The Chief Executive of BBC Worldwide is a personable, persuasive but modest fellow with a south-London accent. Tim Davie wears no tie and has no airs.

When we run out of our allocated time in the Robin Day Meeting Room at New Broadcasting House, he finds, after a few wrong turns, an empty cubicle named after Elizabeth Cowell (BBC TV’s first continuity announcer), where we can continue.

Future interviewers, however, should be warned that he might blow their minds about Auntie. At home, they may think of her as a maligned, crisis-prone embodiment of a 1920s theory of public service with a problematic revenue source. Abroad, Davie suggests, she is a business titan.

In the US, the wholly owned, overtly commercial, BBC subsidiary that Davie leads is turning over 600 million freely spent dollars.

In China, 72 million have watched Sherlock. BBC Earth is not just a channel he has launched – alongside BBC First (prime drama) and BBC Brit (more fun) – but a natural-history theme park in Japan, distantly related to CBeebies Land, which BBC Worldwide opened at Alton Towers in May.

Slovenia recently became the 50th country to make under BBC licence its own Strictly Come Dancing. In Beijing they are auditioning for three fume-­junkies to present the local Top Gear.

In coals-to-Doncaster fashion, BBC Worldwide (in a deal with Love Productions) has made a Great French Bake Off, Le Meilleur Pâtissier.

“It is more macaroons and choux pastry than jam sponge,” says Davie. “And it’s great to see this balance between global brand and localisation. There is something quite powerful about that.”

In this country, the BBC is more Coke than Pepsi. For all the success stories, the world could still be consuming lots more BBC.

Although, not, I say, as powerful a news story as when the Chinese Jeremy Clarkson is announced.

“It’s got to be a great picture,” agrees the former brand manager for Procter & Gamble.

In the nicest possible way he reminds me of John Birt in the 1990s, a man from the BBC’s future, not its past.

Similarly, however, he does prompt the question: is he quite BBC in the strictest sense? He came, after all, from Pepsico.

I gibe that it must be easier to be enthusiastic about selling British television to the world than fizzy pop to sub-Saharan Africa, but he counters that he still finds Pepsi’s “challenger” mentality helpful.

In this country, the BBC is more Coke than Pepsi. For all the success stories, the world could still be consuming lots more BBC.

BBC America, for instance, will soon be in 80 million homes, but they are not all premium-cable paying homes. He says he wants the channel to be “indispensable to a sizeable niche” of pay-channel viewers, which suggests to me that he believes customers might pay more for the right content.

Perhaps, I say, BBC America could grow as big one day as HBO, which rakes in more than $4bn annually from its US subscribers?

He replies that he has plenty of ambition for it, but does not want to put numbers to it. “I am incredibly proud BBC America continues to deliver.”

Otherwise, he is unbashful about money. He is not embarrassed that his base salary of £400,000 is only £50,000 less than Tony Hall’s – although he says it is “critical that leaders like myself offer value”.

Nor does he mind that BBC Worldwide has helped make the original Jeremy Clarkson and his Executive Producer, Andy Wilman, £31m.

Top Gear, after all, made money for the licence payer. “Those individuals who came up with the IP [intellectual property] and developed those ideas could, without doubt, be going with other partners.”

It is the rationale of someone steeped in the free market. Nevertheless, he says that when he joined the BBC in 2005 as head of marketing, it was a jump, but not into the unknown.

“My base wiring is Blue Peter, suburban Britain. The BBC was absolutely part of what I was. I just felt genuinely incredibly honoured to be on the board at the BBC.”

At the BBC he gained a reputation for decisiveness laced with humanity. When he had to fire a senior employee in difficult circumstances, the person was impressed that at parties over the following years he made a point of approaching and asking how things were going.

The greater leap was, he acknowledges, into editorial. When Jenny Abramsky quit as the head of BBC Audio and Music (now known as BBC Radio) in 2008, he applied for the job.

Although he had never made a radio programme or conducted a symphony orchestra, he says he knew they would have been looking for a candidate with leadership qualities and editorial judgment.

But how could they know he had any of the latter? “All I can tell you is that having been on the BBC’s Executive Board for some time, we have quite a lot of editorial debates. But that is probably a question to ask Mark Thompson.”

And here, from New York, is his reply: “Although Tim didn’t come from a programme-making background, he’d shown almost from the day he arrived that he had great critical judgement about TV and radio and a real understanding of the BBC’s values and creative ethos. His ability and potential as a general manager, meanwhile, were not in doubt. That was why I was so confident that the appointment would work and that BBC Radio – never a pushover – would quickly come to accept and value him.”

His fiercest hour in the spotlight came in November of 2012, 22 days after he had been announced as the next Chief Executive of Worldwide.

