Few of the army of Scottish companies which equipped the doomed Titanic in 1912 are still around but flooring specialist Veitchi Group is a proud survivor.

Incorporated a few years later in 1917 on Clydeside, the company went back to its roots this month in a move to Gateway Glasgow in Cambuslang, in its present incarnation as one of Scotland’s biggest construction sub-contractors and a niche housebuilder.

The man leading the 320-strong business is industry veteran Jim Preston, 51, a recent chairman of industry body Homes for Scotland, who says it’s pleasing to be bringing employment and investment to the Clydeside at a time of jobs uncertainty. “Our new headquarters is a prudent acquisition allowing us to consolidate the head office and four business divisions, whilst also giving us room for future expansion,” he says.

The group’s last published profit was £1.12m in 2014, up from £845,000, on a turnover of £38m. Last year’s profit is said to be “up by 26 per cent”, on similar turnover, but Mr Preston is coy about figures. “As a sub-contractor you are allowed to make some money but not too much,” he smiles.

The MD says profits are being spurred by a growing geographic order book and its burgeoning Metframe business. Veitchi is one of only four companies in the UK licensed to use the popular pre-panelised building system used in hotels, offices, student accommodation and flatted developments of up to 11 storeys.

Unusually the company has 70 private shareholders, and an employee who retired 20 years ago has the largest holding at 15per cent. “We meet the main guys twice a year and as long as they are happy they spread the news,” says Mr Preston,who is also chairman. The board used a strong balance sheet to buy back £1m of shares last year, and this month to move out of its four-building sprawl in Rutherglen where it has been for half a century.

Half of the company is now Richardson & Starling, Scotland’s biggest building preservation company, which has 12 offices from Aberdeen to Carlisle. It won a ‘project of the year award’ in 2015 for restoring the Belleisle Conservatory in Ayr after a £500,000 charity fundraising.

“We are kind of unique because we give a 30-year guarantee,” Mr Preston says.

Similarly, the trademark Veitchi ‘raspberry ripple’ floor typically seen in council and housing association common stairs is “a great product – except for the fact it never wears out”, the MD jokes.

The traditional decorative flooring business boasts jobs such as a £1.8m raised access floor for a London library, importing ceramic tiling from Italy. “We were one of only three flooring companies in the UK that could have funded it,” Mr Preston says.

Veitchi’s smaller industrial floors arm gets the nod in tricky spots like food factories for McVities and KP Nuts, which means erecting a dust tent around one production line while the others keep moving.

The group’s other business is interiors, where high-profile jobs have included the high-level acoustic panels in the SSE Hydro, the press desks at the Commonwealth Games athletes’ centre, and work for Virgin Money and the Signet Library.

Mr Preston has been on the board of Homes for Scotland since 2009 and was chairman in 2013-14. “We are just not building enough,” Mr Preston says. “For whatever reason parties up here are very keen to talk all the time about affordable housing, they are missing a trick. On the majority of housebuilding sites now, 25 per cent of those houses will be affordable. If you get more private housing, you get more affordable homes at no cost compared with going through the traditional route of housing associations and councils, which is very cash intensive.” Veitchi Homes builds largely in the north-east on smaller sites.

Mr Preston graduated from Heriot-Watt and trained as a quantity surveyor, first working for Balfour Beatty in Newcastle then moving to a private practice in Edinburgh. “I built my own house for the first time,” he recalls (he has built two since then). “I got really involved in it, and I applied on spec to one of the housebuilders Cala and my CV happened to land on a desk at the right time and I was there for seven years.”

Most of them were spent in Yorkshire, and when Cala began to feel a planning squeeze on its greenfield sites, Mr Preston landed a role back in Edinburgh as special projects director for Persimmon, the UK’s second biggest housebuilder, which had just snapped up Beazer Homes. “I went from a company building 80 units a year to one building 600 - a plc with a very successful model.”

After steering projects such as the former BL site at Bathgate, he moved up to MD at Persimmon East Scotland, before being approached by niche player Carronvale.

But in June 2012, having survived the immediate aftermath of the crash, Carronvale Homes fell into receivership (the timber frame business survives as a market leader). It was the cue for Mr Preston to accept an approach from Veitchi.

“At the time the recession hit we were running about like headless chickens, it’s fair to say,” the MD says. “We were too busy, good old-fashioned processes and controls had been lost. Now we are doing less work and making much better profits.”

As a great survivor gears up for its centenary next year, Mr Preston says: We are looking for opportunities.”