LaGuardia President Gail Mellow made an analogy between groundhogs and heartless marketplaces at the graduation. Keeping small businesses alive and thriving is the purpose of 10,000 Small Businesses, a 20-week course sponsored by Goldman Sachs, with a faculty supplied by Babson College, the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School and LaGuardia Community College, where last week, in the school’s Little Theatre, the fourth annual class was graduated.

At the graduation ceremony, on February 2, Groundhog Day, LaGuardia President Gail Mellow, an avid gardener, told how she had once planted some perennials, which take several years to develop. After two years of nondescript results, she one day looked from her bathroom window to see the first bloom of a beautiful flower. As she thrilled to it, she was horrified to see a groundhog suddenly come along and, with one bite, devour it. She declared that the heartless (but hungry) beast winked at her! She concluded that such could be the fate of well-thought-out small business plans in an often heartless marketplace, if those who create those plans are not especially careful.

Becoming better oriented to the market place was one factor that brought this latest group of students to the course on weekends, though all 28 were already experienced in business. The 28, who came from businesses throughout the tri-state area and Pennsylvania, made up Cohort IV, an appellation that Jane E. Schulman, program executive director, said she’d like to see changed before its Roman numerals got much higher. The two Cohort IV scholars, who delivered valedictory addresses, came from businesses in Manhattan and on Long Island.

The first speaker, Tammy Walters, managing partner and executive director at Flickerlab, 78 Crosby St., confided that she was “terrified”, though her evident self-possession seemed sufficient to overcome any fear.

When her cellphone rang mid-speech, she apologized and answered it, telling the caller that he caught her as she was busy graduating and seizing the occasion to alert him to how good the 10,000 Small Businesses program would be for his line of work, encouraging him to register for it. She praised all her teachers and advisors and hailed the fact that there were “no grades and never a ‘right way’ to do things”. Among the things she learned was “how to fire a problem worker so he could find happiness elsewhere”. More important, she said, she “rediscovered my ability to lead”.

The second scholar, Anchor Security & Investigations Vice President and Managing Partner Melvin Boone opened with straightforward praise for the other 27 people in his cohort: “I’ve never met anyone like you,” he told them. He called small businesses the “gears and pistons” of American prosperity and referred to a short video shown at the beginning of the ceremony in which Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and financial icon, spoke of the necessity of “regenerative capitalism”. He said he joined the class willingly but at the start was suspicious of ulterior motives on the part of its sponsors. Such suspicion was dispelled, he said, while he found the intention to teach him to “think and act like a CEO” was fulfilled. He said he now hopes to grow Hempstead-based Anchor Security, currently at a level somewhat more than $1 million, to $6 million in the next five years. Boone closed by citing the image of the gazelle, who knows it has to be faster than the fastest lion, and the lion, who knows it must be faster than the slowest gazelle, lest one be eaten or the other starve. Human lives may not be so absolute, but competition is intense, whether from lions or groundhogs, he said.

Graduate Sajjad A. Khalfan, founder and CEO of Awards and Signs Express, 69-05 Queens Blvd., Woodside, presented two plaques to LaGuardia and Goldman Sachs. Khalid Azizi of Neko Print & Document Imaging, based at LaGuardia, 30-20 Thomson Ave., made the diplomas for the class. Khalfan later said that the value of the 10,000 Small Businesses experience is greater than could be expressed at the graduation ceremony. He was especially appreciative of the contact that LaGuardia and Goldman Sachs maintain with all their 10,000 Small Businesses graduates, now numbering more than 100 people.

The program has been expanded to Chicago, New Orleans and Houston and to Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. Openings are planned for other cities and communities across the country.