Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity

In this episode of Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity, Andrew Pace sits down with Don Hansen, CEO at Regents Capital Corporation, to explore how an independent lender keeps its flexibility while scaling into an institutional platform. Don founded Regents in 2013 around a simple idea: customers bring their business reality, and Regents' job is to turn it into the right result. That approach, together with a generalist model that can finance a technology company one day and a pickle manufacturer the next, carried Regents to approximately $229 million in 2025 originations and a $133 million inaugural asset-backed securitization this year.

Don walks through the sequence behind that growth. Regents spent roughly its first decade building a direct end-user business. It then secured a significant warehouse facility and strengthened credit, servicing, and accounting before entering the vendor market, because vendor finance requires making every credit, funding, and documentation call in-house. He also explains how a proprietary scoring model handles the clear approvals and clear declines, so his credit team can focus on the deals where judgment actually changes the outcome.

The conversation also covers one of the biggest operational decisions in the company's history, which was bringing servicing back in-house after outsourcing it. Don is candid that the third-party arrangement had Regents spending more time auditing its provider than doing the work, and that a securitization demands every data point on demand. He makes the case that data management becomes a ceiling for independents who don't get it right, and that the $100 to $150 million range is where many of them stall.

Andrew and Don close on culture. They cover Regents' "go and take it" value, above-average employee tenure, a senior team led largely by women, and the Radical Candor framework Don uses to hold people accountable without losing them. For lenders weighing whether to stay at their current size or build an enterprise, it is a practical look at what the harder path requires.

Key Topics Discussed:

• The "turn your reality into results" philosophy and why flexibility is an independent's core advantage
• How a generalist approach across industries, geographies, and equipment types naturally balances portfolio concentration
• Using the strength of a credit to decide how much structural flexibility a deal can carry
• Building a direct end-user business first, then entering the vendor market once every decision could be made in-house
• The drivers behind approximately $229 million in 2025 originations
• Operating as a finance company first and a data-driven technology company second
• How a proprietary credit scoring model frees underwriters for the deals that need judgment
• Why Regents brought servicing back in-house and completed a system conversion during a record growth year
• Data readiness as a prerequisite for rating agencies, investors, and securitization
• The $100 to $150 million threshold and what it takes to scale past it
• Corporate values, employee tenure, and women in senior leadership
• Applying Radical Candor to accountability, and priorities heading into 2027

Notable Takeaways:

• On data as a growth limit: "If you don't have your data house in order, your ability to shape it, command it, report it, analyze it, it will become your ceiling."
• On credit scoring: "The scoring model optimizes, you know, the A's and eliminates the F's, so that what I'm doing is taking the skills of my credit team and applying them appropriately, right?"
• On entering the vendor market: "To properly support vendor-oriented financing, you need to make every decision related to the transaction, right? You can't be third party, you can't have other credit decisions, funding decisions, documentation. We need to be able to make every single call because that's the demands of the vendor marketplace."
• On scaling past $100 million: "Once you're on the other side of it, it's a flywheel, so getting from 100 to 200 was significant effort, but I think getting from 200 to 500 is not gonna be the same because I've built the infrastructure with our team to accommodate the scale."
• On technology: "I've always seen technology as a way of eliminating friction in the process."
• On culture: "The opportunity in the marketplace is there for us. Let's go and take it. The opportunity for growth within this company is there for us. We've got to go and take it."

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In this episode of Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity, Andrew Pace sits down with Brett Rondeau, Executive Vice President of Sales and Syndication at Universal Finance Corp., to explore how a construction-focused equity lender builds its syndication desk, broker network, and underwriting approach around customers who fall outside the traditional lending box.

Universal began as a New England lender with a set rate and a set term. That meant it regularly turned away deals it liked, or quoted strong customers a price they had no reason to accept. When Brett joined in June 2019, the goal was to build a syndication desk that could place those deals with other lenders, earn a fee, and give customers a better experience. After talking with roughly 40 lenders, the team now works consistently with three or four, and over the past year or so has moved further into true discounting with those repeat partners.

Brett brings the same approach to the broker side, where a uniform, repeatable process replaced a model in which the answer a broker got depended on which underwriter picked up the phone. He describes how the desk grew from one person to a small team, with about 65 percent growth in the first full year after adding a second person, and how industry associations, events, and work with the philanthropy committee have built the trust that keeps brokers coming back.

