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In this insightful episode of Mission Matters, host Adam Torres welcomes back Ed Hetherington, a seasoned leader with over 50 years in the leasing and financing industry, to celebrate his contribution to Mission Matters Volume 11. Together, they explore Ed’s signature decision-making philosophy—the 360 Review—and how it can help entrepreneurs, executives, and financial leaders evaluate opportunities with clarity and depth.
Ed also shares his reflections on industry evolution, the importance of asking hard questions early, and how businesses can use financing to drive sales by selling payment, not price. This conversation is a masterclass in strategic thinking, risk management, and long-term value creation.
Mission Matters: Mission-Based Leaders Share Inspiring Stories on Leadership and Success (Business Leaders Edition Vol 11)
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About Ed Hetherington
Ed Hetherington is the President of Hetherington Advisors, LLC, an Atlanta-based consultancy specializing in execution, innovation, and technology solutions for equipment financing and leasing companies. With over 50 years of experience in the equipment financing industry, Ed has held significant roles, including 20 years as President and Senior Advisor of Doosan Financial Solutions.
Throughout his career, Ed has been involved in various aspects of the equipment leasing and financing industry. The first 30 years were spent as both a third-party lender and a lending partner to manufacturers and franchisors. In the subsequent 20 years, he led a successful captive global finance company for a leading equipment manufacturer, financing billions of dollars annually through diverse financial products across over 40 countries.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show. Just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. Alright, so this episode right here is a year, a year and a half in the making. I have Ed Hetherington on the show, and I’m proud to announce that we recently released our 11th edition of Mission Matters.
Volume 11. It seems like just the other day we were on volume one or Volume zero for that matter. First off, ed, congrats and welcome back to the show. So good to see you. Good to see you. Glad to be with you. All right, so you got, you got the book over there. Hold it up, man. Come on. We gotta, how do you feel?
Brand new author in our mission, our bestselling mission matters books. Here is, how do you feel? Actually, I’m very pleased the way it came out. It was an interesting experience and you know, it’s something I probably wanna do more of. It’s awesome. I well, we’re definitely gonna do a deep dive. Ve your chapter, your writing and your work of course.
And for the new listeners that maybe didn’t catch some of the, our previous work together, we’ll get into your backstory as well. But to start, get us started, we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So, ed, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives and experts.
That’s what we do. Ed, what mission matters to you? Well, I think it’s similar. You know, I’ve been in the industry 51 years and you know, over those 51 years there’s been a lot of change, especially in the last, you know, 20 years change is happening at such a rapid pace. Hmm. So you know, I really enjoy comparing to what it was in 1973 as compared to what is in 2025, and sharing some of those experiences with people that are really just starting their career, you know, in the last five or even 10 years.
Yeah, it’s awesome. Love bringing mission-based individuals on the line to share, you know, why they do what they do, how they’re doing it, and really what we can all learn from that. So we grow together. So great, great to have you back on and for everybody watching that hasn’t picked up a copy of the book yet, Ed’s actually in two different chapters.
So we got, we got a bunch to talk about here today. Ed, I wanna start with your chapter first off, so make sure I get it right. So when presented with an opportunity, remember the three. 60 review lots of things you could have written about, like, talk a little bit more about why you chose this angle.
Well, I use 360 review quite a bit when discussing almost anything in business and even in personal life. I kind of related to if you remember in Old World War II movies when you see submariners. Yeah. Looking at a screen, a sonar screen, and you see the blip going around the circle, you know, looking for targets in front and side and in the back.
And so, you know, one of the things I, you know, talk about a lot is doing a 360 because, you know, as you look at any opportunity mm-hmm. As you look at any problem you wanna make sure you’re looking at it. From all different angles, you know? So what’s in front of you? What’s on the side of you? What’s behind you?
Yeah. So without doing the 360, I think you miss a lot and sometimes, you know, people just get, look, look at the opportunity for the opportunity’s sake. Yeah. And don’t really evaluate the risk. Or the assets that might be needed to deliver on the opportunity. And so it’s really just saying, you know, be complete.
Do the complete due diligence. Mm-hmm. The next thing I usually say is a, make sure you ask that next question. Hmm. And by that I mean that next question is usually the question. Sometimes you don’t want to ask because you think it might be the negative Yeah. That you don’t really want. But it’s better to ask that next question early on in any process because that will help you make the true evaluation.
