The future of The Washington Post Co. without its flagship newspaper Without the newspaper, the firm's focus on Kaplan will be starker than ever, even as it maintains an odd assortment of other subsidiaries - including a Phoenix-based cable business and a recently acquired supplier to boiler manufacturers - and hunts for ways to redeploy a small mountain of cash from the $250 million sale of the newspaper division to billionaire Jeffrey P. Bezos. A few surprising acquisitions this year have led to speculation that Graham will turn his company into a mini-Berkshire Hathaway, the legendary holding company run by longtime Graham family adviser and former company board member Warren Buffett. As of June 30, before the sale to Bezos, the company was sitting on nearly $387 million in cash. Graham bats down the idea of replicating Buffett's success. No other company can be compared to Berkshire. There's nothing comparable and never will be," he said in an e-mail. We'll do acquisitions in different business lines, but not in the expectation we can do anything remotely like Berkshire. The Post Co. has long had a history of making modest investments in seemingly random industries, building those businesses patiently over time. While some have gone sour, others have become major parts of the company. Executives and longtime shareholders say that approach is unlikely to change. "I don't think there's necessarily a playbook," said Mark Hughes, director of research at Lafayette Investments in Ashton, which owns Post Co. shares. "I don't think they wake up in the morning and say, "We want to get into health care." I think they'll look at everything coming down the road, and if it makes sense they'll make sensible offers. The Post Co. branched into education, cable and television stations through these kinds of deals, allowing it to diversify far beyond newspapers and become a $4 billion company of many different units, each run very independently. Kaplan's higher-education business was turbocharged by a $165 million acquisition in 2000, when The Post Co. acquired Quest Education, an Atlanta-based chain of vocational schools. This year, the company bought a majority stake of Celtic Healthcare, a small hospice company, and purchased Forney, a global supplier of products for power and industrial boilers. Beyond Kaplan, which is based in New York, 20 percent of the company's revenue last year came from Phoenix-based Cable One, which provides cable services largely in the country's Western region. Ten percent was from Post-Newsweek Stations, which owns six television stations in Texas, Florida and Michigan. That means that without the newspaper, none of the company's major divisions will be based in the Washington region.