Not so long ago, Mark Dodson was in the market for the ultimate executive toy when he was part of a consortium looking to buy a sports club, namely Sale Sharks.

He must surely consider himself a lucky blighter, then, since now not only does he have two of them to play with, but he is being paid handsomely for the pleasure of doing so.

Yet there are plenty of businessmen who would think twice, and then perhaps decide against taking on the role he just has, as chief executive officer of Scottish Rugby at this point in time.

The World Cup campaign that has just been completed has the potential to have been the wrong sort of watershed moment since, for the first time, the national team failed to reach the quarter-finals and, while they have qualified for the next tournament, they will again be in the third batch of seeds with it all to do to reach the knockout stages.

As for those two sports clubs . . . well there are pros and there are most certainly cons, pretty much summed up by the forthcoming Heineken Cup for which Scotland’s leading home-based players now have additional time to help their teams prepare.

What Dodson is guaranteed is double involvement in the highest profile club or provincial tournament in the world which Sale -- along with most other English clubs -- struggles to qualify for. However, in the 16 years since the competition was introduced, the Scottish teams have, between them, reached the knockout stages once.

First things first though, and that is helping the national team’s head coach set the record straight after Andy Robinson was forced, the day the team exited the tournament, to dismiss wild speculation that he was set to quit the post.

The CEO’s supportive vote of confidence could not have been more emphatic.

“As far as we’re concerned, we are wholeheartedly in support of Andy Robinson,” he said. “Andy is an outstanding coach. We’re very lucky to have him and he’ll be taking us through his contract to 2015. We’d love him to develop this group of players and bring other players into that group so I look forward to working with him at the Six Nations to see how we are going to improve on New Zealand and what lessons we can learn.”

However, he knows there are improvements required to help that happen and while he has only been in the job for a fortnight, he was willing to lay out his top-five priorities in terms of the way forward.

Meanwhile, for all that he offered support for Robinson and expressed confidence in the quality of the staff at Murrayfield, the need to ensure the best use is made of finite resources means that all aspects must be assessed in terms of value for money and, thereafter, monitored.

“Everybody in this organisation is going to be accountable,” said Dodson. “I’m accountable. If I fail in this mission I should go. I know that. When you look inside the business, there are some extremely capable people in the SRU business and what I’ve got to do is create the right environment and liberate those people so they can do their jobs.

“With that comes key performance indicators and if you don’t match up to those then it’s the same as any other business . . . you have to get someone in who can. No-one should be frightened of that because there are some incredible people inside the SRU, but everyone’s got to perform on and off the field and I accept that.”

While it was not among his own big-five priorities, he readily acknowledged that the youth development side of the sport must be improved and set himself a highly ambitious target given Scotland’s sporting traditions.

“We’re always going to be challenged on player numbers because of the size of the nation, but what we’ve got to do is bring better players with better skills through.

“My ambition is to make rugby the preferred sport in most schools in Scotland. I think we’ve got a fantastic chance as well while football is going through some difficult times.

“We have some great, great values around the game of rugby in terms of integrity, in terms of health, in terms of sport, in terms of discipline, in terms of community. We’ve got to get that message across because a lot of people don’t even open their mind to playing rugby, they don’t even think about it because we’ve not engaged with them in the past. My real drive will be to get into all schools.”

For that to happen, significant change will be required, with the private schools-dominated Schools Cup competition carrying a much bigger profile than the National Youth League competition contested by clubs.

“We are not an elite sport, we are about elite performance, we’re not about any other kind of elitism,” he said, his Northern English accent somehow reinforcing that point.

“Despite what’s happened in the World Cup here, this is the only sport where Scotland is globally competitive, think about that. Rugby is for everybody.”

He knows, too, that Robinson’s great successes as national coach, beating Australia and South Africa at Murrayfield, claiming a first away win in Dublin for a dozen years and winning a first Test series in Argentina, are now outweighed by his tournament record. In his first two years in charge, this first failure to reach the World Cup quarter-finals has followed two Six Nations Championships during which just a single victory has been registered in each.

By contrast, in his first two years in charge, Frank Hadden, Robinson’s immediate predecessor, won three matches in his first Six Nations and reached the quarter-final of the last World Cup.

Hard work awaits both Englishmen ahead of the next big campaign and the fact that there will be an instant chance to gain revenge over their home country is something Dodson sees as an added incentive to get off to a flying start.

“It’s not that if we have a poor Six Nations the whole thing’s derailed, but it is important and it does help that we’ve got England first up,” he said. Dodson’s excitement is clearly evident.

interview Scottish Rugby’s CEO acknowledges changes are inevitable in wake of World Cup exit but insists the right man is at the helm. Kevin Ferrie reports