New Herne Bay chairman Sam Callander has moved quickly to get the club back on track.

Callander, who played for Bay as a teenager, was announced as Stuart Fitchie’s successor this week.

A successful businessman away from football, he’s got his teeth into transforming the club behind the scenes.

Kevin Watson’s successor as manager is set to be announced today and will have a healthy budget to work with as Bay look to bounce back from Isthmian Premier relegation.

In his first statement as chairman, Callander said the club “overcame the biggest hurdle it faced” at the end of last week.

That centred on Bay’s financial situation.

“As much as I can say, there’s a lot of challenges internally with - not in terms of people - just how we operate on a day-to-day basis,” said Callander.

“Obviously our manager has left us, on a mutual agreement, and there’s a lot of restructuring after we came in and analysed the club financially.

“That’s why a lot of changes have had to happen quite quickly.

“So that’s the biggest challenges, the financial aspect of the club, but we’re in a really good place with new sponsorship deals that have come in and for the upcoming season we’ve got a really healthy budget for the players.

“The manager is soon to be announced. It’s already agreed. We just need to dot the Is and cross the Ts with him.

“He’s got pretty much the budget we spent to get promoted into the league above us.

“I’ve set a two-year plan to get back to the Isthmian Premier. We’ll be back there, with no doubt.

“I feel maybe the club wasn’t being utilised and operated to its full potential.

“The predecessor ran his course and took it as far as he could go and then obviously it needs fresh eyes and fresh blood to come in to take it to the next level.”

Callander, who made his Bay debut as a 15-year-old before joining Chelsea’s academy, describes his return to Winch’s Field as going full circle.

Successful in business - he runs Cater-Connect, a company which counts Pret a Manger and Starbucks among its clients - he goes into Bay with his head screwed on.

“It’s intense, being a chairman, especially when you’re looking after a company the size I am,” he said.

“You have to divvy up time to dedicate to football work as well as your own personal work but we’re getting there.

“There’s a lot of good people in place in the club that I’ve got around me who I lean on, so it’s more of an even spread now of designated jobs around the club to help me out.

“I’m a bit of an operational geek so I’ve gone in and gone, right, we’ve got a good bar, a state-of-the-art kitchen, a pitch that’s worth pretty much £1million that’s under-used and under-rated in terms of the rates we rent it out at.

“The youth wasn’t structured correctly, there’s a lot of things that weren’t correctly run as a business, so I’ve gone in and gone bang, bang, bang, that’s what we should be doing and it looks like the positivity around the club is back.

“There was a bit of a cloud before I came in and now it’s pretty much gone. We’re at a really good place and feeling really positive about the upcoming season.”