Our very own President and CEO, Shad Mohammed, was invited to a collaborative graduation for the Tory Burch Foundation and Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program on Monday. The program and graduation exposed students to the the life of empowering women in the fashion world.
As a small business owner, Mohammed found himself placed in the room with many other entrepreneurs that shared business knowledge ideas for economic growth as well as prominent media figures like Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post. Shad is an alumni of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, which is an intensive program offered to promising entrepreneurs in a range of industries. The program’s objective is to provide training through a series of MBA-like courses to bring potential candidates to own the title of CEO in their company.
The partnership of the Tory Burch Foundation and Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program encourages women to look beyond their daily work demands and to focus on their business as a whole instead. Tory explained the importance of branding and how ambition and drive transformed her self-titled brand into an economic success.
This graduation allowed peer-to-peer networking as well as one-on-one advice from professionals to potential small-business owners and connected them based on their specific needs. It is important to understand how vital small businesses are for job growth in our country and economy today. With more businesses launched, more jobs become available to help drive our economy forward.
As the graduation closes the pilot program for this collaborative class of female entrepreneurs, both Tory and the Goldman Sachs team hope to offer the program to a new group of women in the future and hopefully, expand to other parts of the country as well.