It was the Saturday George Entwistle resigned after 54 days as Director-General. Davie lives outside Henley-on-Thames but he was at the Vue cinema in Reading with his wife, Anne, and their boys, 14, 11 and 8, watching Skyfall when Chris Patten rang. The family gave up on him returning to his seat.

“It was a crisis that needed handling.” How bad could it have got? “It’s a very good question, [but] there was so much to deal with in the real world that hypotheticals are not really needed.”

“One of the great things about the BBC, and it can be uncomfortable for senior management, is its ability to interrogate itself”

The acting DG was soon criticised for not wearing a tie. “I remember thinking, ‘If they’re debating the neck-wear, you are making progress.’”

He nevertheless wore one for the duration of his tenure.

Davie set about meeting his demoralised staff. There is, he says, only so much that can be done by email.

Ten days in, he was at Media City in Salford answering hostile questions from BBC journalists. One tweet enthused that it was “awesome” the way Nicky Campbell, Five Live’s breakfast host, was grilling him.

“One of the great things about the BBC, and it can be uncomfortable for senior management, is its ability to interrogate itself,” Davie says, which make me think he really does get its ethos.

“I can simultaneously be having a tough time being asked questions by one of our reporters, and thinking what a wonderful organisation it is that we can do that. Certainly, Nicky and others gave me appropriate questioning at the time.”

At the meeting he did not rule out applying for the DG’s job full-time; after all, he had gone for it when he was beaten by Entwistle. Subsequently, it was reported he was talking to ­All3Media about becoming its CEO.

The day after that Salford grilling, on 22 November, Tony Hall was appointed.

Did Davie feel like Ryan Giggs, the caretaker doomed not to get the job full time? “As a Crystal Palace fan, I can’t even put myself in the shoes of anyone in Manchester United. Look – you’ll get a cliché off me, but it’s true – you just do the job.”

It took him from New Broadcasting House to BBC Media Centre in Wood Lane.

Under his predecessor, John Smith, Worldwide had doubled its revenues and quadrupled its profits. Less impressively, it had purchased the travel-guide company Lonely Planet and, in 2013, sold it at an £80m loss.

I ask whether, after the political quag­-mires of New Broadcasting House, Wood Lane and commerce came as a relief? “Running BBC Radio is one of the great jobs in the country,” he begins, recalling the nights at the Proms, Radio One Big Weekends and the fight to convert us from analogue to digital listeners.

“But I think in a career it is good to do a number of different things and I have to say it is pretty rewarding to get back to the simplicity of PnL [that’s profit and loss, to us]. I think that what’s excellent about Worldwide is there is clarity.”

The clarity is about how to make money? “I think Worldwide is a bit more than that.”

As managers tend to, he divides his aims into three. The first is to build “the brand reputation” of the BBC. The second is to secure “sustainable, long-term financial returns for the licence-fee payer”.

The third is to be a “world-class media company” and a “leading light” within the UK creative industries: “My view is that the BBC has a role as a leader in terms of growing the creative industries as a whole.”

His joint chairmanship, with the communications minister, Ed Vaizey, of the UK Trade & Investment Creative Industries Sector Advisory Group and his trade mission to China in May with Vince Cable could suggest that – even now – he is looking, long term, beyond the BBC.

He is, after all, only 47 and may have climbed as far as he can in the corporation. Davie’s biography gives reason to suggest he might not respect this ceiling on his career.

He grew up in lower-middle-class Croydon, the son of a wine and spirits salesman and his wife, whose jobs included teacher and psychiatric nurse.

Shortly after they divorced, when he was 11, he won a scholarship to the fee-paying Whitgift School – a “blessing”, and not only because from there he became the first member of his family to reach university. And Cambridge, at that.

“It just multiplied the number of choices I had. I mean, for instance, I love watching rugby, but I was never going to be, with my build, a great rugby player.

“But they had the Olympic fencing coach there and he got us to an incredibly high standard. To this day I feel very lucky to have had those opportunities.

“One of the reasons that I went to Proctor & Gamble after university was that I felt that brand management kept my options incredibly open in terms of what I could go and do after it.

“There are some people who have got a passion for one thing. I have seen musicians, whom I admire enormously, do things with their hands no human being should be able to do, like play a piano that well. I’ve tended to keep my options open a little bit, which makes me a different type of individual.”

Maybe not a BBC lifer, then? “You could argue,” he smiles, “that what I’ve just said means both possibilities are true. I’m not going to dive down one rabbit hole on that.”

We all know where rabbit holes lead. BBC Worldwide is a wonderland the way he describes it, but there may yet be different wonderlands ahead.