The center of the conversation is underwriting. Universal takes an equity position in nearly every deal, through a down payment or additional collateral. It will consider credit down to a 550 FICO and applies common sense judgment instead of hard age or mileage cutoffs. Brett explains how that structure lets customers put equipment they already own to work in place of cash, and how deep knowledge of construction equipment values, including what a repossessed piece actually brings after remarketing costs, keeps the underwriting disciplined. He also covers hiring and developing younger sales talent, the technology that gave a small team time back, and a closing round of Boston sports debates.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Building a syndication desk at a lender that originally lent only in New England
• Vetting lenders and narrowing to a small group of repeatable partners
• Moving from one-off syndications to a discount model
• Weighing loss leaders against the value of trust, speed, and rapport
• Creating a uniform process for the broker desk and growing it from one person to a team
• How AACFB, NEFA, and industry events build credibility with brokers
• Full Steam Ahead for Kids and the Chris Walker Education Fund
• Equity lending, additional collateral, and reducing down payments
• Common sense underwriting without hard age or mileage limits
• Why construction equipment specialization improves valuation and remarketing outcomes
• Hiring and developing younger sales talent in a collaborative culture
• Salesforce, pre-underwriting tools, and taking servicing back in house

Notable Takeaways:

• On loss leaders: "Every deal takes time, right? So is there something that we can get out of that deal if it's not money? If it's going to be a loss leader, are you getting trust? Are you showing speed? Are you developing rapport? If you can get one of those things out of it, I don't look at it as kind of a loss at all."
• On the gap in the market: "But that kind of CD range, I feel like there's a large fall off between certain independents that will lend, I don't know, up to whatever in certain rate ranges, and then there's a large drop off, and I think we kind of fit that gap a little bit."
• On down payments: "With just being able to take an additional piece of collateral, we can save them that down payment. They might not have that down payment, right? So you either forego that purchase or you can utilize equipment that you own outright."
• On the real value of a repossessed unit: "You can go in Kelly Blue Book and plug it in, it's going to tell you that it's worth this, but there's a cost to getting a piece, there's a cost to remarketing it, there's a cost to moving it to the yard, storage fees, all that stuff. And then what do you have, and how quick do you have to move it?"
• On hiring for a different model: "We're not a credit-based model, right? We're an equity position-based model. So to get somebody thinking that way is a little bit tough."

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In this episode of Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity, Andrew Pace sits down with Kareem Jernigan, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at LAI Fleet, to explore how a 68 year old fleet management company is modernizing its entire technology platform without losing the culture and service model that built its reputation.

For a company built on relationships and a workforce with decades of tenure, replacing a 40 year old legacy system is not just an IT project, it is an identity question. Kareem Jernigan, EVP and CFO at LAI Fleet, has spent the last three years leading exactly that kind of transformation, retiring a homegrown, end to end system that handles everything from prospecting to securitization in favor of a modern platform, without disrupting the culture that has kept employees at the company for 20, 30, even 50 years.

Kareem came to LAI Fleet in July 2020, stepping into an organization with an average employee tenure of 24 years and a leadership team, including a president with nearly four decades on the job, that had built the business on personal relationships and deep institutional knowledge. A CPA with an MBA from the University of Houston and a background in oil and gas before joining LAI Fleet, Kareem also served in the United States Marine Corps, an experience he credits with shaping his approach to discipline and accountability.

Kareem and talk through what it takes to de-risk a technology transition of this scale, how LAI Fleet has approached digitizing paper heavy processes without losing what makes the business unique, and how the company earns credibility with a long tenured, relationship driven workforce during periods of change. They also get into how LAI Fleet competes as a privately held, mid-market focused company against larger, efficiency driven competitors, and how Kareem manages residual risk across a fleet of tens of thousands of vehicles.

