A South Shropshire firm set to celebrate 30 years in business next year is investing in its future with a £ 50,000 expansion.
Starting with just two people and a secretary, and with no stock back in 1976, Amodil Supplies, of Forest Park Industrial Estate, Cleobury Mortimer, is now a major UK supplier of stainless steel.
Steel supplied by Amodil ends up in household names such as Hotpoint washing machines, Peugeot engines and Aga cookers.
The firm started life in a small office in Kidderminster, moving originally to a site in Cleobury Mortimer and ultimately to the current premises.
When neighbouring businesses moved, Amodil took the opportunity to occupy their premises, steadily increasing the size of its warehouse. The total site now covers around 105,000 sq ft, of which around half is office and warehousing.
Andy Coghill, director and group general manager, has been with the company for 25 years.
He said: "Our latest expansion involves further extending our warehouse at the rear of the site so we can store more stainless steel. The ultimate aim is to rearrange our handling facilities so we can receive material at the rear of the site, store material centrally and process and despatch from the front of the warehouse.
"Throughout our 30 years of trading we have had to make use of the space available to us but we are now investing money in extending the warehouse and making the delivery and despatch system more logical and efficient."
Money is also being spent on cutting shop improvements and security, incorporating automated gates, bollards and CCTV cameras so the whole site has state- of- the- art security surveillance 24 hours a day.
The group now employs 52 people, holds 4,000 tonnes of stock and its annual turnover has reached £40 million.
It delivers stainless steel products across the UK and also has an office and warehouse in Trafford Park, Manchester.
In 1982 in partnership with Spanish company Olarra, one of Europe's largest producers of stainless steel bars, it formed Olarra UK which now contributes about one third of group turnover.
Amodil can boast links to Buckingham Palace and two big-budget Hollywood movies.
It recently supplied steel to make support brackets used in the building of a stone wall at Buckingham Palace.
The firm also supplied stainless steel fine wire for the manufacture of flexible hose used to create the fuselage for the space craft used in Hollywood blockbuster Lost in Space, starring Matt Le Blanc. And it supplied stainless steel round bar and seamless pipe for the mountings and linkages in the dry ice machines used by Pinewood Studios in the making of the James Bond film The World is Not Enough.
Amodil provided products which have been used in some of the country's major landmarks including Birmingham's Bull Ring, London's Millennium Dome and Millennium Bridge, Leeds Football Club ground Elland Road and Manchester's Trafford Shopping Centre.
Structural bolts from steel originating from Amodil ended up at Paris Airport and tubing was used in a boiler refit at Columbia Power Station in the United States.
It supplied wall fixings for Manchester United Football Club's Old Trafford ground, crash barriers and architectural steelwork for the London Docklands, turnstiles for the London Underground, and replacement railings around Guernsey Harbour.
The company also supplies companies which manufacture parts for the automotive trade, such as valves, wheel rivets, bolts and exhaust systems to Jaguar, Land Rover, BMW, Peugeot, Vauxhall, Williams F1 Racing Cars, Indy Racing Cars and Harley Davidson motorcycles.
Stainless steel from Amodil can also be found in many households - in Hotpoint and Creda washing machines and Aga cookers, and in products for the food-processing industry and breweries, the power industry, pharmaceutical firms, the oil and gas trade, the prison service, hospitals and mobile phone companies.
