As part of the wild-child celebrations of Syntagma Media’s half-birthday, I’ve been re-reading Greg Gianforte’s seminal book, Bootstrapping Your Business. Well, that’s how we let our hair down here at Syntagma Towers. Don’t tell anyone, but we’re really a secret Order of Contemplatives. (Yes, Dan, you can write the book).

Looking at Bootstrapping again reminded me how much my Resiliency Model of business derived from Greg’s book. They are essentially the same because in both cases the key indicator in your business is the relationship between revenues and costs. Costs, of course, should be your principal concern simply because they are the one element you can control.

I remember a Danish real estate business owner I knew on the Costa del Sol. His dream was to have a fleet of white Rolls Royces with his company name emblazoned on the sides and driven by salesmen in white suits and white trilby hats. Apart from the costs of the operation, would anyone actually buy anything from a man in a white suit driving a white Rolls Royce? Think of the profits he must be making.

Gianforte reminds us that a business is not a West End production or a Broadway show. It’s not a government agency either, with its hands in the deepest of pockets. A business is a fragile entity with a single pot marked “Income” around which circle a whole forestful of predators. These include dark spirits confusingly dressed in white suits: your friendly local lawyers and accountants, the Inland Revenue (so helpful with mountains of detailed information on how to empty your pot), competitors who’d steal your shoelaces to garrotte you with. I may be exaggerating, but you get the picture.

My previous business was an educational publishing house. We produced books and distance-learning courses which were sold to the public at a high price while the British Government paid 80 percent of our customers’ costs. It was a snip to keep our buoyant revenues well ahead of costs in such a marketplace.

One evening we heard that the Government had scrapped the entire scheme without notice because it believed that some £100 million ($180m) of its £2 billion ($3.6bn) investment had been fraudulently obtained. The entire sector collapsed.

So now I’m a great believer in what Greg Gianforte says and sustain the current business, Syntagma Media, firmly on the Resiliency Model.

Bootstrapping a business is also much more fun. You have to be adventurous — though never with money — and there’s a great freebooting air about the place. You don’t have to worry about keeping up the payments on the white Rollers … or the men in white suits, who could well be coming to get you in the end.

It’s more fun than building an online college, with its impeccable credentials, as we did before. Syntagma Media is a business built to survive in either a swamp or on firm ground. So what of the prospects for us and blog networks in general?

Jupiter Research expects traffic to blog networks to grow by 280 percent year-on-year to 2010, when it will reach around two billion English-speaking readers.

The Center for Media Research calculates that spending on ads on blog-related inventory will grow to almost $800 million.

Jeremy Wright says: “That’s dedicated spending. Not ad networks, not Google, etc. Dedicated spending, of which 60 percent will go to blog networks. That’s something like 400 times the current traffic, with somewhere around 400 times the income.”

It’s a big country. BlogNetworkLand is not for the fainthearted, even so. The Landrush phase is still going on. As the acreage grows, so does the horizon stretch ever more enticingly Westward. Only the resilient will survive. White Rolls Royces are not really suited to the terrain.