Debt Financing: Funding Your Small Business The Smart Way
David Haber · Founder, CEO at Bond Street
A lender-CEO teaches the pitch he himself sells, so treat the numbers as a sales tool with a genuinely useful framework attached.
What the course actually covers
Debt Financing: Funding Your Small Business The Smart Way is a 50-minute primer built around a single question: if a small business had an extra $50,000 to $100,000, where should it go, and how should that money be borrowed. David Haber, CEO of online lender Bond Street, structures the class as a funnel. It opens with a framing exercise (imagine a growth opportunity and estimate its cost and payoff), narrows into the mechanics of debt versus equity, drills into term loans specifically, walks through an actual Bond Street loan application screen by screen, and closes with two fully worked numeric examples of return on investment.
The middle section is the strongest. Haber names five debt products and gives each a concrete use case rather than a dictionary definition: credit cards for short-term revolving needs, term loans for fixed multi-year investments like opening a second office, lines of credit for working capital once a business is established, invoice financing for the cash gap between shipping goods to a retailer and getting paid 30 to 90 days later, and merchant cash advances for high-credit-card-volume businesses, flagged explicitly as the most expensive option with rates that can exceed 100% APR. That warning, paired with the instruction to always ask a lender for the true APR rather than the headline rate, is the most transferable piece of financial literacy in the class.
Where it earns its keep, and where it doesn't
The two crunching-the-numbers examples, a designer hiring an $80,000 employee and a production studio buying $150,000 of equipment, are genuinely useful templates. Each one walks from cost to projected revenue to net profit to the debt service coverage ratio (profit divided by total loan cost, with 1.15 as the rough approval threshold), giving a beginner a formula to replicate with their own figures rather than an abstract concept to remember.
The application walkthrough is the weak point. A significant chunk of the middle of the course is a screen recording of Haber filling in Bond Street's own form, connecting QuickBooks, e-signing a tax authorization, and linking a bank account. It is a clean explanation of what any online lender's application will ask for, but it functions as a product demo more than instruction, and it means viewers spend several minutes watching a specific company's interface rather than learning something that generalizes to other lenders.
The course never hides its bias, and that is worth noting directly: a lender teaching a class on why and how to borrow has an obvious incentive to frame debt favorably, which the closing section does explicitly, arguing debt "can really be viewed as a tool" rather than something to avoid. The content on preparing credit history, tax filings, and deposit statements before applying is sound and lender-agnostic advice, but competing options outside the term loan category get comparatively thin treatment, and no failure cases or default scenarios are discussed.
For a business owner who has already got revenue and is trying to understand whether and how to borrow for a specific, well-defined growth investment, this class delivers a workable mental model in under an hour. It is not a substitute for shopping multiple lenders or talking to an accountant, and it does not pretend to be one, but as a first pass at demystifying term loans and the underwriting process, it does the job.
The standout
The debt service coverage ratio walkthrough, where net profit is divided by total loan cost and compared against the 1.15 minimum lenders use, turns an abstract approval decision into a number a beginner can compute for their own business before applying.
What you will learn
- How to distinguish equity financing from debt financing and when each fits your stage of business
- The five common debt products (credit card, term loan, line of credit, invoice financing, merchant cash advance) and their real use cases
- How to prepare a loan application: personal and business credit scores, tax filings, and deposit history
- How to calculate debt service coverage ratio (DSCR) to estimate loan approval odds before applying
- How to read a loan offer's true cost through APR, upfront fees, and repayment terms rather than headline interest rate alone
- How to model a growth investment's expected return using two worked numeric examples
Best for: A profitable or near-profitable small business owner or freelancer who has never taken on debt and wants a plain-language map of how term loans work before applying.
Skip it if: Anyone pre-revenue, already fluent in small business lending, or hoping for a neutral comparison of lenders rather than a Bond Street-centric walkthrough.