Administration was spoken about but that wasn’t the RIGHT THING TO DO. We’re the oldest professional club in Scotland. We’d have become a NEWCO or whatever and that was NEVER AN OPTION

KILLIE DIRECTOR BILLY BOWIE ON THE PAST, THE FUTURE... AND HIS YELLOW ROLLS ROYCE

THERE were days when Billy Bowie could have done without the hassle. Days when the angry faces gathered outside Kilmarnock’s main stand prompted a bout of self-analysis.

‘There were times I thought: “Why did I do this?”,’ he now admitted.

Supporters were engaged in a civil war with former chairman Michael Johnston. The club was losing money amidst persistent rumours of administration. A romantic notion of bringing back his boyhood Saturdays when his hometown of Stewarton emptied for Kilmarnock home games was fading fast.

‘Fortunately, I don’t walk away from things,’ he told Sportsmail. ‘There was talk about administration and things like that.

‘I thought: “What image does that present to people out there if you just put it into administration and start off again the next day?”.

‘That was not the right thing for Kilmarnock to do. We are the oldest professional football club in Scotland. We were founded in 1869.

‘If that had happened, the game was up. We would have become a newco or whatever. That was never an option for me.

‘I wanted to keep the club going and get to a point where it lived within its means.’

Balancing the books is important to Bowie. Saving £5,000 to buy his first truck at the age of 24, he never considered a bank loan. He had nothing to remortgage. All he had were the savings acquired from working seven days a week, plus overtime.

Turning 50 last year, he marked the occasion by purchasing a new set of wheels. No overtime required.

‘I got a Rolls Royce done out yellow, the same colour as my trucks,’ he chuckled. ‘It looks the part. Rolls Royce created a new colour for me — Billy Bowie golden yellow.

‘I drive around Kilmarnock in it and I take it to the games. Two weekends ago, my two boys wanted a Subway sandwich, so we went down the precinct in town in the Rolls Royce to buy them.’

Bowie is in a fortunate position; he can buy what he likes. To that end, he also purchased a Bentley, a Mustang and ploughed £2million of his own cash into the local football club.

‘I’m clearly going through a bit of a mid-life crisis,’ he joked.

Corporate life is littered with the corpses of men who ploughed their wealth into fast cars and football clubs.

One of five kids in a modest Ayrshire home, however, Bowie grew up wearing the hand-me-down clothes of his older siblings.

He remembers those days fondly, but his multi-million pound business Billy Bowie Special Projects now operates 150 trucks, employs nearly 100 staff and provides a range of waste disposal services to councils and businesses.

Leaving school to work as a tyre fitter, his firm branched into industrial cleaning and his eureka moment came from an old adage. Where there’s muck, there’s brass.

‘We were main contractors for British Steel, BP and so on and I was taking more and more work on,’ he recalled.

‘But if the steelworks phoned at night with a job, all our trucks would be elsewhere and I’d spend the rest of my day apologising to people because we couldn’t do their work.

‘So I saw an opportunity to fill a gap in the market at 24. I worked seven days a week, saved the overtime cash and raised £5,000 to buy my own truck.

‘These days, people go and get a business loan or use a credit card. The ethic I grew up with you didn’t do that.

‘Whatever you wanted in life you went out and got it. That has never left me. I’m 51 now and my days of debt are over. Most of my assets are paid for as we need them.

‘That’s the ethos I’m trying to instill around here now as well.’

The ‘here’ in question is the boardroom at Rugby Park. A long-time sponsor, Bowie was part of a complex deal to write off £9.7m of bank debt in March 2014 via the sale of the club’s Park Hotel. In return for taking on £6.4m of the borrowings, he acquired 40 per cent of the club.

Asked if he ever feared for Kilmarnock’s existence as Scotland’s oldest professional club, he hesitated.

‘Not at that time,’ he replied. ‘But maybe the next season down the line, especially when we posted losses of £725,000. That could have been the nail in the coffin.’

Avoiding relegation to the Championship after beating Falkirk in the Play-off final, Bowie agreed to write the cheques which covered the shortfall until the sale of Souleymane Coulibaly to Egyptian club Al Ahly for £750,000 finally granted the club some breathing space.

Yet a situation where supporters, local businesses and potential investors repeatedly vowed to withhold their cash unless Johnston stepped down from the board was undesirable and unsustainable.

In May, following the tragic death of his wife Joanne, Johnston resigned suddenly.

‘There were times when things were becoming a bit heated where Michael’s presence here was concerned and I had discussions with him about it,’ said Bowie.

‘But what people forget is that he put 15 years of his time and life in here. People may not have sympathy for that, but any businessman would appreciate what he had done.

‘Michael and I were always in dialogue, working out a way for him to exit. Now people ask me: “How is Michael getting on?” because we still discuss matters concerning the hotel.

‘I think people are concerned he is getting on okay following the death of his wife. He is welcome to come back to a game any time.

‘He has two seats here and I would like him to come back and enjoy the games. I always knew his heart was in the right place.

‘We had some interesting board meetings lasting four or five hours. We had our differences of opinion. But, at the end of them, we all went away content we were only doing what we thought was right for Kilmarnock.’

The appointment of former club secretary Kirsten Callaghan as chief executive means Johnston is no longer involved in the day-today running of the club. He still owns 40 per cent of Kilmarnock and intends to hold on to his shares until 2019.

Despite 3,000 fans demanding Johnston’s removal on a petition in February, however, Bowie believes Kilmarnock owe the former chairman a vote of thanks.

He added: ‘All credit to Michael for getting the debt down as much as he did. That probably contributed to the distance between him and the fans. You make difficult decisions and you are upsetting people.

‘He was making the right decisions, but people didn’t see them that way.’

Now the main decision maker, Bowie’s love of Kilmarnock FC has cost him £2m.

With no remaining debt and 1.9million shares in his possession, however, he believes the club are ‘in a good place’.

Potential sites for a training complex have been sourced in south and east Ayrshire. Supporters

will have their own representation on the board when a fundraising target of £100,000 is met and, courtesy of an artificial surface, the team are back training in Kilmarnock.

Heading towards their 150th anniversary, the Rugby Park club have a spring back in their step.

There is one lingering area of uncertainty, however. Since the resignation of Jim Mann last April, Kilmarnock have operated without a chairman.

When Sportsmail suggested the obvious candidate is sitting across the table, Bowie shook his head.

‘We are working on that, but it won’t be me just now,’ he said. ‘My other businesses are going great and I can’t afford to take my finger off the pulse with that.

‘I’m only 51 and I feel I’m too young for it.’

With a bright yellow Rolls Royce to maintain, Billy Bowie has enough on his plate.