At a Glance
- 53% of equipment finance proposals above $10M that reach a board or investment committee are presented by the customer’s own management, without the finance provider in the room (Secured Research)
- 58% of middle market equipment proposals above $10M now require investment-committee or board approval — a process that was the exception a decade ago (Secured Research)
- Private-equity ownership is the primary driver: sponsors install ROIC hurdles, capital rationing, and investment committees as a matter of course
- Boards do not approve equipment; they approve capital allocation, and a lease competes against every other use of the company’s capital and credit capacity
The Room You Never Enter
For deals above a threshold — call it $10 million, though it moves with the company — the executive you have built the relationship with does not make the decision. They carry it. They walk into a board meeting or an investment committee, present a recommendation, and people you will never meet decide. You spent months selling the operator. The operator now has fifteen minutes and three slides to sell a room that thinks in capital, return, and risk-adjusted alternatives.
The relationship you built is necessary but no longer sufficient. The operator’s endorsement gets the proposal onto the agenda; it does not get it approved. That gap — between getting heard and getting approved — is the gap most providers never see, because their entire process ends at the relationship and assumes the decision follows from it. It used to. It increasingly does not.
