Most funding companies invest in underwriting software, lead sources and sales training. Smart Business Funding invests in those too — and in a performance coach.
Heala Baitner-Cohen is our Executive Performance Coach. Her job is the people who make funding decisions and pick up the phone: how they hold up under pressure, how they recover from a hard week, and whether they are in a state to give a business owner a clear answer rather than a rushed one.
Why a funder employs a performance coach
Working capital is a high-pressure business on both sides of the call. The business owner is often dealing with a payroll gap, a broken piece of equipment or an opportunity that closes on Friday. The person on our side is reading bank statements, weighing risk, and delivering an answer that can change how that owner’s month goes.
Do that all day, every day, and it takes something out of you. Judgment gets shorter. Patience gets thinner. That is not a character flaw, it is what sustained pressure does to people, and it shows up in the quality of the work long before anyone complains about it.
Heala’s work is to keep that from quietly degrading how we serve the people who apply to us. She works with the team on capacity under pressure, on resilience, and on the habits that let someone come back to a difficult file with a clear head instead of a tired one.
Her background
Heala holds a Master of Social Work from Touro University. She is also a Reiki Master, trained at Beacons of Change in New York, and runs her own practice, Zen Healings, where she works in somatic healing, nervous-system regulation and Reiki. Her practice is based in Miami and online, and she shares her work on Instagram.
That combination — clinical training in social work alongside somatic and energy work — is unusual in a finance setting. It is also the reason it works here. The pressure our team carries is not only mental; it sits in the body, in sleep, in how someone shows up on a Monday.
What it means for a business owner
Nothing about this changes a factor rate. What it changes is the person on the other end of the conversation.
Smart Business Funding underwrites with its own capital, which is why decisions come back in hours rather than weeks. Speed like that is only worth something if the judgment behind it is sound. Keeping the people making those calls in good condition is not a perk — it is part of how the decision gets made well.
You can read more about Heala and the rest of the team on our Our Team page. She can be reached at Info@SmartBusinessFunder.Com.
