First Qualify the prospective client or lessor. Are they a Fortune 500 company or a small real estate office down the street? In other words you want to assess their stability. Are they going to be around for awhile or might they run out before the lease is up? If it is a business with a history of stablility then by all means lease. If it isn’t, don’t

. Steps to Calculate
1. Calculate your fee for guarantee and maintenance.
 2. Figure out your landed cost for the plants and planters (or whatever you will be leasing)
3 Calculate the costs for Installation labor and Material
 4. What is a fair interest rate a Bank would charge for the use of that amount of money for one year.

 Next
Take the landed cost, add the installation costs, markup that amount by the interest percentage. The sum of these is your cost. Next figure out in how many months you want to recapture these costs (most companies use anywhere from a 12-24 month recapture). Divide your sum of costs by this number of months and you have your monthly lease fee. Add to this the monthly fee for guarantee and maintenance and you are done. Also, this combined number, one number, is how it is quoted to the client, not teased out as individual line items. Note: While we call it a lease it is really a rental since the client never, never, owns the product. You do. Otherwise if they were to own at the end of a year or two all you are doing is financing a purchase. No gold doing that.

So Why Don’t More Interiorscapers Lease?
 Every plantscaper expects a different profit and some have unrealistic views on the time it takes to retrieve the original costs so many ’scapers price leases unrealistically plus they are afraid of being stuck with 50 planters they can’t resell. Add to these fears the fact that most contracts are only written for one or two years. So, between fear of loss plus unfriendly pricing, most companies book few leases. First of all, I suggest you look at the average number of years you keep clients and not at the length of time the original contract is written. I’ll bet you’ll have a better comfort level when you see that most of your stable clients renew year after year after year. Plus, by prequalifying the client, you should have a better comfort level.
Then, even if the contract is written for only one year, the client, either through inertia or because they really like you, remains your client for years and years. That means that the cost of goods is retrieved after the first 12-24 months and the profit continues year after year. As you can see, a long term lease client is even better than gold, they’re platinum. And, if after five or six years they opt to cancel, so what? You already made double or triple the profit you would have made if they had purchased the material.

 But What About The Planters?
 No place to store them for the next twenty years when someone else will need 50 Puce Green planters? Give them away or deep six them. You’ve already made your money on them

 Leases. A real opportunity once you figure out how to charge for it.