The 1980s may be viewed with some nostalgia in Celtic Tiger Ireland as a decade of dodgy haircuts and suspect songs, but Fergus Frawley remembers it as an era of stagnation when the company of which he is now managing director nearly went out of business.

By the late 1980s, Limerick- based electrical contractors Kirby Group had pared back to the bare bone to survive.

"While the company was never big, by the late 1980s it was down to 10 people and close to going out of business," says Frawley, who had joined Kirby in 1979 as an apprentice electrician.

"It was backs to the wall."

What a difference 20 years and a sustained economic boom can make. Today, Kirby Group Engineering employs 635 people and turns more than €60 million.

The lessons learned and decisions made during the lean 1980s provided the catalyst for growth.

"It gave you certain skills about how to run your business as economically as possible. As a result of the times that were in it, we ran our business very tightly and we were very commercially aware."

Running a business efficiently to survive is one thing, expanding it during a recession is another, but that was the decision the Kirby Group made in the late 1980s.

In 1990, Frawley was chosen to open and head up an office in Dublin. Such an approach might have seemed like a brave move when others were battening down the hatches. Frawley says the firm had few other options.

"Most of what was happening in the country was in Dublin so if we had any chance of surviving, we had to get a piece of the Dublin market."

It was difficult for a small provincial player to get accepted in the Dublin market. "It took a lot of knocking on doors and cold calling. Eventually we were given the opportunity to show what we could do."

One of the first jobs the company won was an electrical contract on a new plant in Kildare by a computer chip manufacturer called Intel.

It turned out to be first of many contracts with a range of Irish and multinational firms, particularly in the medical devices area, such as Abbott, Wyeth and Jansen Pharmaceutical as well as companies such as Analog Devices, Green Isle Foods, IBM and Nortel Networks.

The boom in the building trade would have many believe that contractors of all types are raking in the cash. "That perception of being on the pig's back is more to do with if you're a property developer, but competition in general contracting is tight," says Frawley.

So tight that, just to keep turnover ticking over, Kirby found itself taking on a few residential development jobs at the turn of the century as the commercial/industrial market slowed markedly. Margins are tight in the electrical contracting business, says Frawley.

A quick look at its most recent set of accounts to May 31st, 2005, shows an operating profit of €1.7 million on a turnover of €54.5 million.

"Today the market is extremely tight and very competitive. The margins have tightened and I'd say sometimes clients' quality has been affected by the low pricing. We find ourselves unable to compete in certain cases. We had an option a few years ago of dropping our standards and trying to compete for everything that was in the market or keep our standards at a high level. We weren't going to drop our standards."

The company still apprentices all of its own electricians and, while more and more companies tend to subcontract areas of work such as health and safety, Kirby employs all of its own health and safety officers, designers, project managers and engineers, ensuring full control of a project from start to finish.

"In a lot of our markets quality, safety and standards are a priority rather than costs especially in the pharmaceutical, biopharma and medical devices where the client is prepared to pay a margin to get quality."

In much the same way it did in the 1980s, Kirby has branched out into other areas in order to grow, bolster margins and future-proof the company against any downturn.

It set up K Communications, a data communications business specialising in copper, fibre, telephone and voice over internet protocol solutions. It also acquired a mechanical services firm, R O'Malley in Galway, in 2004 and First Seal, a fabrication company in Meath in 2005, without recourse to borrowing

"The idea is that we could give our clients a one-stop solution whereby we could provide mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, process piping and data communications at one point of contact."

Kirby's electrical division also has a large medium voltage/high voltage section working in the energy sector, a niche the company got into with the opening up of the electricity market. "We saw an opportunity where ESB was starting to outsource a lot of the maintenance and revamping of their substations. That has developed into a situation where we are now building new substations for the ESB."

The company is working with a number of wind-farm developers to provide network cabling from turbines to the national grid.

It now plans to set up an office in Britain, having won a contract with B&Q to work on a number of its stores. With the Olympics coming to London and Irish developers involved in a number of projects in Britain, there could be a number of opportunities for the firm.

"It is the obvious next area of growth within the company," says Frawley.