Introduction
Moving to an advanced leasing or even As-A-Service program is very often a challenge for all the parties involved. Making this journey from a transactional business model to a subscription one requires a holistic view of the way a vendor will structure his offer, sell it and deliver it. We have noticed along our discussions with the members of Lease Europe that the challenges faced are shared and recognized. In other words, as a Funder, do you:
● Want to boost your vendor programs revenue and profitability?
● Aim to onboard your vendors' sales teams?
● Wish to align your targeted customers with the vendor ones?
● Expect your vendors to provide a trustable pipeline?
● Want to industrialize the processes and reduce the administrative burden?
● Looking to monitor associated risks around services and usage in order to becompetitive?
● Crave to be one step ahead from competition?
By the way, those challenges are mirrored when it comes to the vendor you partner with. They often struggle to change their perspective on their market. The ambitions set at the start of the programs are not met nor aligned with the investments made by yourself andy our vendor.
From all manufacturers and integrators we interact with, we activate the drive to astronger implementation of a program by aiming to answer the following moves.
As a manufacturer or integrator do you:
● Want a flexible solution for your customers?
● Want to give them access to your newest products in real time?
● Want to increase engagement with your customers?
● Want to develop predictable, stable income streams at scale?
● Take your first step into the Circular Economy?
Sounds familiar? This situation often witnessed by the founders of Black Winch, all along their careers, is the basis of the services and expertise they decided to combine into one offer for yourselves and your vendors.
Our vision
Black Winch helps your vendors to stay in tune with structural market shifts.
We design and implement a successful, scalable and circular, leasing or As-A-Service business, bringing value to your end-users and stakeholders.
The Black Winch team of Experts hold over 20 years’ industry experience, specialising in leasing and As-A-Service challenges and solutions. With a proven methodology and a results-driven, hands-on team, In 2021, our daily impact on leasing and As-A-Serviceprograms totaled 3 B°$ revenue with a geographical coverage in Europe and North America.
Our methodology, your success
Pulling on our years of experience, Black Winch has designed for your vendors a successful, scalable As-A-Service business model with 8 focus areas:
From financing to As-A-Service
As-A-Service recently became a buzzword that is bandied about at every board meeting: it’s become the holy grail of new business models – although the concept itself remains somewhat nebulous.
Board members of companies want to make it happen, because it generates recurring revenue, helps retain clients and increases shareholders value. Customers, meanwhile, want it because they prefer to just use a product or solution without the hassle and expense that come with ownership. In both cases, the term is used to cover a multitude of ideas, ranging from a basic lease to a full flexible subscription model. It’s not the As-A-Service model itself that’s new, but the areas and industry sectors it’s being applied to – ones that were unthinkable until recently.
Although it seems that everybody wants As-A-Service, between C-level and the customers, there’s the layer of management and their operational teams who have to put it in place. They have to tackle the challenge of defining what is or isn’t included in the As-A-Service offering before they implement it – regardless of the legacy culture of the company and its associated resistance.
The most successful players about As-A-Service are either start ups with no legacy or existing programs that have matured from equipment finance to As-A-Service, as a result of a long journey that started decades ago.
Looking in the rear view mirror back to the 80’s, we experience the evolution of financing assets. We have tried to summarise 4 decades in 4 steps :
1. The initial solutions offered were provided by financial institutions. Remember, we were talking about Equipment finance.
2. Then Independent players entered the market with their capacity to take residual values.
3. Services provided by manufacturers and integrators were added to standard leasing offers.
4. Finally came the only flexible and performance driven solution of As-A-Service, the future of business.
Connecting the dots: As-A-Service and Circularity
The As-A-Service business model is definitely a strong contributor to the circular economy thanks to the centralization of ownership. The product's life cycle is in the hands of the manufacturer or integrator, which guarantees that the end of life is taken care of: reuse,recycling, refurbished.
Sustainability is part of Black Winch’s values, and the company’s governance reflects its CSR ambitions. As a base for our CSR activities and objectives, we used the 17 United Nations Sustainability Goals. We carefully selected four particular goals as our focus areas because they are strongly linked to our business model and our everyday activities.
● Sustainable industrialization (objective 9: industry, innovation and infrastructure)
● Natural resources (objective 13: climate action)
● Sharing (objective 17: partnerships for the goals)
● Sustainable society (objective 12: responsible consumption and production)
I am convinced that entrepreneurs who use the As-A-Service model, including hardware, will be the pioneers of the circular economy. Manufacturers can find a solution in the subscription model to offer usership instead of ownership, and therefore retain ownership of the equipment they produce. Thus their stock of raw materials will no longer be in the ground but in the products they make available to their users, and which they will one day see again, therefore activating Urban mining.
Such a scenario might seem naive: we’ve met plenty of manufacturers who dream of subscription models, switching to usership and circular management of their production process. But we’ve yet to see more than a few take the plunge!
