Sarah Thomas is no slouch. In 2003, when the Williams College- and Drama Studio London-educated actress put into motion plans for her own theater company in New York, she cut no corners. She imported challenging works like a gender-reversed version of “Love’s Labor’s Lost” from London, raised enough money to fund her company’s first performances, then applied for and won a grant for more work from the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable trust. But, though she is bright and ambitious, Ms. Thomas, like many other young theater mavens eager for artistic independence, quickly found she lacked expertise in an area necessary to bolster her fledgling enterprise: business.

Rather than flounder with amateur business plans or blow her seed money on pricey consultants, Ms. Thomas found an unexpected loophole within this era of diminishing arts funding and ballooning consulting costs. On the advice of her sister, she sought assistance for her company, Thirteenth Night, from the Columbia Business School’s Small Business Consulting program, a voluntary organization that pairs companies with business students looking for consulting training.

“I know how to produce, but I never went to business school so I didn’t have that skill,” Ms. Thomas, 27, recalled. “I had it written fine,” she said of her company’s financial plans, “but I didn’t have the numbers in an Excel spreadsheet.”

Now, as Ms. Thomas’s company prepares to mount perhaps its most ambitious programming yet — “Estimated Time of Arrival,” an evening of four short plays by notable names, including Anthony Minghella, that begins performances tomorrow night — her story offers a glimpse of an alternative method of getting a small, nonprofit arts endeavor off the ground and into the black.

The pairing of Thirteenth Night and the Columbia consulting program began with Ms. Thomas’s sister, who attended Columbia’s business school between 2002 and 2004. She had a personal interest in both nonprofit consulting and, as might be expected, her sister’s company, and realized the two might be a good match.

“She has a very small management team, and she’s the producer and artistic director and an actor,” Rebecca Thomas, now a consultant with the Nonprofit Finance Fund, said. “So she really just needed affordable and business-savvy help, with everything from developing a business plan, to helping her come up with basic financial statements that she could present to her board, to helping her identify what her market is looking for in theater.”

The school’s consulting program wasn’t designed specifically to attract arts organizations. Some of the program’s business participants, in fact, haven’t exactly qualified as “small” businesses: This year’s crop includes a company that reported $30 million in revenue last year. But Ms. Thomas’s interest in the program happened to coincide with a concerted effort by its leaders to shift its emphasis to a more diverse portfolio of clients, including nonprofit groups like Thirteenth Night. “We wanted to have an impact on a greater range of business in New York,” Jeremy Sharrard, the group’s president and a second-year student, said.

After applying, presenting her ideas to the group’s board, and receiving approval to participate, Ms. Thomas’s company was funneled into a branch of the program that pairs a few companies with students in a consulting-oriented class. Four students from the class then helped Ms. Thomas create a business plan and conduct a survey to gauge preferences of potential customers. The students in the program are overseen and advised by consultants from McKinsey & Company.

Now in its second year in the program, Thirteenth Night has a new crop of student collaborators who have been tasked with bolstering the company’s marketing strategies.

“When we came in this year, our goal was to help her boost revenues by increasing ticket sales,” Laura Bogomolny, 26, a first-year business school student, said. “The way we wanted to do that was by developing a marketing plan for her.”

“A lot of theater companies have cash flow issues,” Howard Blumenstein, 29, a first-year student, said. “They usually don’t get paid until they sell tickets, but they usually don’t sell tickets until after the show [begins], and they have to pay people to put the show on,” he explained. “We’ve sort of used the upcoming show in January as a launching point. So we’ve come up with ways we can increase ticket sales in advance.” The students have used e-mail marketing and promotions to “affinity groups” that might have a special interest in the show’s theme of young adult relationships. One piece on the program, Amy Fox’s “Double Click,” involves the Jewish dating Web site Jdate.com, so marketing efforts targeted users of the dating service.

To Ms. Thomas, of course, such guidance is worth more than just a helping hand; it’s worth big money. “These people are going to be charging $100,000 for their services,” she said with a laugh, marveling at both her luck and her collaborator’s postgraduation earning potential.

Now on the eve of their first joint effort, the student consultants and the young entrepreneur are already thinking a few steps ahead, looking to evaluate the financial impact of their efforts after “Estimated Time of Arrival” closes. After all, Ms. Bogomolny said, “The whole point is to have Sarah buying into the ideas, and able to implement them herself.”

“Estimated Time of Arrival” begins January 20 (Urban Stages, 259 W. 30th St., between Seventh and Eighth avenues, 212-868-4444).