Why Ecologic For Service Providers?
Increase Revenue, Profits, Cash, Time-to-Market, Sales Velocity, and the Value of Customer Relationships
Stop Locking Up Your Capital In Customer Equipment To Finance Your Own Sales: Get the Cash You Need and Simplify Your Sales
With our unique Service Agreement Financing (SAF) Program, you can get the cash out of your customer transactions, eliminate your CapEx for customer equipment, and improve your margins. Today, senior financial and sales executives like you rely on Ecologic’s program structuring and funding network to help them finance their customer transactions - regardless of deal size, credit quality, or geography - at competitive rates that help them close more deals, better and faster. It’s a win-win situation for you and your customers.
We deliver the capabilities and sophistication of a leasing company to service providers by driving down the cost of capital through competition to close more, better, and bigger deals for your and your company. The SAF program is an innovative example of how we adapt our programs to your business process and manage the details so you can focus on your customers and growing your company.
Here are some of the problems Ecologic solves for service providers today:
- Problem: As a senior sales or finance executive, you know your customers want a single service provider to provide a total, turn-key solution. They want services, software AND equipment bundled together in a complete "managed service" or outsourced relationship and you have to spend your own CapEx budget to buy customer equipment in order to compete. To meet this demand, finance and sales executives of many service providers are forced to buy or lease equipment on behalf of their customers - using their own balance sheets to fund upfront costs. And despite taking on the related credit risks and technology risks yourself, companies like yours rarely reflect this burden in their cost of capital to their customers. In the end, you assume a significant liability to make a sale while also limiting your own growth and ability to compete because you tie up all of your spare cash in equipment purchases. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: In today's highly competitive markets, finance and sales executives need their leasing operations to catalyze and expand sales without proportionally adding headcount, infrastructure or other overhead costs. And they have to get to market quickly and can't afford the uptime typically involved in building their own organization. Likewise, finance and sales executives often struggle with the internal question of how to manage leasing operations, especially if they require resources otherwise associated with core finance and sales functions. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: Finance and sales executives often don't trust their leasing partner because there is no transparency in the relationship. They are forced to share control of the customer relationship, even though their sales people originate all the leads. They believe they are not getting the best terms and the lowest cost of capital in a controlled, competitive financing process. They believe they are probably leaving money on the table.
Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: Many sales and finance executives face the same core sales problem: how to enable their customers to buy over time as a service while still getting the revenue upfront.
Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: The credit quality of a service provider's customer base can vary widely, from investment-grade to poor. Because your current leasing partner has narrow credit policies, your sales team is forced to turn away deals with customers without investment grade credit or your firm has to take the financing risk. This puts finance and sales executives in a bind. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: Finance executives can't track docs, assets, or accounting because they don't have the software they need to controll processes, manage their portfolio, and perform closed-loop, asset-level lease accounting. Discover Ecologic's Software Services...
Get Cash Upfront, Close Better Deals Without Self-Financing Your Customer Equipment
The problem: Your customers want a single service provider to provide a total, turn-key solution: They want services, software AND equipment bundled together in a complete “managed service” or outsourced relationship and you have to spend your own CapEx budget to buy customer equipment in order to compete. To meet this demand, finance and sales executives of many service providers are forced to buy or lease equipment on behalf of their customers - using their own balance sheets to fund upfront costs. And despite taking on the related credit risks and technology risks yourself, companies like yours rarely reflect this burden in their cost of capital to their customers. In the end, you assume a significant liability to make a sale while also limiting your own growth and ability to compete because of capital expenditure financing constraints. So, what can you do?
The Ecologic solution: Ecologic’s Service Agreement Financing (SAF) Program helps solve capital expenditure financing constraints with an innovative program that combines our understanding of service providers’ business needs, our expertise in structuring leasing contracts, and our capabilities for rolling out and administering managed-service financing programs.
Here is how it works...
While you continue to offer your customers a competitive bundle of hardware, services and other soft costs, Ecologic assigns the equipment-related revenue stream and underlying collateral to a third-party funder. In this structure, your company is paid upfront for equipment and any installation-related soft costs from the funder when the funder buys the assigned revenue stream. Your firm is then able to recognize the related revenue in a non-recourse financing. We work under applicable accounting guidelines in order to structure transactions to achieve revenue recognition and off balance sheet financing.
The financing between you and the funder is priced using your customer’s credit quality (not yours), enabling you to get the cash out of the deal, reduce your liability, and improve your pricing. And because of the way we structure the assignment, the funder’s only recourse is to your customer in the event of default. At the end of the term of the funder financing, you’ll have the option of buying back the equipment. If you can extend your agreement with your customer beyond the financing term without significant price compression, you can recognize a significant improvement in recurring revenue because the equipment has been fully paid off and the related customer revenue that you were previously remitting to the funder becomes pure profit for your firm.
At the same time that you enjoy these benefits, your firm continues to perform the billing and collecting, so your customer continues to view you as their total solution provider. We can use a traditional services agreement (even one based on minutes and volumes), a maintenance contract or a managed services contract as the basis for the financeable services agreement. Do you need this solution?
Incease sales, improve deal quality, control costs, reduce management time: leverage the economies of Ecologic's leasing operations platform
The problem: In today’s highly competitive markets, senior financial and sales executives need their leasing operations to catalyze and expand sales without proportionally adding headcount, infrastructure or other overhead costs. And they have to get to market quickly and can't afford the uptime typically involved in building their own organization.