The conversation offers a candid look at what it actually takes to modernize decades of institutional process, how financial discipline holds up under real volatility, from COVID to supply chain disruption to rising rates, and what the expanding role of the modern CFO looks like in practice.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Replacing a 40 year old legacy system without losing company identity
• The technical debt that builds up in long running proprietary systems
• What going paperless actually means in vehicle leasing and fleet management
• Earning credibility as an external executive in a relationship driven organization
• Aligning incentives to support a major technology transformation
• Rebuilding the bench while managing retirements and institutional knowledge transfer
• The expanding scope of the modern CFO role
• Financial discipline and credit risk management through market volatility
• Competing as a privately held company in an underserved small and mid-size fleet market
• LAI Fleet's account executive as fleet manager service model
• Managing residual risk and vehicle liquidity in fleet leasing
• Defining personal and organizational success through succession

Notable Takeaways:

• On modernizing the legacy system: "It's not going to change who we are. This will allow us to become more of who we are."
• On process discipline: "Anywhere there's a lot of friction, it's not being done well."
• On discipline as a personal quality: "I think discipline is a personal quality and it's an inside-out job. It's something that comes from the individual that you project into and onto an organization."
• On serving an underserved market: "Less hassle, lower costs, more profit."
• On financial discipline through volatility: "Slow and steady wins the race."
• On systems and discipline: "We don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems."
• On defining success: "If my successor can step in and I can hand the baton to them and they can push the ball forward, that's how I'm defining success."

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In this episode of Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity, Andrew Pace sits down with Dan Levin, Co-Founder and CEO at Liventus, to explore how equipment finance leaders can cut through AI and technology hype to find what actually drives operational improvement.

Every lender and lessor today is hearing the same pitch: AI will transform your business, automation  will fix your workflows, digital transformation is no longer optional. Dan Levin has spent 25 years watching technology waves rise and fall, and he has a simple test for cutting through the noise: start with the problem, not the technology.

As Co-Founder and CEO of Liventus, a technology modernization and automation company with more than 150 employees across the United States and India, Levin has built his career helping organizations separate meaningful innovation from technology hype. His company is known in equipment finance for CreditMind, an AI-powered credit decision platform, and for its acquisition of Tamarack Technology earlier this year.

Levin and Andrew Pace dig into the discipline behind good technology decisions: why teams chase features instead of solving workflow problems, why automating a broken process only creates automated chaos, and why "custom" has shifted from a red flag to a competitive advantage in the AI era. Levin also walks through the guardrails he puts around AI adoption, from keeping humans in the loop to avoiding what he calls "AI theater," tools that look impressive in a demo but never move the needle.

The conversation also turns personal, as Levin talks about leading through rapid technology change, balancing entrepreneurship with family, and his work with the EB Research Partnership, a venture philanthropy model funding research into a rare and painful genetic disease. It's a conversation for anyone trying to figure out which technology investments are worth making, and which ones are just noise.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Separating real technology problems from feature chasing
• Why automating broken workflows just creates automated chaos
• Measuring true efficiency gains versus emotional reactions to demos
• Build-versus-buy decisions and where proprietary technology creates competitive advantage
• Why technology "ages in dog years" and how to stay ahead of it
• Guardrails for responsible AI adoption, including human oversight and avoiding "AI theater"
• Leading teams through rapid technology change with education over hype
• The role of context and institutional knowledge in AI performance
• Balancing entrepreneurship, travel, and family as a growing company scales
• ADHD, leadership style, and turning perceived weaknesses into strengths
• Liventus's growth, CreditMind, and the acquisition of Tamarack Technology
• Venture philanthropy and Levin's work with the EB Research Partnership

Notable Takeaways:

• On why automating a broken process makes things worse, not better: "Automating a process that's broken will just amplify what's broken. Chaos on top of chaos is just faster chaos. Automated chaos."
• On what AI is actually working with if you skip the groundwork: "A model that has no institutional memory and not enough institutional knowledge is just a very smart stranger."
• On what happens to technology you stop investing in: "Static systems that you're not constantly improving on, they age like milk. They just get stale, and then they smell really bad."
• On the real risk of buying whatever everyone else is buying: "If everybody's using the same generic off-the-shelf stuff, then you're no different than everybody else."
• On how to tell a real efficiency gain from a shiny distraction: "Real gains are going to tie to something that's already tracked."
• On turning a perceived weakness into a leadership edge: "If you can learn how to control it, and you learn how to take all these ideas that are nonstop going in your head and filter them and use them to your advantage, then it can almost be a superpower."
• On the standard he holds Liventus to as a technology partner: "I want to partner with you, get to know you, understand your problems. We're going to come in and help solve those with technology and be your technology partner. That's how I've built it for 25 years."

