Nigel Travis does not divulge the bottom-line figures on the takeover of Leyton Orient, which he and his consortium completed on Thursday of last week. “All I’m willing to say is we’ve put in many millions,” he says. “It’s not like one or two. It’s several times that.”

But the Essex-born, United States-based chief executive of Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin Robbins is happier to detail the inventory of what he inherited at the crisis-torn east London club, which tumbled out of the Football League and into the National League at the end of last season.

There were nine players, he says, the oldest of whom was 19, with the squad’s senior professionals having exercised relegation release clauses. There was no manager, as the club had indicated they would not persist with Omer Riza, who had stepped up from the youth ranks to take charge on 30 March. It felt as if Riza had got the gig by virtue of being the last coach standing at the club. He was Orient’s fifth manager of the season.

There was no fitness coach, Travis continues, and there was no physiotherapist. “We haven’t got a credit card system,” Travis adds. In fact, they were not even able to post a letter because there was no credit on the franking machine. The season-ticket renewals went out a month late and Travis comes up with a blinding understatement when he describes the club as being “behind the eight ball” in terms of preparations for the new season, which kicks off on 5 August. “There’s an element of starting from scratch,” he says. Pre-season training is scheduled to begin on Monday.

Travis, though, is enthused and it is no great stretch to present him as the saviour of this 136-year-old sporting institution; the second-oldest football club in London, behind Fulham. Orient have seen bad days previously and Travis, a lifelong fan who attended his first game as a nine-year-old in 1959 – a 1-1 home draw against Sunderland in division two – says he can remember Dave Sexton’s troubled tenure in the mid-1960s and the collection buckets going round during Dick Graham’s subsequent stint.

But the Os have surely never had it this bad. They had been within a play-off final penalty shootout of promotion to the Championship in May 2014 and, since then, they have dropped like a stone. When the Italian businessman Francesco Becchetti bought out Barry Hearn in July of that year, he promised to take the club out of League One – which he did, with an expensively funded relegation. The ultimate dream had been to get them out of the Football League and, as the gallows humour would have it, he even managed that in the end.

Becchetti went through 11 managers, including caretakers, and his stewardship was marked by dreadful man-management and recruitment decisions, constant suggestions that he would interfere in the selection of the team, supporter mutiny and farcical episodes such as the unsuccessful reality TV show and his own six-match ban for booting the then assistant manager, Andy Hessenthaler, up the backside.

Leyton Orient fans protest against the club’s former owner Francesco Becchetti in April. ‘It’s been tough to watch and what made it more difficult was that we were so close to getting into the Championship,’ Nigel Travis says. Photograph: TGSPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

When a winding-up petition was served against the club on 1 March there was the fear that everything would turn to ashes. The Os dodged liquidation at the high court on 12 June after Becchetti paid off the creditors to keep alive his intention to sell the club but the future continued to look bleak. Travis, with support from the consortium’s principal investor, Kent Teague – a successful Texan businessman – has restored hope.

“It’s been tough to watch and what made it more difficult was that we were so close to getting into the Championship,” Travis says. “I never thought we’d be in the National League, even last Christmas, but we are there and you have to face the facts.

“We’ve tried very hard to tell everyone it’s not going to be instant success because we are so far behind for this season. But reading all the fans’ websites, I don’t think the fans are unrealistic. We have to recognise that the first year is going to be about stabilising and creating the right atmosphere. This has got to be the club it was, which is a great family club in the heart of the East End. If we somehow finish in the top half of the table this season or make the play-offs, it’s a bonus.”

Travis grew up in Woodford and he went to the same school as Hearn; he was a couple of years below him at Buckhurst Hill. Hearn, whose Matchroom pension fund still owns Orient’s stadium, had resigned as the club’s honorary life president in April as a protest against Becchetti but one of Travis’s first moves has been to restore him to the position.

I had a message from John and the team last week just to say: ‘Well done.’ I think we’ll stay very close to Liverpool

His very first one had been to name Martin Ling as the director of football and the club’s former player and manager has since appointed a fitness coach and a physiotherapist, as well as on Friday securing the return from Southend of the striker David Mooney, Orient’s top scorer in the near-promotion season of 2013-14. Matt Porter, the former chief executive, is back as a nonexecutive director and Ling is scouring the market for a manager. He will not be rushed; he knows that it is vital to find the right one. A permanent chief executive to supersede the interim, Marshall Taylor, is another priority and Travis’s buzzword of stability seems to underpin everything.

“I’m not sure that starting from scratch on a lot of things is necessarily all bad,” Travis says. “I’ve done acquisitions in other businesses and the worst thing is coming in and saying: ‘Sorry, out you go [to people].’ We haven’t got to do any of that because we have so few people. Being able to select your own people is a good thing – as long as you make the right choices.”

Travis has done a lot of that in his business life, which first took him to the United States in 1989 for two years, when he was high up in the management at Burger King, and then back for good in 1998, when he worked for Blockbuster, the video rental chain. He would become the company’s chief operating officer. Before his role at Dunkin’ Brands, he was the chief executive at Papa John’s, the pizza chain.

Travis has made his home in Boston and, during his bid to take over at Orient, he was able to call upon the advise of some high-powered friends. “I know the Krafts, who run the New England Patriots and the Revolution MLS team, very well and I’m also very close to the Boston Red Sox people,” Travis says, with a nod towards John W Henry, who also owns Liverpool in the Premier League. “I had a message from John and the team last week just to say: ‘Well done.’ I think we’ll stay very close to Liverpool.”

Travis has a box at Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox, and he has become a firm fan of the Miami Dolphins – much to the amusement of the Krafts – but he remains true to his first sporting love. The bond to Orient now spans four generations of his family, from his mother and father to his children and grandson, and he mentions how the club honoured his father with the Roland Travis commemorative clock, which is located in the executive suite at Brisbane Road. “My dad was coming here until he was 90,” Travis says.

Travis, in his own words, was “pretty hopeless as a player” but he moved to take his coaching badges, getting the preliminary one at 18, alongside the old Orient left-wing favourite Terry McDonald. He later earned his full badge, when he roomed with the former Nottingham Forest and Manchester United player Ian Storey-Moore.

Travis coaches in the American system; he has got up to E License level and he says that he has had 48 matches since last September. He coaches boys and girls, aged 10 and 12, and he has called one of his teams Wellesley Orient. It is put to him that he probably has a better record than any of the five managers at Orient last season. “Well, I had a stable structure because I was in charge of my own team,” he replies, with a smile.

Stability; the right structures and people; an inclusive and positive atmosphere. They are the tenets of Travis’s philosophy and he tells a nice story to illustrate their power.

“When Bob Kraft, who is a great individual, took over the Patriots, they were probably the worst football team in America,” Travis says. “Bob tells the story about how his wife couldn’t believe what he paid for it and I remember, as a Dolphins fan, every time the Patriots came to town, we thought it was going to be a joke.

“But what they have built at the Patriots is just incredible and they have built it through stability. They have created an environment that has encouraged commercial and playing success. And there is a stability and a humility around it. It’s very impressive.”

Travis can see the clean slate at his beloved Orient. The only way is up.