to GE, BankofAmerica, or Key Bank.  Selling off leases enabled the equipment or software provider to recognize a sale, while still allowing customers to spread payments over the useful life of the acquired asset. 

Times have changed, and just when everyone should have a lease offering and most thoughtful customers want one, so they can preserve cash on their balance sheet, the big guys that traditionally bought up the bulk of leases have gone packing. So where do you sell off your lease paper now?

I spent Sunday afternoon with friends, including one CFO of a small bank that told me he had decided that his bank should not accept recent offers of TARP bank-bailout funds.  Why?  Well, it turns out they don’t have any “troubled assets.”  He also wasn’t too excited about having the federal government tell him what kind of loans he should or shouldn’t make.

So now you’ve found your funding source for the lease: a bank that actually does deals not on volume, but on the individual deal’s financial merits.  Or have you?  If you are like most companies, and unlike my business partner and co-founder, David, you haven’t spent the past 20 years building up relationships with fifty of the little guys.  But he has.  Which is why, when the tide is out, our business is up.