It all started on a £40 Argos typewriter

PROWLING the route ahead, the armed guards move into position, their target vehicle now only feet away as they prepare to make their incisive move.

They inch closer, dropping back just as quickly, almost taunting its prey like a wild animal. Creeping along the dusty, barren road, they lie in wait for the right moment to strike.

But it never comes, and the subject of the intense attention continues its journey.

This isn’t a military exercise, it’s business, and the apparent aggressors are, in fact, using their considerable force to protect a convoy containing a North-East businessman.

Components made on Teesside for passive fire protection machines

The backdrop is Nigeria, and managing director Keith Miller is busy continuing the expansion of his rapidlygrowing company, Ecco Finishing Supplies.

Mr Miller is meeting clients who want to use its specialist technology and looking at areas to set up a permanent base in the African country.

Nestled beneath Middlesbrough’s Newport Bridge, the firm, which began life in Mr Miller’s bedroom, aided by a £40 typewriter, supplies pneumatic paintspraying equipment, blasting machinery and fire protection across the world.

Now back from his Nigerian adventure, we sit in his office, inside the company’s Letitia Industrial Estate base.

His desk is littered with paperwork, teeming with invoices and contracts representing deals recently struck.

Behind him, a framed Middlesbrough Cricket Club shirt, emblazoned with Ecco’s name, hangs on the wall, and a Butterwick Hospice logo also catching the eye.

Mr Miller has a keen business sense, but equally as strong is his passion to give something back to the community, which is as forthcoming as the mounting contracts he continues to engineer.

Earlier this year, the company, which employs 15 people, signed a £500,000 deal to send spray machines to Oman-based Tech International, where they will be used to increase heat resistance in steel structures on oil and gas refineries and petrochemical plants.

It will ship more than 12 spray machines to the Middle East in the next six months, but Mr Miller says that is only the start, enthusiastically revealing more contracts, including a £100,000 agreement to send a specialist machine and engineer to Sakhalin Island, off Russia’s eastern coast, to apply fireproof material to an oil refinery.

Mr Miller, who lives in Billingham, near Stockton, is an avid supporter of the Redcar Bears speedway team, so is used to the instant adrenalin-fuelled thrills of speed. But even he is a little taken aback by the sheer pace and variation within his firm’s progress, which includes the time it supplied spray guns to a well-known butcher to glaze his prized pork pies.

As we talk, Mr Miller reveals Ecco has signed a £110,000 Kazakstan deal to supply fire safety products for onshore oil and gas projects, and a £105,000 Angolan contract for blasting equipment to prepare surfaces for painting.

Ross Allan, left, and David Dodd clean up a Redcar Bears speedway team motorcycle the day after racing. Ecco sponsor the team.

Not bad for a man whose global adventure all started with a trip to the high street.

He said: “I bought an electric typewriter from Argos, and it still gets used to this day.

“But I had no computer skills and went on a course to learn how to use one.

“I was doing alright and on my own for about a year before realising I needed someone to answer the phone, so my sister began helping me out.

“The first company I had was Nissan and their order was for 120 spray guns.”

With clients learning of Mr Miller’s ability to supply the goods, work started to increase, and it now counts luxury carmaker Bentley as a customer, with its specialist paint sprayers adding bespoke designs to the firm’s Continental and Flying Spur models for rich customers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

He said: “Our products are bespoke for them. Some of the princes and princesses in Saudi Arabia want their cars to be sprayed in a certain way that can’t be done by a robot.

“People might think it’s only a car, but it’s more than that to me.

“I saw one recently and know for a fact it was done with our equipment and all the Nissans have been sprayed by equipment from us.”

Mechanical fitter Robert Norris prepares a passive fire protection machine for export

TO take the 54-year-old’s success on face value would detract from the years of hard work put in before Ecco’s inception.

Leaning back in his chair, he talks of his experience as a mechanical fitter and latterly, a distributor for Swedish manufacturer, Atlas Copco, whose UK base was in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire.

His role involved selling finishing equipment, which provided tailor-made experience for launching Ecco in 1995, and worked from home before moving to Belasis Business Centre, in Billingham, near Stockton, and eventually Middlesbrough.

He said: “I was with Atlas for eight years and left a cracking job, and I thought that if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it myself.

“So, I set up from home using the philosophy that the answer is yes, what is the question?

“It really makes me smile to think about where we came from to where we are today, and what we are supplying.

“The business is built on the fact that stock is available, customers do not want to wait, and that reliability is key.

“We once lost an order in Poland and that was the catalyst for me to think, we could just sit back here and do nothing, or we could become more aggressive and therefore competitive, and that is what we did.

Store manager Bob Lynch in the warehouse

“We’ve had people come to us and been blown away by our products – they operate like Swiss watches.”

Our conversation returns to Nigeria and those expansion plans, which Mr Miller reiterates are an attractive proposition.

He said: “It is a place we want to do something and are already looking to rent properties over there. There are lots of opportunities in the country and the demand is very high. It is a place that holds huge potential for a company like us.”