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In this episode of Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity, Andrew Pace sits down with Mark Lacek, a nearly five-decade veteran of the recovery industry and one of the most frequently retained expert witnesses in wrongful repossession litigation, to explore what actually goes wrong in the field and how much of it traces back to decisions made at the lender level.

Mark performed his first repossession in 1978, back when the work meant Slim Jims and hot-wiring rather than self-loaders and license plate recognition. He built a leading recovery operation, served as president of his state association, founded Professional Repossessor Magazine, and authored the Commercial Recovery Agent Certification Program, which has certified roughly 700 agents to date. Today he reviews case files for plaintiff and defense counsel alike, and he is direct about where he sits: not on anyone's side, only on the side of the facts.

The conversation moves from the fundamentals of self-help versus judicial repossession into the places where those fundamentals break down. Mark explains why any objection to a repossession, verbal or nonverbal, triggers an immediate duty to retreat, and why contingency fee structures quietly push agents to keep going anyway. He walks through the litigation he currently has on his desk, the pattern he sees behind most of it, and why he puts a meaningful share of the blame on lenders who select vendors on price rather than on certification, insurance, training, and facilities. Andrew brings the commercial and equipment side into the discussion, including a case where an agent was ordered by police to drop a loaded machine on a public street, and the two of them work through what a real strategic partner looks like versus a vendor who simply pushes assignments out the door.

For anyone running a portfolio where recovery is part of the process, this is a look at the downstream consequences of upstream decisions. Mark's closing argument is that this is not a culture problem, it is a training and accountability problem, and that the fix starts with treating safety as a higher priority than the bottom line.

Key Topics Discussed:

• How the recovery industry has changed across five decades of field experience
• Self-help versus judicial repossession and where the legal lines actually sit
• Breach of the peace, the duty to retreat, and why nonverbal objections carry the same weight
• How contingency fee structures influence behavior in the field
• The real cost of selecting recovery vendors on price alone
• Dual assignments and the risk created when two agents work the same account
• Vendor vetting, certification, insurance coverage, and facility standards
• Lender liability for the actions of their vendors and forwarders
• Contracts that get signed but never enforced, and how that surfaces in discovery
• The evolving role of forwarders and what separates a strategic partner from a pass-through
• Camera and body cam technology as both defense and liability
• Applying FDCPA principles as a guide on commercial accounts

Notable Takeaways:

• On why lender vendor selection is the root of so much litigation: "They're trying to save money. And they don't understand that saving $1,000 on a repo could be paying a $5 million settlement a couple of years down the road. I've seen it happen."
• On where liability lands when a vendor gets it wrong: "And now he's going to say, well, I'm not responsible for what he does. But yes, you are. Courts have ruled across the country, across the board. A lender is responsible for the actions of their vendor. That's all there is to it."
• On what a nonverbal objection looks like in practice, and why it matters: "Because I've worked a dozen cases where the repossessor saw the guy running alongside of the car, the consumer, whether he grabbed under the door or he just kept on going, and the consumer ended up getting run over and killed. That's a nonverbal objection."
• On how contingency structures change behavior in the field: "Facts show sources explain that a repossessor will take more chances. He'll take more risks if he knows he's not going to get paid unless he gets the vehicle."
• On the emotional reality behind an objection: "He didn't say to himself, I'm going to chase that truck. That was an emotional reaction. He looked, somebody was taking his stuff. It was something clicked in his brain."
• On what certification actually buys a lender in a deposition: "You damn well should understand the knowledge and understand the test that you took and every part of it that you read. But if you don't follow those professional standards and guidelines, you're going to get in trouble. And someone's going to get hurt."
• On the final tradeoff lenders control: "You got to be able to adjust that bottom line where safety is a higher priority than profit."

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In this episode of Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity, Andrew Pace sits down with Mike Toglia, founder and publisher of Equipment Finance Advisor and ABL Advisor, to explore how three decades inside the industry, from credit analyst to national sales leader to capital markets executive, now shape how he covers it from the outside.

