Becoming Your Own Banker is Nelson Nash's book on infinite banking, which means using a dividend-paying whole life policy as your own source of financing. Between chapters 13 and 14, it has a section on using it in a business. Carlo Viqueira told me that section stuck with him longer than anything else in the book, and the LIFE Pod episode covering the business part of Nash's book is where he said it.
The best-known example is a logger who needs a truck. He finances it through a finance company. The finance company borrows big sums from places like life insurance companies, marks the money up, and lends it to him. In Nash's example, the logger pays about 27 cents of interest for every dollar of his payment. In Nash's telling, the finance company is a toll taker, because every dollar the logger borrows passes through it and it keeps a cut of each payment. Rates were higher when Nash wrote the book, but the setup hasn't changed.
Nash's fix was to borrow the $52,600 for the truck from the logger's own policy. Then the logger pays the policy back the same $1,500 a month he'd have paid the finance company, interest included. Whatever he pays above the policy's own loan interest goes back in as extra premium. That grows the cash value for the next truck, and over years of trucks the effect stacks up. A policy loan still charges interest, and it reduces the cash value and death benefit until it's repaid.
Running it through a business takes some setup, and in Nash's version you own the policy yourself, buy the equipment, and lease it to your company. You could also lend the money to your business and have the business pay you interest. Either way, the business may be able to deduct the lease payments or the interest, and equipment can be depreciated. But those payments count as income to you, so the deduction on one side shows up as income on the other. Put the lease or loan in writing at a fair rate, and set it up with your CPA before the first payment.
Equipment isn't the only use: an online seller can pay for inventory from a policy and pay the loan back from the sales, instead of using a short-term inventory lender. Real estate investors use it the same way to skip hard money lenders, as covered in policy loan vs. hard money lender.
It takes time to build a policy that can carry a purchase that size. Nash called the early years the capitalization period. A new policy can't finance a $52,600 truck in its first year unless it was funded for it. A policy in your business covers the other ways owners put a policy to work.
Pull the contract on the last piece of equipment your business financed and add up the interest over the full term. Then check how much cash value your policy has today, and how many more years of funding it would need to carry a purchase that size.