WHEN Richard Tang was 13 he discovered a passion for computers after his school bought a Commodore for pupils to use.

“I used to spend all my lunchtimes and breaks programming it,” he said. “I was amazed by it. I had always been interested in building things and I loved the idea that you could take a computer that couldn’t do anything and then program it to do something useful.”

Tang was born in Rochdale and brought up there by his Chinese father and English mother. By the time he was 15 he had bought a computer of his own with money earned by selling pet food in the local market. He also formed a fictitious company, Zen Microsystems, so computer suppliers would be fooled into sending him catalogues and data sheets about their products.

After taking a degree in computer systems at Salford University, Tang got a job designing computer hardware. Four years and several promotions later, however, he realised his heart wasn’t in it. “I could see my life mapped out ahead of me. I wanted to do something a bit different.”

So at 27 he gave up his job to travel round China and India for nine months before returning to set up his own company designing computer hardware.

After three months of waiting for the phone to ring, he found work writing software for a large company.

A few months into the contract in 1994, however, Tang found another inspiration. He was having a drink in a pub with his brother when their conversation turned to a new concept Tang had just heard of — the internet. Tang had never used the internet but his brother, an academic, had used it at university and was convinced it would take off in a big way.

Inspired by his brother’s enthusiasm, Tang decided to start up a company that provided access to the internet, figuring that it was an opportunity he could not afford to miss.

“Internet service provision was a new business area and I thought if I could get into it I could create a situation where I would have subscriptions coming in every month — without actually doing very much.”

He persuaded friends and family to lend him £20,000, and his brother agreed to spend six months building a network that would connect his customers to the internet. The original network was created by attaching six modems to a simple wooden shelf which were then connected to six phone lines.

With six lines Tang could take on 50 customers, and he opened for business charging each of them £10 a month for internet access. As more people signed up he added more phone lines, but by 1996 Zen Internet was having to invest so much in new equipment that it almost ran out of money. Tang had to borrow more from friends and family to save the company.

From the start, one of Tang’s biggest fears was that one day a rival company would decide to provide internet access for free and force his company out of business. So when Dixons launched its Freeserve service provider in 1998, he expected the worst.

However, while his company did lose most of its personal home users, Tang discovered that his business customers were happy to pay for a service with customer support. The following year Zen Internet made its biggest profit.

Two years later the company faced another challenge with the arrival of broadband. It was a costly gamble but, after much agonising, Tang decided to take the plunge.

He said: “At the time, broadband was new and high risk. It cost us an initial investment of £100,000, which at the time was a hell of a lot of money. But I figured that if we didn’t change to broadband, we would get left behind.”

It was a smart decision — Zen Internet now has almost 60,000 customers, of which 43,000 take broadband.

“Investing in broadband meant that we went from being a small regional internet service provider to being a national one, and that is what has really driven our success since then,” said Tang.

Zen Internet’s sales were £14.2m in 2004 and are expected to double to £30m this year, while profits were £1.5m in 2004 and are expected to double to £3m this year. Tang said sales have roughly doubled every year since the firm began.

Tang, now 39, still owns 100% of the company, which is worth £13m. He thinks the secret of his success is determination. “I can focus on something to the point of being obsessive. In the early days I worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day. I did nothing other than work, eat and sleep.”

He is immensely proud of what he has achieved. “It is such a good feeling to have built this up and to have created an environment where people working for the company are enthused by it. I have no interest in selling up. I created this business from scratch and I want to see just how far it can go.”