I found the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program the way I find most things lately: scrolling LinkedIn. I’d never heard of it. It was free, I couldn’t spot a catch, and I figured I had nothing to lose. So I opened the books, went through the interview process, and applied.
A few weeks later I got into the Minnesota #2 cohort. And the program taught me its first lesson before a single class started.
The bottleneck was me
When I got in, they told me to plan for 15 to 20 hours a week. We’d meet in person to open and close the program at St. Cloud Technical College, with twelve weeks of work in between: financial audits, marketing, hiring, negotiations. The management fundamentals most of us never sit down and formally learn.
There was a problem with committing 15 to 20 hours a week. At the time, I was Eclipse Digital. I managed the clients. I ran sales. I scoped the projects, then did the development too. I’d just hired Andrea as our Client Relations Specialist and started building out SOPs so I could pull back from the day-to-day, but we hadn’t actually figured out our processes yet, never mind written them down. I was trying to run all of it. Somewhere along the way I’d quietly become the thing slowing my own company down.
So before the program could teach me anything in a classroom, it forced the decision I’d been dodging. I had to hand off the work. I started giving client tasks to my team. I tried being out of the office for three and four days at a stretch.
The business didn’t fall apart. My team handled it. Andrea was new to Eclipse and new to digital marketing, and she stepped up to manage clients and the team while I was in class. Being new turned out to be an asset. She could see the gaps in how we onboard and train people because she was living them. I learned I didn’t need a finger on the pulse every minute of every day. I should have done it years earlier, and the program basically did it for me.
That alone would have been worth applying.
A room full of people solving different problems
There were about 40 of us in the cohort, and the range of businesses was something. Ben runs a residential electrical business. Zach roasts coffee up in Duluth. Michelle owns a social media marketing company. Nicole runs an ice cream shop in Minneapolis. And then there was Roberta, who started a Dungeon Master and game-facilitation business out of almost nothing and grew it into physical locations and serious revenue. I could have listened to her talk about it all day.
We were all at different stages, in different industries, and that was the design. I came in hoping to systematize our operations. I didn’t expect how much I’d get out of the people. Comparing notes with the other digital marketers was useful, sure. But sitting across from an electrician, a coffee roaster, and an ice cream shop owner made me look at corners of my own business I’d been ignoring. Everyone was wrestling with a different problem, and somehow that sharpened mine.
It also plugged me into a network of business owners all over Minnesota. Possible mentors, collaborators, clients. That network has quietly become the piece that keeps paying off long after the fact.
Building the five-year plan (and the night before the presentation)
You can’t graduate without two things: a finished five-year business plan, and a presentation of that plan to your cohort.
Building the plan makes you actually look at your finances. You open the books, sit with the real numbers, and then forecast what your revenue could be if you made the changes you’re planning. Having a hunch about where your business is headed is easy. Putting it on a slide with numbers attached is a different feeling entirely.
The presentation taught me something I wasn’t looking for. Going into the final week I wasn’t worried at all. In my head I was ready. Then we got to the last meetup, I started hearing everyone else walk through their plans, and all of a sudden mine felt thin by comparison. That night I was nervous. I ended up rewriting my slides and writing a longer speech.
What actually got me wasn’t the speech. It was the Q&A afterward, which nobody warned me about. I handled it fine. But it was a good lesson in founder psychology. Confidence on its own is fragile, comparison will always find you, and the work you do in response to that nervous energy usually turns out to be worth it.
What’s actually changed since
The most durable thing I walked away with is the network. I still talk to plenty of people from our cohort, and I’ve since connected with folks from the first Minnesota cohort and the national one. Those relationships have led to real leads and genuine introductions into industries I’d never have reached on my own. The classes end. The network doesn’t.
Inside Eclipse, the shift that started in week one held. I stopped being the single point of failure for every client and every project. Andrea now runs Client Relations and carries a chunk of the day-to-day I used to hold onto myself, which freed me up to focus on the work only I can do: sales and business development. We kept building out the SOPs I started during the program instead of letting them die on a shared drive somewhere, and that groundwork is still paying off.
That shift hasn’t stopped. We’re in the middle of moving Eclipse from one-off project work toward a retainer model, and that only works if the team can run client relationships without me in the room. We’re also building out AI-driven workflows to take on more of the repeatable marketing work that used to eat a person’s whole week. None of that was on my radar before the program. It came out of learning, the hard way, that I wasn’t the asset I thought I was. I was the ceiling.
The honest part: who this program is not for
I’d recommend it to almost any business owner. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I made it sound easy.
This program is not for someone who is the core pillar of their business and can’t take time away from it. The 15 to 20 hours a week is real. A few people in my cohort came close to quitting over the demand. The group meetings, the webinars, the plan itself, all of it piled on top of running a company. They stuck it out, every one of them, and they were glad they did. But if you genuinely can’t delegate, can’t step back, and can’t give the program real attention, you’ll spend twelve weeks frustrated instead of growing.
Which, of course, is my own lesson coming back around. The hardest part of the program is having to step away from your business. That’s also the part your business probably needs most.
Should you apply?
For a free, twelve-week program, you come away with real skills, hands-on experience, and friendships that outlast the cohort. Everyone’s experience is different. Mine pushed me to stop being the bottleneck, to trust my team, to actually read my own numbers, and to build relationships across Minnesota that are still paying off.
If you’re a small business owner who’s been running flat-out and you quietly suspect you’ve turned into the ceiling your company keeps hitting, go look it up. I did, on a whim, on LinkedIn. It’s one of the better whims I’ve followed.
Erik Schultz is the owner of Eclipse Digital and a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, Minnesota Cohort #2.
