Last week Entrepreneur Magazine’s article “The 10 Fastest-Growing Industries for Small Business” showed that “residential building construction” was the fastest-growth industry in 2012 (14.77%) and is expected to continue in 2013. Number two and three, respectively, were “building custom software and servers” at 14.29% and “machinery and equipment wholesalers” at 13.75%. Supporting this growth are the equipment leasing and financing companies who assist these small and medium businesses by establishing construction equipment leases, hardware and software leases, and being the finance department to many machinery and equipment dealers throughout the country.
Small and medium construction businesses are able to quickly get the equipment they need after securing contracts without large disruptions in cash flow. They can even customize the payback based on when the equipment will make money for them.
Hardware and software leasing makes complete sense since those items rarely have any value at the end of the term. The SMB market can easily acquire the technology pieces they need to expand or upgrade existing hardware and software.
Many of today’s equipment vendors partner with specialty equipment leasing companies to act as their own finance division and facilitate the financing needs of their customers. This helps them sell more equipment by providing an additional service they can control and offer various options to the customer without taking on any of the risk.
