After years of impressing his bosses at financial institutions, Neil Caesar said he was “used to being a superstar.”

Then he left the corporate world, where he worked under established business plans, to run a small business, where he has minimal structure.

Caesar is now the chief financial officer and general manager of Digiwaxx LLC, a Harlem-based music marketing and promotions agency founded in 1998. Despite success in such corporations as State Farm and MetLife, where career progression follows a defined path, Caesar admits that he was ill prepared to be an entrepreneur. “You get in this environment and there’s not a lot of training for it,” he says, adding that he doesn’t have an experienced boss to consult for difficult decisions.

To help people like Caesar, professors and administrators at Columbia Business School last year created the Columbia Community Business Program.

It’s run out of the school’s Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center and provides a group of small businesses in upper Manhattan with free advice from both professionals at the school and a seasoned small business coach. The group meets 10 times a year but has unlimited access to Columbia’s professors who can connect participants to professionals in other faculties, like law and engineering.

The participants include 11 businesses and one not-for-profit organization that have been around for at least three years and bring in annual revenues of at least $250,000. This peer group represents one of the program’s key features; typically, business schools deploy their relatively inexperienced students into communities to work with organizations that need business advice. In this program, participants learn from peers going through similar problems and are in constant communication with seasoned professors.

Each of the organizations agreed to a two-year commitment. For Caesar, this requirement was one of the biggest lures. “It forced me to carve out time and drill down on how I’m going to improve the business,” he said.

For participants, like Princess Jenkins, the minimum annual revenue was a major attraction. Jenkins owns the Brownstone, a clothing and accessories store on 125th Street just east of Fifth Avenue. The Brownstone has been around for 10 years and is well known in Harlem, but Jenkins wants help “growing the business and taking it to the next level.” She runs the store by herself (she used to have two business partners), and is trying to launch a mail-order catalogue.

Jenkins treats everyone who enters the store like a friend, ending many of her sentences with “baby” – “thank you, baby,” “told you, baby.” She is well connected in the community, but her network lacked people running businesses of the same size, making it hard to find advice.

“A lot of the time, small business development information is developed toward startups or businesses making over a million,” she said. While she has cleared the hurdles new businesses face, she can’t yet relate to big firms’ problems.

She applied to the program after hearing about it at a Harlem Business Alliance meeting. Entering with almost no expectations, she simply assumed that she would learn a great deal because of the business school’s reputation.

Looking back on the project’s first year, marked by the greatest economic disruption since the Great Depression, Jenkins acknowledges that she learned a lot – particularly such small, concrete skills as online social networking.

A year ago, the Brownstone wasn’t on Facebook. The program changed that. It also set her up with Google Analytics, which allows her to track who visits her web site and how often, and connected her with Columbia engineering students who will help improve the Brownstone’s search engine results.

Jenkins also praises Columbia’s flexibility. “They’re not trying to give you a road map for success,” she said. “They’re saying, ‘What’s your map and how do we get there?’”

Kevin Walters owns Creole Restaurant in East Harlem; he has spent the past few years finding nightly entertainment and connecting with local artists exhibited in the restaurant, and is only now focusing on promotion.

Aside from learning from his peers, who run the gamut in age, gender and ethnicity, Walters is particularly appreciative of working with the business coach, Barbara Roberts.

“She has academic training,” he says. “She also has tons of hands-on experience, so she’s in it. She’s hot. She’s a rainmaker.”

Roberts’ resume includes being the first woman on the board of Dean Witter. She also ran Acoustiguide, offered in museums and galleries, and FPG International, which sold for $80 million and became part of Getty Images.

Roberts’ experiences have taught her that small businesses drive economic growth and that helping them expand “is a lot easier than sorting out GM and would be a much quicker fix for the economy.”

She agreed to join the program at the height of the economic boom last year, but altered her advice when the economy turned sharply downward last fall.

“The first half of last year was very much on survival: cutting costs, making sure you didn’t lose a client, cash flow,” she said.

But she isn’t surprised to hear that most participants made few references to the recession — she says they’re typically so overwhelmed with detail that they tend to be myopic and “don’t appreciate their own evolution.”

This year, Roberts said, the program will focus on growth in the recovering economy.

Not everyone finds the advice useful. John Lowy runs the River Room, a restaurant and jazz bar in West Harlem, and has been an entrepreneur for 30 years, much more experience than most participants. He learned a few things from his peers, but nothing substantive. He would, however, advise other entrepreneurs to jump at the free opportunity.

The program also failed to keep all of its participants afloat. The Morningside Bookshop closed after the group meetings started last fall. Still, the project earned rave reviews from most business owners interviewed.

Columbia Business School has committed to running two more two-year program sessions, the next round starting in fall 2010.