HE was unaware of it at the time but, with the benefit of several decades’ hindsight, Neill Hunter is now pretty certain who inspired him to go into business.

“My dad was a clever engineer in the tobacco industry in Paisley,” said Mr Hunter, who runs ScotCrest, the Inverclyde-based clan plaque manufacturer, with wife Pauline.

“He suddenly gave that up and bought our first shop in Paisley and ended up with four or five at one point. It was a beautiful licensed grocer and florist.

“I remember being with my dad in the shop helping him to do deliveries. That’s probably where I got the inspiration from.”

Now presiding over rapid growth at ScotCrest – the world’s biggest manufacturer of clan plaques –

Mr Hunter did follow in his father’s footsteps. But, though he also became an engineer, it would be many years before he would go it alone. Indeed, he would have a successful career spanning different incarnations before he and wife Pauline would have their own business.

Mr Hunter joined Rolls-Royce as an apprentice after attending Paisley Grammar, ultimately spending 10 years with the engine manufacturer in product design and mechanical engineering roles in the west of Scotland.

He then joined Compaq Computers for what would be an eventful 13 years.

While his time there was professionally rewarding, it was also demanding. Suffering from a stress-related illness – eventually diagnosed as ME – he was given the opportunity to explore a career change with Compaq’s blessing. It went so well that Penna Consulting, the firm brought in to coach him, offered Mr Hunter a job in business development. “I learned a completely new industry,” he said. After two years at Penna, he moved to competitor DBM before returning to Penna a couple of years later. However, his illness then returned “because I was getting really stressed”.

“I kept coming back to the idea of running my own business,” Mr Hunter said. “I developed a few ideas and registered with a website of companies for sale. ScotCrest came up; it offered a return to manufacturing and could be creative. It had a 40-year history, great heritage and good staff in Blairgowrie.”

Convinced of its potential, Mr and Mrs Hunter secured a deal to take over ScotCrest in 2011. But at the same time another, ultimately welcome, distraction arose.

A friend involved in Quarriers, the Renfrewshire children’s charity, asked if he could help. “I was fascinated by what they did; they just needed some help on business development,” Mr Hunter noted. “I put in place a structure for them to report to the board.”

He was also on the fund-raising board that helped the charity deliver the William Quarrier Scottish Epilepsy Centre on time and on budget in April 2013.

Meanwhile, shortly into their time at ScotCrest it became clear to the Hunters that they would have to relocate the business from Blairgowrie if it was to realise its potential. The site offered no scope for expansion and its long-standing plaque supplier was about to retire.

A solution was at hand, though. Mr Hunter was introduced to the chief executive of a social enterprise, which gives young offenders and people with disabilities the chance to make things at its workshop in Port Glasgow. The organisation now supplies the wooden plaques to ScotCrest, which now rents the workshop next door. Since then progress has been sure and steady.

Licence agreements with leading Scottish football clubs and the National Trust of Scotland, Burns Cottage in Ayr, The Gordon Highlanders Museum in Aberdeen and The Black Watch Museum in Perth have raised its profile, while ScotCrest has also carved a successful niche supplying clan plaques as wedding gifts, including many to customers overseas.

Work is under way to relaunch the company’s website, leading ScotCrest to target a minimum 30 per cent uplift in online sales in its current financial year.

ScotCrest's progress has not gone unnoticed in the wider community. It was recently named Best Performing Small Business in the recent Greenock Chamber of Commerce awards, where it was also a finalist in two other categories - Best Manufacturer/ Producer and Inverclyde Goes Global.

“Hand on heart, I think we are the largest Scottish clan plaque manufacturer in the world,” Mr Hunter said. “I cannot find anything or anybody that does it to our quality – clans and clan chiefs order from us – and our volume.”

And it is not banking on growth through the supply of clan plaques. A quick glance at the company’s website highlights the increasing diversity of its offer, which ranges from whisky to homeware items such as coasters and tea cloths.

Mr Hunter said the company had increased turnover by 17 per cent to £170,000 in the year ended July 31 and forecasts that turnover will reach £500,000 in three years.

Workshop expansion is on the agenda and there are plans to add to the team: ScotCrest now has two full-time staff, including a heraldic artist, in addition to Mr Hunter, Mrs Hunter and her brother David, who works part-time.

Mr Hunter insists the biggest kick he gets from ScotCrest is that it has created a manufacturing business in Scotland.

Praising Business Gateway and Scottish Enterprise for their support, he said: “It was only when I had been ill and later in life that I thought I’d like to get back to manufacturing.

“The golden thread running through everything I do now, I really realise, is absolutely the manufacturing piece. My dad ran his own business... but the golden thread that runs through me is manufacturing.”