Saturday Interview: Bruce Davidson brings his international marketing experience to selling Scottish shellfish, reports Mark Williamson.

As a veteran of the international cigarette business, Bruce Davidson is not the kind of man one would expect to have environmental concerns as one of his priorities.

But sitting in an Edinburgh dockside fish restaurant on a sunny autumn morning, Davidson appears keen to stress the virtues of a small Scottish company that made its name on what he jokingly describes as the lunatic fringe of the green movement.

The company concerned is Loch Fyne Oysters, which runs a famed oyster fishery, restaurant and shop by the eponymous loch and which Davidson claims is free of the hypocrisy of much bigger firms that may have embraced the planet for the sake of profit rather than people.

"They Loch Fyne Oysters have always been interested in the environmental aspect, even 30 years ago, when they must have been seen as idealistic nutcases," says Davidson. These days he has a particularly good reason to be interested in the firm that is based in an area of outstanding beauty in Argyllshire.

For, after spending years hawking cigarettes and branded footwear at high levels around the globe, Davidson makes his living these days as the managing director of Loch Fyne Oysters. The company was formed in 1978 by the aristocrat Johnny Noble and marine biologist David Lane, who spotted the potential of cultivating oysters in Scottish waters.

The 56-year-old Davidson says the employee-owned Loch Fyne's values were one of the things that tempted him to join three months after resigning from the board of Imperial Tobacco, a FTSE 100 titan, in 2006.

"I just felt it was a brand that had been true, unlike supermarkets that reinvent themselves as the leaders in sustainability and all of these things because that's what consumers are telling them is important, but Loch Fyne's been doing it because it believed in it."

Pressed on why he decided to turn his back on life in the FTSE elite, Davidson may strike a chord with many who find themselves caught up in the kind of careerist game-playing that can blight corporate life.

"The journey was more exciting than the destination. I was very proud to have got on the board, but it was a lot more politicking and board stuff and a lot less out and running the business," says the former pupil of Morrison's Academy, whose games teacher at the Perthshire public school was film star Ewan McGregor's dad. Still, Davidson is refreshingly honest about the circumstances leading up to his departure from Imperial.

"It was one of those situations where there's certain things and If you don't support me it might be better if I go' and you're kind of thinking he's going to say No, don't do that' but he said Well maybe that would be the best, then' so it was mutual," he recalls with a chuckle.

Davidson is also open about the fact that his career did not have the most auspicious beginning.

For, after deciding to study commerce at Edinburgh University in the expectation that it would not interfere too much with his social life, the rugby-mad Davidson found himself toiling in his first job as a trainee at a small Edinburgh accountant.

He left without passing his first accounting exams, and ended up on the management trainee scheme operated by British American Tobacco. A move into sales and marketing led to progressively more senior roles for the car-dealer's son. These involved stints in countries ranging from Saudi Arabia to Singapore, which remains his favourite.

Enthusing about living in very different cultures, Davidson notes that the places where life was hardest, such as Saudi, were those where expats made the most effort to look after each other, which ensured that a good social life could be enjoyed.

The fact that he was head-hunted by Imperial in 1997 to launch an international expansion drive, after heading the Asia Pacific sales operation for Timberland footwear, speaks volumes about the regard in which he was held.

But for all the fun he had overseas, Davidson says he always felt a desire to live and work in his native Scotland. This exerted a powerful influence when an old school friend put him in touch with Loch Fyne Oysters when the company was looking for a new head to replace Lane following his retirement.

The sales and marketing expert in him also saw huge potential in a quintessentially Scottish brand at a time when growing numbers of people were starting to eat more fish for lifestyle and health reasons.

"I met them a few times, got sort of intrigued with the brand, intrigued with the business and I liked the Scottishness of it so I decided to buy into it."

Two years after starting work in Argyllshire, Davidson appears to be relishing his new life. The father of two has long had a home in Edinburgh from where he can easily travel to Argyll and to other parts of the UK on LFO business.

The firm has an exclusive supply deal with the Loch Fyne restaurants operation, which was spun out and is now owned by the Greene King brewing to pubs operation. This has 35 outlets around the UK including the one on the old Newhaven quayside in which we meet.

Davidson admits that moving from a megacorp to a relative minnow was challenging.

"Almost every dynamic was diametrically opposite: whether it's the size of the business, the size of the margins, the number of people; whether it was international or very frankly quite parochial, everything was different."

However, having had in the past to operate in sometimes challenging places miles from head office, he says he does not find himself pining for the supportive embrace offered by a big firm's infrastructure.

He has been pleased to find that people in the tight-knit Loch Fyne community have been very fair in their treatment of him.

"You don't achieve acceptance overnight; if they see you are genuinely interested in the business and not here today and gone tomorrow, in time they accept you for what you are."

Perhaps surprisingly, given his roots, Davidson appears to be quite comfortable operating in a firm that has been owned by its 135 employees since a £4m buy-out backed by the Baxi Partnership in 2003.

"I've always believed you should be encouraged to have a stake in the company you work for."

Helped by the payment of dividends, employee ownership seems to bring a genuine commitment to the business and an interest in its decisions.

He says the two employee directors, who are elected by the workers, have demonstrated a very mature and commercial attitude to their roles.

In the straitened times in which we live, Davidson is obviously glad not to have to operate according to the short-term earnings targets that listed firms try to meet.

As many Scottish fish process-ing firms have fallen victim to intense overseas competition, employee ownership provides other benefits to LFO. "It's a fantastic benefit that you can put protection in place in your structure that keeps the brand and the company anchored at the head of the loch, or I'm sure we would probably all be learning Norwegian."

Davidson's only gripe is that employee ownership limits LFO's ability to raise expansion funding through issuing shares to external investors. This means it will have to rely on debt, which is not easy to get on acceptable terms in the current environment.

He believes LFO may need to adopt a hybrid model under which shares are issued to raise funding from outsiders but bought back fairly quickly.

In June, Davidson showed his enthusiasm for acquisitions by leading the purchase of Surrey-based Simson's Fisheries.

The move gave the Scottish company - which had focused on selling oysters and mussels from its own farms as well as other locally-caught fish such as langoustines - access to a wider range of white and wet fish as well as a distribution base in the south-east of England, close to many of its customers.

Davidson says it would also be nice to have a base in the north of England.

There is plenty of scope to grow Loch Fyne Oysters in overseas markets such as America and Asia, and he insists the prospect of a recession does not worry him.

"There are lots of opportunities to accommodate people down-trading. People will still go out, but instead of lobster they could have a fabulous fish cake."

Things are likely to be challenging for the next couple of years. But, in what he expects to be his last full time job, the former slacker is not going to let that stop him being ambitious.

"In five years we aim to be a £50m company through organic growth, selling more products, through exports and possibly through more acquisitions."