WE meet in London’s plushly modern Great Eastern Hotel, on Liverpool Street.

“Noo, I’m not staying here,” says Sir Ian Wood, chief executive of the Wood Group. “It’s a wee bit expensive for us.”

Oh, please. Wood, 63-year-old founder of Britain’s biggest oil and gas services company, could afford to buy the block, let alone the hotel. A tall, snowy-haired Aberdonian, he is worth more than £400m by most estimates, but delights in tweaking expectations.

In fact, he is a bit of a surprise all round. Gentle in speech and dressed like a dapper academic, he doesn’t look like a rich technocrat, nor a man who made his fortune helping the world’s oil giants with the dirty end of their business.

Yet the Wood Group does just that — providing engineering design, project management, maintenance and operation of facilities for the likes of BP and Shell. More recently it has moved into gas-turbine repair. Created by Wood from his father’s ship-repair business, the group has successfully drilled its way out of Scotland to compete globally against mega-firms like Halliburton and Technip.

Floated in 2002 and worth £1 billion, the Wood Group is still under family control (a 40% stake) and still based in Aberdeen — which means that Wood, who also oversees a successful east coast fishing business, is one of the richest men in Scotland.

But he will hate me for mentioning it. His family, like most Aberdonians, don’t make a fuss of their wealth — hence the point about avoiding plush hotels. Not for nothing is granite the stone of choice in his windswept home town.

“We all have a strong work ethic,” nods Wood. His elder sister is a dentist, his younger sister worked as an economist. Nor does Wood get any added respect for building that family fortune. “I don’t think close family is ever that impressed by success, is it?” he says.

Wood is a well-known figure in Scottish business circles, where his firm’s leap out of the parochial into the global, while never deserting its roots, has provided a benchmark for ambitious entrepreneurs.

Yet down south he had little profile until he floated his company three years ago. Since then he has had a bumpy ride. There were two profit warnings as problems emerged in the gas-turbine division, and delays hit contracts for deep-water work.

The company’s pre-tax profits slipped from £71m in 2002 to £28m in 2004, and its shares, floated at 195p, have been up and down, hitting a low of 113p last year. New investors, who had bought in noting Wood Group’s constant profit growth in the 1990s, were less than impressed.

Last week, however, it was back to business as usual for Wood. He had a better-than-expected set of interim results to announce, a share price pushing above 200p, and a week-long marathon of presentations to start, as the firm raises more cash to put towards acquisitions.

His itinerary is exhausting, and on the evening we meet he already looks tired, his craggy face drawn. He asks for a ginger beer to drink, and ruffles his thinning hair messily as he ponders each question.

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