Mike walks through the arc of his career, starting as a formally trained credit analyst at Fidelity Bank, moving through GE Capital, and eventually running a $600 million equipment finance unit as National Sales Manager at Textron Financial before shifting into capital markets. That foundation, he explains, is what let him build Equipment Finance Advisor into one of the industry's most-read independent publications, now marking its 15th year, with ACS among its earliest supporters.

The conversation digs into what he calls the "two-minute business": the discipline of delivering a daily e-newsletter that readers can process before their day starts, and why that format has stayed largely unchanged even as attention spans and reader sophistication have shifted. Mike also speaks candidly about the trust required to balance readers and advertisers, and why turning down stories that would drive clicks but damage credibility is part of protecting that trust.

The episode closes with Mike's read on where the industry is headed: rising AI adoption among service providers, growing collaboration between equipment finance and working capital solutions, and a younger, more digitally fluent generation entering the field. Andrew and Mike also settle a long-running debate on whether credit or sales should drive a lending culture.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Mike's career path across credit, sales, and capital markets
• The founding and growth of Equipment Finance Advisor and ABL Advisor
• Publishing strategy and the "two-minute business" model
• How reader habits and industry demographics have evolved
• Trust and credibility between publishers, readers, and advertisers
• AI adoption trends across equipment finance
• The rise of private credit and private equity in the space
• Collaboration between equipment finance and working capital solutions
• The role of third-party service providers in portfolio management
• Credit culture versus sales culture in lending organizations
• Long-term outlook and resilience across market cycles

Notable Takeaways:

• On why his credit background made him better at sales: Toglia credits his formal credit training as the foundation for everything that came after. "Being a credit person made me a hundred times better of a business development person. It just did, because I could sit across the desk from a CFO, and I could still do it today, because you don't forget what you learned."
• On AI adoption across the industry: Toglia sees a clear divide forming between companies investing in AI now and those waiting it out. "The companies who aren't looking at AI today and aren't considering it or investing in it today are going to be left behind."
• On rejecting the word "resilient": Toglia pushes back on the industry's go-to description of itself, offering a sharper one. "I don't like to use the word resilient because everyone uses the term resilient when they talk about this industry. It's not a survivor. It's a warrior, this industry."
• On the credit-versus-sales culture debate: Asked to pick a side, Toglia lands firmly in the middle. "If you don't have a strong credit culture and you don't have the business development side of it respecting that culture and trusting that culture, then you're going to fail. And if you have purely a sales side that's running the business and not paying attention to what the credit teams and risk management people are telling you, you just can't get there."

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In this episode of Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity, Andrew Pace sits down with Daryn Lecy, CLFP, MBA, Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President at Oakmont Capital Services, to explore what it actually takes to scale an equipment finance company the right way.

Oakmont's growth story is not typical. In 2018, Daryn and his team joined Oakmont's Minnesota office as an 11-person operation. Today, the company is approaching 100 employees across two offices. That kind of growth doesn't happen by accident, and Daryn is direct about what drove it: culture first, relationships second, and operational discipline throughout.

The conversation goes deep on what Oakmont's high-tech, high-touch model looks like at the transaction level, how the company balances credit discipline with sales momentum, and how they approach fraud risk without letting caution kill speed. Daryn also shares where Oakmont is in its AI journey, including a credit-side pilot that is already shaving meaningful time off the underwriting process while keeping human decision-making exactly where it belongs.

For equipment finance professionals thinking about scale, culture, portfolio health, or where independent lessors are headed over the next few years, this conversation has a lot of practical ground to cover.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Growing from 11 to nearly 100 employees and what the early culture-building decisions actually looked like
• How Oakmont operationalizes low employee attrition and why listening matters more than talking
• Balancing credit discipline, operational efficiency, and sales momentum without sacrificing any one of them
• Asset class concentration strategy across compact construction, landscaping, and last-mile delivery
• Geographic diversification across all 50 states and how they monitor for early warning signals in the portfolio
• The high-tech, high-touch model in practice: remote online notary, flexible application channels, and keeping a human available when it matters
• Fraud risk management and maintaining speed without blind spots
• AI implementation in the credit workflow: how Oakmont piloted it, validated it, and what they learned
• Referral growth driven by operational execution, including competitors directing business their way
• Where independent lessors are positioned over the next three to five years and what keeps the opportunity alive

Notable Takeaways:

"Culture is most important to us. We can teach you this business. It's not rocket science. We just want to make sure you fit in with the environment that we have."

