As the realities of business grinding to a halt weigh on the minds and bottom lines of end users, leasing companies such as GreatAmerica Financial Services and LEAF Commercial Capital are caught between a rock and a hard place. There are the end users, requesting some level of forgiveness regarding their contract obligations. The other challenge is ensuring dealer/reseller clients have protection and preservation with their end-user relationships. For this, we turned to Jennie Fisher, GreatAmerica’s senior vice president and general manager of the Office Equipment Group, and Nick Capparelli, managing director, LEAF Commercial Capital, to learn how the financing companies have struck a balance.
How has your leasing company mobilized since the onset of coronavirus?
Fisher: We used a staged and staggered approach to our response strategy, leaning on our Business Continuity Team at GreatAmerica. Specifically, we wanted to accomplish a couple of key goals.
- Protect our workforce. The safety and well-being of our team members was, is and will be our number-one concern.
- Continue to provide the GreatAmerica experience for our customers.
Our focus was to accomplish both of these goals by mobilizing our workforce to a work-from-home (WFH) operation and social distancing.
We implemented a plan to socially distance our team members. We were able to use our headquarters facility, in addition to our recovery workspace located across town. This plan allowed our employees to work further apart and continue to serve our customers, helping our Business Continuity Team and leadership to move to Phase II, the plan out to get everyone home who wanted to be.
Our team members were then segmented in waves of 50-100 to be deployed home, based on function criticality and equipment availability. We used mostly equipment that was already at our recovery workspace, or was procured early from budgeted future purchases. This allowed us to keep desktops intact at work to help ensure a smooth future return in the months ahead.
Within roughly one week, all team members (over 95%) that wished to be home working were successfully doing so. Our Business Continuity Team is already planning our thoughtful and phased return, knowing it could be weeks, if not months, before it will be appropriate to do so. The health of ourselves and those around us continues to be the basis of all our decision making.
Capparelli: Our first concern, as always, is protecting our employees and customers. Our business-resiliency plan allows the overwhelming majority of our staff to work from home with little to no disruption to our customers, and we’ve moved quickly to let our customers know we are here for them during this unprecedented time. Being in a position of financial strength going into this situation, we are well equipped to handle their financing needs, and we are working with customers on a case-by-case basis to offer assistance with their existing obligations. We’re also offering information on government funding alternatives, as well as ideas to help them access capital as they enact plans to strengthen their companies.
What are the challenges you have faced from a leasing standpoint, in terms of coordinating with dealers and servicing end users?
Capparelli: Many of our customers have seen a severe reduction in demand. With revenues in steep decline and the delay of government-sponsored programs to fill the void, cash positions have been under extraordinary pressure. As such, we needed to quickly adapt our approach to offer relief for our customers’ near-term obligations. Making sure we are connected to them at a time when virtually all are simultaneously in need is a big task. Our employees are doing an exceptional job for our customers in a very difficult time, and we are thankful for their tireless work.
Fisher: There are certainly many challenges for both our customers (office imaging resellers) and their customers (end users) right now. Many businesses have been impacted negatively through no fault of their own, and the sheer number of payment-relief requests from end users has been overwhelming at times. Because a high percentage of contracts in our portfolio are bundled (equipment hardware billed with monthly service and supplies), we are extra mindful in our management of these extensions to protect our customers’ revenues. Rather than having a blanket approach, we have been creative in providing options to help our customers provide relief to their end users. Administration of these options is being orchestrated with two critical priorities: 1) help our customers protect their monthly service and supply revenues coming from those entities that are still using their equipment and able to pay, and 2) protecting the relationship that they have with their customers. We have long recognized office imaging resellers as our primary customer, and we are vigilant to protect the bond they have with their customers.
As we continue to experience and work through these challenges together, we also continue to uncover opportunities. Our customers offering IT services have seen an increase in business through additional project work for at-home set ups, as well as new customers who are finding they need consistent IT support through this pandemic. This leads to additional opportunities to finance managed IT and ancillary services to help solve today’s problems, and for conversations on how they can add value in the future. The need for automation is creating opportunities as well—adding technology integrations that allow digital sharing of documents and transformation of data for remote workers, digital signature capabilities, and comfort in virtual connections.
In addition to opportunities coming our way, we have seized the opportunity to proactively provide informational and educational resources for our customers. Focus here has been on information about government subsidies, guidance on security with an expanded remote workforce, tips on continuing to cultivate culture remotely, education on video communications, and our very-well-received webinar with “They Ask, You Answer” author, Marcus Sheridan on virtual selling, which had more than 800 participants.
We will all look different coming out of this, many in very good ways.
