(FORTUNE Small Business) – Rohit Khare is trying to save his company. He has burned through $300,000 in the last six months trying to get a new company off the ground, and he hasn't got much to show for it. He has no product, no revenues, no customers, no profits, and no hope of seeing any in the near future. All he has is a cool new technology and just enough money in the bank to cover one more week of payroll for his seven employees. He needs help--and fast. Which is why he's here on a ranch in western Montana, 500 miles from his office in Seattle, valiantly defending his business plan as it is being shredded--along with his ego--by the last man to give a damn about his dying dream.

That last man is Rob Ryan, a rich, retired tech mogul whose notion of early retirement is to wrestle new companies and their founders into shape at his Roaring Lion ranch. Today's project is Khare, who has just set off on a breathless monologue, outlining his grand plan to revolutionize the Internet. His idea is to get other new companies to embrace his technology. Revenues will soar. Profits will follow. Khare, 25, is spinning a wonderful fantasy, but Ryan isn't buying it. With a single verbal skewer, he punctures the entire pipe dream, telling the young entrepreneur that his plan is deeply flawed. Why? For one, he says, Khare's customers are as financially wobbly as he is. "You're a pygmy," Ryan says, shaking his head in bemusement. "They're pygmies. Two pygmies dancing is a bad scene."

This is life at Rob Ryan's Entrepreneur America, a business boot camp where entrepreneurs-in-training come to learn the skills and the discipline to start and manage their fledgling concerns. Every three weeks, a fresh batch of young recruits shamble into town with bold new technologies buried in business plans that are fat, flabby, and unfocused. Over the next two days, they'll endure a grueling regimen of meetings and a barrage of often profane criticism from Ryan. In the end, they'll march out of camp sculpted into lean, mean moneymaking machines.

Ryan's rigorous training has produced some notable stars. Among the alumnae: Silicon Spice, a Mountain View, Calif., chip and software manufacturer that was sold to chipmaker Broadcom for $1.2 billion in August; Abuzz, a communications network that was bought last year for an undisclosed amount by New York Times Digital, the online division of the New York Times; and search-engine company LookSmart. Three years ago, Ryan rescued LookSmart from "the valley of the shadow of death," says founder Evan Thornley. Under Ryan's guidance, San Francisco-based LookSmart shed its original plan of making money through advertising and has focused on licensing its directory to media companies, portals and Internet service providers. Revenues were $48.9 million in 1999, and though the company hasn't yet turned a profit, it has won a roster of blue-chip clients, among them Microsoft.

Camp commander Ryan has been battle-tested for twenty years in the trenches of capitalism. Son of a milkman, he was raised in the Bronx and won a scholarship to study math and physics at Cornell University. After graduation, he made pit stops at all the tech meccas--Burroughs, Intel, Digital Equipment--before launching his first venture in 1983 at the age of 35. A year later, he sold his company, which made Ethernet cards for PCs, to modem maker Hayes for $6 million. In 1989 he co-founded Ascend Communications, a computer-networking firm, which was acquired last year for $24 billion by Lucent Technologies. (Ryan won't say how much he made on his stake, but the stock had soared 66 times in the five years that it was a public company.) Ryan had left active management of the company several years earlier after injuring his back doing a flip in a pool. In 1996, he bought 1,200 acres of pristine forest and ranch land outside Hamilton, Mont., and indulged in the fantasy of retiring young and rich. But he was bored and restless, so he set up his boot camp and began inviting promising young recruits. "I'm a competitive guy," he says. "You can't sit around and twiddle your thumbs even if you've got a ton of money."

Of course, Ryan's camp isn't exactly Parris Island, the steamy, bug-infested swamp that is the training ground of the U.S. Marines. His recruits stay in a comfortable log cabin where the kitchen is stocked with treats like smoked salmon and fresh strawberries. Dinners are gourmet, catered affairs featuring such dishes as stuffed Cornish game hen. Ryan doesn't scrimp on the wine, either. The table wine is $55-a-bottle Robert Talbott Chardonnay. Between meetings, recruits can hike the backcountry and indulge in some target practice with Ryan's .357 Magnum.

Ryan doesn't look like your typical barrel-chested, buzz-cut drill instructor, either. At 52, he's bespectacled and a bit on the pudgy side. But when it comes to business affairs, Ryan is a big proponent of the military way: training, discipline, teamwork, self-sacrifice. He advocates the bootstrap model of success. Grow slow. Keep costs low. Build a strong management team. Maintain a tight focus on your market. Target sectors of the market that are established and profitable--in other words, corporate America. "One of my basic rules on how to make money is that you don't rob delicatessens," he says. "You rob banks. You have to go where the money is."

Just don't come to his ranch looking for some quick cash for a half-baked get-rich-quick scheme. Ryan isn't running a charity. He rarely invests in his recruits' companies and only does so when the founders have demonstrated their willingness to work hard and follow his blueprint. More often, Ryan takes a small stake in the most promising of the companies in return for his advice. That tack has paid off richly in recent years. In 1998 he took a small stake in the company he saved, LookSmart, which went public a year ago. Current value of his stock: $14 million. Some of his winnings go to fund the boot camp. The rest, he says, goes to art and science museums and to his alma mater, Cornell.

Getting into Camp Ryan isn't easy. Some 1,000 entrepreneurs apply each year. It's free; Ryan says he wants to help bootstrappers. Most of them hear about the camp from other alumnae or through a grapevine that twists through the nation's high-tech hot spots. Ryan also meets a lot of candidates at MIT, where he lectures frequently. From among those applicants, Ryan picks about twenty to come to Roaring Lion. He's looking for companies that have a hot new technology but lack the management skills and the financing to bring it to market. "You're not talking about the cream of the crop of Silicon Valley," Ryan says. "These are companies that would have trouble getting funding."

