WOULD it be unfair to suggest that Steve Mason has the face of a rugby player? He takes the assertion with good humour. And having played for teams in New Zealand and Australia in his younger days, and now acting as coach to aspiring young players in Nottingham, he does have a history of sporting performance.

Today, as managing director of his own growing telecoms business, Mason Infotech, he is not slow to appreciate that there are important lessons in team sports that can be applied to business.

"You've got to rely on your mates," says Mason. "Every time you go into a game, if you don't look after yourself, there's a good chance you're going to get hurt – and you're definitely going to lose. One superstar does not make a team. Everyone has to play. So developing that team ethos is definitely something that is carried over into business."

Mason founded his business ten years ago with his wife Debrah and they initially ran it from their study at home. Steady growth has given them a projected turnover of £1.8m this year and the business, with a handful of employees, now operates out of Churchill Park in Colwick, Nottingham.

Its business is the supply and installation of voice and data networks – telephones, lines, broadband internet etc – to companies which are, typically, your "£5m to £250m turnover SME."

Customers today include solicitors Fraser Brown, North Midlands Construction and nearly 2000 cash machines which rely on Mason Infotech-supplied and maintained broadband to connect with the great bank account in the clouds.

Or "Cloud".

Speaking to Mason it soon becomes clear that telecoms is a business which is packed full of acronyms and specialised terminology – X25s, SIPs, hosted telecoms, broadband clouds...

Although Mason says that networks aren't as complicated as they appear to be, he does admit that, "the world of telecoms and IT is too complicated for most people – they don't want to know. It's a bit of a black art".We are told that mobile technology is the future.

So, does Mason believe that the old office landline telephone is set to become redundant? His answer is that landlines are currently necessary for broadband and, so long as it is cheaper to use a landline and to call a landline, then they will stick around.

Mason, who was brought up in Netherfield, began his telecoms career in his 20s following some formative years in New Zealand and Australia which involved rugby and working as a shepherd and as a concrete labourer at a gold mine.

Back in Britain he worked for various telecoms company, including BT for 14 years, before joining a US company called Daleen Technologies. It's worth hearing the story.

"I joined because, one, they were going to pay me a lot more money and, two, because they were based in Miami and Amsterdam," says Mason. "It was great fun for a while, I was earning six figures, under no pressure. But I knew it wouldn't last. They had 600 people when I joined them and I had a phone call when I was on holiday in Spain, on the beach, to say that they'd gone down to 300 overnight, mostly in America. My boss had a sell [share] order for let's say $55.5 and it was at 54 and then plunged down to cents. He would have made a couple of million dollars had he stayed with it. We nearly sold Daleen to BT. They had a wholesale system, a huge monster of a number cruncher which reconciled calls between networks, and they used to outsource that. But they didn't have a retail billing proposition, which is what we did, and it got to the point where they came over and did the due diligence on our product. But it didn't stack up for them and that was when I was made redundant."

That was 2001. Since he and Debrah had written the business plan for Mason Infotech the previous year they got the ball rolling in 2002 and that was the start of the company. Rugby has been important in his business, and not just because of its lessons about teamwork. Perhaps 25 per cent of his clients have some rugby connection either from his own old playing days or his current coaching activities.

And he still goes in for physical effort. He's run a half-marathon and, two years ago, aged 48, competed in the Men's Health survival of the fittest 12k run in Nottingham. It was hard, he confesses, and this year his wife has told him to get down the gym every day to lose two stone.