The prospective new owners of Ashford United have a clear plan as their takeover nears completion.

Businessmen Lloyd Hume and Dave Warr are on the verge of taking charge at Homelands as equal partners.

Everything has been agreed with outgoing owner Don Crosbie, with the deal now awaiting FA approval.

Hume, who sold his industry-leading hair transplant clinic 18 months ago, is well-known in Kent football as a former player and manager.

He led Maidstone United to successive promotions in partnership with Alan Walker, who is Ashford’s new director of football and will be growing the club’s academy.

Warr, a big football fan and Charlton Athletic season-ticker holder, sold a highly successful lift engineering business before the Covid pandemic.

The pair retain other smaller business interests but their focus is firmly on unlocking the potential at Ashford and building on Crosbie’s years of hard work and dedication at Homelands.

Hume and Warr, who won’t be taking a penny out of the club, want to grow the business sustainably and take the Nuts & Bolts to National League South over a six-year period.

It was Dorking Wanderers owner Marc White - a friend of Hume’s - who suggested buying Ashford.

An initial meeting with Crosbie went well and Hume returned with a couple of business associates - one being Warr - as the prospect of getting involved gathered momentum.

“Their feelings were the same as mine, that the club’s got huge potential,” said Hume. “The fact it owns its own freehold and ground doesn’t limit us to what we can do to try and financially support the club.

“So, we’ve got a clear aim in our head that over the next six years we want to try and get two promotions.

“We don’t want to do it overnight, we don’t want to chuck a load of money at it, we want to make a self-sustainable club and we want to try and get in Conference South within a six-year period.

“We want to do that by investing in the facility in the ground around it to generate the income that it needs to survive. That’s the plan.

“Decisions are going to be made with my head, I hope, not my heart.

“That’s sometimes difficult when you’re so passionate about football, and it only took me three games of watching Ashford to become fairly passionate about the club.

“I’m really excited about the challenge.

“Both me and Dave, not in mega ways, have been fairly successful in our businesses which has put us in the situation we’re in.

“I’ve been in football long enough and I’m too well-known in football that I can’t let the football club go backwards - it’s got to go forwards.

“Don’s been easy and straightforward to deal with and he’s leaving the club in a genuinely good position. We have to build on that.

“He’s done a wonderful job but he’s been there 20 years and he’s been doing it on his own, so we’re just going to come in with a fresh mentality.

“It’s a great opportunity for us to own a football club that has got the ability to be self-sustainable and grow it to where it should be.

“Look at Maidstone, Chatham, Ramsgate. Why can’t Ashford follow in their footsteps and generate a community club where people go and have a good time rather than it’s just about football?”

Hume and Warr are looking to grow average attendances to around the 500 mark in their first season, and ideally 600.

They have plans to build a 1,000-space car park to attract supporters to the out-of-town ground and they also want to get on with installing the additional 3G pitches which the club already have permission for.

“A lot of the investment is already done there,” said Hume.

“There’s lots we’ve got to do but we’re determined to get things done.

“We know we only get one opportunity to make a first impression with fans and the community so we’re determined to get that right.

“I know football clubs inside out, I’ve been involved in football clubs and even when I was at Maidstone, while I didn’t run the club, I was involved financially and was helping the club out.

“So I understand non-league, I understand the mistakes other chairmen make.

“They make decisions with their hearts, not their heads, and I think people will probably expect that of me because of my football passion and the want to win.

“Everyone who knows me knows I want to win at everything I do but winning in the first instance isn’t about winning every game of football we play.

“It’s about building a club that we can progress with going forward, not just fabricating a club with false finances and paying players ridiculous amounts of money to get us promotion, which is what a lot of clubs have done and they suffer because of.

“What we’re not doing is going into it expecting to earn money.

“We’re not getting paid - we will not get paid. We’re investing 50% of what we earn back into the first team and 50% of what the club makes back into the infrastructure.”