I HAVE always been involved in construction. When I left school I went to Exeter College and studied construction and then went on to Bristol Polytechnic.

I came back to work for Exeter City Council within their direct works and building control departments.

After a few years I moved into the private sector and went to a stone restoration company in Torquay, which was owned by Exeter Building Company (EBC) Group, now Rok. I moved from there to an Exeter building company called MT Sleeman, which was also part of EBC.

I was working as a contracts manager and I just took to that job and got good results. During that time Garvis Snook took over as chief executive and completely reordered the company, when it became Rok.

I was in the right position so progressed quite rapidly and learned an awful lot about business as well as construction.

I got promoted to team leader so I was overseeing a team of contracts managers but after a while I started to get disenchanted with being part of a large organisation because it wasn't flexible enough. That really made me want to do my own thing.

I stopped working there and just wanted to reflect on my whole career and make sure I wanted to stay in construction, so I took six months off with my family and travelled around South East Asia.

I decided that I did enjoy construction, it was just being in a large organisation that I wasn't so keen on.

At around that time we bought a house to renovate that needed a lot of work doing on it. While I was doing that project I was also doing some freelance quantity surveying work for a small building company that wasn't performing very well. The owner wanted me to run it so I put in some proposals but they were a bit too radical for him.

By then I was so enthused by that I thought I would go and do it on my own, so I started Arque in May 2004. At first it was just me in a very small office at Upton Pyne, just outside Exeter, and to get the work done I used sub-contractors.

The main challenge in the early days was getting the work. I had a lot of contacts from working with Rok but I couldn't get the enquiries coming in. The difficulty was getting people to have confidence in a new building company.

The few jobs we did we ran really efficiently and did really well to make sure the client was very happy. After the first 12 months we had a small track record but clients would give us excellent references and so we built on that reputation.

I also spent a lot of time phoning people asking them for work, even if they weren't advertising, just to keep my name out there.

We now employ 16 people and will probably do 100 different jobs this year, some small and some large, up to a value of £750,000. Next year we are aiming to turn over £2m.

A lot of people say businesses can grow by word of mouth, but I employ a member of staff to do marketing and PR stuff, which in my view is important, especially in these times.

We have still got a lot of enquiries coming in and we are still busy. I'm quite optimistic at the moment, although I think we have another 12 months to go at least before things in the economy are going to get any better. I'm confident we will get enough work to keep us going in the right direction.

I think it's important to keep on growing, but at a controlled pace. If you stop growing you take your eye off the ball and that's how businesses can become stagnant. But what I don't want to do is become a large organisation because that's why I left Rok.

When people start up in business it's often because they are good at something, like being a hairdresser. Just because you are good at it, that doesn't mean you are going to have a successful business.

In the first couple of years the main issue is cash flow, how to manage that and where you are going to get your work from.

It's really important to actually get some business advice or sound business experience. Talk to business people to find out about the financial side of things.

The other key thing is looking after your customers. Give them a really good service and make sure you give them what they want. In any business that's vitally important, and applies equally in a large organisation and a small one.