ALAN REVIE is the unsung Scottish entrepreneur who joined National Tyre Services as a fitter, and 25 years later, bought the loss-making company in what he now reveals was the deal of the decade.

Mr Revie, 53, turned it around in two years, then built an auto chain based in Scotland, the UK's only major independent with 250 outlets.

Talking in the boutique hotel 21212 in Edinburgh he acquired a few years ago, Mr Revie said he effectively paid £9 million, with only £2m up front, for a business losing £20m a year but with almost £80m of assets, and which still has £25m of tax losses on its books.

The business was off the hard shoulder within two years, with no branch closures, and then moved into the fast lane. "By 2005, we had got the foundations right and I wanted to explore how much market share we could take," Mr Revie says. "We had some amazing growth. We doubled tyre sales in five years."

Investment saw last year's profits fall by one-third to £3.9m – with no tax – but shareholder funds rise £4m to £65m. He adds: "We have no shareholders we have to bow to, the most important people we bow to are the 1400 [including 200 in Scotland] who work for us and their families."

The Hamilton school leaver may have started fitting tyres but within two years, aged 19, he was branch manager, the youngest in the company's history. He recalls being awestruck when taken to the company's Cheshire headquarters to meet the chief executive in his office, and how he revisited it when he took charge in 2002.

"It was nothing special, just quite a small room, but I was 19," he said.

A year later he moved from Dunlop-owned NTS to work for Bill Fleming's Smiley group, working his way up to regional manager running 40 branches and opening new ones in England, before joining rival Birkenshaw International as managing director. "We took that business from £2m turnover to £16m, and it was bought by Continental, so was owned by a world-wide tyre manufacturer, which was fantastic from a career point of view."

The German tyre-maker quickly saw the value of their manager, giving him responsibility for opening new retail businesses in Europe.

In 1996, at the age of 37, Mr Revie started up on his own.

"I was pretty well-known in the European tyre industry and in the worldwide wholesaling industry, and I didn't have to go to a bank to finance it. I was buying container loads of tyres from all round the world and selling them to retailers in Europe, and that started from my back bedroom. I remember saying to my wife Joan we are expanding, we need two filing cabinets now."

His connections with Continental began to bear fruit. First came a partnership with four German former employees to set up a pioneering internet tyre retailer based in Hanover, which they eventually floated on the Frankfurt stock exchange in 2006. Meanwhile, Mr Revie recalls: "I kept a very good relationship with the board of Continental, with the chief executive who became chairman."

Then over the horizon came NTS, which had passed from Dunlop to Michelin to Continental and by 2001 was in trouble. "It was losing serious money, and they had already struck a deal with a London company who were going to buy it and asset-strip it. I phoned the board and said are you sure, the company will be closed and 1300 people will be out of work. Why don't you put me in as chief executive and let me have a look at it?"

The Germans said yes. "I was in the company for about a week, and said if you can break the deal you have, I think I can turn this company around, I will buy it, providing you give me a five-year contract to sell Continental tyres, which also allows you to continue selling the tyres in the UK."

Mr Revie and three former colleagues offered £24m to rival the existing bid, but stipulated that for the business to survive, £15m of liquidity would be needed, non-returnable. They finally proposed paying the balance of £9m over four years, with just £2m upfront.

"At two o'clock in the morning on December 21 I led my team out of the room, this wasn't going to happen.

"On December 27 they said they would agree to everything and the next day we signed for the business."

The headline losses were £44m a year but the real trading loss was around £20m.

There were £140m of tax losses on the books and there were property assets worth nearly £80m.

"They hadn't revalued the assets since 1991," Mr Revie says. "I made them very aware of that at the time. All we had to do was negate a £20m a year loss. We hadn't raised any capital because there was no need to raise capital."

The stonking deal done, now came the hard work. NTS was dying, its board "almost believing that the tyre fitters were there to service the board as opposed to the other way round", Mr Revie says.

Training had been abandoned and the IT system delivered sales information five weeks in arrears.

"Some of the costs in the business were horrendous," the entrepreneur recalls. Staff turnover had hit 50% a year, twice the industry average. These days it is closer to 15%.

One of the new boss's first tasks was to close the inefficient NTS financial centre in Ireland employing nearly 100, and transfer the work to Glasgow to be handled by 12 to 14 people, as NTS became part of Axle Holdings, Mr Revie's Scottish-based company. "In three months we put in a new IT system, and by eight o'clock each night you would have all the figures you could possibly want for what we sold that day."

But the real transformation was in culture. "The staff knew Alan Revie, knew I had started as a fitter and they thought thank God here is someone who knows how to run a tyre business. We spent money on training, we are really committed to training. We take our corporate responsibilities very seriously."