Theo Labuschagne, of Proman Associates Ltd, Filey, with seated electrical engineer Garth Williams

Selling warmth to Portugal is a feather in any businessman's bowler, but for Theo Labuschagne, of Proman Associates Ltd, Filey, the £500,000 deal is a triumph over adversity.

It is two years since Theo, a victim of redundancies at generator manufacturers Dale Power Systems Ltd of Filey, linked arms with another former Dales man Ian McLeod, who had already struck out on his own.

Together they put all their own energies into Ian's venture, Proman Associates, offering project management and design of power projects.

Now the business consists of nine people with another two jobs being advertised for an electrical design engineer and a project administrator.

Turnover has expanded 13-fold from around £60,000 to £800,000. The project to build a co-generator scheme creating electricity and channelling its heat for the Europarque exhibition centre in Porto is about to come to fruition. And they see themselves as good prospects for the Evening Press Business Venture of the Year.

South African-born Theo, 34, who as a mechanical engineer came to Britain with his British wife, Arlene in 1987, says: "I sometimes find this success hard to comprehend. One minute you find that you are regarded as not good enough to stay employed, the next you are winning big contracts like this one - and taking on two or three people from Dale to do it."

Theo worked for Brush Electrical machines in Loughborough when he first arrived in the UK and for three years honed his skills as a commercial engineer, before joining Dale Power Systems Ltd as a special projects engineer, generating electrical energy from landfill gas. Then Iain Dale sold out to the TT group.

Under the banner of Proman Associates, Theo and Ian McLeod made their first big breakthrough by convincing Celtic Infrastructure, a subsidiary of Hyder Industrials which supplies electricity and water to Wales, to use their services and supply power generation on landfill sites. "There were a couple of other companies who were chewing over the idea and this tipped them in our favour."

Now, apart from the Portuguese contract, Proman Associates is building a mines gas power station at Tower Colliery in Wales, a ten megawatt mines gas station near Stoke on Trent, and a landfill gas station at Boston, Lincs.

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