Actuality Systems was one of them. The 3-D display maker was a runner-up in the prestigious MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition in 1997. Judges were impressed by the innovative product, which allows you to create a small but sharply defined three-dimensional image that appears to be floating in air under an acrylic dome. But Gregg Favalora, the Reading, Mass., company's 26-year-old founder, was having no luck raising money for his company from venture capitalists, and understandably so. He didn't have a clue as to how to sell his product. By the time he landed at boot camp three years ago, he was so broke that his parents were paying for his rent and groceries.

Ryan urged him to cut costs by scaling down his prototype, and to focus on new markets such as the pharmaceutical industry, which might buy the company's product to make models of the chemical structure of drugs and diseases. Ryan's name also helped Favalora open doors in the venture-capital community. Actuality raised $1.5 million last December, largely on the strength of his name. Among the investors was Michael Reeves, a venture capitalist with Point West Ventures in San Francisco, who put in $100,000. "Rob has a strong reputation because of Ascend," Reeves says. "Taking a startup and creating a multibillion-dollar company goes a long way." Today, Actuality Systems has six employees and intends to have its product in beta test by the end of the year.

Ryan's advice goes far beyond the basics of good business. He helps recruits decode the language of venture capitalism, thus saving them days of wasted time chasing after noncommittal VCs. He helps structure dynamic presentations designed to impress investors. "Ryan's a laser logician," says Andy Sack, founder of Boston-based Abuzz, who worked with him for about a year. "Boot camp was useful in helping us nail down our business model." Sack was a soldier in Ryan's army for about a year before cutting ties amicably with his mentor. "We wanted to make our own mistakes," he says, "and not necessarily adopt the Rob Ryan way." Still, Sack was grateful for the early advice. Six months after breaking with Ryan, he sent him shares in Abuzz worth about $25,000.

Some of the lessons are painful for recruits. In some cases, Ryan has to instruct his trainees in the dangers of violating the rules of business etiquette. Two years ago, Creditland founders Tony Wilbert and Henrik Johansson flew out to the ranch from San Francisco, so thrilled to have won a slot in boot camp that Tony bought brand-new army fatigues for the occasion. But they forgot to set their watches ahead an hour to local time. The next morning, they didn't show up on time for their first meeting with Ryan. Incensed, Ryan marched into the log cabin where they were lounging and shouted, "Where are you, you morons?" He followed that query with a string of familiar four-letter words.

Wilbert and Johansson were able to make amends with Ryan, and he's been counseling them ever since. Creditland, based in San Francisco, started out three years ago as a consumer Website hooking up borrowers with lenders. Now Creditland prescreens borrowers for a number of banks and financial companies, including Bank of America, American Express and First Union. To date, Creditland has raised $35 million in capital from Robertson Stephens, Thomas Weisel Partners and Charles Schwab. An IPO may be in the works. "Rob helped us focus on the core things that were important," says Wilbert. "This guy," Ryan says proudly of Wilbert, "has a nose for money."

And what about Rohit Khare, the chastened founder of KnowNow? First, some pre-camp background. Khare conjured up his idea, a next-generation version of "push technology," while working toward his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California-Irvine. (Push technology allows information to be delivered to computers via the Internet.) He promptly took a leave of absence from school to market his technology. Khare's software will track certain Websites--say, one in which game schedules are posted for Little League--and notify users of changes by e-mail, page, cell or instant message. Khare had come to boot camp full of arrogance. But in his first meeting with Ryan, one of the first questions made clear the danger facing his little company: How much money was left in the bank account? At the current burn rate, Khare answered, one week. Khare had planned to hit up some venture capitalists for funds. But Ryan cautioned against that, saying the business plan was too immature to take on the road. Timing is everything, he said. For quick cash, he advised appealing to the bank of last resort: Mom.

Next, Ryan tore apart the business model. Khare's plan was to woo companies' Webmasters, the techies who handle production tasks at Websites. Ryan shot that proposal full of holes. "My gut works in conjunction with my brain, and it is telling me, 'I don't think so,'" Ryan says. "The Webmaster is low on the totem pole, and he's not controlling a fundamental budget." He suggests that Khare sell to vice presidents, who actually have funds at their disposal. They have "large buckets of money," Ryan says.

Some of the advice doesn't go down well with Khare. On a hike through the woods with his chief technology officer, Adam Rifkin, the young entrepreneur agonizes over the tough decisions he has to make. And wonders if he's wasting his time away from the office. "I can't say I'm happy about standing here by the river when I have next month's payroll to worry about," Khare gripes. Near-death experiences are getting to be a monthly ritual at KnowNow, and he knows the company can't continue on that path. But Ryan's bootstrap model doesn't have a lot of appeal for him. He fears losing ground to other, faster competitors if he opts for slow, steady growth. "We have momentum," Khare says. Rifkin counters, "But how do you determine if momentum is a snowball or a runaway train about to crash?"

Such moments are typical and necessary in the life of a start-up, says Ryan, especially when the founders are young and inexperienced like Khare and Rifkin. "This is normal," he adds. "We don't have a good answer. Right now, we're reviewing all the bad answers."

Was it worth it, Rohit? Seems so. Two months later he's still in business, having survived the crisis thanks in large part to the advice he got from Ryan. He left boot camp with a new sense of mission and quickly laid off three employees, reducing the monthly burn rate from $75,000 to $60,000. He convinced his angel investors to toss in another $500,000, rescuing the company from the brink of insolvency. And he's planning to open an office in Silicon Valley to chase down the corporate customers Ryan recommended he target. Ryan's take? "Basically they were running around with technology and no way to make money. I suspect I'll get a call saying 'everything you said was true.'"