Fountain Partnersblog | Fountain Partners

See you at the ELFA Annual Conference in San Diego

Chris — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:54:10 +0000

Fountain Partners managing director Tom Carter looks forward to meeting with friends old and new attending the Equipment Leasing and Finance Association’s (ELFA) annual conference Oct 19 and 20 in San Deigo. For those readers who will be attending and would like to arrange a meeting in advance, please email capital@fountainpartners.com or follow and message using @tom__carter on Twitter.

Takeaways from Hosting Conference in Las Vegas

Tom — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:35:13 +0000

The key takeaways from the 4th Annual Hosting Transformation Summit from a capital markets standpoint was that financing, whether bank, mezzanine or equity, is still not as fluid as it has been in the past and may be even non-existent for companies with EBDITA of less than $20 million or $25 million a year. Of course this is part of the reason that Fountain Partners exists (to fill gaps in the market). Being contrarian does not matter to us per se, but being right matters a lot. Operating performance has held up well overall in the hosting industry over the past 12 months. We have invested throughout that period and continue to look for interesting opportunities today. If you are solving the right problems for people, the money will find you. Right now, “the money” (the risk capital) is in the process of figuring out which financial services firms deserve the responsibility to deploy that capital.

Fountain Partners Attending Hosting Transformation Summit

Tom — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:44:55 +0000

The proliferation of social media, the popularity of bandwidth-intensive applications such as YouTube as well as the evolutionary rise of cloud computing and software-as-a-service have shined the spotlight once again on data center and hosting services. Businesses are again looking to their data center as a critical area to manage costs yet still provide a high quality of service for users accessing these applications.

Hosting executives and industry leaders are converging on Las Vegas over the next couple of days for the Hosting Transformation Summit 2009. It will be out in the desert and under the neon where challenges of the industry will be discussed and how hosting and related application providers can position themselves to succeed in the future.

So why is Fountain Partners attending? It’s simple. For hosting providers, CAPEX costs are a significant part of their business. Rather than to simply buy more and more infrastructure to keep up with client demand, businesses are turning to equipment leasing solutions that Fountain Partners provide. Moreover, hosting companies have held up very well overall in the recent economic downturn. While some application service providers have put off capex upgrades, hosting companies have continued to replace the old and sell the latest, fastest and most energy efficient processors available.

The summit will be a great way to catch up with these hosting providers as well as other financial professionals to let them know that equipment leasing is an excellent financing alternative for these CAPEX-intensive businesses, particularly with some banks and other forms of capital slow or unable to react to all but the largest operators in the space. Fountain Partners remains a trusted financial partner to hosting, colocation, cloud storage and managed services businesses and has continued to invest fresh money in to the industry throughout meltdown in the financial services industry.

Stay tuned in the next couple days for Tom Carter’s observations from the Summit by following him on Twitter @tom__carter.
www.twitter.com/tom__carter

Fountain Partners Instant Proposal tool

Tom — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:08:41 +0000

We are in the process of launching the alpha version of something we call “Instant Proposal” and what we are referring to is a page on our site that will allow you to create a proposal for yourself or one of your clients if you are an interim CFO or equipment leasing broker. The first step will be simply to fill in who the proposal will be addresses to and emailed to. The next step will be to answer some questions about the company profile including general financial questions and the last step will be for you to elect some preferences to customize the offer to fit your particular needs and then “…tadah!” you will be either to view and download term sheets to either maximize your cash runway or to minimize your total cost of leasing. You can return either of the term sheets to us and we will get started immediately upon approval or you can contact us to further refine the term sheet if you like. The important thing is that you are able to 1) determine quickly if there is a match between your business and your equipment needs and our funding parameters, 2) get at least a good starting point for terms and 3) customize the proposal to suit your needs.

Financial services companies don’t need blogs

Chris — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:48:51 +0000

We start with this title, “Financial services companies don’t need blogs”, with the intention of attracting you(?): the person who generally enjoys blogs – whether writing or reading.
It is a shabby attempt to be cute by someone who tends to be cynical about corporate propaganda disguised in a weblog format. I have had a few entrepreneur friends over the years encourage me to start a blog. One thought about a blog is that for a blog to be something more than an element of SEO strategy, the blog should have a very regular update cycle with a reliable and interesting content scheme for the target audience. Privately my thought process has generally been that I am in the risk capital business not the publishing business and if I were to go into publishing it would surely not be in the form of a blog. The other basic thing is that we are just generally contrarians as it relates to business strategy – being like the rest even with use of a blog is almost uncomfortable so we wrestled with the idea of not having a blog just for the sake of not appearing to be like “the rest”. But alas, blogs today still matter in the algorithm of the current search king Google and so to make sure you found us, we have loaded the blog publishing tool and will consider the ongoing time investment in keeping you entertained, informed and engaged in what we see, do and think about.