One business owner missed the opportunity because he was more concerned about what the advisor would gain. What happens inside Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses, from an advisor who spent 43 years in public accounting first.
Howard J. Kass was encouraging the owner of an optical store to apply to Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses when the owner asked him a question. What would Howard gain from it? Howard explained that he receives a salary for his role. The owner, he recalls, “couldn’t believe that Goldman Sachs wasn’t trying to find a way to extract money from him.”
Howard tells that story for a reason. He wants small business owners to know that Goldman Sachs “isn’t looking to gain something in return for their participation in the program.” The owners he most wants to reach are the ones who “feel isolated and believe they have no choice but to figure out how to run their businesses alone.”
The program runs at 19 sites nationally. Howard is a Business Service Advisor at one of them, Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, a role he took up in 2019 after 43 years in public accounting. (The advisors, he says, informally call themselves Business Advisors.) He describes the program in one sentence: “A program that teaches business owners how to scale their businesses and to be more effective business owners.” The program’s own figures: 70% of scholars increase revenue within 18 months of graduation, and 50% create new jobs in the same period.
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A Show of Hands on the First Day
The program calls the business owners in the program scholars, and what they leave with is not a business plan. Howard is particular about the wording: “we don’t help business owners create a business plan; we help them craft a growth plan.”
“A business plan is usually written for outsiders and includes a lot of information that may not be relevant to the task of growing their business. A growth plan, in contrast, is targeted to the business owner, and it is written to lay out the road map for them to identify, evaluate, and execute a plan for scaling their business.”
Howard J. Kass, Business Service Advisor, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses
The difference is illustrated on the first day of class. The scholars are asked for a show of hands: how many have written a business plan? “Usually, anywhere between half and two-thirds of the hands go up,” Howard says. Then comes the follow-up question. How many of those plans are sitting in a drawer, “never to again see the light of day?” His report: “Most of the same hands go up.”
The business plan is not the only document that goes unread.
The Statements Owners Don’t Read
Asked why owners misread their numbers, Howard corrects the question. “I don’t think that it’s as much a case of small business owners misreading their numbers as it is a case that they just don’t know how to read their numbers at all,” he says. Some, in his account, have “deeply flawed or even nonexistent accounting systems.” Others “don’t even know what to look at, let alone how to interpret it.”
Many of the owners who do use their financial statements look only at the Income Statement. They don’t realize, Howard says, that there is “a treasure trove of information in their Balance Sheet and Statement of Cash Flows they should also be reviewing on a regular basis.” He adds that this is particularly true of owners who use, or should use, the accrual method of accounting.
“Not understanding the difference between profit and cash flow is one of the most critical errors a business owner can make.”
Howard, Business Service Advisor, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses
The cash side of that difference shows up in national data. In the Federal Reserve Banks’ 2025 Small Business Credit Survey, about half of small employer firms reported uneven cash flow as a financial challenge in the prior 12 months.
Howard’s work with scholars includes reviewing their financial statements and helping them develop a five-year forecast for their current business as well as for a growth opportunity that they identify. The program has numbers of its own, and he has a view on what they leave out.
What the Statistics Leave Out
The program’s figures go beyond revenue and jobs. It has a 96% graduation rate and a 99% recommendation rate. Among graduates, 84% do business together, and 65% of alumni mentor others. There are more than 17,000 alumni across the 19 sites, and more than 1,100 graduates in Northeast Ohio. Those are the owners a new scholar joins.
Howard says these statistics don’t speak to “the one intangible that I see over and over from the scholars I have worked with: a massive increase in self-confidence.”
He gives one example. He worked with a woman who, he says, “struggled with negative self-talk” and, as a defense mechanism, often lashed out at her fellow group members. Howard took her aside and gained her commitment to make an effort to get along with the others. Over the next 12 weeks he coached her and encouraged her to start letting go of the negative self-talk, “which she gradually did.” By the end of the cohort she graduated with a growth plan that she expressed complete confidence in executing.
Howard says what he brings to scholars was learned before he arrived.
Forty-Three Years in Public Accounting
Howard earned a BBA in Accounting at Kent State University, where he was enrolled in the Honors College. He joined Zinner & Co. in Beachwood, Ohio, as a partner in 1999 and assumed the role of tax partner in 2006. There he established firm-wide tax policy, oversaw the firm’s technology function as I/T partner, and represented clients before the IRS and before state and local tax authorities, obtaining Private Letter Rulings and concluding numerous tax examinations. He also created the firm’s tax internship program, which, as he puts it on his profile, “still flourishes and has produced 50% of the current professional staff.” He remained a partner until the end of 2018, and served on the boards of the Estate Planning Council of Cleveland and the Society of Financial Service Professionals Cleveland/Akron.
