Just over two years ago we tried an experiment: a blog dedicated to government accounting and contracting issues. We looked for issues relevant to the aerospace and defense industry, focusing on oversight and controls, with a leavening of space and technology issues. Frankly, it was a gamble. We weren’t sure of anything at the time.

We weren’t sure anybody would read the articles, or care about the content. We weren’t sure if we could attract a readership. We weren’t sure we could find sufficient content to generate articles. We weren’t sure that we could actually publish articles on the internet, that we could muster the technical skills to post articles and link to other sites. (It’s not our forte, actually.) And most of all, we were unsure we could find the time and the energy to write between 2,000 and 6,000 words a week.

But we did. We posted several articles per week over the past two years, and now we have about 350 individual articles in our news archive, representing a nice two-year history of regulatory changes affecting government contractors.

Another aspect of the gamble was the “branding” associated with the blog. There are a number of blogs out there in the blogosphere, and (in our view) only a few offer a point of view that questions the status quo and does so with supporting facts and figures. We were advised that our point of view could ruffle some feathers and negatively impact our brand in the marketplace. Maybe so. Maybe our ranting and hyperbole has turned-off some potential clients and cost us some business. But we figured that a government contracts-related blog without a point of view was simply a rehashing of the regulations—and who would want to read that?

If we couldn’t interest ourselves, how could we interest any potential readers?

So we developed a sharp tongue and a point of view that (we hope) dared to ask the questions we were all thinking—but that nobody was willing to ask publicly. We hope that we dared to grumble about the things we all grumbled about over a beer or behind closed doors—but that nobody was willing to grumble in public about. In short, we aspired to be brave enough to “speak truth to power” and we hoped our willingness to risk our principles and integrity would attract the kind of clientele we would want to work with.

And you know, it’s all worked out so far. The business side of the house is more than okay, and we have great clients and more work than we can fit into the blog schedule. So as far as we can tell, the gamble has paid off.

And our site readership has grown. In December, 2009, we started keeping statistics. In that first month, we had 68 visitors, 255 visits, and 791 page views of our site. In the month of February, 2011 (fifteen months later), we had 2,420 visitors, 3,012 visits, and 4,578 page views. Here’s a chart showing our growth:

So thank you, thank you all for caring enough about these arcane and often complex issues to keep coming back. We couldn’t or (more accurately, wouldn’t) do it without you.

And if this were an Academy Award acceptance speech we would also have to thank the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Defense Contract Audit Agency, and the Defense Contract Management Agency. Not to mention Senator Claire McCaskill, the Project on Government Oversight, Robert Brodsky at Government Executive, and all the bureaucrats and regulation-drafters who keep us puzzled and frustrated enough to keep writing these articles.