Toby Lindsay and Seamus Murphy only had one student on the day they opened their English language school two years ago.

He was a young Korean who had seen a flyer for the school, walked into the classroom and plonked £1,000 on their desk to enrol.

Regency College at the Wayland House business centre in Hove has expanded rapidly ever since and now has about 90 students on its books.

In October 2003, Toby and Seamus leased the £850,000 business centre so they could expand their business whenever a tenant moved out.

The college, which achieved British Council Accreditation in November last year, now occupies about half of the 23-room building in Western Road.

Early last year Tony and Seamus bought Practical Books - a bookshop in Brighton selling teacher training manuals, now based at Wayland House.

Toby and Seamus are now in charge of three separate businesses with a combined turnover of at least half a million pounds.

The pair met in 2000 while working for another English language school in Brighton and discovered they both wanted to go into business.

Toby, 29, said: "As with most jobs, people were always grumbling and moaning about how they could make a better fist of it than the managers.

"And I clearly recall how one day when Seamus and I were sat on the steps outside having a fag, we said to each other, 'Well why don't we just do it?'.

"Neither of us had much money so we built our own web site and designed and printed all of our promotional material.

"From day one it was just a case of getting a bus into town and hitting the streets with a load of flyers and talking to people.

"We knew we had to start generating capital quickly because we didn't have any money to speak of - just the £1,000 we had both put into the company."

They both felt foreign students were getting a raw deal from English language schools, shelling out a fortune for little in return.

They wanted to open a college where the emphasis was on rigorous academic learning coupled with a relaxed, informal social scene.

Toby said: "There was a lot of hostility from other schools when we first went into business because we were effectively poaching their students.

"But most of these are private businesses making a lot of money so I have to say I wasn't particularly racked with guilt.

"And a lot of people said we would never make it so it is very satisfying that everything is going so well."