So, you know, the 360 is an important. Part of the way I look at things, especially in the business world. Yeah. Take me through like, like, okay, so I’m watching this podcast for the first time. I’m learning this concept and I’m like, and obviously I want everybody to pick up a copy of the book. We’ll have a link in the show notes, so you can do that.
But take me through what this could look like, and it doesn’t have to be a real world example, or it could be, or fictitious, whatever, but like take me through an example of this is the first time I’m getting introduced to this concept. Now where do I start? Well, you know, the first thing is, you know, you evaluate the opportunity and so you know.
You put down the things that you hope to gain if you proceed with this. Mm-hmm. But then, you know, you gotta look at, okay, what’s the risk from stopping me for that opportunity to become a reality? Yeah. And so, you know, you ask questions like is this scalable? Is it something that’s more of a one-time event?
Or is this something that’s repeatable? So, you know, it’s really coming up with a laundry list of questions and approaching it not only from the sales angle, but from an operations angle, from a credit risk angle, from a cost, the capital angle. Yeah. So it’s, it’s really making sure you’re asking, you know, the questions that will get you to the right answer.
And sometimes the answer is not what you hoped it to be. Yeah. Because it could mean you know, that you pass on that opportunity. Or after the further evaluation, that opportunity really wasn’t as good as you thought it would be, or at least the risk outweigh the rewards. Hmm. It’s really a due diligence model.
Mm-hmm. But it, it’s really forcing you to understand what you’re getting into. Why are you getting into it? Maybe even having some stage gates to prove out some of the concepts. Mm-hmm. But you know, it’s the complete due diligence, you know, which, you know, I think is very important. And my business revolves around credit and risk.
So, you know, you know, I don’t wanna say it’s more important ’cause I think it’s more, it’s important for everybody, but yeah, it’s, it’s a prime importance when you’re dealing with credit risk. Hmm. So speaking about your business, let’s go a little bit further into Hetherington Advisors LLC. Maybe talk a little bit more about your work today.
Yeah, so today, you know I technically retired a few years ago and found out pretty busy for retiring, man. Well, I found that very quickly. My golf game is terrible and after 50 years it’s not gonna get any better. I don’t like woodworking. I don’t like gardening. So I went back to what I like to do, which is planning and the leasing and financing business and really just concentrated on strategy, you know, and really pushing change.
Mm-hmm. A lot of times the industry has been accused of not changing, you know, quickly enough. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, I wanna use some of the experiences I had. But also use embrace change. Mm-hmm. So, you know, you would look at somebody, you know, like myself as somebody who, you know, wouldn’t embrace change.
But one thing I learned, especially in business if you don’t like change, you’re gonna like irrelevance even less. So you know, so I’m a big believer in change, and I think change should come from experience also. Mm-hmm. So, you know, that’s really what, you know, Hetherington advisors does. Mm-hmm.
And we work with finance companies, we work with manufacturers, we work with dealers mm-hmm. And helping them use financing to help sell equipment, help gain greater customer acceptance of their product. Mm-hmm. Create a stickiness with their customers. And really it comes down to what. We call selling payment and not price as being the key principle of using financing to help sell equipment.
Hmm. And what would you say to the, I like to ask a pay it forward question when I can. So the, the next group of entrepreneurs that wanna get into this business or, or in general, that wanna get into the equipment side of things and leasing and financing. And I know when you shared some stories about how you originally, when our previous episode, how you originally got started, way back when, I think tow truck or something.
I, I’m a little hazy on the exact details, but how, how would you suggest that somebody new gets started nowadays? Well, it, it’s different because, you know, 51 years ago you typically started in collections. Mm-hmm. And you really learned the business from collection. Then you might go into credit where you actually proving deals, you know, get some operational experience.
And then possibly at that point, after, you know, three to five years, you would start to make some decisions. You know, what you want your permanent track to be, whether it be operations, sales, marketing you know, and so that gave us a great benefit. You know, that, you know, today we don’t have, because today many people wanna start, if not at the vice pre president level.
At least at the vice president level. Yeah. And so, so they don’t gain a lot of that early experience of why things happen. Mm-hmm. And so. You know, today, I would say the same thing. Learn as much of the basics of the business. Mm-hmm. So even if you get into sales early on, you know, learn about credit, learn about operation, learn about documentation because the more complete.
