Saurin Shah has been in the equipment finance industry for more than 20 years, starting from his days with GE Capital all the way to his most recent endeavor: heading up recently launched MidCap Equipment Finance, a sister company to MidCap Business Credit, which provides asset-based lending solutions to the lower middle-market.

With Shah at the helm, MidCap has already gotten off to a great start, with the new business earning its first deal just weeks after its February launch and adding half a dozen more opportunities in the pipeline for the second and third quarters of this year. Aside from his overall equipment finance knowledge, Shah’s experience as an entrepreneur in the industry makes him a solid leader for a company just getting started in the sector. Prior to joining MidCap, Shah was a co-founder of Nations Equipment Finance, which is now known as SLR Equipment Finance, and also a co-founder at FirstLight Financial. Both were startup financial service companies.

“I’ve been in this position before, starting a leasing company from scratch, establishing business processes, underwriting policies, operations policies, systems and business development,” Shah says. “They’re all good skills to have to build a business at MidCap.”

Although MidCap Equipment Finance is not being entirely built from the ground up since it has support from MidCap Business Credit, there are still plenty of the same risks that come along with a de novo business. In fact, before the business became a reality, Shah had to take a risk of his own, serving as a contractor to map out how the equipment finance business could work within the overall company.

The process got started when Steve Samson, president of MidCap Business Credit, who worked with Shah at GE Capital and FirstLight Financial, introduced his former colleague to Jeff Black, CEO of MidCap. Shah convinced Black of the opportunity that existed in the marketplace for MidCap and then spent months getting the company’s bank partners and investors on board before MidCap was ready to go live. In all, Shah estimates the process took 10 months, starting in March 2021 and ending this past January.

Going Lean

Just like with many new companies, MidCap Equipment Finance will be a smaller operation in terms of dedicated personnel, but that is entirely by design.

“We’re going to try to run this business as lean as possible,” Shah says. “We have a great opportunity to leverage finance, operations and risk management folks in Steve’s organization. And that gives us the benefit to get a lot of deals sourced, underwritten and booked with the current infrastructure.”

The full team includes Shah as president, with Matt Lightfoot leading origination efforts and Al Berger heading up underwriting and portfolio management. Lightfoot and Berger both previously worked with Shah at Nations Equipment Finance, so the chemistry for the trio is already well-established.

On the credit and underwriting side, Berger has experience working with bank leasing companies and independents, giving him an extensive mental toolkit to pull from as a leader at MidCap, where he’ll build out operations and credit processes as well as legal documentation and systems implementation. From a business development perspective, Lightfoot has spent a significant portion of his career direct calling on customers as well as cultivating many relationships in the indirect channel.

“In my experience, when we were at Nations, a significant portion of our volume came from the indirect channel. We have to develop relationships with the lease brokers and other intermediaries out there to show us deals,” Shah says, noting that his team will also leverage the relationships of business development personnel at MidCap Business Credit.

Shah also expects that setting up the platform will be a total team effort.

“I have great confidence in Matt and Al to source and underwrite deals,” Shah says. “I also know that we will receive great back-office support from Steve’s team. My main focus is to make sure MidCap Equipment Finance’s business processes are solid and scalable.”

Why Equipment Finance?

Recruiting veterans like Shah, Lighfoot and Berger to start a brand-new equipment finance business may seem like a no-brainer, but why exactly did MidCap, a stalwart entity in the ABL space, want to get into the sector? The answer is equal parts timing and opportunity, although there are also some less obvious contributing factors. For starters, MidCap had built up enough of a capital base to start a new business line.

“We wanted to offer a broader product offering to our customers and to our referrals sources, essentially to be a one-stop financing solution for the lower middle market,” Samson says, although he says that he expects both businesses to keep their own individual identities.

Even if they remain separate on an identity level, MidCap Equipment Finance and MidCap Business Credit will be far from siloed off from each other. In fact, Samson says the plan is for there to be a great deal of cross-pollination, with the equipment finance business leveraging the ABL business’ existing strengths in risk management and operations to amplify its results. There will also be plenty of cross-selling opportunities, which feeds right into the company’s “one-stop shop” goal as well as its desire to continue differentiating itself as customer-focused and responsive.

“Even though we’re growing, we are still a very flat organization and we can turn around a proposal or get to a closing, I think, faster and more efficient than anyone in the market,” Samson says. “And we hope to have that same timing and flexibility on the equipment finance side of the business going forward as we do on the ABL side of the business.”

According to Samson, the ability to cross-sell will also be a boon from a talent recruitment perspective, an exceptionally important differentiator given the current labor market.

“We need to increase opportunities and have opportunities across the platforms to attract talented young people into the business,” Samson says. “Bringing in another business line just increases those opportunities and makes it a more attractive place to work.”

A broader product offering will also help MidCap more efficiently use its capital, with the equipment finance side providing steadier outstandings than the sometimes less predictable ABL market, according to Samson.

Opportunity Awaits

Thanks to the experience on the roster, MidCap Equipment Finance isn’t going to try a bunch of different strategies to see what sticks. Instead, it will attack a specific part of the market while relying on the strengths of its team members when it comes to preferred industries and types of equipment financed. Shah says the company’s average ticket size will be $5 million, with the potential to go up to $20 million when working with leasing partners.

“When I examine the current marketplace, there are plenty of small-ticket lessors that have the capability to finance up to the $2 million range, and then it seems to me that larger independents are now looking for minimum $20 million to $25 million transactions,” Shah says. “That seems to create this nice opportunity for doing transactions somewhere between $5 million and $10 million.”

Shah and his team will also stick to their approach from prior experiences when it comes to the types of companies they work with, remaining largely industry-agnostic aside from avoiding direct oil and gas. The business will also be a generalist in terms of equipment, although it will likely do less in the IT, software and medical equipment sectors than others.

With internal funding targets in mind, Shah and his team are hard at work capitalizing on the immediately positive reception they’ve received from the market. In fact, at the Equipment Leasing and Finance Association’s National Funding Conference in April, Shah’s calendar was filled up, leaving him with plenty of new prospects and potential partnerships when he returned home. However, ultimately, Shah wants the company’s reputation to be built on its reliability rather than the growth of its pipeline.

“I’d like for customers to trust that we can deliver on our deals and I’d like lease brokers and financing partners to benefit from our speed, streamlined process and honesty,” Shah says. “I always think of repeat business as being a good indicator that you’re doing a good job on that front.”

Phil Neuffer is senior editor of Monitor.