I THINK you can safely say that Bill Allan, chief executive of Thus, has not been seduced by the glamour of his job.

“Hullo,” he says, popping his grey head round the door of Thus’s tiny reception at its ground-floor London base behind Moorgate. He then spends at least two minutes negotiating with the receptionist for a free meeting room which, when we get there, seems to be full of broken chairs. Och well, he frowns, trying to find one to sit on.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. Greenock-born Allan, once a high-flyer at Cable & Wireless, has been running Thus on frugal lines for some time now. The company, formerly Scottish Power’s telecoms arm, has been making a loss since it was spun out of its parent in 1999.

Allan was lured in by a call from Goldman Sachs, which was advising on the demerger. Those were the days when alternative telecoms suppliers were rather sexier than they are now.

It has given Allan a rollercoaster ride. The company, which runs Demon and sells voice and internet services, was once so hot that, for three brief months not long after it floated, it shot into the FTSE 100 with a market value of more than £2 billion. Then the telecoms bubble burst, and Thus’s value whistled down to £70m, leaving a lot of shareholders, who bought in at the float price of 310p, seriously out of pocket.

And all the while Allan, 51, had to get on with building up Thus’s network and expanding its customer base. “It was horrible,” he says. “We were not prepared for the FTSE 100, not geared up for any of it, and what happened after was even worse.” Now he just wants to “prove the buggers wrong”.

Last week, after five years of losses, he came closer to his goal, announcing preliminary results for the year to March 2004 that showed turnover up to £332m and losses down to £25m (from £59m). More important, he confirmed that the company would move into operating profit in the second half of this year.

Was this a cause for celebration? Not really. His shares dropped by 10% to 26Åp as the markets worried about his shrinking margins, caused by a surge in income from selling low-margin broadband. In the turbulent, unevenly regulated, highly competitive world of telecoms, there are no quick fixes.

But Allan, trained as an engineer and with 26 years’ experience at C&W, prides himself on his perseverance. Tall, trim and rather flinty behind the toothy smile, he is also good at keeping on top of the numbers while never forgetting the people.

“Technology is neutral,” he says. “The trick is the people, and how you manage the service, and how they get on with the customer.”

And then in an instant, blinking behind steel-framed glasses, Allan is up and scribbling in green ink on a white board, talking me through J-curves and V-curves and the company’s 10-year plan.

This, you quickly gather, is a man who has spent as much time arguing about the future with investors as he has wrestling with thorny, technological issues. And he purveys all his arguments with an engineer’s total certainty about eventual outcomes.

It’s very different from the international life he led at C&W, dealing with governments, handling sensitive operations at subsidiaries in the Middle East, the Far East, eastern Europe and the Caribbean.