Person you could be in this world of financing of equipment the better it’s gonna be for you, the better it’s gonna be for your customers. Mm-hmm. And the better it’s gonna be for the company that you, you represent, or in some cases the company that you own. Hmm. Yeah, it, it makes a lot of sense and I like to think of it as it’s interesting that you bring up that VP side of things where people wanna start with, with the marketing titles or otherwise.
It’s like the apprentice, the, the, the concept of apprenticeship. I feel like sometimes that’s lost on us nowadays. And the idea that you, I remember when I started in finance, like, you know, I started in the IRA department. I was filing, I, I was doing whatever I could do to learn. Right. And so like that, that’s how it was started Once upon a time.
Now I guess things are a little bit different, huh? Well, you know, everybody wants to start, you know, and start making money quickly and, you know, and start being the bigger office and, you know, all these things that I. You know, really don’t mean you’re knowledgeable about what you do necessarily. Yeah.
And you know, so I have, I mean, I have the greatest appreciation, you know, I, as you know, you alluded to what I, how I started and it wasn’t tow trucks, it was actually repossessing cars. That’s what it was. Repo. Okay. I missed. I thought I had the picture of somebody’s car getting taken or something. Get it.
But I made that up. Go ahead. And occasionally we did use a tow truck, so I guess, there we go. I guess your memory is pretty good, but more often than not we didn’t. But in any event, you know, that’s kind of how I got started and, you know, and then made a career out of it. You know, that was more consumer lending, where mostly my career, you know, has been commercial lending.
Hmm. But to be honest with you, strangely enough now in my consulting, I’m doing, you know quite a bit with consumer lending. So it comes back sometimes, yeah. That’s interesting. I, I wanna spend some of the time that we that we have left here talking about the other chapter that you wrote.
So I know as a consultant you work with multiple companies, and one of them that I’ve gotten to know would be Brad Kissler and, and Van Cap. So let’s, and, and this is a chapter that was was co-authored between yourself and Brad. And it’s the birth of Van Cap. So maybe give us a, just a little bit of an overview or a, a flavor of that.
Yeah, so I’ve been working with Brad for a number of years. Actually in my prior life, we tried to do some things together. Mm-hmm. But when I opened up Hetherington advisors, you know, Brad, you know, wanted to know if there was something we could do together. Mm-hmm. So I started consulting with him.
I. And, you know, he wanted to try to do something totally different, something that’s not in the market right now. Hmm. And there’s a lot of different ways, you know, manufacturers and dealers and, and users approach financing and leasing. But we wanted to really attack it from what we call captive financing.
Mm-hmm. So, captive financing has been around many, many years. You know, the car industry started it, you know, the old GMAC Ford Motor Credit. When you went into a dealership, you know, they had this financing available through a company owned finance company. Mm-hmm. But then, you know, many companies do not have the ability or the resources to to infect.
Open a company, a separate company, which is financing as opposed to the manufacturing division. Mm-hmm. So there are programs out there, there are lenders out there that do what we call vendor program agreements which are captive, like but what we try to do with Vanguards van Cap program is to set up a virtual captive that we outsource and manage for a manufacturer.
So we’re able to, through this virtual captive, to work with a manufacturer and set up a captive finance company, a virtual captive finance company. Mm-hmm. Which gives them most of the benefits of owning a captive without most of the liabilities and risk associated with owning a captive. Yeah. So, and then we use our experience to help guide them through that maze to start that.
To appropriately use it in their sales merchandising and then to also use the data that we, we gather, you know, for future sales. Hmm. So, you know, the captive finance company is a great way to not only increase market share, but make sure you don’t lose market share. Because if you lose market share here and you increase here, you don’t really gain anything.
So you know, you need to retain your present customers. As well as add-on to customers, and that’s how you get market share and captive financing allows that to be done. It’s really going back to what I said a little bit earlier. Mm-hmm. Giving that sales person who sells equipment, a tool which helps them sell payment and not price, it’s much easier to say to somebody, you can have this for 48 months for $2,000, or as opposed to gimme a check for.
75,000 today. So it lets the equipment pay for itself Hmm. In the industry as a whole. I’m, I’m curious ’cause you’ve been, you’ve been doing this a long time. What kind of trends are you following? Like what, what gets you excited right now in the industry overall for equipment leasing and financing?
