WHEN the price of oil was in the doldrums a decade ago, one of the most popular car stickers in Aberdeen read: “Dear Lord, please let there be another oil boom. We promise not to piss it away this time.”

The golden age of the 1970s and early 1980s, when the global oil giants descended on the Granite City to exploit – and spend – the North Sea’s riches, seemed a lifetime away.

“Those were the days of three-hour champagne lunches,” recalled Stewart Spence, owner of one of Aberdeen’s plushest hotels, the five-star Marcliffe at Pitfodels.

But when the price of oil slumped to below $10 a barrel, there was a swift end to the excesses.

In 1986, within three months of the oil crash, 15,000 Americans left Aberdeen. The hotels were empty, the restaurants shut. Bye-bye boom time.

However, spend a little time in Scotland’s oil capital today and you soon realise that the good times, like many of those big hits from the 1970s, are back and better than ever.

Hotels are full to bursting, office space is at a premium and chic designer shops such as Hugo Boss and Cruise have opened in Union Street for the first time.

As if to underline the change of fortune, a new car sticker has appeared that simply reads: “Thank you Lord.”

All round the city there are signs of success.

BP is building a new headquarters, Chevron’s is almost finished and Wood Group’s new HQ is going up on Riverside. The global giant Halliburton is next in line.

One of the biggest success stories in recent years is the oil support group PSN, run by Bob Keiller, which spun out of Halliburton two years ago. Now worth £600m, it has employed 1,800 extra people in the past two years and a stock-market listing must be on the horizon.

It is easy to see why. The oil price is soaring – Brent crude stood at $83.86 on Friday – and there is great demand across the globe for the services and expertise in which Aberdeen excels.

Companies that were turning over £2m a couple of years ago are reporting sales of more than £50m, with £100m a realistic target in the next few years.

Demand is so high that there is a real shortage of qualified staff, which means most workers can earn good money. Some firms say that it can be tough getting fitters and turners to work overtime because they are on such good pay during the week.

The difference with the gold rush of the 1970s is more than skin-deep – Spence said that lunches are more businesslike, for a start – and the new wealth creators include many local business men and women who grew up in the industry, rising from the shop floor to the boardroom.

Rod Coffey left school in nearby Huntly at 16. “I didn’t even wait for the full year to finish; I left at Christmas,” he said. He spent the next seven years working in a local textile mill. But then he got a chance as a salesman at an oil company in Aberdeen.

Within a few years, he had moved high up within another company and eventually bought it using the money from his remortgaged home.

Now his firm, Stable Holdings, has a turnover in excess of £50m, employs more than 1,000 people and will have earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda) of £6m-£7m this year.

Coffey works hard for his success. When we met, he had just returned from a business trip to Australia and was heading off to America the following day; but the rewards are great. His children go to a private school, he has a plush house in a rich suburb with a swimming pool and drives a Bentley convertible. Aberdeen is reported to be one of Bentley’s sales hotspots outside southeast England.

“There are plenty of expensive cars, usually all with personalised numberplates,” said Coffey, who admits to owning eight personalised plates for his company’s fleet of vehicles.

“Aberdonians generally don’t flash the cash, but you can see signs of the success everywhere. Houses at the top end are hard to come by and that has dragged up prices,” he said. There is a waiting list for the city’s private schools.

Stable is an oilfield-services group that is capitalising on the global demand for drilling equipment – “dumb iron” as Coffey describes it. It is typical of the businesses feasting on the current good times.

Tommy Dreelan’s Qserv was one of the Scottish finalists in The Sunday Times’s Entrepreneur Challenge. In fact, three of the final five came from Aberdeen – including the eventual winner, RB Farquhar.

Dreelan also rose from the shop floor and recently opened Qserv’s gleaming new £10m headquarters at Portleithen on the outskirts of the city. The company employs more than 300 and is on target for a turnover of £30m-£45m with ebitda of £12m.

Dreelan built up a successful service company, PSL, before selling it in the late 1990s and making millions in the process. After a few years of “kicking back”, he started Qserv, which is now almost as successful. Dreelan’s wealth has allowed him to indulge in his passion for vintage cars and rallying.

But the Irishman, who came to Aberdeen in the 1980s, gets his biggest kick out of building the business, and is immensely proud of his new headquarters.

“We are doing well and there is plenty of scope in the North Sea, but we are looking to grow in international markets,” he said.

“Persuading people to come here may be a problem, but once they are here, they stay.

“There was one guy from Ven-ezuela who was being relocated here, and his wife asked a friend who used to live in Aberdeen what it was like. She said it was winter for six months and the other six months were full of bad weather. But they came and they stayed.”

Quality of life is a factor. Aberdeen may have the reputation of being in the cold, frozen north, but it has more hours of sunshine than any other British city and is in the middle of some of the most beautiful countryside in the world. Skiing at Glenshee is just over an hour away.

Alasdair Cowie’s offices are in the heart of Aberdeen Harbour. By no stretch of the imagination would you call it pretty, but it is here that a lot of the money is being earned.

The area is being regenerated, too, and a new boutique hotel, the Carmelite, recently opened. Cowie’s firm is already bursting out of its rented offices and he is looking for more space; but it comes at a premium.

His company, offshore-sup-port specialist TS Marine, has seen its profits increase by £4m in a year and is currently on target for revenues of £50m this year and £100m in the next three years.

“We were pulling in £10m two years ago, but the last two years have gone really well and we have a pipeline of stuff that makes us confident things will continue,” he said.

