Ebbsfleet boss Dennis Kutrieb intends to stick by his squad - regardless of how they start the National League season.

It’s a common solution for managers to turn to the transfer market when things aren’t working but Kutrieb operates differently. He’s never been keen on signing players during the season and will keep faith with his principles.

Fleet have retained the majority of the squad who won National League South, adding six new faces. Kutrieb believes they have the tools to handle non-league’s top flight, with the opening game at Rochdale just over a week away.

“We are not big fans of signing players if something is not working out for us,” said Kutrieb. “If something is not working then it’s my job to improve things by working with the players we have.

“If we identify areas where we are not good enough, we can train on that and work on that and make sure we get better for the next game.

“We are pretty much where we want to be with our squad and if we are not achieving the points we want to achieve, then we need to work harder, not just bring in different players. That might be a different approach.

“I realised when I first came here three years ago and got to know the leagues and the behaviour and the mentality, it might be slightly different to what other clubs do.

“I’d like to think it should be an advantage for a player that he knows this is my club for the next 12 months and I can just focus on playing football and I don’t need to be worried that, after sitting on the bench, I get kicked out and can find another club because I’m not good enough.

“It’s on us because we recruit the players, we work with them, so if we make a judgement that they are good enough for us, then we have to make sure they are good enough, otherwise we’ve done something wrong in our recruitment.

“We’re convinced we’ve got our recruitment spot on and it’s just a situation of work harder if things are not in our favour. We could have a great start or we could have a bad start. Anything can happen in football.

“We don’t know but what is for sure is we will work our socks off and if something is not going in our favour then we will work on it and make sure we get better at it.”

Fleet won 2-0 at St Albans on Saturday and beat West Ham under-23s 2-1 on Tuesday night. They complete pre-season at home to Chelsea under-21s on Saturday (3pm) with preparations for the new campaign going well.

“I’m not so much into making big judgements before pre-season starts,” said Kutrieb. “We always try to bring something across and if the team takes it on board, you can go to the next step.

“If it takes a bit longer, you keep going on the same topic. At this moment, most of the basics we have already got into the team.

“It helps that we've kept the majority of last season’s squad and when you don’t have many injuries, so everyone can be involved. I would say we are exactly where we want to be but we’ll see when the games start.

“We’ll know if it’s helped that our squad is still together and that we have the basics already on board when other teams are maybe still trying to find that.

“At the end of the day, we’ll really know when the games start because we have some interesting games where we can challenge ourselves.

“You have all kinds of different challenges straight away in the first games of August.”