"Speed is how we win deals."

"We want to make sure we're not just using it because we think it's easier, that it actually is going to make life easier in the long run."

"We ran them concurrently, the manual process plus the AI process, and are we finding we're getting the same things? Is there any hallucinations that are happening, stuff that we might be missing?"

"There's always gold in the files that you have in front of you to ease your acquisition costs."

"Independents will be able to move at a pace that, as long as they continue to keep up with technology, there's going to remain opportunities there for a long time."

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In this episode of Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity, Andrew Pace sits down with Bruce Brandon, Vice President of Indirect Business Development and Training at TCS Equipment Finance, to explore how trust, credit discipline, and vendor relationships shape deal flow in the middle market broker channel.

Most brokers spend their careers in small ticket, app-only territory, where a credit score and a Paydex number get a deal approved in 24 hours. Then, once or twice a year, a $500,000 or $1 million opportunity lands on their desk, and the playbook that worked for everything else stops working. Bruce Brandon has built his role at TCS around that exact moment.

Bruce is a 25-year veteran of the equipment finance industry, with leadership experience at Onset Financial, Pacific Western Bank, Marquette Equipment Finance, and Bank Financial in Chicago, and a track record of generating well over $100 million in new business over his career. At TCS, he runs national indirect business development through brokers, vendors, and manufacturers in the $300,000 to $30 million middle market, while also training the firm's new salespeople.

The conversation covers a lot of ground: why vetting a broker and vetting a transaction are two completely different processes, what separates audited financials from reviewed and compiled statements and why that distinction changes how fast a deal can move, and what TCS learned from the trucking downturn about how quickly asset values can turn against a lender. Bruce also gets into the vendor side of the business, where relationships often live with a single salesperson rather than a company, and why that makes vendor-sourced deals harder to predict than they look.

Bruce is direct about where speed comes from and where it doesn't. Deals backed by audited financials move quickly. Deals backed only by tax returns don't, and he'd rather tell a broker that upfront than promise a turnaround he can't deliver.

Key Topics Discussed:

• TCS's focus on the $300,000 to $30 million middle market and why that range is underserved by both brokers and large institutional lenders
• The difference between vetting a broker and vetting a transaction, and why they require separate processes
• Why full underwriting on larger deals looks nothing like a 24-hour app-only approval
• The spectrum of financial statements: audited, reviewed, and compiled, and what each costs and signals to an underwriter
• Lessons TCS took from the trucking downturn and how asset value risk shows up in a default
• Why specialty and mission-critical equipment carries more intrinsic value to a lender than commodity assets like standard tractors and trailers
• How vendor relationships function differently than broker relationships, and why they're often tied to one person rather than the company
• What happens when a vendor pressures a broker for financing speed that credit realities can't support
• How TCS's approach to broker communication has evolved toward more upfront honesty about turnaround times
• What separates experienced brokers from newer ones when it comes to preparing a submission
• Advice for brokers who want to move consistently into middle market deal flow
• Why face-to-face relationship building at industry events still outperforms transactional swag and giveaways

Notable Takeaways:

"There's a difference between vetting the broker and vetting the transaction. The transaction vetting is easy. What are their revenues? Are they profitable? And do they debt service? Those are kind of three initial criteria right out of the gate."

"If you have to go through and spread compiled information, you kind of have to come to your own conclusions. Whereas an audit, you can trust the numbers. It's right there. There's not much you have to do at all because it's right there."

"So here you are two years into a five-year lease, repossessing these assets that have completely depleted in value. And that's how companies go out of business. And once you do one or two of those transactions that get into that space, if you survive it, you'll never do it again."

"The specialty trucks have more intrinsic value to us as a lender, because we know that the company, if things go bad, if they're going to try to salvage the business, they're going to want to make their payments on those things to keep the business running."

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In this episode of ACS Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity, Andrew Pace sits down with Chad Sluss, CEO of the National Equipment Finance Association (NEFA), to get an honest read on where the industry stands and where one of its most important associations is headed next.

