Craig Smyth is the little-known managing director who has quietly led a Scottish business through a decade's international growth to become the world's second-biggest airport services company.

It is his employees who will take your luggage and turn your aircraft round at 127 airports across the globe, though he still works for the same venerable quoted Scottish company he joined as a young would-be corporate financier two decades ago.

John Menzies, founded in 1833, created Menzies Aviation as a growth engine to replace its historic businesses in decline, and the upstart now employs 18,000 in 27 countries, has a £700 million turnover, and is flying with 15% annual earnings growth, leaving its newsprint stablemate Menzies Distribution on the runway.

After crashing to 43p three years ago, John Menzies shares are now closing in on 600p, as fund managers catch onto a "sky's the limit" outlook for the business.

Menzies Aviation still has only 2% of a global market where only 25% is outsourced from the big airlines, and where growth is being driven by the likes of easyJet – Menzies' biggest customer, delivering 12% of its revenues.

Mr Smyth is now targeting pole position as "the world's number one aviation ground services provider", and says of the fragmented market: "We intend to be a consolidator."

Married to fellow accountant Jocelyn, with three children aged 12 to 16, the affable Glaswegian who is happy to admit he is "living the dream" has emerged from the shadows as the group's high-flying division sets a target of trebling revenues to £2 billion and doubling market share by 2020.

He recalls: "I qualified with Ernst & Young in Glasgow, stayed for a couple of years, and came through to Edinburgh – which was a big move at the time – to my first job in industry."

Within three months came the first acquisition of the embryonic new division, and Mr Smyth was parachuted down to London as its finance director.

"I didn't fancy being an FD, I wanted to buy and sell companies and all that stuff in my twenties, and I thought if I can prove there is a business there, that is where growth will come from over the next 10 years."

The tiny AMI had revenues of £10m and no profit. A decade later, when Mr Smyth stepped up from FD to MD, the aviation arm had grown falteringly to £100m but only £2m of profit, held back by the costs of investment and integration.

"There was lots of vision but execution wasn't brilliant in the early years," he says. "You were allowed to make mistakes and we had plenty of them. We were nowhere near fulfilling the potential. But in the last 10 years we have come of age. We have created a business model customers buy into."

Before the credit crunch Menzies had over half its business in cargo, which fills up 90% of an aircraft's hold, but where profitability is dependent on volume and thus on the state of the economy.

A 3% fall in world output prompted a 30% drop in cargoes – and a 90% drop in the share price at Menzies, which was then carrying substantial debt.

Mr Smyth says the group "learned a lot" from the turbulence, cargo handling (24% of the business) recovered, and Menzies is now the world's largest freight forwarder (16% of revenues) with £100m of spend. But critically the less cyclical ground-handling business continued its flight path and now accounts for 60% of revenues.

After years of buying up operators and wrestling with integration, but winning few new contracts, Menzies is now giving airlines what they want in a highly demanding market.

"Airlines are up against it and we account for about 10% of airline spend, they see ground-handling as one of their very controllable costs," Mr Smyth says. "It doesn't matter whether you are a low-cost carrier, getting that first bag on the carousel in 15 minutes is vitally important. We are now doing 2500 aircraft turnrounds every 24 hours – every 43 seconds an aircraft is being turned round by a Menzies team." Economies of scale have also kicked in at Mr Smyth's modest headquarters close to Heathrow, which employs 35.

"My central overhead hasn't really changed in the last eight years, it might have gone up 15%, but the business is four times the size."

The group's IT investment includes biometric (hand scanning) check-in across all its sites, for all 18,000 staff, to control overtime costs. He explains: "60% of our costs are people costs, and in a 5% margin business, having overtime go up by 5% in a month is a disaster."

Menzies Aviation now makes only 20% of its revenues in the UK (100% a decade ago). Its top 20 customers account for 43% of revenue, led by easyJet, where Menzies handles 90% of its volume in the UK and Europe in locations which have grown in a decade from two to 28.

"Most of our airlines are attractive, they are growing, financially sound, and value what we give them," Mr Smyth says. His latest easyJet airports are Toulouse and Naples, taking Menzies into France and Italy for the first time.

"We didn't avoid western Europe but we saw the opportunity of going into South Africa and Africa five years ago, we thought we would go for emerging markets, invested £40m, and created almost instantly two very good businesses," he says.

Germany, meanwhile, is "still closed" to new entrants, pending a revision of a 15-year-old EU ground-handling directive.

Mr Smyth says meeting his 15% earnings growth target will see the business double every three to four years and even without acquisitions enable Menzies to challenge market leader Swissport, a private equity-owned spinout from the crashed Swissair.

"I am now saying we want to be the biggest, not because of vanity but because of the economies of scale and because the market is so fragmented."

He adds: "We will never forget the credit crunch, and maybe we are going through a second one, but the things we have done, the geographical resilience and diversity, are all things that will help us outpace any decline.

"It's a pretty formidable track record in a very competitive market."