Oliver Ash says Maidstone will learn from this season's mistakes as they regroup in National South.

Assessing United's relegation, co-owner Ash believes the club haven't helped themselves at times.

He concedes they got it wrong with the appointment of Harry Wheeler as manager but feels whoever followed Jay Saunders faced a difficult task.

Ash said: "We probably haven’t helped ourselves with some of the choices and that’s why this has been that very difficult season but we take it on the chin, learn from our mistakes and move forward.

"There have been difficult choices all the way through.

"There are reasons why we chose as we did when Harry Wheeler came in with his team.

"He’s a good manager, and I’m sure he’ll do well in his career, but he wasn’t right for us at that time and it led to a huge change in the structure and ethos of the club and the whole way we operate.

"That’s probably the thing we would perhaps do differently if we had our time again but you can’t forget also that we aim to run the club in a way which has to wash its face as a business.

"We don’t subsidise the club the way many clubs get subsidised.

• Wheeler's first Stones interview

• Wheeler leaves Stones

"Some of them hit the rocks when the money runs out and they get into difficulties.

"We’re trying to avoid that so our budget, when we were recruiting a manger, excluded talking to some relatively expensive ones."

Wheeler had an unenviable task succeeding Saunders, who won three promotions, two cups and twice kept Maidstone in the National League during his seven-year reign.

Ash added: "It was going to be difficult for anybody to come in after Jay because Jay had been here since the beginning of the new structure of the club, he knew everybody, was often down at the club and he was central to all the success.

"Harry's probably not got Jay's natural warmth of character and he lives a long way away and there wasn't the immediate rapport with fans.

"He brought in an awful lot of new players who had no immediate connection to the club.

"It was all a bit too brutal and a bit too quick and it severed some of the lifelines that had existed.

"It was a big change when Jay left and we perhaps underestimated what impact that would have not just on the playing side but on the club as a whole."

Ash and fellow co-owner Terry Casey have faced criticism for the first time this season.

Both men know it comes with the territory in football but some of it has stung.

Ash said: "If you’re the owner of a football club you don’t expect any plaudits, you expect to get criticism.

"If you’re there to get plaudits, you’re in the wrong business.

"So it doesn’t surprise me that fans can be critical, they’re paying their money to come in and they want to watch a decent product.

"They can’t expect to win every game but we set out our stall at the beginning of the season to finish somewhere in the middle.

"We thought we had a competitive budget, the reality is it wasn’t as competitive as we thought because the goalposts are moving all the time.

"The National League clubs don’t stand still, they all find extra money and the average has moved well up.

"When things started to go wrong we had extra expenses during the season.

"We had manager expenses, player expenses, loanees going out and still paying half their wages, and it’s really put pressure on the numbers this season.

"Some of the criticism has stung a little bit.

"I’m not thick-skinned enough to not feel upset by some of it.

"However, now is the time to look forward and as a whole club start getting back on track for next season."

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