If you're looking for a winner from climate change - not to mention the recent floods - look no further than the tiny (and very green) engineering consultancy, Weeks Group.

Weeks may seem an unlikely company to have been started in the proverbial garage. But, in 1973, that was just where founder Dr. Weeks formed the basis of the group's concrete, soils and materials testing laboratories - now a £6 million business.

Consultancy grew faster, and currently generates sales of £9.5 million. The group now employs 400 from its Maidstone headquarters and works as far afield as Fife and Poland, supplying its environmental and geo-technical skills to the construction industry, developers, property investors and insurers.

Normally, Weeks will be brought in at the start of a project. That could be to help in the structure of a road or a building, or it could be to stabilise poor quality soil for a brownfield development. But it also helps with maintenance - and it has the skills to measure wear and tear on busy motorways or airport runways, for example.

By its own admission, Weeks has not always remembered to apply commercial tests to its own business. Last year it found remedies, made management changes and restructured. It has a new chief executive, Phillip Hill, who came in with an acquisition a couple of years ago.

In the year to March 2000, operating margins rose from 4.8 per cent to 5.5 per cent. Profits improved from an underlying £665,000 to £786,000, giving earnings per share of 0.4p against 0.3p. Net debt was brought down from 38 per cent of shareholders' funds to just 7 per cent.

Hill reckons there is plenty of scope to take Weeks into a bigger league. With the engineering consultancy market estimated at around £1 billion, and climate change forecast to take an increasing toll, he sees no problems growing the business. Weeks hopes to increase market share in leaps and bounds as outsourcing helps it build partnerships - one relating to subsidence work has been established with Royal & Sun Alliance.

Its shareholders profile is changing, too. Weeks came to Aim four years ago when small companies were out of fashion with institutional investors, so it pitched itself to the private client sector as a penny stock. Times have changed. Its deeply green status is now attracting environmentally-conscious fund managers. This gives more stability to the share price as well as scope for acquisition funding.

The new house brokers, Seymour Pierce, reckon a profit of £1.25 million is on the cards for 2001, with £1.5 million possible the year after. That suggests the shares are selling for barely ten times earnings, one year out. That is hardly demanding.