Likewise, executives like you often struggle with the internal question of how to manage leasing operations, especially if they require resources otherwise associated with core finance and sales functions. But how do you get the leverage you need from your leasing operations while positioning the operations and management needs to scale?
The Ecologic solution: Leverage Ecologic's leasing operations platform and specialized expertise through our outsourcing services. Ecologic has the expertise, best practices, and technology platform at the appropriate scale to manage this function properly and support all the other organizations in your business. And because leasing operations is our business, we invest approximately 15 - 20% of our revenue per year in training our people and the research and development needed to ensure that leasing can have the strategic impact on your core business.
So because we focus on what we do best - leasing operations - our service provider clients can focus on what they do best: Achieve excellence in their customer sales, service, and relationships (while beating the competition).
Break the grip of monopolistic leasing companies – get the best financing terms through competition
The problem: Finance and sales executives often don't trust their leasing partner because there is no transparency in the relationship. They are forced to share control of the customer relationship, even though their sales people originate all the leads. They believe they are not getting the best terms and the lowest cost of capital in a controlled, competitive financing process. They believe they are leaving money on the table. The executives may be working with one, monopolistic funder. Or a variety of people in their company may have relationships with many different funders in North America (in some cases 30 or more).
The Ecologic solution: Financing transactions should be managed and negotiated by a team of trained financial experts. Ecologic’s leasing professionals have expertise in credit analysis, pricing, structuring, financing, and syndication. They work with our clients to develop the best strategies for their business, and then develop programs and manage the equipment financing processes to meet their needs.
We systematically and routinely compete funders as appropriate for our clients’ business strategies, and manage their performance for the life of the program. Ecologic maintains a centralized database of funders in North America with whom we engage at some level over the course of a year. Whenever possible, we work with the "buy-desk" to avoid the sometimes-costly internal origination fees that banks and leasing companies pay to sales people.
We provide our clients with a transparent, side-by-side ("apples-to-apples") comparative analysis of proposals so they can decide the best path forward. We then facilitate the negotiation, selection, documentation, and on-going performance evaluation of the funder, working closely with our clients so they have the greatest comfort and confidence.
Say "Yes" to your customers: Sell your product as a service and your customers will buy more
The problem: Many service providers face this same core sales problem: how to enable their customers to buy over time as a service while still recognizing the revenue upfront.
The Ecologic solution:Ecologic resolves the complexity of multi-contract, multiparty lease financing with our innovative Services Agreement Financing (SAF) Program, allowing your customers to use your products as a service, which they pay for over time.
Instead of an upfront payment, your customers can pay one monthly fee to your firm that bundles together the cost of all products, services, and financing into a single, straightforward services agreement. You still get the recognizable revenue and your customer gets to align their expenses with their use.
Through our SAF Program, we can finance the capital costs (equipment + soft costs such as installation) from within a services agreement. The transaction can be off balance sheet for your firm, and can greatly simplify the buying and selling process while reducing the technical complexity for buyers. Now, your customers can simply enjoy the benefits of the products you delivered to them as part of your services offering, rather than having to research the technical details or gain purchase approval for costly equipment.
Ecologic’s SAF program helps service providers convert customers from old legacy technologies while catalyzing sales by simplifying the buying and selling process.
Get the Most from your Pipeline (ROI) - Regardless of Credit Quality, Geography, Ticket-Size, or Asset Type
The problem: The credit quality of a service provider's customer base can vary widely, from investment-grade to poor. Because your current leasing partner has narrow credit policies, limitations in geographic coverage, ticket sizes, or asset types, your sales team is forced to turn away deals with customers without investment grade credit or your firm has to take the financing risk. This puts finance and sales executives in a bind.
The Ecologic solution: Ecologic’s financing programs exploits our broad funder network to ensure that service provider customers get the financing they need, and that the sale goes through at the right price – regardless of a customer’s credit quality.
You won’t get this commitment from a leasing company. But because we work with many funders around the world, we apply the power of competition to reduce the cost of capital and to maximize the number of deals in the service provider pipeline that get funded and closed.
Ecologic's Software Services: LeaseAccelerator™ and PortfolioManager™
Ecologic’s LeaseAccelerator and PortfolioManager software services give our clients the centralized solutions they need to automate and manage their financing and leasing processes for greater visibility, consistency and control.
LeaseAccelerator is an automated service that supports the end-to-end process of lease establishment and asset tracking by facilitating transactions and document flow among the multiple parties.
The system’s workflow, document management and transaction processing capabilities accelerate funder review and acceptance. And it automatically links together documents in the supply chain, making them accessible by schedule or asset.
Ecologic and our clients use LeaseAccelerator to create, send, and track acquisition requests, purchase orders, asset assignment and notification documents, certificates of acceptance, and lease schedules.
PortfolioManager is an asset-based lease accounting and portfolio management system. It provides an automated service for tracking and managing leases, assets, and risk, complete with robust, Web-based reporting capabilities.
Ecologic uses PortfolioManager to perform asset-level accounting, including sales and property tax calculations. Ecologic also uses PortfolioManager to perform billing and collecting services, enabling our clients to attract low-cost funders who need this critical servicing capability in order to invest in transactions.
To protect up-time and access to our software services, Ecologic uses geographically distributed hosting facilities with redundant back-up and fail-over capabilities. We also provide security at the data, application, system, and network levels.