Chad came into the NEFA role in September 2020, stepping into a job where the core value proposition had just been dismantled by the pandemic. What followed was a multi-year rebuild, not just restoring what existed before, but rethinking what a modern equipment finance association should actually do for its members. Under his leadership, NEFA's membership has grown from roughly 265 companies to over 400.

In this conversation, Chad walks through the career that shaped how he leads, spanning food service, state bar associations, home building, and an international legal network operating across 52 countries. That kind of cross-industry experience doesn't produce a specialist. It produces someone who knows how to read a room, identify what's missing, and build something that lasts.

The conversation covers what Chad is hearing from NEFA members right now about deal flow, credit conditions, and equipment demand. It also gets into the association's education build-out, the global connections NEFA is forming with counterpart organizations in Australia, Canada, and Europe, and how Chad is thinking about the next strategic planning cycle. If you want an honest read on where the equipment finance industry is and where it's headed, this is a good place to start.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Chad's nonlinear career path and the transferable leadership skills it produced
• Joining NEFA in September 2020 and the immediate pivot to virtual programming
• How NEFA restructured its in-person conference experience coming out of the pandemic
• Programming across three distinct member segments: funding sources, broker lessors, and service providers
• What NEFA members are saying right now about deal flow, credit conditions, and equipment demand
• Transportation as a challenged asset class and the cautious optimism emerging around it
• The economist at NEFA's spring conference, the AI investment tailwind, and demographic concerns on the horizon
• NEFA's education portfolio: 70-plus hours of online content, monthly knowledge exchange roundtables, and a four-part AI and technology series
• The CEO roundtable with counterpart associations in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Canada, and Europe
• The MOU with an Australian broker association and the cross-border business it's already generating
• How NEFA is thinking about the next generation of equipment finance professionals
• The 2027-2029 strategic planning cycle and the member town halls that will shape it

Notable Takeaways:

"This industry is on the tip of either a really booming economy or a downturn."

"I think the demand is out there. It's just people have to work harder to get the business owners to move forward with deals."

"Business should sort of come first. All the other stuff is just noise."

"Six, seven years ago, I didn't know anything about this industry. I was blown away how large it is, and the opportunities."

"If we know what people want, we can make it happen."

"We need to continue to look ahead and try and anticipate what our members are going to be facing from challenges and then also opportunities."

Subscribe to Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity for more industry insights and field-tested strategies.

For more information, visit Asset Compliant Solutions.

In this episode of Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity, Andrew Pace sits down with Erik Anderson, Chief Credit Officer at Northland Capital, to explore how disciplined credit strategy, strong relationships, and continuous evolution have fueled long-term growth.

Erik shares his unconventional path into equipment finance, starting as a credit analyst during the 2008 financial crisis and growing into a leadership role overseeing a $1B+ portfolio. He breaks down how Northland scaled its business through syndication, allowing its sales team to compete more effectively while maintaining underwriting discipline.

The conversation dives into navigating multiple credit cycles, building a resilient portfolio through diversification, and why volatility often creates opportunity for well-positioned lenders. Erik also offers insight into building a strong credit culture rooted in accountability, ownership, and continuous improvement.

From process and portfolio strategy to leadership philosophy, this episode delivers practical insights for anyone looking to better understand risk, growth, and long-term success in equipment finance.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Erik’s path from actuarial science to equipment finance
• Lessons from entering the industry during the 2008 financial crisis
• Building and scaling Northland’s syndication platform
• How syndication unlocked growth and competitive positioning
• Managing portfolio risk across multiple economic cycles
• The importance of diversification across industries and asset classes
• Navigating today’s macro environment, including rates and tariffs
• Credit discipline vs. growth pressure
• Building a high-performing credit team and culture
• Extreme ownership and learning from losses
• The role of relationships in credit and syndication success

Notable Takeaways:

“You make a decision today, and you won’t know if you’re right for two years.”

“Volatility creates opportunity if you’re in the right position.”

“Bad loans are made in good times. That’s just what it is.”

“Diversification is the number one.”

“We got to say yes more often—and that changed everything.”

“You live to play another day.”

“Not one of us is bigger than the game itself.”

“If we’re not lending it, then we’re not aggressive enough.”

Subscribe to Portfolio Perspective: Managing Risk & Seizing Opportunity for more industry insights and field-tested strategies.

For more information, visit Asset Compliant Solutions.