NEWLY- PROMOTED Wrexham won't lack for ambition when the Second Division campaign gets under way in eight days time, but Racecourse chairman Mark Guterman is determined not to chase short-term success on the field at the expense of the club's long-term survival.
Speaking on the day that former bigspenders Huddersfield Town announced a rescue plan designed to rid the Yorkshire club of more than £15m of debt, Guterman claimed no true Dragons' supporter would want to see a similar scenario.
"There are many other Football League clubs who are in the same sort of trouble," he said.
"The fans at those clubs will be simply happy to see their clubs survive.
"We have got to be sensible about what we are trying to achieve, but we are also optimistic about the future and we genuinely believe we can challenge for honours again this season.
"We have brought in a budget which means we have a smaller squad of players - by one - than last year, but within that we have tried to give the manager as much support as we can."
Racecourse boss Denis Smith released Wayne Phillips, Kristian Rogers and Dan Bennett last May and also saw Andy Morrell, Lee Trundle and Scott Green move on to pastures new.
In response he brought in just three new faces in Chris Armstrong, Chris Llewellyn and Matt Crowell, while also promoting two of the club's youngsters, Craig Morgan and Mark Jones.
And the chairman has the utmost faith in Smith's ability to get the best out of his players, pointing out that 12 months of relative success has not been long enough to undo the effects of the previous season's relegation, itself largely the culmination of a long period of disharmony behind the scenes before the change of ownership.
"We have to ensure that the club remains viable," he added.
"But the facts are that at the moment the club is not profitable. On a positive note we have paid off a lot of debt but there is still a lot more to go. We are getting there but we will not sacrifice the gains we've made by chasing success on the field at all costs."
Guterman said it would have been easy for everyone at the Racecourse to be carried away by Wrexham's superb runin to promotion, which was finally confirmed in front of a near-10,000 crowd at the Racecourse in April - more than twice the home attendance only four weeks previously.
But football's financial climate, particularly since the collapse of the ITV Digital deal, had changed a great deal since the days when former Racecourse chairman Pryce Griffiths had been almost begging for gates of 4,500 in order to achieve a break-even figure.
"A truer figure now is between 6,500 and 7,000," said Guterman.
"It was superb to see so many people in the ground towards the end of the season and I was delighted they had something to celebrate, but the important lesson I learned against Cambridge was that the potential Wrexham fans are out there in numbers and we have to do what we can to encourage them to come through the turnstiles," he added.
"It's a two-way process which means we have to put out a product they are willing to pay to come to see. Supporters work very hard all week to earn their money and if they choose to spend some of it with Wrexham on a Saturday afternoon they want value for money.
"I believe Denis and his players provided that all through last season and we had a fantastic hard-core of support. Now our task is to encourage more of those who were at the Cambridge game to come back and watch us in the Second Division."
Wrexham have also been working hard on schemes to increase their commercial revenue, and Guterman said managing director David Rhodes and commercial manager, Bill Wingrove, together with their respective staffs, had played a key role in building new partnerships and attracting new sponsors and investors.
"We have made a great deal of progress on that front and, again, it's an area of the business we can build as we grow as a club," he said.
"But there's no quick fix and we will not allow ourselves to be carried away by any success, because we know it has a nasty habit of coming back to bite you when you least expect it."