He admits to enjoying the trappings of his success but sees it all round him. “Not everyone is coining it in, but there are a lot of people doing very well,” he said. “Just look at the number of Bentleys you see.”

Like other firms, TS Marine’s expertise is in demand across the globe. “I got on a plane at Aberdeen airport recently to fly to Australia and when I landed in Australia, there was a guy picking up his bags who had checked in at the same time as me in Aberdeen.”

A direct service to the American oil capital of Houston begins this January, and the 50-seat business-class service is long overdue.

“Any day of the week, there are at least 50 people leaving Aberdeen airport for Houston,” said Rita Stephen of Aberdeen City & Shire Economic Forum (Acsef).

While the oil-support industry is one of the big winners – exporting technology and expertise all over the world – the city is determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past and rely on one industry.

Aberdeen’s public and private sectors have combined to set up Acsef to ensure that, this time, they don’t waste their good fortune.

According to figures from the forum, the area’s economic growth is 2.4%, just above Scotland’s figure of 2.2%, but gross added value, which measures the contribution to the economy of each individual producer, industry or sector, is Britain’s third highest at £21,638.

Average gross weekly earnings are £606.30 – 20% higher than the Scottish average of £503.70. Aberdeenshire had the lowest unemployment rate in Scotland, just 1%, in 2006, and the area has the highest number of start-ups in the country. House prices rose by 21% in 2005 and 2006 compared with 12% for the rest of Scotland.

But skill shortages and churn – people leaving one job for another – are a problem.

Dreelan thinks the industry is not responding well and Coffey is giving up 21% of Stable to staff to give them a stake in their own futures.

“You have to be innovative,” he said. “We’ve been lucky in that we’ve been able to hold on to key people, but not everyone is so lucky.”

There are plenty of venture-capital firms in the city or looking to move in – 3i closed most of its Scottish offices a couple of years ago but remains a big presence in Aberdeen.

Everyone recognises that there is a need to diversify. “We have plenty of opportunities to do that,” said Stephen. “Our universities are among the oldest in the world and there are other world-class industries in the area like First Group and Aberdeen Asset Management.

“Macphie of Glenbervie is a good example. One third of all food exports from Scotland come from Aberdeenshire and they are world leaders.”

Tourism, however, is going to play a big part.

Donald Trump arrived in Aberdeen recently to do some lobbying ahead of a planning decision later this month on the Trump Resort, a £1 billion hotel, golf course and luxury-home development at the Menie Estate, six miles north of the city.

Trump’s mother comes from the Isle of Lewis, and he is making much of his roots to ensure support.

But not everyone is happy. Environmentalists say he will spoil the sand dunes, while local fisherman Michael Forbes said no amount of pressure – or money – from Trump International would persuade him to give up his 23 acres at Mill of Menie, which sits directly between the billionaire tycoon’s plans for two 18-hole golf courses and a 450-bedroom hotel.

Despite being a rival hotelier, Stuart Spence is not one of Trump’s opponents. “I think it is great because everyone will have to raise their game,” he said.

“I get annoyed when the local media give a huge amount of coverage to the protests. Anyway, we have 65 miles of sand dunes north of here.

“This city needs to move upmarket to attract tourists, and many have been too lazy to do so because they can virtually guarantee 100% occupancy during the week with so many people staying here to work.

“In the 1970s, the oil money was gushing and everyone expected it to last forever so nobody was prepared for the downturn. There were no tourists because the hotels were full of people working. When the Americans left, the hoteliers were left exposed.

“I had dinner with Donald Trump the other night and I think he will be a great thing for this place. When he says he will build the best golf course in the world, he means it.”

Stephen said the aim of Acsef was to build a sustainable future for the economy and ensure the money being generated remains in the area. Spence agrees.

“People who made their money here spent it in Edinburgh, Glasgow or London. Union Street looks very poor and needs addressing, but there are signs that retailers are coming in,” he said.

“I do not think there is the potential for, say, a Michelin-star restaurant at the moment. We may have only 200,000 people. But having said that, restaurants are full during the week.”

Spence’s hotel has 86% occupancy during the week but this slips to 65% at weekends. One of the city’s best function suites helps boost income.

“Look at the developments at St Andrew’s like St Andrew’s Bay,” he said. “They turned it into a year-round resort. That’s what will happen with Trump and the others.”

Unlike many other Aberdonians, Spence is not shy of celebrating his success. He boasts on the Marcliffe website that he drives a Range Rover Vogue, shops at Brioni at Harrods, likes Loro Piana jackets, Ferragamo ties, Church’s shoes and Turnbull & Asser shirts.

“There can be a tendency by people here to underplay their wealth. There can even be a bit of envy. I bump into people from here dining in expensive London restaurants who complain about the price of a meal in Aberdeen,” he said.

“But I sense it might change. We have a lot of young, dynamic people in the council, for example, and they are keen to take things on.”

The current success is still built on oil that will run out eventually, but already firms are looking at other areas such as renewables.

“Aberdeen should be the northern hemisphere capital for renewable technology and there is no reason why not,” said Stephen.

Success tends to rub off on others and perhaps the biggest indication that the good times are back is that Aberdeen Football Club — which won the European Cupwinners’ Cup in 1983 under Sir Alex Ferguson, at the height of the oil boom — is back in Europe after a decade in the doldrums.

It may be too much to expect another run to the final, but given the confidence in the Granite City these days, who knows?

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