How do brokers get paid — who pays the commission?
The broker's commission is paid when a deal funds, and it comes out of the financing structure arranged with the lender.
The short answer: The broker's commission is paid when a deal funds, and it comes out of the financing structure arranged with the lender — the broker brings the lender a complete, fundable deal, and the lender compensates the broker from the deal itself. The broker never lends money and never has to buy the equipment.
Here is the mechanic using Sam's first deal. A business needed a $10,000 spray-paint booth. Sam arranged the financing and marked up the lender's buy rate by ten points, and that markup is where his pay came from: $1,000 on his first funded deal. The business got its equipment with a payment it accepted, the lender booked a loan, and the broker's compensation was built into the rate structure of the deal rather than billed as a separate invoice the business had to write a check for.
That same principle scales with the deal. Across Sam's career, his funded deals have paid $2K–$5K per deal — his experience, shared as an example of how the math works, never as a guarantee of what another broker will make. On this site, student Michael Chen's $180K excavator deal paid a $4,200 commission, another concrete case of commission coming out of a funded deal's structure.
Two practical consequences follow. First, a broker's income is entirely performance-based: no funded deals, no commission. Second, a broker needs no capital to start earning — no loan book, no inventory, no equipment lot — because the lender's money funds the deal.
Equipment Finance Broker Mastery teaches deal structure and broker compensation inside the 6-module course, alongside the lender directory and calculators in the Broker CRM. Details at www.equipmentfinanceacademy.com — $97 one time at the current launch price (regular $297).