WHEN electronics engineer Askar Sheibani set up a one-man business in a garden shed he bought for £50, few would have put money on him turning it into a company with a multi-million pound annual turnover within 20 years.
Certainly the banks did not rate his chances. Small business advisers at the Department of Trade and Industry – DTI – were no more encouraging.
But Askar, originally from Azerbaijan, is made of stern stuff and in less that eight months he had doubled his workforce – to two – and was ready to move to a small unit on an industrial estate in his then home town of Reading.
Today, as he controls his company Comtek Network Systems from headquarters on Deeside Industrial Park, it is clear he has not forgotten the lessons he learned when the firm was in its infancy in 1989.
"We have a culture that wants people to hold back rather than move forward and take a risk," he says. "We should be doing far more to help businesses."
Askar later accepted an invitation from government minister Patricia Hewitt to sit on a DTI advisory board.
"I ended up sitting on the board advising the very people who had told me to forget my business idea," he says.
It is difficult to find a simple way of explaining what Comtek does so to quote Askar: "Comtek is a Pan-European provider of services and products to the network, datacomms and telecommunications service industry. We also provide direct support to end-users. Customers are realising that IT products are capable of providing many years of useful service and do not need to be regularly replaced with new equipment."
In short his message to clients is don't throw it way if it can be fixed. That, he says, saves companies money and is good for the environment.
Comtek moved to Deeside in 1997, a decision Askar rates as the best he has ever made, and in the same year he opened another 'one-stop repair shop' in Amsterdam.
Today the company employs 40 of its 90-strong workforce on Deeside, where 60 per cent of the business is for the export market, with the others split between Holland, a base in Frankfurt in Germany, and a handful still in Reading.
Askar is not slow to praise the people he regards as responsible for his company's continued success – his team of highly skilled and motivated engineers and salespeople.
"The skills gap was a problem when we first came here, but thanks to Deeside College that is a thing of the past," he says.
"We have had wonderful help from Flintshire County Council and the Welsh Development Agency at first, from the Welsh Assembly in later years.
"I don't think some businesses realise how lucky we are in Flintshire. I have worked with several councils and Flintshire is the most positive I have ever dealt with."
Married in 1982, Askar and his wife are very much at home in Flintshire having brought up their two sons, aged 21 and 13, in Hawarden.
Comtek's list of customers reads like an IT industry who's who with the likes of BT and Hewlett Packard leading the way.
It works for worldwide companies as varied as the Hong Kong Railway Company and Eurotunnel. It has undertaken projects for firms in China, Singapore and Bangladesh.
He speaks with pride about his company's recycling credentials. "We'll cannibalise any scrap electronics equipment and make use of any working components," he says.
Askar says prospects are excellent with trade missions to Washington and San Jose aiming to win new contracts and the construction of state-of-the-art workshops planned on Deeside later in the year.
And links with the past? Yes, you've got it... Askar has still got the £50 shed he used to launch his business!