One turn in those years began with a departure. A tax manager who was the firm’s Estate, Trust, and Gift Tax specialist left just before the start of tax season. “I resolved at that point to acquire the expertise to fill that role which resulted in me becoming an Accredited Estate Planner,” Howard says.
The person he names from that time is Jack Krause, his partner in the firm he merged into Zinner & Co. “He taught me how to carry myself as a partner and how to take responsibility for myself.”
What He Learned From Clients and Partners
Asked what a former tax partner notices that a coach would miss, Howard again declines the premise. His tax experience, he says, is “undoubtedly an important aspect of my relationships with scholars,” but “it’s far from the most significant piece of what I bring to the table.” What matters, in his words, is “what I learned over those 43 years from my clients and partners about building a successful business.”
He lists what that experience included: “managing staff, collaborating with partners to grow our firm, advising our clients, and working together to solve internal issues.” He says he observed “not only what worked for our clients but also, perhaps more importantly, what didn’t work.” And he considers the lessons he learned about himself: “what I did well and what I could have done better.”
“There are still decisions I made in the past that trouble me, playing over and over in my mind. Yet, holding myself to a higher standard and committing to continuous self-improvement is what makes me the business advisor I am today.”
Howard, Business Service Advisor, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses
There is a lighter habit alongside that standard. “I find humor in everything, usually in the most sarcastic and inappropriate way,” he says. “I use humor as a tool to disarm potentially tense situations.”
Where Howard Is Now
This fall the program at Cuyahoga Community College welcomed Cohort 40, and it is accepting applications. Recruiting eligible companies to apply is part of Howard’s role. Two kinds of owner are on his mind: those who are struggling and “feel like they are all alone,” and those who are dissatisfied with their current advisors and “unsure about when or how to make a change.” He wants to connect with both.
For the second group he has a starting point. The first thing that should tell an owner it’s time to change advisors, he says, is “when they sense they’re not getting what they need from their current advisor.” He adds: “In most cases, they either need to have it pointed out to them, or they know it’s time, but they need a nudge from an outsider to move them in that direction.”
His name carries the designation CPA (Inactive), and he asks that it stay that way. Under Accountancy Board rules, he explains, he put his license into inactive status so that he no longer has to accumulate continuing education hours, and he can’t use the title CPA without indicating that he is inactive.
Outside work there is photography. He looks for ways to share his work with others, and his video meetings are one of them. “In my video meetings, I reject the use of corporate virtual backgrounds to showcase my photography.”
Offered one entry of his own for the diary, he sent two words: “Question everything.”
As for what comes next: “I plan to keep serving as a Business Advisor, as long as it continues to be fun. When (and if) the fun stops, I’ll move on.”
Asked for the line he would want to own, Howard wrote it in the third person: “He truly cared about the success of each and every one of the scholars he worked with.”
Five Reflections from Howard
Which plan is in the drawer? A business plan is usually written for outsiders, a growth plan for the owner who has to execute it.
When did you last read all three statements? Howard points owners to the Balance Sheet and the Statement of Cash Flows as well as the Income Statement, on a regular basis.
Do you know your profit from your cash flow? He calls not understanding the difference one of the most critical errors a business owner can make.
Are you figuring it out alone? By the program’s figures, 84% of graduates do business together and 65% of alumni mentor others.
What could you have done better? Howard still asks it of himself, and says holding himself to a higher standard is what makes him the advisor he is today.
From the Diary of Howard J. Kass
Howard J. Kass, CPA (Inactive), is a Cleveland-based Business Service Advisor with Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses at Cuyahoga Community College.
| Role | Business Service Advisor (informally, Business Advisor), Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses in Partnership with Cuyahoga Community College |
| Based in | Cleveland, Ohio |
| Previously | Partner, Zinner & Co. LLP (1999 to 2018) |
| Also | BBA in Accounting, Kent State University (Honors College) |
“He truly cared about the success of each and every one of the scholars he worked with.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary features Howard J. Kass because he answers the question a wary owner asks before applying to anything: what does the person recruiting me gain. He corrects the premise of three of the five questions we put to him, and each correction tells an owner something the question did not. He gives the program’s numbers and then says what they do not measure. He spent 43 years in public accounting and says the tax work is far from the most significant thing he brings. That is what convinced the editors.
Executives Diary, Editorial
