Richelieu Dennis is in the eye of the hurricane. That's what Holly Hendrix thinks when she looks at the recent growth of Dennis' natural personal care products company, Sundial Creations. "Don't micromanage it. Go with it," Hendrix, a UBS financial advisor told Dennis, her client of only a few months. "Ride the wave. Try not to lose any important pieces along the path, and then at the end you'll clean up the mess and you'll be wherever you are, which is bigger."

Hendrix and Dennis began their professional relationship following the July kick off of a six-month pilot program between UBS Wealth Management Americas and the William J. Clinton Foundation. In this philanthropic endeavor, UBS and the foundation have created 10 teams in the New York City area. Each team consists of an entrepreneur, a financial advisor and a mentor (who is also a UBS client) who are matched up by UBS and the Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative (CEO), a group within the Clinton Foundation. The program is aimed at providing the nascent businesses with more sophisticated resources and advice than they could obtain on their own. By helping the companies grow, the program aims to help them create more jobs. And, the financial advisors give their advice for free.

The project is one facet of UBS Wealth Management America's Revitalizing America initiative designed to foster strategies to stimulate the U.S. economy. "We wanted to have an opportunity to do something a bit more hands on," Lori Feinsilver, head of the CEO-UBS small business advisory program at UBS, says of the pilot program. The firm's meetings with the Clinton Foundation resulted in an instantaneous recognition of how UBS could "really put the great work our financial advisors were doing with their clients to use for the broader good," she says.

The pilot program requires that the teams commit to working together for six months and check in with each other at least once a month. UBS hosts two workshops during that time on topics relevant to all of the companies, including balance sheet management and marketing. UBS has also provided the teams with a list of partners in their home office that they can consult on various topics and areas of expertise.

"The program has exceeded our expectations," Feinsilver says. "I think the small businesses are learning a lot, but I wouldn't underestimate how much the clients and our [financial advisors] are learning."

The pilot program will finish in February, and plans are already in place for a national roll out starting in April in Chicago and California, focusing on either Los Angeles or San Francisco. The next program will include about the same number of teams, Feinsilver says, but may narrow the current $2 million to $26 million-revenue range of the participating companies. The ten participating companies had $8.44 million in average annual revenue in 2010 and altogether had 400 employees as of the end of last year.

Including Sundial, the personal care products company, and its advisors, On Wall Street sat down with five of the participating teams, including a construction company, a dumpling restaurant, a high-tech firm and an educational materials company to examine how the partnerships are working out.

Rickshaw Dumpling Bar
When Rickshaw Dumpling Bar submitted an application to several new kiosks in Times Square, co-founder Kenny Lao did not necessarily think his business would win. "We were like, 'Let's throw in this application and then figure it out,'" Lao says.

"All of a sudden we got it and it was kind of like running at full speed." The new kiosk is scheduled to open on Broadway between 42nd and 43rd Streets this month. It will be a hybrid of Rickshaw Dumpling Bar's two New York restaurants and four food trucks. "It's literally an old shipping container that we bought from New Jersey, and we're shoving a truck into that," Lao says.

Establishing a new relationship with UBS financial advisor Peter J. Klein, senior vice president of investments, and Klein's client Peter Furth, chief executive of FFF Associates Inc., a consulting company for the food, spice and agri-chemical industries, came at just the right time, Lao says. "To have some help from these guys in thinking out the bigger issues and looking at the cash issues was really, really cool," Lao says. Lao co-founded Rickshaw Dumpling Bar in 2005 after having worked as a special projects director for high-end restaurants in New York that allowed him to sample the city's finest restaurants.

The menu includes chicken and Thai basil dumplings with spicy peanut sate dip and vegetarian edamame dumplings with lemon-sansho dip (Editor's note: They are delicious!) The recipes were created with prominent New York chef Anita Lo.