When Toby Knight's gymnasium products company, Knight Athletics Inc., won its first contract in 2006, to provide batting cages, electronic scoreboards and other equipment for a new recreation center in Fairview Park, Ohio, the good news came with an "uh-oh."

The project came in at $139,495, but Knight Athletics was bonded for only $100,000.

Mr. Knight's bonding company raised his bond -- a type of insurance on contracting jobs -- to cover the shortfall, but even so, "I saw that I had a problem right away ... now all of a sudden I have no bonding" for future jobs, until the completion of the recreation center, which took a year.

Now that has changed. Mr. Knight's Castle Shannon-based company is submitting a bid to provide seating for Indiana University of Pennsylvania's new convocation center, to be completed in 2011, a job that could be worth more than $1 million to his company.

And when he learned that the general contractor required a letter stating that Knight could be bonded for that amount, there was no "uh-oh." He provided the letter.

The change in Knight's bonding capacity results from Mr. Knight's participation in "Blueprints for Success," a class for contractors put together by the Minority & Women Educational Labor Agency and the Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh's Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. Mr. Knight was one of 21 contractors in the program's inaugural class, who graduated last week in a ceremony at the Rivers Club in Oxford Center.

"Blueprints for Success" is one component of the Sheltered Bond Program, the brainchild of MWELA's founder and executive director, Marc Little. Since founding his own firm, Lorraine Construction, 15 years ago, Mr. Little had learned that contracting skills alone were insufficient to land jobs large enough to keep a contracting business going. He formed the agency in the fall of 2004 to create a framework for a program that would help contractors to qualify for higher levels of bonding.

Collectively, graduates of the class have already been bonded for $7.5 million, Mr. Little said.

The Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence designed the curriculum and provider instructors for the class, which met on the last Thursday of each month for six months, beginning in February. Topics included marketing, management and business law -- a subject of special interest for Mr. Knight.

"Having spent the last two years reading contracts, it was very beneficial," he said. "I was able to ask some very specific questions on issues that I had developed over the two years that I have been doing this.

"When you have a free session with an attorney, that's very good."

Erin Martier, a principal with Leechburg-based Arriba Construction, said that the value of the program went beyond the classroom instruction.

"One of the best things about it was that we all networked with one another," she said. As the graduates move forward, "hopefully we can patronize each other, besides finding other business out there."

The class also helped her to realize that "there are a lot of companies out there that really want to help minority and women-owned businesses, and not just because they have quotas to meet. A lot of them are very sincere."

Arriba is currently working on the interiors for the renovation of the Keystone Building, Downtown, into condominiums and supervising the installation of concession stands at the New York Mets' new stadium.

But the graduates will not all need to go to New York to find work. The program's creation comes at a time when the region is experiencing a multibillion-dollar construction boom, characterized by large, long-term projects such as the UPMC Children's Hospital in Lawrenceville; the August Wilson Center for African-American Culture, Downtown; and Westinghouse Electric Co.'s headquarters and research facility in Cranberry.

For Mr. Little, graduating the first class was "a dream that came true. ... To see something on paper translate to real life, the vision translate to reality, is absolutely incredible."

Now he hopes to "take this pilot process and move it into a sustainable model that could possibly go statewide."