Well, I think it’s really what I would call lifecycle management. Hmm. So, you know, as opposed to when I started the business, it was very transactional. You know, get the deal done, you know, put it away and you know, that’s it. Yeah. Now, you know, especially over the last 20 years, you know, I’ve been a big proponent of lifecycle management.
Mm. And so I believe there’s two lifecycles. Number one, there’s the customer lifecycle. Mm-hmm. So if you got a customer today, you finance that customer today, and you, you know, you kind of think of what’s the value of having that customer for the next 20 years. You know, so, you know, are they trading in that machine every three years?
Yeah. And during, during those periods you know, what other sources of revenue do they produce? So in many cases, you know, customers will buy parts from you, services from you you know, sometimes rentals. So there’s other areas of, of revenue that you have. Once you gain that customer, when you gain that customer through financing, and then you also gain, gain a lot of knowledge about their, their credit history and how they pay you.
Mm-hmm. And so that makes the second deal, you know, easier to get done. And, and so then you, you could track out the lifecycle Yeah. Of the customer and what that value is. And then the secondary lifecycle, especially on income producing equipment, is you follow that, that piece of equipment through its life.
And some of the equipment has two or three lives. You know, they get the original buy who want new equipment, but then let’s say in three or four years, you know, that original customer trades it in. Mm. Because he wants new equipment, but there is somebody out there that really just wants used equipment.
Yeah. So you know, now if you track that and you finance that again you have that value, but then you also have maybe even a higher percentage of. Incremental revenue from parts and services and things like that because obviously used equipment would, you know, need more parts and service. Mm-hmm.
And so now you have a, another lifetime value on the equipment. So I think, you know, to answer your question, it’s, it’s less about the transaction and it’s more about life cycles. Yeah. Man, that’s interesting when you bring the way you, the way you explain that and, and to be able to model that out. And then that all, correct me if I’m wrong, that all, you know, backs into how these things are financed, like long term.
Is that, is that right? Like all that, all that becomes knowledgeable, you know, knowledge that you have and how can you do it better, you know, the next time around. Mm-hmm. And you know what you learned about that customer base or that industry base. Mm-hmm. ‘Cause that allow you to do different.
Structures. Yes. So, I mean, some of the simple structures can be you know, skip payments during the winter months, you know, where equipment might not be used if it’s outside. Mm-hmm. You know, some other structures is you know, let’s say 90 day deferral on first payment. So that allows a customer to gain access to the equipment.
Actually produce some sort of product, build that product, collect the money from billing that product from, from us from creating that product, collecting that money, and then actually having the money before the first payment is due. So the machine pays for itself day one. Wow. So, so you, let’s put, you know, 90 days before your first payment mm-hmm.
That allows for that to happen. So that’s, you know, that, that’s really where you’re showing. Selling payment, not price. Mm. You know, one of the things I say all the time is selling equipment is hard and buying equipment is hard. Yeah, I’ve heard you say that. Yeah. And you know, but financing and selling payment not price makes it easier both on the selling side and on the buying side.
Yeah. So that’s the connectivity you’re looking into. And then that creates the lifecycle management. Once, once you, you know, help the end user with that solution. Hmm. This has been a lot of fun, man, having you back on the show. I’m, I’m thrilled to have you in the book. I know we’re planning some book launches, some book signing parties, and some other release activities, so I’m glad to reconnect with you.
I know last time we saw each other was in Florida for the a ED conference, if I’m not mistaken. And looking forward to reconnecting. And I was talking to Brad. I’m like, man, where are we gonna? Throw some, some book launch parties. Have some fun with this new book. Take it out for a test drive. Come on.
So more, more coming there. If somebody’s watching or listening to this and if they want to learn more about Hetherington Advisors, how do they do that? Www.hetheringtonadvisors.com. You know, there’s all my contact information and we’d love to talk to you about whether you’re a manufacturer, whether you’re a dealer, or even an end user.
You know, talk to you about financing. I. Wonderful. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes, so you can just click on the link and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new in. To help you along the way on your journey as well. And don’t forget, grab a copy of the book so you can read all of Ed’s writings and also the the other authors we have in the book. So grab a copy of the book.
The link to that will be in the show notes. Ed, thanks again for coming on. Thank you.