The terrific trio

They’ve seen British leasing develop
from a tax advantage product into a multi-billion pound industry,
watched recessions come and go like bad weather, and marveled at
the raw leasing acumen of Ringo Starr.

Alastair Lawson, Tony Hewett and
Steve Dexter are three of the five men behind Lease UK, a brokerage
that has not only grown steadily since its inception in 1994, but
maintained that most intangible of assets in a market where brokers
are under such great pressure: a reputation for integrity.

Century of experience

With more than a century of leasing
and brokering experience between them, there’s not much they
haven’t seen – so what do they make of the leasing game in
2009?

Leasing Life finds out in a
brand new building just five minutes from Sandown Park racecourse
in Esher, the genteel Surrey village where chairman and controlling
shareholder Alastair Lawson founded his first business, Lease
Management Services, in 1972.

“Back in 1972 you had a far more
conservative business climate than you have today,” explains Lawson
briskly. “Companies worked on the basis that you purchased
everything outright, and leasing never would have grown as fast as
it did on the basis of cost benefit alone.”

“But” he says, breaking into a slow
smile, “when you have a finance director faced with the benefits of
100 percent capital allowances, and the ability to set lease
rentals against much higher rates of corporation tax than exist
now, you find that a company can very easily be convinced to change
culture.”

Lawson believes that leasing business
as a proportion of UK capital investment achieved almost all of its
growth during the tax-crazed 1970s and early 1980s.

Building on the tale, the three
directors are soon extremely animated in reminiscing about the
“brass plaque” leasing companies that sprang up to provide tax
relief to individuals such as Beatle Ringo Starr, whose accountant
was behind the formation of the wonderfully named Cavity
Leasing.

But despite the faintly insane timbre
of the market, there was serious work going on. Lawson built LMS up
into one of the leading sales aid lessors in the UK, and was joined
there in 1983 by Tony Hewett, who had come from a branch manager
position at Schroder Leasing to take on the role of national sales
manager.

LMS was bought by the Woodchester
group in 1992, after which Lawson and Hewett, now firm friends,
found that the firm’s culture had changed significantly.

Before long, they were talking with
underwriting wizard John O’Reilly and professions finance
specialist Tim Gammon about breaking away to start their own
leasing company.

Planning a leasing startup at the tail
end of a recession was a thorny proposition, especially with the
rising cost of litigation on collections, and the prospect of
setting up as a funder began to seem more trouble than it was
worth.

“We were very reluctant to start up a
new leasing principle business,” says Lawson, “and it involved
pledging an awful lot of capital. However, the nature of the market
was changing, and we could see that the flexibility presented by a
broker model was clearly the future.”

So what changed their mind?

“Well, we had a bit of good luck”
explains Hewett, talking about his time on the FLA’s nascent Small
Ticket Committee, which had been set up initially to clean up
documentation in the copier leasing industry.

“For the sake of decision making, the
committee was fully made up of leasing company MDs, so that
decisions could be made on the spot. Alastair and I had been on it
at separate times, and Alastair knew a lot of these people already.
Before long, it occurred to me that we both knew all the industry’s
top brass. Brokering is a people business, and we certainly knew
the people.”

And so Lawson, Hewitt, Gammon and
O’Reilly founded Lease UK as a pure broker in 1995.

Final piece of the
puzzle

The final piece of the puzzle fell
into place later in that year, with the arrival of current sales
director Steve Dexter, who had worked with the others as an area
sales manager at Woodchester.

Dexter, an ex-Royal Marine who comes
across with genuine enthusiasm when talking about the ins and outs
of his business, brought a very clear set of convictions about
setting up a sales aid process, and these principles have driven
Lease UK’s business right through to 2009.

The conversation wanders through
several points of broker sales strategy: the value of sector
expertise in a business introducer, the relationship between a
broker and a lessor in the due diligence process, and the
importance of convincing a vendor to embrace the leasing mindset at
director level before training sales staff.

Technicalities aside, Dexter finishes
with a point that is as relevant now as it was in 1994, or
1984.

“As a broker, you’re only ever as good
as the supplier you introduce,” he says. “No matter what volumes
are on offer, you can only be sure to write good business once you,
and the lessor, can be sure that the supplier is making respectable
sales.”

Dexter makes the point that his
colleagues made in telling the company’s history – whatever the
importance and the attraction of big numbers, lease brokering is
essentially a business about knowing people, and about getting the
measure of people.

Judging the directors of Lease UK on
that basis, it would seem they have a lot more business, and
history, left to write.

• 1968 Alastair Lawson
joins Credit Insurance Association as credit and insurance
manager.

• 1970 Tony Hewett joins
Lombard North Central as collections rep

• 1972 Lawson founds
Lease
Management Services

• 1979 Steve Dexter enrols
in Royal Marines

• 1983 Hewett joins LMS,
meets
Lawson

• 1987 Dexter joins
LMS

• 1988 Lawson becomes
director of Brown Shipley & Co, owner
of LMS

• 1992 Woodchester buys
LMS

• 1994 Lease UK
founded

• 1995 Dexter convinced to
join Lease UK